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The coming of the fabulous fifties brought with it a different Superman, this time on the relatively newly affordable device known as the television set. Clark Kent on the small screen was just as much a take-charge go-getter as he had been in Alyn’s portrayal, but, as played by George Reeves (whose only prior notable role was that of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone With The Wind), he had a sly cheekiness about him, often cocking his head, pushing the horn rims up on his nose and winking to the camera after offering an implausible excuse to Lois about where he had been while all the excitement had been going on.

Just one time I would have loved to have heard him say, “Well, Lois… If you would take your head out of your ass long enough to get ample oxygen to your brain, you would realize that I AM Superman.” If George Reeves as Clark Kent seemed endearing, his portrayal as Superman was downright charming. Still looking uncomfortable in the leotard (according to reports, George claimed it was very itchy and made him sweat profusely), the middle-aged actor did a great deal of bouncing off a miniature trampoline into and out of open windows, kicking in balsa wood doors and crashing through Styrofoam brick walls.

The flight technique was now achieved by filming the out-stretched actor lying on a table against a blue screen and then superimposing his image, cape ruffling, on top of a background of either passing clouds and/or buildings. Every single time he took to the air, the Superman Theme Music would pipe in. Doing the majority of his own stunts took its’ toll on George Reeves, who suffered from chronic back pain as a result until his death by suicide at the end of the decade. Contrary to rumour, George Reeves did not leap from a high rise building’s ledge to end his life, he in fact killed himself in the bedroom of his Beverly Hills home by pressing the barrel of a loaded WWII German Luger to his temple and squeezing the trigger , unable to climb out of the bleakness of a clinical depression brought on by his inability to work.

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Except for a poorly animated series of cartoons and a musical that ran briefly on Broadway in the mid-sixties, Kal-El remained confined to the pages of the comic books.

Then in 1976 he was back in a major big-budget motion picture adaptation of the saga penned by none other than Mario ‘Godfather’ Puzo. The title was ‘Superman, The Movie’ (as opposed to what? ‘Superman, The Infomercial’?). The film was hyped with the tagline, “You WILL believe a man can fly”, and, even though you didn’t, it still boasted a stellar cast including Gene Hackman as a wonderfully sarcastic Lex Luthor, and a notoriously overpaid Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Donning the cape this time was an obscure stage actor named Christopher Reeve, who filled out the tights like nobody had in the past and whose chiseled facial features seemed to have emerged directly from the comic books.