SUPERMAN’S WIFE

My first long distance love affair was with film star Kim Novak. The movie was director Josh Logan’s Picnic which co-starred William Holden. From the backseat of my family’s 1955 red and white Buick Special I watched fascinated as Novak and Holden glided around the dance floor to the lush strains of the romantically evocative tune Moonglow. I was just six years old at the time, but something staggeringly potent clicked in my adolescent head that night, something that my parents in the front seat drinking coffee and munching drive-in popcorn and Eskimo Pies would not have imagined possible. That click was telling me that there was a profound difference between men and women beyond the one wearing dresses and the other long pants. I didn’t know yet exactly what this difference was except that it was obviously pretty potent stuff and not something that would go away or that I could readily dismiss. It was here to stay.

Not too long after this I dumped Kim for Elizabeth Taylor when I was once again taken to that same outdoor theatre this time to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In an early scene that immediately grabbed my adolescent attention, Liz is pelted with ice cream projectiles launched at her by a bunch of southern brats. She hurries to her room and removes her soiled nylons and dress and stands in all her glory in a white slip. Again, my parents, lapping up their java and mustard-marinated dogs, paid absolutely no attention to my intense fascination with what was happening on that big screen. After all, I was just a dumb little kid.  Well, maybe.

In any case, this was the start of my on-going love affair with a whole bevy of film actresses, affairs that for a long time preceded my real-life dealings with the fair sex. There were many of these as the years went by, certainly too many to chronicle here, but they were varied and often very different types, tough and soft, fragile and robust, good and bad girls. I loved watching the old movies from the 30s and 40s that were shown on TV in late Sunday afternoons when my father was off golfing or working in the garage and my mother was otherwise occupied cooking or gabbing on the phone or pasting Blue Chip Stamps in booklets with a mind to acquiring enough for a trip to Hawaii (although the biggest thing I ever recall her buying was an imitation cow stool that doubled as a telephone stand). I would pull the drapes, load up on Hawaiian Punch and a stack of Oreos—the latter which I would share evenly with my Dalmatian—and watch the likes of my favorites…Gene Tierney, Ella Raines, Linda Darnell or Jane Greer giving much needed support to heroes Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, George Raft and John Payne.  I just couldn’t get enough of this stuff.

Nighttime TV had its allure in this area as well. Once again I would sit with my folks viewing certain shows and never let on that the real attraction was not the shows themselves, the comedy or the dramatic content but the featured actresses.  I particularly liked Barbara Britton from Mr. and Mrs. North (something about her voice), Irish Mac Calla from Sheena of the Jungle (this one’s pretty obvious) and my all time favorite, the spunky, effervescent Anne Jeffreys as the “ghostess with the mostess” on Topper.

Also high on the list, however, was an actress whose name I did not know at first. She only showed up on a semi-regular basis on the comedy hit The Bob Cummings Show portraying Shirley, one of photographer Bob’s regular models who he pursued every week but never caught.

This, of course, was the era of the 50s blonde bombshell personified by Marilyn Monroe (not exactly a new phenomenon for Hollywood if you can manage to recall Jean Harlow, Betty Grable or Alice Faye, but Marilyn and a host of tinted clones certainly put the concept back on the map). Besides Ms. Monroe, there was Mamie Van Doran, Diana Dors, Sherrie North and Jane Mansfield, to name just a few. Oddly, even though it might have sounded strange at the time when the whole world seemed enamored if not obsessed with Marilyn and company, I was not all that impressed. Although there were a few exceptions, I normally was not attracted to blondes, always preferring the darker, sultrier, semi-exotic look in the ladies. Ava Gardner and Yvonne De Carlo also come to mind.

I did, however, make an exception and it was with this stunning person who contributed so much to Bob Cummings’ on-going frustration. The actress’s name, I would eventually learn, was Joi Lansing.

In addition to her obvious standout good looks (a sensational figure and ravishing smile) there was just something highly appealing about this woman, something that went beyond tape measurements, gobs of makeup and her over the top sexuality. In short, Joi was fun, effervescent, radiant and sparking and things really lit up when she walked into a scene. I never missed an episode and when she was not featured I was pretty letdown. I suspect I was not the only one in the great TV audience that felt this way.

Imagine my surprise then, one nearly approaching disbelief, when I sat watching Superman re-runs one afternoon and not only came across an episode I had never seen before but one which featured Joi!!!!! One thing I did know for certain was that whether the show was good or bad really didn’t matter. Joi and Superman were going to be in the together.

Could life get any better than this?

Superman’s Wife, episode 100 of the series, filmed in 1957 and directed by Lew Landers from a script by Robert Leslie Bellem and producer Whitney Ellsworth, starts out with a bang. No slow buildup here. In a police interrogation room Inspector Henderson and Superman are giving the verbal assault to Duke Barlow (Wayne Heffey) a suspect in a series of bank robberies but getting nowhere fast. They suspect that Barlow is merely one small clog in the wheel of a crime syndicate king pin with the moniker of Mr. X.

Enter Sgt. Helen J. O’Hara portrayed by Joi.  No sooner as she shaken hands with the Man of Steel than he suddenly proposes to her. No ring, no flowers. He doesn’t even go down on his knees to pop the question but she accepts anyway. I guess you couldn’t blame her.

