AoS Joey Television 

Five Thoughts on Adventures of Superman‘s “Joey” and “The Unlucky Number”

By | August 25th, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

Season 4 [clap clap clapclap clap]! We’ve made it to our second 13-episode, in color season. Will there be major tonal shifts in between seasons 3 and 4? Let’s find out!

1. Let’s get depressed!

So the first thing we see in this episode is a grandfather severely bumming out his granddaughter by telling her that he’s got to sell her favorite horse to try to save his farm. She’s a reasonably good sport about it, but overall just emos all over the screen. Then, just when you think something good might be happening, Perry, Lois, and Jimmy show it. Turns out grandad and Perry went to school together, and so Perry’s going to buy his horse to help out the cause. I expected him to buy it, but to let it stay on the farm. Nope! He’s buying it as a racehorse, and not as Perry White, but as the Daily Planet.

There’s an idea here of using the winnings from the horserace to help save the farm, but ultimately it seems like a bad idea, as this horse has never raced before. More on this later.

2. Super…hearing?

So, this horse, Joey, can’t get himself out of the stable because he’s so torn up about missing his best gal pal. As this is happening, we see two thugs who have a horse that is in the same race arrive to take out Joey so he can’t race. They’re talking in hushed tones, but just a few feet away from the Daily Planet crew and Joey. Shouldn’t Clark have been able to hear what they were saying, and therefore step in and stop them? Ah, the inconsistencies of 1950s writing!

3. Beginner’s Luck?

I am no horse racing expert, nor do I have an innate understanding of how horses are trained, but it seems odd to me that a horse who, as of a week ago, was living on a farm, would be able to race right away and, not only that, but beat horses that trained their entire lives for this moment. But it turns out, Joey is the best racehorse there, save for one, who – wait for it – was being electrically shocked by remote control from the crowd. It’s a bizarre crime, and, as is common on Adventures of Superman, a pretty low-stakes situation for Superman to involve himself in. Or, put better, it’s an odd situation for Superman to spend this much time on. Superman’s day is spent helping people with small problems, but because this Superman is ineffectual as fuck, he can’t just help people, he has to make it a whole thing.

4. The latest in a long line of dumb kids

There are a lot of dumb kids in Adventures, but this week’s may take the cake. In “The Unlucky Number,” young Bobby thinks that the boarder in his grandmother’s house is Superman because he sees bullets bounce off of him. This is actually a relatively fair assumption, but if the kid opened his eyes for 2 seconds, he’d realize how foolish of an idea this is. Later on, he encounters the real Superman and instead of thinking “Wait, this looks nothing like our boarder!,” he tries to do mental gymnastics to make his Superman fit with the Superman in front of him. A big part of this is him having Superman do feats of strength to ‘prove’ that he’s Superman.

I failed to mention the thrust of this entire episode is a gang of small-time thugs rigging ‘count the jellybeans in the jar’ contests. Think about how sad your criminal enterprise must be if you’re rigging jellybean counting contests? Well, one of those sad thugs, our aforementioned boarder, must’ve known he had a target on his back, as he was wearing a bulletproof vest, which is why Bobby thought that he was Superman.

5. A legitimate surprise

At the end of this episode, we see the boarder go into a closet and, because Bobby thinks he’s Superman, Bobby tells the thugs that they should shoot through the closet, since the bullets won’t hurt him. So, they do just that, and litter the door with bullets. But out jumps…Superman! I was absolutely shocked, even if the explanation (Superman entered the closet through the back and jumped in front of me!) is pretty flimsy.

This episode, overall, had none of the heart of “Joey,” nor any real intrigue or characters to root for. Season three avoided episodes like this one effectively, and hopefully this will be an anomaly in season four as well.


//TAGS | Adventures of Superman

Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

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