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.

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.

Being a big SUPERMAN fan, I can remember when this musical was on TV. I think it was broadcast as an episode of the late night ABC WIDE WORLD OF ENTERTAINMENT. At the time, the old SUPERMAN TV show was popular in reruns again. What made me think to look this up, is that I am currently watching a vintage (c.1966) episode of I'VE GOT A SECRET on THE GAME SHOW NETWORK. The celebrity guest is an actor named Bob Holiday, who was currently starring on broadway in the original play. With songs by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who also wrote "Bye Bye Birdie." Holiday came dressed in his Superman costume, and his "secret" was to teach Steve Allen how to fly on a wire. I seem to recall seeing a TV GUIDE article about the play from around this time. I can remember the cast album of this play being available in budget "cut-out" record album bins for many years. The stars in the stage play (or at least on the show album) were Jack Cassidy and Linda Lavin. I sure wish I would have bought one then, but checking on the net, the cast LP was re-released on CD in 1992! Those are my memories of IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE. Mark R. Hill

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!"

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.