But advances in movie technology have made it possible to represent the character's superpowers a great deal more easily and realistically. But by the time subsequent Superman movies were made, in 2006, the character itself had undergone significant changes as well. DC Comics, which owns the character, along with Batman and Wonder Woman, decided, probably because of the Reeve representation of the character, to reconceive it for a new audience of fans.
The first time Superman appeared outside the covers of a comic book was in animated short films in the 1930s. That seemed to be an ideal medium for such a character, and it was better equipped to represent his superpowers. A Superman radio show was popular in the '40s, and producers had to find creative solutions to some of the limitations of the medium. For instance, when Superman takes flight, the actor playing Superman had to say the words, "Up, up and away'" and a sound effects department would add the sound of hurricane winds. Audiences enjoyed the moment when Superman would speak those words so much that when the radio show transitioned to early television in the '50s, the actor George Reeves would jump on a springboard and leap into the air to simulate him taking off into the air without him having to say the words "up, up and away." But the response from fans convinced Reeves to say the words, regardless of the redundancy.
Something on the order of twenty-six years ago, I watched the second Terminator movie with some Navy friends. I was 34; they were 20 at most. When it was over I was surprised when they complimented the movie's "graphics" - which I would've called "special effects." I guessed then that it was due to their having grown up with video games, but I didn't exactly know what they meant until the appearance of the first graphic novels. At first I thought they were merely illustrated novels. Now I know that they are novels told partly in words and partly in graphics, or hand-drawn images. So, too, what are known as comic book movies are not merely reconstituted comic books. They are graphic movies consisting partly of actors and sets and costumes and partly in graphics, or CGI.
Computer Generated Imagery has given movie directors, especially those involved in the making of superhero movies, an incalculably valuable tool for the creation of movie special effects - or graphics. Their movies combine actors and live action with original computer-generated imagery on a sometimes astonishing scale. Like past technical advances in movies, like the additions of sound and color, CGI has contributed to movie realism, but through the detailed creation of original, alternate realities. They are now so seamless that they make the suspension of disbelief unnecessary. The results make the special effects used in the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder era look terribly hokey. But because movie technology is now developing at an exponential pace, today's CGI becomes obsolete almost immediately. George Lucas was so bothered by the limitations of special effects in hs first three Star Wars moves that he revisited them and made extensive improvements on them. Some fans of the original films, however, have rejected Lucas's "improvements" and prefer the original productions, replete with their seamy special effects which were state-of-the-art in 1977.
More than one observer of the differences between the first Superman movies and the latest productions have pointed out that the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder movies were made "tongue-in-cheek" - something that infuriated many comic book fans because it suggests that the subject of the movies could not be taken seriously. But the original Superman movies weren't created by fans. They were created by filmmakers who were faced with finding technical solutions to the realization of a comic book world in a wholly different medium relying on a literalness that a comic book totally eschews.
Christopher Reeve was an actor playing a man from another planet whose molecular makeup made him defy earth's gravity and totally invulnerable to physical harm. But Christopher Reeve, however physically beautiful and incomparably brave he showed us he was, could not fly and was not, alas, invulnerable. The latest superhero movies continue to use actors, but as CGI advances, the elimination of real people from these movies is foreseeable.
Looking back on the first Superman, directed by Richard Donner in 1978, what stands out in my memory are the beautifully human scenes like the one in which the young Clark Kent attends the funeral of his adopted father (the great Glenn Ford), backed by the stirring symphonic music composed by John Williams. Or the moment when Superman, busy saving the residents of a California valley from an earthquake and flood, finds that he is too late to save Lois Lane, whose car has fallen into a fissure in the earth. By the time he wrenches her car out of the ground, tears off the driver's door, and pulls Lois out of the car, she is dead. At that moment, by making Superman shed tears, feeling deep love and grief, he proves to be greater than all of the superpowers with which the new movies are replete. As the latest Superman gets closer to making his superpowers real, the sillier the character seems. The moment one of these movies touches the truth, it falls to pieces.
The original Superman, despite my having seen it perhaps a few too many times, now looks like a towering masterpiece - because, not despite, it was made tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes a wink and a nod is all it takes to suspend our disbelief.
(1) Nothing exposes the underlying juvenile mentality behind these superheroes better than the Incredible Hulk. Obviously, whenever Bruce Banner, the normal-sized man (played by Mark Ruffalo) transforms into the Hulk, ten times his size, he should be divested of every stitch of his clothes. How is it, then, that the man's pants somehow survive the transformation? Nobody wants to expose a giant green penis - or sexuality in any firm - to the overgrown kids who flock to these movies. They would prefer to remain in a blissfully pre-sexual stage, before life got complicated by real women (not Wonder Woman) and procreation.
Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder, 1948-2018.
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