As a kid I don’t know if I thought the nuptials—never actually depicted on the screen—were the real McCoy but I probably bought the concept. I mean, who wouldn’t want to marry Joi? One person, however, who is not very happy about this set-up is Lois (Noel Neill) who doesn’t do a very good job of masking her true feelings, something Editor White (John Hamilton) recognizes and tries to console her about but Lois is having none of it. She is one miserable girl reporter and doesn’t care if it shows.

Of course, the whole thing turns out to be a scam, a plan set up by Superman, Henderson and O’Hara to trap Mr. X into coming out in the open. Mr. X, by the way, emerges as none other than actor John Eldridge who it may be recalled portrayed another criminal mastermind Walter Canby in the first season’s Crime Wave. Actually, since Mr. X’s real name is never revealed, I tend to think that Mr. X is Canby, just released from prison. There is no evidence of this, of course, but I like to think it all the same.

To further ensure that his scheme will work, Mr. X also hatches a second backup scheme to lure Superman into a bathysphere (at Pier 96) containing Lois, Jimmy and Perry White which is subsequently lowered to the bottom of the harbor while across town Sgt.O’Hara (now known to all as “Mrs. Superman”—which begs the question, is Superman a legal immigrant, a registered U.S. citizen with the name Superman on the official documents? —just curious) is tied to a soon to be detonated bridge. Naturally, Superman would have no problem escaping from the bathysphere, but in the process of crashing out of it Lois, Jimmy and Perry would succumb to the ocean pressure. It’s a bad situation all right until the Man of Steel realizes he can pull the bathysphere to the surface using the cable attached to the top of the roof (couldn’t he just fly three feet upwards and push the thing?). In any case, despite a bit of water getting in, Jack Larson, who is reported to have hated scenes where he was forced to endure getting wet, must have hated this moment although it’s poor Perry, hat or not, who gets the most soaked.

So after saving his three friends Superman arrives just in time to rescue Sgt. O’Hara, to watch as the bad guys, in typical later episode style, knock themselves out (fifty years later and I still hate these scenes!) and Mr. X is corralled.

The whole plan and bogus marriage is revealed and Lois couldn’t be happier. Both ladies let it be known that they each wouldn’t mind tying the knot for real with the Man of Steel and thy make a stab at getting along.

Personally, I don’t—and didn’t then—think that Superman was the marrying kind but if that was the case and he was going to pick a partner, my money would have been on Joi.  

In any case, there was still The Bob Cummings Show to watch her on.

Yep, life sure was good back then.

And by the way, for the record, I ultimately married a brunette.

October 2008 

THE DOG WHO KNEW SUPERMAN

February 2008

JET ACE

By Bruce Dettman

I sometimes think that my brother wriggled out of the womb already loving airplanes. As a boy, his bedroom walls were always covered with framed photographs of every sort of airborne craft although he favored fighter planes. We had several family friends who worked for companies like Lockheed and Boeing in addition to knowing a few pilots who had survived World War II, and someone was always bringing him new pictures of planes to add to his collection. In addition, he constructed models of various bombers, pursuit planes and fighters, many of which he hung from the ceiling. My favorites were the ones he had cleverly designed with shards of cotton he had painted bright red which belched from the front of the fighters to simulate gun fire and flames. On vacations and weekends my father would take him to air shows, airports and air museums and once, at the opening of the news Oakland International Airport, he was thrilled to meet and talk to Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz, two of the 20^th century’s most famous aviators (both of whom later worked as stunt pilots in the movies and died in aviation mishaps). How jealous he was some thirty years later when I chanced to pull up a bar stool in a nearly deserted San Francisco tavern and Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier and one of my brother’s great heroes, walked in and sat two bar stools down from me. I don’t think my brother’s recovered from this yet.

Chris White in the second season Jet Ace is a stunt pilot too. He is also Perry White’s nephew (the son of his sister from Kate from Drums of Death perhaps) although it would be an understatement to say there isn’t much of a family resemblance. White the younger is played by veteran B actor Lane Bradford, a ubiquitous presence in dozens and dozens films and TV shows, usually in westerns and for the most part cast as a villain (a rare exception to this was his appearance in the Republic serial Zombies of the Stratosphere where he played one of the invading space aliens). Bradford’s craggy, almost granite like features and receding hairline made him a perfect bad guy and it’s a bit jarring to see him in the role of Perry’s aviator nephew. Bradford, by the way, was also the son of John Merton, another familiar face in scads of B features and was also seen briefly in TAOS’s The Man in the Lead Mask episode as the flame thrower wielding plastic surgeon.

