This is the train one.

We get Daily Planet headlines about the biggest ever shipment of gold being sent by train and we know, that’s gonna have some trouble. The byline on the article is Lois’s, which is nice considering in this era she was often depicted as being stuck doing “women’s stories” and such, and she even gets to ride the train along the shipment to keep the story going. A bunch of exactly-the-same-guy looking security guards load the gold onto the train and we’re off.

Obviously this is a story about an attempted train robbery. The nondescript masked robbers have a cool modified car, which is the only really notable thing about them. Two of them hop on board, though their hijacking attempt doesn’t go great. Though they are able to get rid of the security guards and knock the engineer off the train, they only do so by falling off themselves. Now we have a train with all that gold and the only person on board to protect it is Lois Lane.

This cartoon is a good showing for Lois. Is she in a woman in peril? Yeah, sure, but she’s there for her job and she doesn’t go quietly. In this one she picks up a gun and fires back at the cool car. The car is bulletproof, but hey, Lois tries.

Back at the office, Clark hears about the situation so he gets into his Superman outfit (just hiding behind some boxes to do it today), and we get to see who really is more powerful than a locomotive. The remaining criminals use their cool car to Wacky Races the train, in that they keep getting ahead of it and setting traps and whatnot. Superman responds by doing super things to save the train. All good stuff. A great bit is when the train is falling and he catches it and jumps back up with it back onto the tracks, making sure to leap swiftly from the front to the back as he does it to line it up right. And the bit where Superman struggles ever so slightly to pull against the train’s downhill momentum puts me in a mind of the fight where he punches the lasers in the Mad Scientist. I like seeing Superman have to put some effort in. I’m not one of those who think the character needs to be depowered to be interesting, but I do think he should look like he’s trying while he’s doing all those powerful things.

In the end, Clark brings the gold to its destination by himself, so it can be used by the military-industrial complex or whatever, and we’re given another news article by Lois saying that he went back to catch those criminals and then disappeared. We’re given a little “back at the Planet” scene for an ending, but it’s not a great one. Still, Clark knowingly looks at the camera and, while he may not wink, it’s getting closer.

I am fond of this one, though largely for the cool car. If you’d asked me at the start of this rewatch, when Clark excused himself at the beginning, I thought he was slipping off so that he could Superman up to watch the train. Instead, since we next see him at the office, I guess he really was just working on a different story. I like that better somehow.

This is the one where Superman fights some robots.

This is the second one. We get the whole Faster Than A Speeding Bullet and Amazing Stranger speech here, along with the “Truth and Justice” declaration. Then we’re right into the scene of a robo-bank robbery. An criminal figure is controlling the robot and has it robo-escape by flying back to headquarters and robo-depositing the ill-gotten gains in the money vat. The robots in this short have numbers on them, right? Well it has bugged me for years that when the criminal controls his robot to go rest by the wall until needed again, he doesn’t put them in order. I may not be overly concerned with bank robberies, but this chaos requires the aid of Superman!

Fortunately for me, the criminal is not happy with vats of money, he pushes his luck to also robo-rob a really cool-looking jewellery display place (what is it a museum or something?) and that is very noticed by Lois Lane and Clark Kent. During the chaos, Lois pulls Clark to safety with a visceral “C’mon, you fool, you wanna get trampled?” but she has far less concern for herself because the first chance she gets she sneaks into the robot. Just gets right inside the containment hatch it is stuffing the jewels. One of the more dangerous things I’ve ever seen Lois do.

Lois is captured by the criminal but won’t tell him what happened to the jewels, so the criminal puts her in a deadly trap and Superman comes and busts up the robots and saves the day.

I like this one, which I don’t think is a controversial opinion. On this viewing some of the things that stood out to me were the detail on some of the still backgrounds, such as the jewel display and, even moreso, Metropolis from the sky. We’ve got some iconic things in here as well. Clark protecting Lois from the molten metal with his cape is one I’ve seen referenced, and ending with Lois and Clark at the Planet always feels right with me, though this one lacks a wink. The robots themselves have made appearances in the comics from time to time and they are pretty good robots. They’re not top-level S-tier supercool robots, but they’re solid B-tier I think, especially for the time and for giving Superman a pretty cool fight. That said, the bit when they spend so much time on each robot individually waking up almost feels like a joke to me, but was not intended as such.

More noticeable perhaps is that Clark gets into his Superman suit in a phone booth in this one. It’s a thing that has happened far less often than you’d think considering its reputation. I think it’s interesting that he went in there to actually make a phone call to the police or whomever. He wasn’t gonna Superman up for those jewels until Lois got in trouble. This makes sense to me. People are more important than jewels.

