It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman!

The star of the 1966 stage musical "It's a Bird ...It's a Plane...It's Superman!" wasn't Jack Cassidy, it was Bob Holiday (in the double role of Superman/Clark Kent). Cassidy was the featured comic villain.The situation was that Cassidy was so right for his role, he stole most of the attention from Holiday.

Let me say, too, that it's wrong to approach this material expecting the Superman of the Salkind movies. It's closer, in attitude, to pre-Tim Burton "Batman" or the '60s "Thoroughly Modern Millie." In other words, jokey and silly and not a little racist. Only the problem, in this case, was a central uncertainty whether to parody its source material or to revere it.

Can't speak to this particular TV adaptation. I do, however, love several of the songs in the stage version -- notably "You've Got Possibilities" and "Oo-oo, Do You Love You!"

Today, April 18, 2018, is the 80th anniversary of Superman's first appearance in Action Comics # 1 which premiered at newsstands on that date way back then in 1938. So it was with that in mind that I finally got to watch the entirety of this TV adaptation of the Broadway musical from the mid-'60s based on The Son of Krypton. It was meant to be campy, like the Batman TV show from that period, and, boy, there's a lot of camp here. David Wilson plays the Man of Steel who gets weepy near the end but I don't want to mention why just watch the thing if you're willing. Lesley Ann Warren plays Lois Lane with such cheery dreaminess that it's almost infectious. Kenneth Mars and Loretta Swit are fellow Daily Planet scribes created especially for the musical. And David Wayne is the main villain and he's the funniest one in the cast especially whenever he breaks the Fourth Wall! I also recognized Al Molinaro as one of the gangsters who help in the villainy. Two more characters are a couple of young men who address each other as Jerry and Joe, one ID's himself as wanting to draw and the other wanting to write about Superman. It's clear they're meant to be Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Kal-El's creators. In fact, the last thing Superman says to them is "Hey, Jerry, Joe, what can I say without you there wouldn't be a Superman!" Truer words were never spoken and it's pertinent here since at the time, they still weren't credited as Supes' creators (in fact, they hadn't been since the last of the Famous Studios cartoons that featured him back in '43) and wouldn't be until the release of Superman: The Movie in '78. In summary, It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman! was a partly enjoyable take on the comic book legend.

The Broadway show was not the greatest contribution to the Superman myth, but it was enjoyable. Peggy Lee recorded "You've Got Possibilities" but I don't remember if that was the one I heard several times on the radio. The show had many clever lyrics. My favorite was "It's a satisfying feeling when you hang up your cape/to know that you've averted murder, larceny, and rape!" And the rhyme of "quite a dish" with "solid as a knish." And in "Revenge," where Prof. Sedgwick bemoans being passed over for the Nobel Prize, laments: ....They gave the prize to Harold Urey./The shocking thing about the matter is/My heavy hydrogen was heavier than his! And plenty more. I remember many of the songs pretty well, almost 40 years later.

The Broadway production was named in the Broadway ten best list for that year. You've got Possibilities was recorded by Jane Morgan, Edie Gourme and Streisand. The staging was by the legendary director Hal Prince. The writers of the book enentually used some of their often humorous story as part of the screenplay that they eventually wrote for the Christopher Reeve film.

The TV production was unfortunate in being broadcast out of prime time, and it did look cheap. Best line ... when Perry White receives a news article from a reporter and says "Rosebud..a sled!!!! no one will believe that!". Was anyone paying attention? Why do people on this board keep saying there was no Perry White? Even the Broadway production had a Perry White, played byEric Mason. It was Hal Prince the director who replaced the character of Jimmy Olsen with a more mature pragnmatic character named Jim Morgan. This vharcter was cut from the TV production. Benton and Newman's main plot line and tongue in cheek humor are maintained in the Salkind film. The biggest objection to the Broadway show was it looked too much like Bye Bye Birdie, and the villains parts were bigger than Superman's or Lois Lane's.

I recommend tracking down the best quality version of this you can find, as there are some pretty horrible versions out there.

I have seen this twice now. It's mostly quite boring, it's silly, many of the jokes are dumb, and the songs aren't that catchy. As a musical, there's not much of a reason to go looking for this. The same goes for those who are after a good Superman-movie. This isn't it. Superman is an overly insecure side-character in this story, that mostly revolves around the goofy villains.

But if you like so-bad-it's-good, things that are campy, or just interesting pieces of popular culture - then you can do worse than this musical. It's interesting to note that the people who wrote it, also took part in writing the 1978 Superman-movie (maybe this explains why both movies featuring Superman using x-ray to look at underwear). For superman-fans, you might notice how the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, appears as characters in the movie. As a Norwegian, I took great delight in the villain's end goal being to destroy Sweden(!). And there are some gags in the movie that are genuinely funny.

That said, the movies doesn't take itself seriously on any level, and there's not much more than the novelty of it, that makes this worth a watch.