Superman Through the Ages! Forum

[coagulating random thoughts into one thread]

Everything about Superman Returns makes sense -except- for the basic premise that he leaves the Earth for 5 years chasing Kryptonians.  If you don't buy that, everything falls apart.  I don't buy it.  But, note that a similar handwaving was used before, with the "same" Superman.  I didn't buy that gap, either, but I don''t feel as bad about it. 

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".)  One Superman actor leaves and another enters.  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.  The gap does adequately explain why Clark Kent is naive even by Clark standards.  How would you behave if, for your entire adult life, your father was teaching you remedial cosmic education class?  Superman doesn't really become a "man" until age 30 or so when he defies his father (in either Superman I or the Donner cut of II).

The difference is that the 12-year chapter break in Superman I wasn't really dwelled upon by Donner, beyond the one "paycheck for mom" reference.  By contrast, the 5-year break became the titular conceit of Superman Returns.  I think Singer erred by not pulling a Darrin Stephens, focusing too much on filling Reeve's shoes and "the return".  You know Superman's back by the time the Williams music plays.  Now have him do something other than redo the "Superman I plot with bratty kid variation", pushing for that conscious "compare and contrast".  Of course, given the tortured production history of Superman Returns, I guess we're lucky it didn't have a gay R2-D2 and giant spider in it.

It's clear that the 12-year gap had storytelling potential that could have been exploited.  The (few) better parts of Superman III and Superman IV both go back to the farm.  Heck, III and Superman Returns have the "Superman goes back to the farm, then meets up with his sweetheart who now has a child" plot.  But that was hard to play out into a fuller story without the 12-year gap being problematic.  Imagine Lana asking Clark about what he did for all those years in III, or Clark trying to show more emotional resonance to his mom's death without some flashback (as  Reeve never interacted with Martha).

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?


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?).


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?  :D

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.

In the director's cut to Superman I, it's clear that Jor-El has a problem with hours -- 24 vs. 28 hours.  He might generally have problems with units of time.  It'd explain the "relativity gap" where Jor-El speaks of Einstein and "many thousands of your years ago".  Perhaps native Kryptonian time isn't measured in years at all, but in "seconds since Rao".  A line Zod said implied that Krypton may have had more than one sun, so solar rotation units may not have been in vogue.  It might not been exactly a 12-year gap after all, though Clark sure looked different afterwards, so it was something big.  :)

Given when that movie was made, a 12-year gap makes sense. Superman just misses the late 60s and most of the 70s, which goes along with how he is shown.  It would've been interesting to see if Superman had spoken of the American Way had he actually been around for Watergate.  Would Clark have been somewhat less uncool if he were around during a time where "swell" became less popular?  The bucolic rural town thing wouldn't work today.  Heck, it hasn't worked for awhile...  seeing Smallville and Superboy in the swinging sixties in the comics was just odd. 

Has he ever actually shown direct signs of super-brain power in any of the movies -- something not coupled closely with some other power)?  The closest I can think of is Superman III where he outwits the computer with a lame plot device, because we like our Superman not using his powers to defeat a menace.  (He could've compressed Richard Pryor into a wafer that fit in his cape and given the computer indigestion and I would've cheered, but that is a different story.)  All that info he was force-fed never came in handy.  He didn't even recite poetry.  I forgive him for falling for Luthor's first trap.  Superman hadn't ever been hurt, and probably didn't think he could be.  Jor-El never warned him about kryptonite.

I thought that East looked a little too close Reeve's age, but not -older-.  I assumed he was a failed attempt at finding Reeve, and only found out many years later that he was specifically cast as "young Clark".  It's funny that he's actually -in- Kansas these days. 

This doesn't wash. A year is a year. If you are speaking English, and you say "year", you mean the time taken for a planetary revolution around the sun. That's what a year is.

If speaking Kryptonian, and you mention a length of time that is not a planetary revolution around the sun, when translated into English it will not be "year" but something else (assuming the Kryptonian word itself is not quoted).

In defense of home schooling, I'd say the script doesn't say much for the education of the writer  -- whether it was received in public school, private school, or at home. Maybe he could have used twelve more years of study. ;)

I seriously doubt that The Daily Planet would hire a reporter without a journalism degree, so it appears that at the end of the twelve years, Jor gave Kal a forged college diploma.

I hate the whole idea.

One of the major points of Superman's great story is that he lost his biological father when he was a baby. That's that. A big giant talking head doesn't come back to educate him for YEARS! (Give me a break.)

It's all GARBAGE!

The father that brought up and educated Superman is PA KENT.

Much of the contentious quantification (e.g. "many thousands of your years" instead of "many, many of your years") in the Superman I/II script came at a later stage.  The only hard numbers I see in the (sometimes very painful to read)  pre-Donner script is the "28 hours, 24 as it is on Earth" exchange.  Somewhere along the way in the Donner days, a lot of quantification was added to the script (e.g. the 28 known galaxies, Krypton being from the Xeno galaxy), then was removed -- mostly. 