The story here is that Bradford is testing out a new airplane and has invited, as guests not reporters, Uncle Perry, Jimmy, Lois and Clark to watch the trial (when Lois spots Clark staring upwards she snaps “You don’t think you can see him through the ceiling, do you Clark?”). Not invited, but who shows up anyway, is Steve Martin (no, not that Steve Martin and not Raymond Burr’s reporter character from Godzilla either) an unctuous, unethical (and, as we soon discover even more nefarious) newsman from the Daily Planet’s rival organ The Blade (played with oily glibness by the always enjoyable Larry Blake). Blake accuses the military of giving preferential treatment to the Planet staff, but there are more problems than this to deal with when Chris’s plane begins to give him serious problems and he eventually passes out as he plunges to the earth. Something has to be done and fast but Clark can’t handle the pressure (“I can’t stand it. I have to get out of here”) and bolts near hysterically from the room only to transform into Superman who flies to Chris’ aid and rights the ship. Chris is understandably shaken and is convinced to go up to Perry’s cabin for a few days to recover where he can relax and work on his report of flying the new plane (Perry throws in the added incentive of the gift of a shotgun for hunting purposes although the weapon Chris is later seen with looks nothing like a shotgun to yours truly, more like a Mauser though I am no gun authority). Unbeknownst to everyone, our sleazy friend Mr. Martin is interested in more than just a story for his paper. He’s a foreign agent out to get information on the new test plane and has a couple of goons (Richard Reeves and Ric Roman) doing his dirty work for him. Said goons follow Chris to his cabin, try to strong-arm him into giving them the plans to the ship (which he has cleverly hidden in the barrel of the gun) and kidnap him but are later caught by Superman who they spill a lot of bean to. When Martin realizes his scheme is being exposed he returns Chris to the cabin, ties him up and sets the place on fire. Superman gets wind of the plan via a mailman who reports that he has just seen Chris and flies to the rescue. When he explains to the young flier that he can hitch a ride back to Metropolis with Clark Kent who should be arriving at any moment Chris is grateful:

“He’s a pretty swell guy in spite of what Lois thinks of him.”

“Well, he’ll be glad to hear this.”

And I bet this is so. Superman must get a bit tired of hearing his alter ego constantly lambasted.  Hell, everyone likes to be liked.

So Superman rigs it so that Martin believes the flyer to be dead, lures the duplicitous news man into a trap and confronts him. His time around Superman saves his brawn and allows Chris to wipe the floor with the shady character while he watches with enjoyment.

There’s a few gaping holes in David Chantler’s script, particularly regarding the time element of the mailman getting back to Metropolis in time to alert Superman to having seen Chris (and the odd business of the gun being left outside in plane sight and no one picking it up) but these are minor quibbles.

JET ACE, directed by Tommy Carr, isn’t a superior episode, but it’s solid and enjoyable with a likable performance by Bradford even though I bet anything Chris White was adopted.

November 2007

THE WHISTLING BIRD

I suspect the first time I realized that intelligence could be at great odds with parental affection was the year my mother and father gave me both bongo drums and a chemistry set for Christmas. The bongos—tied into America’s short-lived flirtation with Calypso culture in the 1950s—didn’t last long because they required practicing which I had no patience for (about a year later a similar scenario would be repeated when I attempted to master the saxophone until my father—whose late afternoon martini sessions had been negatively impacted by my infernal screeching—coerced me into giving up the instrument by raising my allowance a quarter a week, an attractive bribe I quickly accepted).

The chemistry set, however, was quite a different matter and while I really had no interest in actually mastering the properties of the chemical world, I certainly was attracted to creating stuff that might produce visual results (i.e. an explosion). To this end—and tiring of the boring experiments outlined in the little booklet that accompanied the set—I began a concentrated effort to combine all the ingredients at my disposal in an attempt to achieve the intended dramatic effect. With no great reaction from the set’s limited resources, my next step was obviously to up the ante. In order to accomplish this I waited until a Saturday when my parents were away from the house and then telephoned a few of my closest pals come to over and help me with my plan. Placing a bucket in a fenced in area behind the backyard, we began to fill it with every liquid at our immediate disposal, not just from the chemistry set, but from the garage and house, a mix that included everything from my mother’s perfume and bath oils, to ant killer, root beer (Hires), my brother’s Vaseline hair tonic, Ajax cleanser, vanilla extract, detergent, turpentine, acetone, anything and everything we could find that would pour into the mixture. I guess we tried this on two or three occasions before getting a satisfying reaction. Suddenly on that immortal day the concoction began to bubble and hiss and a kind of milky and frothy material rose up and started to pop and spit. The explosion that followed wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was sufficiently loud enough so that inquisitive neighbors were soon spilling out of their houses to see what all the ruckus was about.  It was at this point that we determined it would probably be wise to go back to playing baseball, eating PEZ for lunch and watching Sky King instead of searching for a new version of the A-bomb.

Uncle Oscar, making his second appearance on TAOS (played by the wonderful Sterling Holloway), dreams up his explosive purely by accident when he is trying to do the world a favor by coming up with a new (6) flavored postage stamp. Invited to the grand unveiling of the stamp by Oscar’s niece Nancy (Allene Roberts)—who, by the way, Jimmy seems mighty chummy with—Clark (embarrassed at having been caught napping in his office—yes, Superman naps!) and the cub reporter are on hand for the big trial testing but when Kent fixes the stamp to an envelope with his fist, kabooom!! The implications are obvious, that Uncle Oscar has unwittingly invented one of the world’s most powerful explosives, a fact Kent wants to let the authorities know about. Unfortunately, a group of bungling spies (Toni Carroll, Joseph Vitale, and Otto Waldis) who have been watching the goings-on from an upstairs window also want to get their mitts on the potential weapon. Uncle Oscar, however, has wisely left a portion of the formula out of the instructions and confided this essential element exclusively to his chatty parakeet Schyler, which means the trio must somehow get the creature to spill the goods. They attempt this by switching Schyler with winged look-alike but this doesn’t work and before you know it the spies threaten the lives of Oscar, Jimmy and Nancy. Eventually trapped in a secret, lead-lined (and therefore X-ray vision proof) room which is filling with water, things look pretty grim for all concerned until Superman shows up, hears the water and pulls everyone to safety.

