"The Girl Who Hired Superman"
"Superman's not for sale"...unless you have a pie that needs delivered to Alaska...then you get first-class service!
I'm not sure which was more contrived -- how easily Clark agreed to go along with this indulgence for a couple of rich fat cats (even for the sake of charity, it sets a bad precedent) or how Mara and the bad guys just assumed Superman would show up just because Mara talked to Clark about it. Now we even have strangers taking it for granted that Clark is Superman's message service.
Turning coal into a diamond is a classic Superman trick, but I've never heard of him turning a (fake) diamond to powder and crushing it back together. I can't buy that his super-pressure would allow him to restore the stone's cut.
We saw before in that jungle-idol episode that he could crush coal into a cut and polished diamond. So he must have incredibly fine manipulative abilities in his fingers. In this case, the fake diamond was probably a rhinestone made from flint glass. Crushing it would be easy for Superman, as would melting it with pressure from his fingers and molding the glass into the desired shape. The problem would be cooling it down, but if this were a comic book, he'd probably have directed a split-second pulse of his super-breath to cool it down -- while describing the process to the readers in a verbose thought balloon.
Charity or no, Superman putting on a private show for the lady didn't feel right...but it would have been a nice bit if they'd done an episode that had him performing for orphans or children in a hospital. Perhaps a room full of child extras would have been beyond the show's means.
Yeah. And I don't mind, because Gloria Talbott (Mara) is possibly the most gorgeous actress they've had on this show to date. (And again, the "girl" is played by a 25-year-old actress -- although I guess that's not the same as the 20-something "boys" in the show, since it was common at the time to refer to any single, non-elderly woman as a "girl.")
A plot involving a photographic negative and Superman didn't fog it with his X-ray vision...or did he and I missed it?
He didn't need to, because what he was carrying wasn't actually a photographic negative, it was a counterfeit printing plate hidden inside a film holder. Though no doubt he could've used his x-ray vision to see what was really inside the holder -- and no doubt he overheard the bad guys whispering to each other in his earshot, a really stupid move on their parts.
Lois and Jimmy should have called about the film holder, instead of practically turning themselves in to the bad guys.
But they already knew the phone was out. So at least this time they had an excuse.
So did Clark have some way of making the lightning strike the antenna? Otherwise, it seems like he was counting on getting a little too lucky.
In a storm that heavy, it's not too unlikely that an antenna would get hit by lightning. Maybe the switch he flipped open was to the grounding wire which would've protected the equipment from the lightning, so that when the lightning did strike, it was directed through his body rather than to ground.
I'm more surprised, though, that the electric current recharged the batteries rather than burning out the equipment altogether.
Once again sending kids to summer camp comes up as a charity, and this time it's established to be Superman's favorite. He must have wanted to go real bad as a kid but the Kents couldn't afford it.
Yeah, seriously. Why not medical research into some deadly childhood disease? In the radio series, you'd sometimes hear public service announcements encouraging people to give money to polio research or the March of Dimes. There was a polio vaccine by 1956, but there must've been other diseases that needed to be fought, like muscular dystrophy or something. It's a shame the TV series didn't manage to be as socially conscious or genuinely beneficial as the radio series was.
"The Wedding of Superman"
And I was just saying that they didn't do any Neill-centric episodes....OTOH, it features Lois sniffling over the lovelorn column. Not exactly the sort of Lois that we've become used to in more recent decades.
Yeah -- but it's the first time this show's Lois has been portrayed in a way consistent with her '50s/'60s comics portrayal, as a character whose entire identity was defined by her obsession with marrying Superman. Although the comics' Lois took that obsession to a downright predatory extreme, and was in a bitter rivalry with other suitors (if you can use that word for women) like Lana Lang and sometimes Wonder Woman. Even though Lois wasn't as bad here, her sudden weepy obsession with romance doesn't look good on her. Especially at the end where she was evidently teetering on the edge of a psychotic break and couldn't distinguish dreams from reality.
We also get another Silver Age comics trope, the imaginary story, though filtered here through the TV trope of the dream episode. I wonder how many times Lois married Superman in imaginary stories. There was even one where Superman was split into two identical selves, Superman Red and Superman Blue, and was thus able to marry both Lois and Lana. (This was the loose inspiration for the weird '90s phase where Superman was split into Red and Blue selves with new costumes and electrical powers.)
Interesting casting note: there were two Lois Lane actresses in this episode. "Sometimes Mabel" was played by Julie Bennett, who would go on to be a career voice actress and would occasionally substitute for Joan Alexander as the voice of Lois Lane in Filmation's '67 Superman series, as well as playing Wonder Girl in their
Teen Titans shorts (and Aunt May in the last season or two of the '90s
Spider-Man series).
The episode also features Dolores Fuller, best known as the girlfriend of notorious director Ed Wood.
"Dagger Island"
Hey, hey, there's Lois's office!
We saw her office in "The Wedding of Superman" too, remember.
I love it how they're going to such lengths to avoid casting guest actors when they can get Perry to fill the role. First he revealed hitherto-unsuspected scientific brilliance, and now it turns out he's secretly a lawyer too! He's like one of those characters in small Western towns who are the mayor, the postmaster, the sheriff, the justice of the peace, and so on.
(Oh, and here's a
Gilligan's Island ad with Dawn Wells. Who's looking incredibly good for a woman in her mid-70s.)
Pro tip for trenchcoat-wearing hoods: If you're going to chloroform someone, wait until they hang up the phone so nobody knows they're in danger.
Odd that Superman inhaled the gas but didn't exhale it safely like he did last time he used that trick -- it just disappeared. Also, the window he jumped out of in Lois's office was exactly the same window he re-entered out in the hallway.
And using heat vision to make that cannonball hot didn't exactly protect Jimmy, considering that it just meant Jimmy had to dodge a hot falling cannonball rather than a cold one. And how did Jimmy think the cannonball got heated if he didn't know Superman had intervened?
I wasn't watching this one very closely, but closely enough to notice that it's chock full of more of those major color/quality shifts. It makes me wonder if they did any remastering/restoration for the DVD releases.
I doubt MeTV is using the same source material as the DVDs. They're probably using some cheaper version, one that isn't very high-resolution, judging from the posterization in a lot of the black-and-white episodes they showed before.
Anyway, I think the shifts in quality were inherent to the episode. I noted that for the most part, the lower-quality footage was in shots that dissolved into each other or faded in or out. That would mean they took an extra pass through the optical printer, which would've degraded their resolution compared to the raw footage. Normally the effect isn't this extreme, but I've seen it in other old productions. They must've been using a pretty poor optical printer.
And it was cool to see Jimmy successfully fast-talk his way out of a crisis and rescue himself and Lois without Superman's help. Plus I loved his line about genius -- "It runs in my family, and sometimes I catch up with it."
