Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Ladies and Gentlemen, heeeere's Johnny!

"The MIDNIGHT MURDER SHOW!" (http://superman.nu/tales4/midnight/)

:s:

Yay! You just gotta love a Bronze Age Superman story a la Cary Bates! Thanks for putting this up, Rao!

Having Steve Lombard as a guest host is Johnny's second favorite thing. What's first? Having an unclean yak sit on his dinner!

Hey, can anyone identify the guests on the show? Hank Aaron is obvious, but who are others? I'm guessing the guy is Clint Eastwood, but I don't have a clue about the lady. They should have Earth-One names, too. How about Hank Moses and Clint Westwood?

Hmm.  

1974?  2 years before Star Wars came out.  

I think the only way to figure this out is to dig up People magazie 1974 in review issue.   Could be an actress, a singer, or a fashion model.  Maybe even Holly from Price is Right.  She looks like Holly, but I'm not sure

At any rate, this is a good story that shows Superman using his brains over his muscle.  I do like the mad scientist bit.  Instant sonic booms.

Very entertaining story :-)

Question: did any (real-world) weekday late-night shows actually start at midnight in the 70's? Earth-One's Eastern Time Zone-dwellers must've been an awfully sleepy bunch come morning...

Hmm... no idea who the woman's supposed to be, but alternate names for the Earth-One Hank Aaron and Clint Eastwood... um... how about "Henry Allen" and , um, "Cliff Westwood"?

Finally: this story came along *three* years before Star Wars came out (SW came out in '77... my sister was being born around the same time it debuted in the theater...)

To quote Touch McCoy:  "no --no, it just ain't possible!"

How fast must Superman be moving to get there between the click of the mechanism and the actual bullet hitting Johnny?  Where was this just discussed?

IIRC, The Tonight Show was 90 minutes for many years, then cut back to 60 minutes sometime around 1980. Where I lived (ET), it always started at 11:30. The real night owls stuck around for The Tomorrow Show. IMHO, Tom Snyder was a sure cure for imsomnia.

Hmmm . . . NBC also has The Today Show. Did they ever have The Yesterday Show?

Regarding the Earth-One counterparts of Earth-Prime people, I'm going to start a new topic on the "Superman" category.


I was waiting for someone to ask about this. This is the real hole in the story. Consider that Superman couldn't even start moving until the sound of the click reached his ears! Sound travels at about 1100 feet/second near sea level. So figure about 5 seconds per mile from the kidnappers' hide-out to the WGBS studio. Superman must have known the hide-out was very close, otherwise he would have left the studio after Johnny was dead!

He might call it super-hearing, but it is something entirely different.  Along with telescopic vision.

The ability to HEAR something on a planet elsewhere in the solar system, does not rely on the speed of sound or the medium seperating Superman and the source of the sound.

Telescopic vision is in the same boat.   The Green Sun Supergirl story is the perfect example of this.  Supergirl was able to SEE what was going on during the present of a planet, despite being several hundred light years away

Calling it super-hearing and super-vision is just shorthand for a different power altogether.

I don't know how super-hearing and super-vision are defined in today's Superman comics, but back in the 1970s they were generally governed by the laws of physics. I say generally, because it really depended on the writer's knowledge and attention to detail. In "Last Son of Krypton" (http://superman.nu/thebook/lsok/?chapter=3&language=), Elliot Maggin said Superman could hear only within a sound-conducting atmosphere.


A similar scene appears in "The World's Greatest Heroine" (http://superman.nu/tales3/greatest/?page=66), where Superman and Supergirl use their telescopic vision to look at another world. Once again, however, that is just a mistake by the writer. There was never a suggestion anywhere in pre-Crisis comics that Superman could "see" faster than light or "hear" faster than sound.

Don't mean to be confrontational, but I don't believe there has ever been an era where Supe's powers were governed by the laws of physics.

His powers impossible in any event, I think it is the misapprehension or ignorance of basic science and physics by many writers that led some subsequent writers to attempt a "reboot" or "retcon" to repair some of this unreason.

Please note that I am in agreement with most on this forum that the results of that revisionism has been lamentable and destructive to the mythology of Superman.  I simply state that the continued and escalating violations of the "laws of reason"-- which led to such things as Superman blowing supergiant stars around the universe at trans-lightspeed w/ his superbreath-- creates a sort of Supermanic state of physical laws that are difficult to write into.  A writer couldn't just step into the Superman universe; he'd have to get his head around things that were permitted by precedent but that were not reasonable or logical or even internally self-consistent.

You know, the endless efforts to "explain" Superman's secret disguise--a pair of eyeglasses!--is the most blatant illustration of this.  The dumbest (actually, the most innocent, from a time of innocence) secret identity in all of comics, its very lack of reason screams to conform w/ a universe of reason.  Ergo, so much attention to what many in this forum have correctly identified as the most mundane, boring aspect of the whole Superman story.  But... if *that* doesn't make sense, what does make sense??

What a tragedy that, instead the various attempts to "challenge" Superman (whether through various hues of Krytonite, endless survivors of Krypton, Sandman, etc), DC editors didn't just make the writers take a classes in physics or somesuch to bring Superman's powers into a common realm...

Superhearing?  Superventriloqusim?  Sure, but subject to the speeds of sound.  Telescopic vision?  Yeah, but subject to the speed of light.  What's seen on other planets is ancient history.

Perhaps this attention to detail, this "common sense weakening," might have spared us all some horrible destruction of the Superman family and of a character special to us all.

My $0.02.

A phrase to conjure with!  Thanks Van-Zee!



Similar problems lead the ancient Greek poet Homercles (what, you never heard of him?) to scrap most of those hoary old nonsensical Greek Myths in favour of a new batch of "more realistic" myths --now lost to history. :D



Some good points.  One of the most charming aspects of this "weakness" I read recently was a Superboy story in which SB stashes his glasses in a tree to convince Lana that Clark was flung there by Chandu the gorilla.  Later Clark confronts LL without his specs but because he's wearing civilian clothes (I guess) she doesn't see that he's Superboy.

Of course, many of the writers were long-time science fiction fans and writers themselves, with at least a basic grounding in physics and chemistry.  Go figure.  I still chalk the Crisis, etc up to small-mindedness, idiocy, and short-sightedness, in general.