For me Holloway makes the episode come alive with his quirky delivery of lines and amusing physical take on things. I’m also fond of the wrap-up scene where Superman, having once digested the liquid explosive to save his friends, decides the crooks aren’t worth another sampling of the unpleasant solution and tells them to run for their lives instead. Reeves is great in this scene showing a very human side to the Man of Steel.                              

While not a superior episode, Holloway’s presence and some excellent chemistry between the cast makes it enjoyable and satisfying light romp.

Kaboomb!

September 2007

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Movies and television have seldom been charitable to the scientific community. The history of both mediums are rife with depictions of men of science as either diabolically mad figures (Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Pretorius, etc.) or brilliant but addle-brained eccentrics and technical misfits out of touch with their fellow men.

Personally, I was lousy at science in school, but enjoyed putting on my father’s lab coat, making my best friend up as the Frankenstein Monster (he was older and taller), having him lie up on the tool bench and turning on every machine in the garage—which in addition to dangerous power tools included some pretty nifty electrical gizmos with great control knobs and switches—to imitate the original creation sequence from the 1931 film Frankenstein. Imagine our combined surprise when one afternoon my father came home early from work, decided to do a bit of woodworking and discovered what we were up to. After the yelling and threats were over I was summarily banned from the garage for life save for the weekly chore of sweeping up the sawdust. And that was the end of my scientific career other than a short and disastrous flirtation with a chemistry set which I will touch on in a future column.

All his great powers aside, Superman needs the voice of science when he is confronted with a tough problem.  When an unnamed Latin American country is interested in publishing a foreign edition of the Daily Planet, White, Kent and Lois visit and in the process walk into the attempted assassination of the democratically motivated president (Donald Lawton) whose enemies, including his own vice president (Robert Tafur), wish to get rid of him. Superman intervenes, however, and saves the ruler, but at the instigation of the unmasked plotters is placed in jail pending an investigation of the attempted crime. Superman, of course, can see through this scheme of wanting him out of the way, but being an example to all of a law abiding citizen refuses to simply break out of his confines. There must be another answer.

Enter Dr. Lucerne.

Veteran character actor Everett Glass appeared on TAOS twice as the helpful Dr. Lucerne who instantly solves—at least in theory—two of the Man of Steel’s biggest physical challenges of his career, how to alter his molecular density (his atoms are packed tighter, the Professor explains) to allow him to move through an otherwise impenetrable wall (The Mysterious Cube) and in this episode how to split himself into two separate entities so he can be in two places at once. Glass had a long career as a character actor, often portraying men of intellect. He had small but memorable parts in both sci-fi classics The Thing From Another World and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was great at projecting wisdom and brains without a trace of conceit or arrogance. Luckily Superman has him as a confident too and quicker than it takes most of us to decide to tie our shoes Lucerne comes up with the answers Superman is looking for. However, just as in Cube there are dangers connected with this plan of separation even if the theory becomes a reality. First, in dividing himself his powers could be split and therefore radically diminished. Second, he risks the possibility of not being able to reassemble himself. It’s a no-brainer for Superman, however, and (with the help of a double whose head shape doesn’t much resemble Reeves’) he instantly becomes twins.  Just as predicted, his powers are reduced, but even so he succeeds both in keeping the President safe and rounding up the plotters.  Just for the record, the doppelganger, double or twin has always intrigued man. Some of the greatest writers, from Dostoyevsky to Robert Louis Stevenson and Vladimir Nabokov have been fascinated by the concept and used it in their writings. Movies too have taken full advantage of the notion as has television, particularly in dramatic and adventure shows of the 50s and 60s, when in such programs as Bonanza, 77 Sunset Strip and The Rifleman the double concept was often exploited in storylines. And, of course, TAOS would also play with the idea in the second season’s Face and the Voice.

Directed by Phil Ford with a script by producer Whitney Ellsworth and Robert Leslie Bellem, Divide and Conquer has always been one of more popular of the later color episodes and with both the appearance of Professor Lucerne and Superman’s similar experiments with his own molecular makeup seems a perfect companion piece to The Mysterious Cube.

Science was always a great help to Superman but I continued to give it a wide berth. Even today, all these many years later, I get uncomfortable when I smell sawdust and remember my friend and I and our makeshift laboratory and that unforgettable look on my father’s face.

August 2007

THE LADY IN BLACK

The first football game I ever attended was at San Francisco’s now defunct Keyser Stadium, circa 1957. It was a contest between the city’s 49ers and the Chicago Bears. This was particularly appropriate because the guy who was treating my dad and I to this athletic confrontation was John Stevens, a friend and owner of the local liquor store in our town who, as a young man, had played a season for the windy city’s gridiron franchise.  Right before the game started John turned to me and said through a wide grin “Bruce, I’m now going to teach you two things today; how football is played and how to duck beer bottles.” He turned out to be a good teacher at both. A few years down the road, however, there was a strange breach in our relationship. John insisted that I had come into his store one night, gone to front counter where the magazines were displayed and swiped a particular adult publication. He called my father rather than the police and my dad gave me hell, told me to return the periodical and apologize to John. Problem was I hadn’t taken it. I went up to the store and swore to him that he had been mistaken and while he wasn’t really all that upset about the episode—teenage boys had a long history of pilfering such material—he never believed my tale that I hadn’t taken it despite my sticking to my story even into adulthood when I would occasionally run into him. Even then after such a long time the episode continued to bother me. No wonder not being believed has supplied the impetus for many a crime story (from Hitchcock to Richard Kimble), the innocent man alienated from his friends and society for adhering to a story that no one accepts as true.

Just ask James Bartholomew Olsen (Jack Larson) in the second season’s The Lady In Black as he stays in the apartment of one of his mother’s friends, a certain Mrs. Jones (who resides at 360 Apple Tree Lane), and where he keeps hearing peculiar noises through the wall. Despite his insistence that something is amiss, no one will believe his story, not even his pal and co-worker Clark Kent who is very busy (though oddly not so busy that he’s typing at super speed) and chalks it up to a bad case of “indigestion of the brain”. More to humor him than anything else, Kent finally sheds his reporter’s duds and visits Jim in his red, blue and yellow garb and finds the cub reporter out on his feet, the result, or so one of the neighbors who has supposedly stumbled upon him claims, of a nasty collision with an unseen beam. The cat petting neighbor, Mr. Franks, is played by veteran character actor Frank Ferguson, probably best known for his portrayal of Mr. McDougal, the irate owner of a house of horrors, in the classic monster comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. His wife in this particular episode is Virginia Christine, an equally familiar face in many films and TV shows of the 40s and  50s, later a TV coffee huckster  for Folgers (Mrs. Olson) but also known to many genre fans as the Princess Ananka in The Mummy’s Curse, an association she was reportedly none too pleased about. Also in the cast as the mysterious, scar faced and impatient hardnosed character is John Doucette, miles (and one season) removed from his earlier slapstick performance in the first year episode The Birthday Letter. I always find it interesting in this episode that Ferguson and Christine as the Franks are so unimpressed or surprised to come home and find the Man of Steel in their living room. The Mrs. actually seems indifferent if not bored by his appearance. One would think that running into Superman in any case would hardly be a common occurrence in a town as big as Metropolis and moreover, if you were a crook, as these two turn out to be, that his showing up in the middle of your little stolen art game—which is what all of this turns out be about—might just be a bit unnerving. But when he finally assures Jim everything will be all right and flies off they hardly give him more of a departing glance than they would the Avon Lady. Talk about your cool customers.

This show, written by Jackson Gillis and directed by Tommy Carr, is a bit on the claustrophobic side with most of the action confined to either the apartment where Jim is staying or some very obvious studio-bound sets such as the bus stop or the basement where the hot art items are smuggled in. It’s terribly predictable even for a half hour TV show.  I would have to say that George seems rather disinterested this time around, a foreshadowing of some of his limp performances in later seasons. I usually like those rare shows where a few of the cast members have some time off and we are given time with just two of the characters but there isn’t much between Reeves and Larson here. The whole thing just seems overly formulized, sluggish, too transparent and lacking sufficient energy even if it sports a solid supporting cast. It’s not one of the second season’s finest hours, but it has moments as do almost all the shows. Sometimes, in this crazy and unpredictable universe, just knowing that our TAOS friends are always there for our enjoyment is pleasure and satisfaction enough.

Now if I could only get Professor Twiddle from Through the Time Barrier to take me back to 1959 so I could show John Stevens that I didn’t steal that magazine.

June 2007

JUNGLE DEVIL

The first dream I ever experienced—or at least the first dream I recall with any degree of clarity—was also one of the most vivid of my life and I have never forgotten it. I was about two years old at the time and shared a bedroom with my older brother. In the dream I suddenly awoke to the sight of a very large gorilla climbing in through our open window. Strangely, I was not particularly frightened by this intruder, really more fascinated than anything else, and calmly watched the animal as it glanced casually in my direction. It seems this gorilla had no agenda other than a need for some immediate shuteye and therefore settled down on the floor, curled up in a fetal position and began blissfully snoring away. Intrigued, I crawled out of my bed, walked over to the beast, stroked its fur several times and that was that. The next morning, and I guess for a long time after that, I enthusiastically regaled my family with tales of this dream until it became a kind of Dettman Legend. Everyone was quite amused by it except me. I took the whole thing deadly serious and would never back away from the fact that it had actually happened. In retrospect, what is odd for me to understand after more than fifty-five years is just how I even knew what a gorilla was. We had no TV in those days. I had never gone to a zoo. My parents didn’t take me to the movies until I got a bit older. What had triggered this image of a giant simian?

In any case, this nocturnal run-in with my gorilla pal ignited an active curiosity about these creatures and I later came to regularly be on the lookout for them in TV shows like Ramar of the Jungle and Sheena (not that Sheena herself, in the person of statuesque beauty Irish McCalla, wasn’t attraction enough) as well as feature movies featuring such series characters as Tarzan, Jungle Jim and Bomba. Later I would learn that certain actor/stuntmen in Hollywood actually made careers out of both impersonating gorillas on the big and little screen or sometimes just renting their costumes out to the various studios. The most famous of these players were Charles Gamora, Ray “Crash” Corrigan and later Steve Calvert (who purchased Corrigan’s suit). To be honest, none of their costumes were true anatomical duplicates of a real primate and were rarely terribly scary but they were fun to watch anyway as the actors pounded on their chests and grunted away.

Certainly close to the bottom of the barrel in gorilla impersonations was the titled Jungle Devil which was featured in this second season show. Portrayed by bartender/actor Calvert, this had to be one of the mangiest, out of shape and thread-barren adversaries that ever stepped before a camera, but it frightened me nonetheless. To add insult to injury, the Superman producers, for some reason, wanted the gorilla to be a silver color and the resulting paint job began to immediately rot the head so it had to be eventually replaced. Still, I’m pretty certain it took George Reeves as Superman a lot of control to take the scene where he confronts the beast seriously. For the record, Calvert in this get-up would also square away against Phyllis Coates in the Republic serial Panther Girl of the Congo.

Jungle Devil has Clark (who for once ditches his signature suit and tie for a safari styled hat and coat straight out of Banana Republic), Lois and Jimmy (the latter having stowed away on the plane carrying the reporters to  some country called Zinaya—wonder if he had time to get all his shots) trying to locate missing scientist Dr. Harper (Damien O'Flynn) and his wife Gloria (actress Doris Singleton, probably best known for playing Lucille Ball’s  scatterbrained and myopic pal Carolyn Applegate on I Love Lucy) who are being held captive by the local tribe of local natives who have understandably taken umbrage at Gloria accidentally losing the diamond eyepiece (in a pool of quicksand) from the wooden statue of their tribal god. In retaliation they refuse to let the scientific exploration proceed on its way until the stone is returned to its proper place.  I should also mention at this point that if the so-called Jungle Devil of the title is far from intimidating, the natives themselves, mostly middle-aged guys who don’t look to have seen a treadmill in their entire lives, appear about as threatening as the cast of Seseme Street. Still they manage to kowtow the Harpers who seemed doomed to not only spend the rest of their lives in a studio manufactured jungle set but to have to endure the repeated dance exhibitions by these natives who haven’t exactly been choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

Enter Clark, Lois and Jimmy who are also summarily surrounded and taken prisoner by the pot-bellied, spear waving locals. When the cub reporter sees their plight his bravery and patriotic ardor shoot to the surface.

“Let’s show them we can die like Americans!”

Clark has a better idea.

“Let’s live like Americans.”

Easy for him to say.

Everything is eventually righted  when Clark replaces the idol’s diamond peeper with a new version he has made by applying so much pressure from a super squeeze to a lump of coal that its is transformed into a gem (which amazingly fits just perfectly into the wooden eye socket). This only happens, however, after he has been taken away by the natives for a sacrifice to the Jungle Devil and tied to a stake. This is a perfect opportunity to materialize into the Man of Steel (a convenient burst of smoke helps camouflage the transformation) and after taking a harmless rock to the head shoos away the easily discouraged animal.

If you remove Superman and the Daily Planet crew from this show, scripted by Peter Dixon, it could pretty easily be recycled and used for a Ramar or Jungle Jim episode. It’s one jungle cliché after another and so obviously studio bound—not even relying for atmosphere on any integrated newsreel footage of jungle critters—that you half expect the actors to trip over a camera chord at any moment.

Still, I loved it as a kid and no matter how many times I saw it I waited with baited breath and great anticipation for that moment when Superman faced the Jungle Devil.

