Sunday Morning

Michael Scott, a reader of this site, recolored the George Reeves pic to put Superman in his traditional tones. Several of you have written to me to say that the costume Mr. Reeves wore in the black-and-white episodes was grey and brown, and I think I've seen that costume. There seems to be some disagreement as to whether he had a couple of different ones and what their colors were, but I'm pretty sure that the pic I posted with the goldenrod outfit was a matter of some lobby card stylist screwing up.

A couple of folks wrote to ask if the action and violence in the Superman TV show were toned down because of the Wertham-fanned horror comics scare or because the sponsor demanded it or what. Both were probably factors but my understanding is that the decision was primarily a matter of investment. After the series went on the air, the stations that bought it were primarily programming it as a kids' show in terms of time slots and the kind of commercials they sold for it. I believe there were even cities that folded it into an afternoon block of programming anchored by a kiddie show host. (In Los Angeles, around 1960, "Engineer Bill" Stulla had The Adventures of Superman on his Channel 9 show, right after episodes of Spunky & Tadpole, Q.T. Hush and Colonel Bleep.) And of course, Kellogg's cereals — which bought heavily into the show — was primarily interested in the younger audience. So as the show found its market, content was adjusted to match…and I think they also toned down the action because it cost more to shoot, and the producers had adopted a "cheap as possible" approach to the budget.

In 1968 or so, I spent one afternoon in the office of Whitney Ellsworth, who was the former editor-in-chief of DC Comics. In the mid-fifties, the company sent him to Hollywood to supervise the Superman show and to drum up other TV projects, and he stayed out here and in that post, long after he'd outlived his usefulness. What I recall from our conversations is that Mr. Ellsworth was terrified of saying the wrong thing to me. Somehow, he feared that if he said "You know, I don't like red on comic book covers" to a 16-year-old comic fan, it would get back to his superiors in New York and they'd use it as an excuse to terminate whatever financial arrangement he still had with the company. But what he did talk about, over and over, were the high costs of production. He had not been able to get numerous DC-related projects off the ground because of how expensive everything was, he insisted. And if I asked him anything about the old George Reeves series, the answer was always money, with the implied fear that the show would be cancelled and everyone would be thrown out of work if they went a dime over budget. This is only a slight exaggeration of the way it went…

ME: I never understood why you rarely saw Lois Lane taking notes when she was covering a story.

HIM: My God, do you know what a notepad cost then?

So I gather that the answer to most questions about that Superman show is, "Because it was cheaper." Whatever it was. I think it's amazing how watchable even the latter episodes were, given that they were trying to do the show for a buck-ninety.

I'm still on a dial-up connection which is not faster than a speeding bullet, so I've gotta run here. There will be more posting on this site when the Comcast people make me whole again.