“Playing Superman ruined my acting career,” Alyn said later. The serials look cheap even by the standards of the medium, which was waning by the late ’40s they couldn’t make his wire-enabled flight look remotely real, so whenever Superman takes off, Alyn is replaced by a rotoscoped cartoon. “Then the guy said, ‘Take off your pants,’ and I said, ‘Wait a minute.'”) In two 15-chapter serials, Alyn fights a femme fatale called the Spider-Lady and the metal-masked Atom Man 1 he’s too slim to really look the part but he springs into action like the trained dancer that he was. (“They said take off your shirt, so I did and flexed my muscles,” he said once. He was 37 when he landed the role, a vaudeville performer who’d struck out for Hollywood with his pal Red Skelton and struggled to land major roles before Columbia Pictures offered him the cape. The first live-action Superman was Kirk Alyn, born John Feggo Jr. Superman (1950) The Adventures of Superman (1952-58) Here’s a look back at some of his more noteworthy appearances on screens small, large, and huge. The most important Superman movie is whatever the next one is. What define him are his endurance and his mutability. Regardless of how Man of Steel does - and even with a Rotten Tomatoes score hovering around 59 percent as I write this, it still looks too big to fail - it won’t define him for long. If he were a real person, he’d be a leathery showbiz survivor - 75 years old, with a résumé split between massive hits and outrageous flops. He’s outlived his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and will undoubtedly outlive his current corporate paymasters, too. (Just kidding - that was never cool.) He’s weathered a sex-tape scandal, taken a wife and then lost her to a continuity reboot, died, and been reborn, with a mullet. This is how long that is: He’s been famous since it was cool to use the phrase “Slap a Jap!” on the cover of a comic book. Superman has appeared in comics more or less continuously since 1938.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |