Saturday Night Not Live

My cable modem has picked a splendid time — the July Fourth weekend — to malfunction so I'm in on a dial-up connection. This will limit posting here a bit until Tuesday afternoon when a technician is supposed to come make it well again…although the last few times the cable went out, I made an appointment for a service call and then, six hours later, I was able to cancel it because the thing began to miraculously work again. Each time, of course, was after they'd assured me that they'd done all they could from their end and that the problem had to be on mine. They're saying that this time, too, so maybe it'll right itself before then.

If not, not only will posting be so lethargic but I'll be even farther behind on e-mail than I am now. Forgive me if yours is languishing in my "to be answered" folder. It's in good company in there.

Several folks have written to ask about the photo of George Reeves I posted earlier…why Superman is gold, did I change it, did some stupid person color it, what? I was going to color-correct his uniform to blue but then decided to leave it the way I'd found it. It's a cropped pic from the lobby card from Superman in Scotland Yard, and I did a little Photoshop Magic where something covered part of his arm. I copied a hunk of the other arm, flopped it and pasted it over to complete the Man of Steel's manly elbow. But I didn't change the coloring.

In the black-and-white episodes — one of which that was — Reeves wore a costume that wasn't colored properly but it "read" on film as the right shades. Sources conflict as to what the hues of that actual uniform were, and how many times they changed but I don't think they were ever quite these colors. I think the person who assembled the lobby card took a photo of Reeves in the not-blue suit and enhanced its colors but, deliberately or not, didn't change the main color to Superman's traditional blue. So they took the wrong colors and made them more wrong. If anyone has more info on this, let me know…but don't expect a reply until after Tuesday.