Well, mercifully, here we are. The end of the first season of Adventures of Superman. Well, sort of.
1. Judging on two different criteria
You see, before Adventures of Superman, there was Superman and the Mole Men, which was a theatricl pilot of sorts for the series. A 58 minute film, this is considered the first ‘full length’ DC Comics film. After the show was picked up, the film was split, and slightly edited, into two episodes, “The Unknown People” parts one and two.
I chose to watch the film, rather than the truncated for television version, because I figured it might play better in its intended form. And it’s hard to judge the episodes for any faults in flow, or timing, because it was never intended to be shown in two parts.
That said, you can see easily where edits might have been made, due to the lengthy, and incredibly dull, chase scene that goes on forever in the middle of the film. It isn’t all that visually interesting, and it doesn’t advance the plot in any real way. It simply gets a mole/unknown person and two townspeople from the town proper to the outskirts. One establishing shot could have done this; instead, it took a fly’s lifetime.
2. Bodies like moles? Heads like humans?
When Lois first encounters the creatures from the center of the Earth, she describes them as having ‘bodies like moles, heads like humans.’ Now, for clarity’s sake, let’s look at these mole people:
Now, tell me friends: if you had to describe those people, what part of their bodies would look odd to you? Wouldn’t it be their fucking heads? Sure, they are short, but that doesn’t make their bodies like moles. When Lois sees a tall person, does she say “he had the body of a giraffe and the head of a human!” What the fuck, Lois?
3. Best spit-take ever
There is one amazing moment of the chase sequence, which almost justifies its entire presence. As the mole man is running through the outskirts of town, he passes a cowboy or prospector or some white dude in a cowboy hat. The guy is, as folks in Westerns are wont to do, drinking from a ladle. Dude drinks, swallows, looks to his right, sees a mole person over the ridge, goes back to his drinking from a ladle, suddenly realizes what he saw, and does a magnificent spit-take. I want that to play on a loop in my office to cheer me up when I’m having a bad day.
4. Boy howdy, does Lois hate Clark
Lois is so mean to Clark in this episode. Now, mind you, Clark comes off as an ineffectual buffoon in these episodes, always running away at the slightest hint of trouble, but that’s because he’s, you know, Superman. Absent that knowledge, I can see why Lois would be frustrated, but she really buries him to some of the townsfolk. She basically says “Clark is shit and is half the person I am” to anyone who will listen.
5. Actually Super!
The best part of this episode is how heroic Superman is. First of all, he cares for the mole men for no other reason than they are living things, and have inherent dignity. He stops the townspeople from lynching one of them, compares them to Nazis, and generally tells them how they are misguided. He saves the life of the guy who shoots him no less than half a dozen times, even though he says it is “more than [he] deserves.”
But this is the Superman that I’ve wanted this entire series. I want to see a guy who stands up for what is right, not a guy who abandons people on a mountaintop because they know his secret identity. I want a Superman who makes unpopular decisions in order to save people, and who tries to inspire and change people’s minds. This is the closest Superman comes in this show to feeling like my Superman.
Let’s hope season 2 is better in that regard.
See ya next summer!
