Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Superman's serial returns to television!  Set your tivo, hd, or vhs on Turner Classic Movies:

Oct 28 Saturday

Start time 10:00 AM ET Superman Comes To Earth (1948)
Chapter 1 of the serial Superman (1948). 

Depths Of The Earth (1948)
Chapter 2 of the serial Superman (1948).

Reducer Ray, The (1948)
Chapter 3 of the serial Superman (1948).

Man Of Steel (1948)
Chapter 4 of the serial Superman (1948).

Job For Superman!, A (1948)
Chapter 5 of the serial Superman (1948).

Saturday November 4

Start time 10:00 AM ET Superman In Danger (1948)
Chapter 6 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Into The Electric Furnace (1948)
Chapter 7 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Superman To The Rescue (1948)
Chapter 8 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Irresistible Force (1948)
Chapter 9 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Between Two Fires (1948)
Chapter 10 of the serial Superman (1948).

Saturday November 11

Start time 10:00 AM ET Superman's Dilemma (1948)
Chapter 11 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Blast In The Depths (1948)
Chapter 12 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Hurled To Destruction (1948)
Chapter 13 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Superman At Bay (1948)
Chapter 14 of the serial Superman (1948).
     
Payoff, The (1948)
Chapter 15 of the serial Superman (1948).
   

November 18th

Start time 10:00 AM ET

Superman vs Atom Man (1950) begins!

Starting at 10AM, they'll be showing five chapters of the 1948 SUPERMAN serial on October 28th.

If you don't have TCM, it's worth it to get it if you're a science fiction movie fan. For one thing, they tend to have a lot of classic science fiction, whether it is the original KING KONG or any of Doug McClure's 1970s actioners involving dinosaurs.

That's cool to know...

I might pass on the "Land (and People) that Time Forgot" movies though... 8)

Hahahaha. Oh, boy, did I ever feel sorry for the dinos in that one. Because they had limited mobility, they just sat there and got chewed into hamburger by gunfire. It was like watching SHINDLER'S LIST but for dinosaurs...even the big ones never even had a chance.

This is why slasher movie bad guys always use gardening tools. Give a slasher a machine gun, and you've got a two minute teenager massacre instead of a slasher flick.

Did you know I got this one confused with AT THE EARTH'S CORE? Considering both are Doug McClure vehicles involving dinosaurs and cavemen this is understandable. But one had Caroline Munro and the other didn't. I kept on waiting for her to show up...what a rip-off!

In a similar mode, check out the Richard Boone movie, "The Last Dinosaur"...

Thank You!

I KNEW I was thinking of a movie with Richard ("Paladin") Boone and not Doug ("You might know me from such films as "Journey to the Earth's Core" and "Gladys, The Groovy Mule!") McClure.

You gotta love classic B-movies like this.  "We've discovered a lost land at the center of the Earth.  We theorize a dinosaur may still be alive there.  Let's spend every cent we have to go there and kill it!"

Honestly, I never understood the whole "lost world" sub-genre as invented (I gather) by Burroughs and continued through countless bad movies and Ka-Zar comics.  How exactly would these worlds-within-a-world come into existence?  What do they do for a sun?  For an atmosphere?  How did the dinosaurs get there?  Did they have drill-nosed "molemobiles" like the humans in the stories?

I'd pay good money to see a film where a party of adventurers gets together and drills down after dinosaurs, only to hit molten magma and vaporize themselves 30-45 minutes in.

There was actually a Russian scientist at the turn of the century who theorized that mammoths occasionally esaped an undergound warm world near the North Pole and became trapped in ice, explaining the frozen carcasses in Siberia...

At least Conan Doyle's lost world was a plateau in South America...

It's actually kind of fun to go back and look at all the theories about dinosaurs over the years, even from "legit" experts.  Some of the "thunder lizard" conceptual drawings from the 1800s are a hoot, and even since my own childhood a lot of what we "know" has gone out the window, like the idea that Dinos were reptiles, loners, etc.  Now they're illustrated in a whole rainbow of colors, sometimes several colors on one beast, instead of all the green or brown versions I grew up on.  Even one of the highest profile dinos, the Brontosaurus, is now believed to have not even existed (apparently they put the wrong head on the wrong neck!).

Just goes to show that science is not as exact as some people would have you believe.  It's pretty much about what we are capable of understanding at any given moment in time, as opposed to what actually "is."

UPDATE!

I was just reading in the forward to the 2005 edition of MASTER OF ADVENTURE: THE WORLD OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS that the script for the movie version of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT was written by the greatest fantasy novelist of all time, Michael Moorcock.

Holy Cow.

That sound you hear is my jaw hitting the floor. Apparently, Moorcock's entry into the world of science fiction was writing an ERB-fanzine at age 14, which brought him to the attention of tons of other people that eventually led to an early gig writing the script for THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT. And I checked it out on IMDB, and it's true.