He never invaded my dreams though. Those were reserved for Irish McCalla

May 2007

MY FRIEND, SUPERMAN

By Bruce Dettman

At one time or another everyone seems to have had a special friend, someone a bit different who, for one reason or another, they create a unique bond with.  My special friend was named Buster. Buster, my senior by some fifteen years, lived just down the block from us with his elderly mother and stood nearly seven feet tall (in an era when even professional basketball players rarely eclipsed the 6 foot 6 mark). In addition to Buster’s extraordinary height he had the mental capacity of about a twelve year-old except in the area of mechanical things where he was quite exceptional. Buster designed and built a special bike to accommodate his size as well as putting together a fantastic HBO train layout. He regularly showed two short 16 millimeter films in his garbage (one featuring Abbott and Costello and another one about an albino ape) and charged a penny for the local kids to come over and watch them. He also had a pool table and taught several generations of boys how to shoot eight ball.  For Halloween fun he would dress up as the Frankenstein Monster, prop himself up against his garage door and lure kids over who thought he was a dummy or mannequin. The reactions when they realized he wasn’t could be pretty dramatic. On scorching summer days, accompanied by neighborhood pals Jimmy (best tree climber on the street) and Richard (best spitter on the street), I would walk downtown with Buster and watch as kids continually (and tentatively) approached him, dropped on their knees and raised up his socks to see if he was attached to stilts. Naturally we all felt smug and superior since he was our buddy and not theirs and usually treated “Bus” to a double Frostee ice cream cone. The long and hot vacation days of our youth that we thought would never end finally did just that and we grew up and went our separate ways, all except Buster who stayed at home with his frail old mother. Jimmy died of a brain tumor and Richard was an early casualty of the Viet Nam War. The last time I saw Buster was about ten years ago. I was waiting around at a train station one morning and noticed some little kids around me laughing and pointing at something and when I looked to see what had grabbed their attention I saw it was Buster standing alone on the other side of the tracks. He was bent over, looked very old and grey and moved with great difficulty. I approached him tentatively. I didn’t know if he would remember me. He looked up.

“Hey Bus,” I said for the millionth time in my life.

“Hey Dettman,” he said in that familiar high-pitched voice of his.

He knew me instantly.

We talked and he said he now lived in a  special home but still had his pool table and asked where all the guys were (meaning the decades of children who had once visited him) but I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Jim and Richard. Eventually a bright-colored van slid up and he climbed in and said he’d see me soon. The little kids were still watching him and I wondered if they too were tempted to see if he was walking on stilts.

Meeting with Buster and remembering my unique friendship with him reminded me of Tony in the second season’s My Friend Superman. Obviously, Tony, who owns a diner just around the corner from the Daily Planet (and who has a daughter named Elaine who the overly shy Jimmy Olson has the hots for but can’t seem to work up the nerve to ask out on a date), needs to impress his customers with the fact that he is great pals with Superman even though he has never actually met the Man of Steel. Apparently the poor little guy (played by Tito Vuolo) is just bored with flipping burgers (one of which he has christened a Superburger in honor of his idol) and has decided to bring a little excitement into his daily drudgery by inventing this relationship. He’s even gone so far as to have a mangled rifle on display in the diner that he informs customers Superman was responsible for bending out of shape. Tony’s rich imagination and white lies aren’t his real problem, however. His real problem is a trio of local gangsters who are running a protection racket and squeezing weekly payments out of merchants in the neighborhood including the poor restaurateur who’s keeping mum about the whole business. Through some misunderstandings regarding Lois (Noel Neill) taking a mysterious vacation, these underworld characters think their racket is going to be exposed unless they head-off the reporter and the victims who are now willing to come forward to reveal their crooked activities. Superman ultimately figures things out and shows up at the diner where the loyal patrons curtail the three bad guys by throwing all manner of diner food at them, particularly pies. Although from the get-go the slant of this episode, written by David Chantler with veteran Tommy Carr at the directorial helm, runs consistently on the light and frivolous side, this Keystone Cops/Three Stooges finale just seems totally out of place on TAOS even if in upcoming seasons there would be other pretty ridiculous scenarios and segments. Still, emerging in a season that would deliver such excellent episodes as Panic In The Sky, Superman In Exile and The Face and the Voice this blatant baboonery seemed jarring, almost embarrassing. According to one account, producer Whitney Ellsworth, feeling bad that bad guys Paul Burke, Terry Frost and Joseph Vitale had to be the brunt of this meringue shellacking, gave the actors a few extra bucks. They certainly deserved it.

THE MYSTERIOUS CUBE

By Bruce Dettman

The problem for writers dealing with Superman is that, well, he’s super. While this smacks of the embarrassingly obvious, think of the predicament laid at the feet of the creative forces that weekly (on TV) or monthly (in the comics) had to come up with some scenario significant of challenging or taxing the character to levels worthy of his powers. You couldn’t drag out Kryptonite with any regularity or it would soon become boring and predictable (the comic book guys eventually solved this by inventing variations on the standard green Kryptonite and gave us assorted colors that affected the Man of Steel in different ways) so alternate concepts had to be created to test his mettle.

As a kid playing Superman in a pretty realistic suit that my parents fashioned for me one Halloween (and which subsequent to the holiday I wore beneath my street clothes nearly everywhere I went), I tried my best to come up with make believe situations and characters that might prove an acceptable threat to my super powers. One of these involved locking myself in the bathroom, cranking up the water temperature in the shower to full heat, letting the intense steam fill the room then grimacing in front of the mirror as a reaction to the paralyzing effects of what I called Kryptonite gas. I have to admit that I had a great time with this scenario—which sometimes took as much as fifteen minutes to play out—and recreated the scene dozens of times until my parents—never at home during the actual dramatic moment—started to notice that the relatively new bathroom wallpaper was beginning to peel off at an alarming rate. They never figured out the cause but I was smart enough to put a halt to this in-house cliffhanger. After all, I had already lost a painful amount of my allowance about a year before for pretending that our backyard peach tree was a giant squid and going after it Captain Nemo style with my older brother’s Boy Scout hatchet.

