They tell me there’s yet another Superman movie doing the rounds. Probably called Superman XXII in what seems to be an eternal series.
Rightly so, of course, as Superman is immortal, or so we believed as kids. Every week a new comic appeared and our hero would save damsels, prevent train crashes and deliver villains to the cop shop. All in a day’s work.
If you went to the pictures on Saturday afternoon, there he was again, looking a bit overweight in an ill-fitting costume and kidding us he was about to fly by running to the edge of the screen and doing a feeble jump skywards. Still, it’s all we had.
A bit before my time, he was also a radio star. Kids would tune in at 5.45pm to listen to his adventures on the wireless where the flying bit would have been easy - just a ‘‘whoosh’’ sound effect, maybe.
The radio series was recorded in Australia, like most of the soap operas on New Zealand radio. The scripts were American but in those enlightened times, American voices were deemed unsuitable for a discerning audience, so the programmes used Australian actors with no trace of an Australian accent.
They called it ‘‘ABC English’’, just as we had ‘‘NZBS English’’.
Brisbane actor Leonard Teale took the starring role and Superman with Leonard Teale as the Man of Steel was the unforgettable introduction. Pure poetry.
The scripts were rewritten to avoid horrors then unknown in the Antipodes like hamburgers, baseball and freeways. Re-working this material was Christchurch-born Michael John Noonan (no relation to New Zealand writer Michael Anthony Noonan).
Michael John Noonan wrote thousands of scripts and was bemused that Superman had been banned from New Zealand radio.
I was on to the case at once and found that Superman ran on NZBS stations from February 1950 to December 1953, and finished simply because there were no more episodes to play.
In one incident, portraits of prominent Māori in the Auckland Art Gallery were slashed and in another, an explosive was attached to a car’s ignition. Luckily, the driver was not injured when his car exploded.
In those days, the minister of broadcasting, Ronald Algie, ruled the roost, as radio was just another government department. He had a stirring defence for Superman when MPs suggested it be banned.
‘‘It has been going for more than three years and a-half, and its principal theme was that right and good would triumph.’’
He pointed out that no fewer than five staff members spent all their working days listening to serials before broadcast and ‘‘when doubts were raised, they were referred to their superior officers’’.
An audition committee logbook still exists which makes fascinating reading, as it describes the horrors of American soap opera episodes which were withdrawn, never to pollute New Zealand’s airwaves.
Having missed the radio Superman, I relied on comics for my fix of the triumph of right and good and, like many others of my generation, I wondered what would happen if Superman was selected to play on the wing for South Africa. (This was the time of the great 1956 Springbok tour, you must remember).
We also wondered why Superman had not been enlisted to win the war. In a one-day global circuit he could have destroyed Japan, Italy and Germany and what a lot of bother that would have saved.
Academics have asked the same question and found the answer in a wartime Superman comic which told of Superman’s alter ego, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, enlisting and going through a medical.
It included an eye exam which Kent failed. He inadvertently used his X-ray vision and was reading from the wrong chart in the next room.
The doctor’s ‘‘you’re physically superb, except that you’re as blind as a bat. The army doesn’t want you’’ ended any hope of Superman joining the ranks.
All pretty plausible, really, except that I’ve yet to meet a mild-mannered reporter.
I came across Superman many years after my comic-reading phase when my son took me to see the 1978 movie, which was a great improvement on the old Saturday afternoon bughouse version. In full colour and with the hero actually flying instead of hopping off-screen.
My son loved it and when I got round to explaining it was just a story, he ignored my explanation with a loud ‘‘Oh no, Dad. The Man of Steel is real.’’
I’ll be seeing that son at Christmas time. I wonder if he’ll take me to the new Superman movie.
I think I would enjoy it.
• Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
