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

This movie could have been awesome, but it misses the mark. It's a Superman Musical, based on a Broadway flop, and aired at 11:30 at night; you know it's not going to be Oscar material. But the fun comes in that the movie knows it's bad, and revels in it. It bears its cheese like a badge of honour, and as such actually comes close to being pretty good. It's cheesy, low-budget, and self-referential: three of my favourite things. Plus, it's narrated by Gary Owens, which makes it hard to go wrong.

But there's two problems: 1. It goes on way too long. There's only maybe 20 minutes of plot, tops, stretched into an hour and a half. This is due largely to 2. The songs. There's a whole lot of them, and they're not very well written. In fact, when you get down to it, some of them are really badly written. The rhyme schemes are haphazard and lackluster, the tunes are decent but nothing special, and in general, they all end up being pretty forgettable.

The songs also tend to repeat themselves a lot, stretching a single point into five or six verses... Then repeating several of those five or six verses over for emphasis. It gets boring very quickly. And since a large portion of the movie is devoted to the songs, the movie also gets old pretty quickly.

Still... For all of its flaws, it ends up being a fairly enjoyable movie. And as bad as it is... It's still not nearly as bad as The Adventures of Superpup.

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.

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!"

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.

I saw this production of the musical on late night TV at the age of 15. Yes, the production values aren't that great, but Loretta Switt has 2 great numbers as mentioned in other comments. You've Got Possibilities and Oooh, Do You Love You!-which shows what a spectacular belt voice she has. Although pretty bad, I remember at the time finding it really funny. The updated 70's orchestrations are really fun too and Leslie Anne Warren as well as Kenneth Mars and David Wayne are funny. The original Broadway production got critical raves, but the show couldn't find an audience as Batman was the show everyone was watching at the time. Hello Dolly & Funny Girl opened the same season as well which didn't help matters. The show got lost in the shuffle.