One of the most enduring memories of my childhood, which is odd as it only happened four times, was watching the ‘Superman Festival’ on local station WWOR Channel 9, based out of Seacaucus, NJ and serving the New York metropolitan area. The festival, hosted by Adventures of Superman‘s Jimmy Olsen, Jack Larson, featured a number of Adventures episodes aired on Thanksgiving Day after the end of the Macy’s parade. You can watch some of Larson’s bits on YouTube.
Carrying on that tradition, we will be posting three of our Adventures of Superman double shots today, acting as a ‘Superman Festival’ of our own. For all those celebrating, Happy Thanksgiving.
After four really enjoyable episodes, we hit a bit of a lull with these two episodes, one of which continues the scientific bent, and the other of which seems directly out of season one.
1. Vague and undercooked
There’s something really interesting about the show reflecting a bit of the late 50s dual paranoia about both nuclear weapons and Soviet/communist espionage. The Cold War is alive and well in “The Atomic Captive.” Well, we presume it is a Soviet scare, as never once is the USSR or Russia mentioned. We get folks with Russian names, speaking in Russian accents, referring to the ‘old country’ across the ocean.
This episode feels the most like a basic outline that people were supposed to spruce up, but no one ever really did. There’s a guy who is supposedly radioactive, who is living not far from a nuclear testing site, and the Daily Planet is there to cover a nuclear test. We’re never given any real indication as to how the scientist got exposed to radiation, nor do we really know why the Russians want him back. Or, for that matter, why three reporters are needed to cover one story.
There are so many elements here that just make no sense: why are the generals even considering Clark’s request to stop the launch? Why do Lois and Jimmy blatantly ignore all the warnings about the radioactivity? It’s a really frustrating episode.
2. A woman? [faints]
A potentially interesting element of this episode is that the head of the Russian contingent in the Untied States, known as “X29” is a woman who has gone through ‘six years’ of training to sound and act just like an American. Now, the gender is only relevant because everyone treats this like she’s a toddler. They are so shocked that this person can be both a woman and a spy that their brains are nearly fried by the prospect.
But, like everything else here, we get very, very little about her or her motivations. And so, instead of being an interesting tale of espionage and nuclear weaponry, it’s just a footnote in an episode that has little else going for it.
3. Clark sucks
This has somewhat been a theme since the show started, but in “The Superman Silver Mine” we see just how poor Clark’s instincts for both a story and to tell right from wrong are. This isn’t played up in a fun way, like Barry Allen always being late, despite being The Flash. He’s not even guileless like how he was played by Christopher Reeve. Clark gives the impression that he just doesn’t give a shit, which is, well, a take.
Here, Lois and Inspector Henderson essentially guess what actually happened, and Clark is such a dickhead that he convinces them they’re wrong for no real reason other than he wants to go to lunch instead of talk this through. It almost gets his friends killed, but since he has the excuse of being Superman, he doesn’t seem to feel even the slightest bit bad about it.
4. Why not teach Lois and Jimmy the whistle trick?
In “The Atomic Captive,” Superman teaches the irradiated professor to just whistle if he needs Superman. This leads to a comedic plot about the man’s nerves preventing him from whistling properly. It’s reminiscent of ideas from the comics, like Superman being tuned into Batman’s heartbeat, wherever he is on the planet.
But, as seen in “The Superman Silver Mine,” Lois and Jimmy find themselves in danger all the time. Why wouldn’t he tune himself into their whistles and save himself, and them, a ton of time? This is one of my biggest problems with this show, which is that for every good idea it introduces, it explains it so poorly it stops being a good idea.
Continued below5. I kept wondering where this was going
Multiple times, way more times than you’d expect, it is mentioned that the impersonator in this episode has a metal plate in his head. It’s brought up for a few reasons, but this is Adventures of Superman, and oftentimes things are there and never discussed. But this actually followed the Chekhov’s gun example and became a plot point. Of course, in perfect Adventures fashion, the metal plate gets used to drag him back to the gang when Superman makes a magnet out of a metal beam nearby. Why he didn’t just, you know, run after him, or fly after him, or pop the car’s tires with his x-ray vision, or any other logical idea, who knows.
Well, that does it for our Superman Festival. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
