Adventures of Superman continues to make its villains smarter and its heroes dumber. Let’s get to this week’s double shot of absurdity.
1. Jimmy Olsen, the Fool, Part 8493
So Jimmy is on vacation, just driving a car 50 miles outside of Metropolis, as one does on vacation, and he’s pulled over for speeding. Jimmy is a drip doing 35 in a 40, but because he just drove through a small town that has a 25 mph limit, he’s getting a ticket. He’s dragged back to the town to appear in court, and the town is basically a strip mall that contains a jail, a court, and a diner.
You see, this is all a scheme. Some crooks move this town all over the highway, making money from phony speeding tickets and stealing trucker’s merchandise by offering a 50 cent steak and coffee special (they check his brakes while he’s eating, find them faulty, and then imprison him for negligence). It’s a pretty clever scheme, and people appear to be falling for it, even if it seems like a highway patrol/state police bust up would happen pretty quickly.
2. Clark isn’t even trying anymore
Clark has dropped all the facade from his plans, allowing everyone in his circle to see when he’s up to something, but then does something just dumb enough to shake suspicions. Here, he convinces Inspector Henderson and Jimmy to, along with him, get themselves arrested to expose this fraud. He almost gets Henderson shot in the process, and then, according to Superman, left them there to go file the story. Why is anyone friends with Clark?
3. The lack of Supermanning in a Superman show
In both of these episodes, problems are attempted to be solved by Clark Kent instead of having them solved in a quicker, more direct way, by Superman. In “The Town That Wasn’t,” a fly along the highway would’ve revealed just about everything instantly, but instead he drives with Henderson and Olsen. And in “The Tomb of Zaharan,” Clark has to jump through hoops on both sides of a trip to explain his presence. Constantly, Clark is asked to contact Superman, so why can’t he just say “I called Superman, he’s handling it. Now excuse me, I have to go masturbate or something” and then fly off as Superman, instead of dragging every situation to a grinding halt as Clark first?
4. [Wondershowzen_You_Are_Racist.gif]
Whenever this show attempts to show anything other than basic white middle class city dwellers, it gets racist really quickly. This episode features a number of characters from a country they go to great lengths to not call Egypt, but basically want to be Egypt. Of course these poor actors are forced into fezes and likely some dark makeup to give them the Middle Eastern look the show wants. I know that information on other cultures was tougher to come by and there were less expectations to not be shitty, but this whole episode was one stereotype after another, whether it was foreigners believing in superstitions or Perry’s episode closing “joke.” Oof.
5. Queen Lois
The central concept of “The Tomb of Zaharan” is that there is an ancient myth about the Queen of Zaharan returning years in the future, to be recognized by a necklace of a scarab. Well, Lois is wearing such a necklace, borrowed by Perry White to attract the Zaharan travelers. So, they kidnap her and Jimmy and take them outside of their capitol city of Beldad (which I kept hearing as Beldar, aka the Christian name of the male Conehead, although he comes from France). While there, they dress her up as an Egyptian Zaharan princess, and Jimmy as her slave, and then leave them to die in an incense-filled tomb, only to be reborn as their queen.
This obviously doesn’t happen, Superman saves them, but the Zaharans, because of course they’re silly folks who believe in mumbo jumbo, they take the broken down door and the leaving of the necklace as signs of the queen’s resurrection and escape, instead of clearly seeing what happened, especially as they saw Superman save Lois and Jimmy’s lives once before.