Hey, I might as well do posts about the old Superman cartoons, right? Here’s one:

This is the first one, and it’s about the time Superman got to punch a death ray beam. It begins with the standard “up in the sky” routine, but not the “amazing stranger” speech. In the place of that expository intro, we get a slightly more detailed look at Krypton exploding (seen from space) and then a storybook image of the orphanage where infant Clark was brought. Then we move on to the “truth and justice” portion. The most notable thing to me in this recap of the origin is how it goes with the old notion that the job as a reporter is done to keep Clark in a position where he can learn about disasters and things earlier and be Superman at them. I’m on the record as preferring that Clark actually care about journalism, not just use it as a way to be Superman more efficiently. In any case, in this story, Clark definitely doesn’t use the job that way.

Lois is here too. Perry assigns Clark to help Lois investigate the destructive Mad Scientist who is plaguing town, but Lois brushes him off. She wants to handle it herself. Clark protests, but Lois is off, nothing he can do. A point in favour of Lois being a cool action hero in these shorts: she just immediately goes and pilots a plane to follow up on her lead. Sure, she is immediately captured once she reaches the bad guy’s lair, but I’ve often said Lois Lane is not a damsel in distress because she’s a princess being kidnapped or whatever, she’s out there in distress because she’s actively doing things against the villains. That’s better.

The villain of the piece is only known as the Mad Scientist. He’s the archetypal Superman Mad Scientist foe. Superman has lots of those and this is one. Other than that, we know very little about the guy. We better understand the motives of the average villain in Looney Tunes than we do this guy. His threatening note to the city mentions “those who laughed at me” which is pretty standard Mad Scientist background stuff. I’d love if we could claim this guy is the Lex Luthor of the cartoon shorts universe, but I don’t know that it could really be done (though Lex, like this guy, would have a lair in an observatory at a later point, and also this guy is balding pretty hard). His plan, to destroy the city with his “electrothanasia ray” does not feel very much like something Lex would be into, but who can say? I will say that “electrothanasia” to me indicates a much more peaceful attack than the pure destructive force this ray deals out. Unless, I suppose, they really laughed at him a lot.

Important News: The Mad Scientist’s sidekick is a cool bird! There’s just this cartoon bird who hangs around with this guy and helps him do his laser revenge plot and stuff. What’s this bird’s deal? We don’t know! And it gets away at the end too. Superman does not capture the bird!

Speaking of Superman, he’s doing his thing. All the cast here is taken from the radio show, which I love, so they’re good and Jackson Beck as Clark is very welcome. As I said, we’re told that Superman here is using his job at the Planet to be ready when Superman is needed, but after receiving a letter that the Mad Scientist intends to strike at midnight and knowing that Lois has gone out to investigate and he considers that dangerous, Clark is just hanging around in the office when the time comes. You’d think he’d have been in costume, ready to go.

I do like that Superman is knocked down by the electrothanasia ray, showing he’s not omnipotent, but then he wills himself back on his feet and struggles his way up the beam to stop it. He doesn’t step out of the beam and let it keep destroying the city, he becomes a lighting rod for the damage, and fights his way to the source.

And the bit where Superman throws the Mad Scientist in the prison reminds me of the time Captain Sunshine threw the Monarch into the prison yard without any due process or anything, which is amusing.

I guess that’s it for this one. I’m not here to review them, just to think about them. I’ll try to get to the next one next month, I suppose. Until then, let’s all imagine what the cool bird got up to after escaping.

Alright. It had to happen eventually: I have watched the new Superman movie. Overall, I enjoyed it. I went in with high expectations, I think. I’d heard good things and I genuinely found myself thinking “I may wind up having to change my repeated claim that Superman has never had a movie that was more than ‘good’ in quality level.” Well, I don’t have to change that claim. This is a ‘good’ movie. It did not move me in the way I want a Superman film to move me, but it is good. I enjoyed it. It was a fun blockbuster movie. This movie gets 5 out of 6 pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. I have to reiterate this stuff because I will, when you say Superman has never had a movie reach “great” status in your mind, people will act as if I’ve said all of his movies are bad. I never said that! Geez! I just said LOTS of his movies are bad.

Seriously, though. I liked this one at a level I can compare to how much I liked Superman II as a kid. That was my favourite Superman movie back then, so I guess this is tied for my favourite Superman movie. With that cleared up, now I can pick it apart!!!

