January 5, 1948: The 1st Live-Action Superman Film

January 5, 1948: The Columbia Pictures film serial Superman premieres. It is the 1st live-action version of comic books' leading superhero.

Superman had debuted in Action Comics #1, produced by the company that would become known as DC Comics, in 1938. He had a radio show that began in 1940, and Max Fleischer produced 17 10-minute cartoons from 1941 to 1943.

There was one problem with having a live-action version of Superman: How to make it look like he was flying, without making the wires holding him up from the ceiling look obvious? Directors Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr got around this by simply making the flying Superman a cartoon.

This film's story is simple enough. The character's origin is shown: Scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara send their son to Earth right before their home planet, Krypton, explodes. Upon arrival on Earth, the baby is raised by a farm couple, under the name Clark Kent. He discovers that being a Kryptonian on Earth has given him, as the radio series had already established, "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men."

He grows up to become a reporter, getting a job at the Daily Planet, a newspaper in the fictional city of Metropolis. This way, he can hear about crimes or disasters as soon as they happen, and handle them as Superman.

The serial runs 15 parts, a total of 4 hours and 4 minutes. Kirk Alyn plays Clark/Superman, Noel Neill plays Planet reporter Lois Lane, Tommy Bond plays Planet teenage photographer Jimmy Olsen, Pierre Watkin plays Planet editor Perry White; and Carol Forman, who had played the titular villainess in The Black Widow the year before (no connection to the later Marvel Comics hero), plays this serial's villain, the Spider Lady.

There was a sequel in 1950, Atom Man vs. Superman. Alyn, Neill, Bond and Watkin reprise their roles, and Lyle Talbot plays the Atom Man, revealed to be Superman's already-established nemesis, the bald, evil scientific genius Lex Luthor. Despite their onscreen opposition, Alyn and Talbot were close friends, with a shared love of cooking.

The following year, the full-length feature film Superman and the Mole Men premiered, with new actors, including George Reeves as Superman and Phyllis Coates as Lois. This served as what would later be called a "backdoor pilot" for the TV series The Adventures of Superman, debuting the next year. Superman and the Mole Men would be broken up as the two-part finale of the 1st season. After that, Coates left the series, and Neill resumed the role.

Alyn followed radio actor Bud Collyer's tactic of dropping his voice an octave when switching from playing Clark to playing Superman, and also adopted Collyer's tagline, "This looks like a job for Superman!"

But, formerly considered a song-and-dance man, Alyn was typecast. In 1952, he was cast as another DC hero, though one without powers, in Blackhawk, leader of a flight squadron in World War II. In the 1978 film Superman, Alyn and Neill were cast as the parents of a young Lois Lane, as a passing of the torch to the film franchise that starred Christopher Reeve.

Watkin died in 1960, only slightly outliving his TV successor, John Hamilton -- and Reeves. The other stars lived a lot longer: Talbot died in 1996, Forman in 1997, Alyn in 1999, Bond in 2005, and Neill in 2016.

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January 5, 1948 was a Monday. Actor Ted Lange was born. It was also the day that what became known as The Kinsey Report was released. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball and football were out of season. There were no games in the Basketball Association of America, the league that became the NBA. And no games were scheduled for the NHL, either. So there were no scores on this historic day.