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

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.

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.

"It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" was the unwieldy (and comma-less) title of a 1966 Broadway musical that ran for less than four months. The score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams produced not a single hit song ... although "You've Got Possibilities" was recorded in England by Matt Munro. 'Superman' was such a resounding failure that, years later, when Martin Charnin approached Strouse to write the tunes for a musical comedy about Little Orphan Annie, Strouse almost refused because he'd already had one flop musical about a comic-book character! ('Annie' became the biggest hit in Strouse's songbook.)

Many bizarre (or Bizarro) decisions were made in the musical 'Superman', chiefly the decision to eliminate most of the established characters. The Broadway musical has no Perry White, no Jimmy Olsen. (They show up briefly in this tele-version.) Superman wastes a lot of time fighting some larcenous Chinese acrobats (played by white actors) who seem more like Batman's sort of villains. The main villain here is an evil scientific genius in the tradition of Lex Luthor ... but he isn't Lex Luthor. Apparently the producers of 'Superman' didn't want to pay DC Comics for the rights to use the Luthor character, so they named their villain "Doctor Abner Sedgwick". In the Broadway production (but not in this TV version), the actor playing Dr Sedgwick wore long flowing hair, just to make sure we all understood he wasn't the famously chrome-domed Lex Luthor.

The lead character in the 'Superman' musical isn't even Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane or anyone else in the established superhero canon: it's Max Mencken (who?), an egotistical reporter at the Daily Planet who wants to destroy Superman due to sheer envy. Mencken actually has more time onstage than Superman and Clark Kent together! (And more songs.) In 1966 the big-name Broadway actor Jack Cassidy was looking for a star vehicle, so the 'Superman' production team built up the minor role of Mencken in order to attract Cassidy and take advantage of his box-office name value. This was a fatal error: a musical about Superman ought to be ABOUT Superman.

'ABC Wide World of Entertainment' wasn't so much a TV series as it was an irregular time slot. In the 1970s, whenever ABC-TV had a piece of programming that didn't fit any established niche, they bunged it into whatever late-night slot was available and called it 'Wide World of Entertainment'. The most notorious example of this was the 'Monty Python' special which ABC-TV aired at midnight: several Python episodes were drastically recut to fit the time slot, provoking a famous lawsuit from the Python comedians.

The 1975 television production of "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" -- transmitted under ABC's 'Wide World of Entertainment' rubric -- is a re-staging of the Broadway show, with a new cast. This is a VERY bad musical special, done on a criminally low budget. The entire production is filmed on a cramped sound stage. The musical numbers, which were bad in the first place, are staged in a very unimaginative manner.

In the Broadway version, the nearest thing to a hit song was "You've Got What I Need, Baby", a duet sung by Mencken and Sedgwick when they decide to team up in a plot to kill Superman. Staged on Broadway, this was a rousing up-tempo number that efficiently closed the first act. In this 1975 TV version, the song is stodged down so that Kenneth Mars and David Wayne can perform it with arthritic slowness.

A (very minor) musical high point occurs in the song "You've Got Possibilities" when Loretta Swit, as the villainess, attempts to seduce mild-mannered Clark Kent, whom she doesn't realise is really Superman. When Linda Lavin performed this number in the Broadway production, there was an element of suspense when she sang the line "underneath, there's something there" while she started to unbutton Clark's shirt ... nearly discovering the big Superman "S" underneath. This clever staging was omitted in the TV version, and nothing better is brought in to replace it. Swit's singing voice is smoky and appropriately vampy, but weak.

This TV special does have one poignant moment that didn't occur in the Broadway original, when Superman meets two teenage fans named Jerry and Joe who want to write stories about him and draw pictures of him. This is a subtle reference to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real-life teenagers from Cleveland who created Superman in the 1930s and sold the character to National Periodical Publications. I wish that "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" had more moments like this. I'll rate this terrible show only one point out of 10. Pass the Kryptonite.

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.

Campy TV musical about Superman, adapted from a short-lived Broadway show from 1966. It's fun at first, with its cheesy sets and costumes and very corny songs. But a little bit goes a long way and this thing wears out its welcome long before the hour mark and it goes on another half-hour past that. There are some recognizable faces in this, such as Lesley Ann Warren, Loretta Swit, Kenneth Mars, and poor David Wayne, who had certainly done better than this earlier in his career. It's something Superman fans will want to track down and see, for laughs if nothing else. I can't see musical enthusiasts getting much enjoyment out of it though. The numbers are all pretty amateurish. Anyway, give it a look if you're a die-hard Supes fan or if you just like things that are so bad you can laugh at them.