Presenting a disordered list of my first thoughts, including spoilers:

• Good portrayal of Clark. He gets treated like a person. In fact the whole movie seems to be willing to treat its characters like people.
• Good treatment of Superman as a genre, if you will. The movie is never embarrassed that it is a Superman movie and therefore doesn’t feel the need to mitigate its fun to get respect.
• I went in knowing that it would have a bunch of other DC characters so I had calibrated for that. This movie is being used to launch the company’s latest iteration of a shared cinematic universe after all, so of course they’re leaning on those. And I am fully willing to admit that they made some of these characters work well enough in the story being told here, but that’s because they wrote the story being told here. If a Superman movie ever reaches “great” status in the eyes of PDR, you know it won’t have that kind of corporate synergy woven into it. Heck, even Kara, a character I gladly welcome in Superman stories and whose scene I found amusing, just made me think that it was setup for something else.
• Good portrayals of Lois and Jimmy and Perry. I’d definitely have liked to have seen more journalism on display (it’s basically limited to discussions about interviewing Superman and Jimmy calling a clingy ex for information), but I honestly don’t go into any Superman content expecting I’ll get the amount of journalism content I want. I’d be a fool to expect them to actually commit to that. Someday they may, but that was not today.
• Speaking of the Planet cast: Steve and Cat and Ron get to be there! They don’t do much, and Steve is relegated to a joke the way he always has been post-Crisis. Ron, I think, doesn’t get a line. But they’re there.
• I’m very happy that they chose to make some political commentary in there. Not a lot, certainly not as much as I would’ve liked, more than I probably would have bet on. And even this minor amount led to idiots on the Internet decrying it as too woke? I could write you a Superman story so woke you’d cry, you losers.
• Good Luthor, and perhaps more importantly, a Sydney Happersen so comics accurate I could tell it was him just from looking! They put Happersen in there for me alone, clearly.
• Related to Lex, I found the scenes in his pocket dimension prison kinda stupid. The prison design aside, there’s a Luthorcorp employee who, I guess, is just required to stand there holding a baby forever? And when it is extremely clear that Superman is about to start the escape, he doesn’t have the ability to contact anyone or anything? Dumb.
• There’s a couple of mentioned of “Hope” as a concept, but they don’t overplay it so I was perfectly capable of just letting them slide by without affecting my mood.
• Superman’s costume looks uncomfortable to me. It looks like it would bunch up and annoy me, especially around the collar and sleeves.
• The Fortress of Solitude still looks like garbage inside. Just another icy room. Get a frigging rug or something, Clark!
• There was another thing that was spoiled for me, so I was able to calibrate myself before going in. And thank goodness it was because it would have had a negative impact on me: this version of Jor-El and Lara sent Clark to Earth specifically AND they did so with a message telling him to conquer the locals. The movie has about three characters tell us this message is legitimate, not faked by Lex, and that means this has to be my least favourite thing going on here. My preferred take has always been that baby Kal-El was sent into space as a last ditch effort to save him and he just happened to wind up on Earth, rather than it being Jor-El’s plan all along. But more importantly, they’re basically saying that this character who is famously a refugee has parents who sent him here to rule over the people in his new homeland. Clark rejects this, sure, but the insinuation that this is what refugees are like is bad enough to me.

Anyway, I may develop deeper thoughts later, but those are my fresh-from-the-viewing thoughts. Now to catch up on 11 episodes of various podcasts I have been putting off until after I saw it.

I was starting to think that I had already found all the ways that I deviate from the mainstream fandom of Superman. I’ve come to think of myself as a rebel among fans of the character, the Bad Boy of Superfandom if you will. After all, unlike most of those chumps, I have clearly stated that I believe:

• Superman as an avatar of the concept of “Hope” is a bad thing.
• Superman and Batman shouldn’t ever appear in each other’s stories, let alone be depicted as close allies.
• Superman has not yet had a movie that reaches a level of quality above “Sure, that was okay.”

But I came up with another one! I listen to a lot of Superman podcasts, it’s my preferred way to learn what other fans of Superman think. I’ve yet to hear anyone on any of those podcasts state this: Superman stories would be better if they’re not so directly about Superman.

In a way, this isn’t as new a thought as I am making it out to be. I mean, I’ve mentioned multiple times that I think superheroes should not need personal connections to their foes in order to act. Remember that one Peter Parker guy? Remember how his origin is a real classic of the genre? Remember how he learned that if he has the power to act he should do so, even if it doesn’t directly affect him? Well, his career has basically gone down a path where every villain he meets has a personal connection to him after all, so that origin taught him nothing useful. But Superman more than anyone should be out there doing his thing without needing to be prompted by revenge. I don’t know about everyone else, but if a story tells me the hero cares about solving a problem for someone else, that is enough for me.

But it isn’t just about the villains that I think the stories shouldn’t be less about Superman. Hopefully I can clarify: I still want Superman stories to be about Superman. But I them to be less about Superman Being Superman and instead focus on Superman Doing Superman Things.

These days we get a lot of stories with Clark questioning if he has the right to interfere in the world. He worries if those he loves are being adversely affected by his actions. He feels the strain of balancing his Superman activities with his everyday life. I don’t have anything against that really, not as much as I do the personal stakes stuff that’s for sure, but for gosh’s sake can’t we limit that to the B-plots? I want stories in which Superman does Superman things! Give me maybe 20% of that stuff and 80% colourful scifi adventures! Is that too much to ask?