I was disappointed with Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman. That's the new documentary about You-Know-Who that debuted this evening on the A&E Network. It pretty much drives home the fact that to the folks who now control the property — and who obviously controlled the documentary to the extent of making its latter segments an infomercial for current TV and movie projects — the comic books are an incidental sidebar in the character's history. Every TV, movie and radio appearance was mentioned but the comics got a surface treatment, barely epidermis-deep. Although a few writers like Mark Waid and Elliott Maggin were interviewed about the character's history, I don't think anyone after Jerry Siegel was mentioned as having written 60+ years of Superman comic books and the artists didn't fare any better. No mention of Curt Swan or Wayne Boring or Al Plastino or any of them.
For that matter, as the history was recounted, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had the vision, did the first stories and were thereafter unworthy of further mention. What became of them? We heard a lot more about the fate of the men who portrayed Superman on screen than we did about the men who created him. Of course, some of this was because of current litigation and long-time corporate embarrassment…but I suspect most of it was because Time-Warner is pushing the Smallville series and the new Superman Returns movie. The other stuff can be mentioned for historical context but only as it sets up the current product as the culmination of all that has gone before.
I also thought the documentary ginned up a lot of vague, unconvincing reasons for Superman's enduring popularity. The explanations seemed flimsy and forced. I know some of the people interviewed have deeper, personal affections for the character. It would have been nice to hear more along those lines and less from the producers of the current movie…which, if we are to believe the documentary, already has people flocking to it even though it has yet to open.
And this may just be a personal prejudice of mine from having seen too many of these. There seems to be a law among documentarians that if your subject spans the sixties and seventies, you must include news footage of the J.F.K. assassination, Vietnam protests and Nixon's resignation. Not only that but you must draw some sort of line, however forced, between those events and your story. In this case, the throughline seems to be that the murder of Kennedy caused the mass disillusionment of a generation and led to things like race riots and war protests…and this, in turn, made Superman — as a defender of the status quo — seem irrelevant. I think both premises are questionable or, at best, gross oversimplifications.
Finally, I think Kevin Spacey may be the best actor working today. Isn't it amazing that as a narrator, he's monotonous and unable to sound the least bit interested in the topic at hand?
Maybe I shouldn't carp because these specials are usually even farther off the mark. But so much work went into this one that, I dunno, I somehow was expecting something with a bit more substance. As it was, I guess it was a nice collection of clips…especially from films and TV shows that Warner Home Video has coming out.