Why SUPERMAN?
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between March 9, 2021 and March 11, 2021. It was composed of 459 words across nine tweets.
I'm in one of the earliest age groups that can't remember life before timeshifting--the ability to play back audiovisual media at any time of the viewer's choosing. In fact, I was born right in the middle of the mass market success of the VCR.
Every little kid who grew up in that era or since has that one movie that they couldn't let go of. The one that they latched onto, imprinted upon, the one that they obsessively watched over and over again until they internalized the whole thing. For me, that movie was SUPERMAN.
I believe I first saw SUPERMAN, taped off of HBO, when I was three years old. That the movie itself was around a decade old at that point would have never occurred to me. (Compare to a child of today latching onto, say, The Avengers.) SUPERMAN felt like it had always existed.
Why it was SUPERMAN and not some other movie, I couldn't say for sure. I also had the Fleischer cartoons on VHS around the same time--they're in the public domain, so you could get them for cheap--and I'd seen episodes of the 1950s Superman and the 1980s Superboy at the time.
It's possible that I always had a thing for Superman as a character. It's also possible that my family picked him as a child-appropriate fictional role model, and I was merely buying into the paraphernalia they surrounded me with. I'm going to say it was a little bit of both.
As far as my favorite movies go, SUPERMAN got its foot in the door first. What I find interesting is that I never left it behind, never became embarrassed by it, never saw through it the way that adults sometimes do when they revisit their threadbare childhood entertainments.
I think, as you age, a movie that's any good will age with you. You'll value new things in it that you didn't notice in it before. As your perspective on life changes, so will your perspective on the movie. Not all movies hold up to this process. But, for me, this one does.
It may not be my number one favorite movie, though there have been times in my life when it was. That slot is typically occupied by whichever movie I need most at the moment, but those movies come and go. SUPERMAN has carved out a permanent space near the top of the list.
I'm like the Nathaniel Philbrick of SUPERMAN. Having studied different facets of it over the years--like an intricate jewel that turns slowly in front of my face as I age--I'm as close to a specialist as one can get.
Why SUPERMAN?
Because it couldn't be anything else.
Next: The Morality of Super Time Travel
Back to contents.
Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
site and contents
© 2024 Ken Alleman.