In Superman I, Jor-El yanks young Clark away for 12 years to educate him some more. (I guess all that information shoved on him as a baby in the spaceship didn't "take".)
Yes, this is a bit odd, isn't it? You'd figure that those 2 1/2 years of "books on tape" during baby Kal's voyage might have taught him something, but apparently not. Maybe Jor-El was planting some kind of subconcious "primer" knowledge that would be tapped into and activated in the later, Fortress-based instruction? Of course another good question is what is baby Kal doing for food those two years, and who changes his diapers?
One Superman actor leaves and another enters.
Hmm...come to think of it, this seems to be the key to Superman's "makeovers." Every time he disappears, he comes back as another actor. And always looking younger! (Am I the only one who thinks Chris Reeve looked younger than Jeff East?).
No one pays attention to what sort of emotional torment dear old Martha must have gone through over his 12 year absence. Sending part of his paycheck to her wouldn't begin to heal the emotional scars.
You mean sending them once he gets to Metropolis? Because during that 12-year absence, Clark has no job and so Martha gets squat. No farm boy worth his salt would fail the family on THAT large a scale. The jerk.
I remember when I saw the film at age 14 I was confused by the scene where Jor-El begins talking about Kal's education and we seque to space scenery. I took it to mean that they were literally travelling in space during those 12 years. The alternative is that Clark sat there in the lotus position for 12 years soaking up his learning in some sort of super-acid trip, which is twice as dumb.
And of course the real question is, how could he get 12 years of education and still be dumb enough to fall for Luthor's obvious traps, give up his powers for Lois, etc? Doesn't say much for home schooling, does it?
For me, the biggest problem with the 5-year-gap is that it's physically impossible. Even though baby Kal aged only 2 to 3 years on the trip from Krypton in Film 1, Jor-El says he's been dead for "thousands of your years," (a line that survives into SR) which suggests faster-than-light travel. Now using that logic, Superman's round trip to Krypton might have taken 5 years of his own life, but for Earth-dwellers it would have taken twice as many "thousands of years" as his first trip. Thus, when he returns to Earth, he should not find his friends 5 years older and Lois with a kid...he should find the Earth thousands of years beyond anything he remembers, with all of his friends long dead and no one around who remembers Superman as anything more than ancient myth.