There was no 12-year gap, in particular.  I suspect that was added simply because of the need for a different actor to play "young Clark".  I doubt there'd have been a 12-year gap if they had a pre-pumped-up Christopher Reeve playing young Clark.  But, of course, they couldn't predict that Reeve would bulk up as much and be so physically different once Darth Vader got through with him. 

If the Salkinds are to be believed, then part of the 12-year gap wasn't spent in the fortress, but at college...the Superboy TV show. He had to get a journalism degree from somewhere...

Hmm...come to think of it, just because we see him go in as Jeff East and come out as Chris Reeve doesn't mean he actually never left during that whole 12 years.  He could always have taken Jor-El's lectures as a sort of night school, and led a normal life the rest of the time.  Maybe the Fortress is the North Pole equivalent of ECPI or the DeVry Institute.  :D

And for the record, Spiff, I wasn't slamming home schooling; my wife and I are doing it for our two boys.

Glad to hear it! And I'm sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. My wife and I are also home schooling our three kids.
Amen. In my mind this detail provides the answer to the question "Who is real -- Superman or Clark?" and the answer is BOTH. Due to his physiology, Kal-El could be nothing less than a superman on Earth. But the instruction and guidance of Jonathan and Martha Kent made him into something much more, a man. The Kents adopted Clark (yes, Clark!) in the fullest sense. They knew he was different, that he was from "somewhere else", but they also knew he was a child who needed parents. That he arrived in a rocket didn't make him any less theirs. He was the last son of Krypton, and the son of Jonathan and Martha. They loved him and raised him as their own, instilling their values into his life. The man -- Kal-El/Superman/Clark -- is formed by the confluence of Krypton and Smallville. The two parts of his heritage are inseparable, and both are essential.

Unfortunately, in Superman: The Movie Jor-El ignores Clark's upbringing on Earth. He tells Kal-El that he is not human and must not interfere in human affairs. Of couse, that's not right. Kal-El is just as human as anyone else from Smallville, and Clark is as Kryptonian as anyone else from Kryptonopolis.

I'm not so sure, Spaceman Spiff! I like to think of Perry White as just that old-fashioned sort of reporter, who worked his way up from copy boy to editor, that would be impressed by Clark Nobody Kent bringing in an impressive scoop and hiring him on the spot. I really do think Perry would look sideways at "degrees" and other such nonsense not of the real world.

It's very nice to hear from someone who understands Superman.

Do you think Jor-El was expecting that anyone besides him would really "raise" his son?  One of the things I loved about Maggin's LSOK novel was that Jor-El was thinking about just who should raise his child, which wasn't something talked about very much in the comics.  It was largely "my kid will be ok -- he'll be super after all". 

And Jor-El's "it is forbidden..." lines came across to me as more "lead by example, not by imposing your powers on the world" which seems like a reasonable sentiment.  Maggin's "Must There Be A Superman?" covered a very similar theme. 

During the depression, yes. In 2006, no. The Daily Planet is our equivalent of the New York Times, and if you go up to the New York Times without qualifications, especially with the problems they've had...it's not going to happen. Clark had to have gone to college somewhere.

Well, that's one take on it, but Spiff's is equally valid.

You could make the argument that every time Superman saves someone from a car crash, a hurricane or whatever he's tampering with the course of human events.  If he weren't around, those people would die, just as they do in our world without a Superman.

Let's say Superman has a chance to save President Kennedy at Dealy Plaza.  Should he do it?  Sure, he's Superman.  But if he does, he's changed history, hasn't he?  That's an obvious example, but who's to say what the "average joe" might mean to the time stream?  Maybe the kid Superman saves from a crashing school bus today will be President in 30 years.  Maybe the guy he saves from a house fire will go on to murder a man who could have cured cancer.

As far as I'm concerned, either Jor-El is a fool who takes both sides of the argument (help them, but don't make a difference!) or Superman is disobeying his dad every time he performs a super-rescue.

I like Brando as much as the next guy, but this whole "father-son" thing in the films is a bad idea.

i think the whole 12 year gap thing is a bit of a mistake, it sort of dehumanises superman, like in the orginal radio show, when superman comes to earth as an adult and then takes on the "disguise" of clark kent..

... thats not superman, thats the martian manhunter

I've only listened to the first few radio episodes, but recently I discovered that Superman coming to earth as an adult was never referred to again: the radio show "fixed" it later. In the 1942 retelling of Superman's origin, he came as a baby and the Kents were his parents. See here: http://www.supermanhomepage.com/radio/radio.php?topic=radio-episode-list

"Titular conceit". I really like that. Nice turn of phrase.