On TAOS, the Man of Steel had several run-ins with Kryptonite, of course, and at other times tangled with radioactivity (Superman In Exile), intense cold (The Big Freeze) and electricity (Crime Wave) but always came away from these brushes with death relatively unscathed. In the 1957 season the writers, in this case the team of Robert Bellem and producer Whitney Ellsworth, having exhausted the more obvious ways of trying to destroy him, decided to change tactics a bit and thought small—molecular small, that is. In Divide and Conquer, Superman split himself in two and risked the possibility of never being able to unite his two halves. In The Mysterious Cube (one of the color episodes that nearly everyone I’ve ever talked to—even non-Superman fans—seem to remember in the same way that they recall the second season’s Panic In The Sky), he takes a chance on not being able to reassemble his anatomical components after an attempt to move through the heretofore impenetrable substance of which the cube is made.

It’s not really that the episode itself is so outstanding. Like many of the series’ later shows it’s a bit claustrophobic, too set-bound with some pretty deficient dialog and villains you can’t take all that seriously. And yet, there is the Cube.

The Cube is what everyone remembers, not much of the plot or the characters but rather the idea that someone has actually come up with a material which seems impervious to all Superman’s powers. He can’t break through it, see through it or burn through it. How, we all wondered as kids, could this be? Could there actually be something Superman couldn’t master? And those crummy crooks laughing at his failed attempts. Oh, the pain of it! Yep, I still remember the sinking feeling in my gut when George Reeves bounced feebly against it.

In any case, the plot has this guy Paul Barton (Bruce Wendell) a crook who has been hiding out in the mysterious cube for seven years (created by “a scientist who isn’t with us anymore”), so the police won’t be able to arrest him for his crimes after the statute of limitations has run out and he can be declared legally dead. Why he puts the cube in the middle of Metropolis rather than out in the boonies where he can’t be so closely monitored is anyone’s guess. Paul is understandably a pretty cranky guy since all these years he’s not seen a soul and lived on concentrated food tablets and vitamins. Paul’s brother Steve (Keith Richards – no, not that Keith Richards!) who incidentally played the lead in the 1949 Republic serial The James Brothers of Missouri opposite Noel Neil, and helper Jodie (Ben Welden) are on the outside gearing up for Paul’s emergence as a free man from the enigmatic structure. Superman shows up but can’t put a dent in the thing, so consults with Professor La Serne (Everett Glass), who also helped him out in Divide and Conquer and who suggests (as calmly as I’d suggest a new coffee brand) that he might be able to redistribute his atomic particles and move through the cube. As it turns out, the Man of Steel has no problem with the process, but not wishing to hedge their bet, Jodie and brother Steve and kidnap Lois and Jimmy to prevent Superman from going in and getting Paul. Hearing their plans he pretends he cannot penetrate the cube, has Washington authorities turn back Paul’s clock so that he comes out of hiding minutes before the statute of limitations has run out, and saves Jimmy and Lois.

The Mysterious Cube is fun mostly for the concept (just think of all the other amazing uses that could be made out of the miraculous material such as regular buildings, shops and airplanes, but I guess its secret was lost with its inventor) not so much the execution which, under director George Blair’s direction, is be a bit flat and listless. Still, there’s was just something about that cube that sticks with you, even after nearly half a century.

And for the record, my parents decided to paint rather than re-wallpaper that bathroom.

February 2007

STAR OF FATE

By Bruce Dettman

When kids of my era thought of Egypt, one image invariably came to mind…mummies. Pyramids, Cleopatra and the Nile might have crept into the mix sometimes, but by and large ancient Egypt was inexorably tied up with visions of live and murderous mummies limping slowly along, shredded bandages trailing behind them, their arms outstretched in search of victims to claim in the name of some ancient curse. As enamored of mummies as anyone else my age, I was particularly lucky that only thirty miles from my home was San Jose’s famous Egyptian/Rosicrucian Museum. At least once a year I would persuade my father, who was pretty good in humoring my sometimes obsessive tastes in oddball things, to visit the place where I never tired of the exhibits, particularly the very realistic replica of a famous eighteenth dynasty Egyptian tomb which was dark, dank and very atmospheric. As for the mummies on display, having seen Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. in the Universal Mummy series, the real things, shrunken, usually diminutive and not very scary, were always a bit disappointing, but I never failed to check them out anyway.

There was just something about Egypt, not only distant and shaded in a far away past, but so mysterious and alien. I later took a few college courses in Egyptology and read a lot of works on the subject, including several on the world’s most famous hunters of Egyptian relics such as Flinders Petrie, James Breasted and, of course,  Howard Carter, discover of King Tut’s tomb. No Egyptologist that I encountered in print, however, bore the slightest resemblance to Dr. Barnack (Lawrence Ryle) from the second year episode Star of Fate who looks and behaves as if he would be more inclined to break into a downtown bank vault than an ancient burial chamber. The guy has thug written all over him and when we meet him he is in the midst of a bidding contest against curio store owner  Mr. Whitlock (Paul Burns from Riddle of the Chinese Jade and other shows) for the ownership of a mysterious and supposedly cursed Egyptian jewelry box.  When the bidding doesn’t go his way (it reaches the $10,000 mark) he responds by poking Whitlock in the ribs with a snub-nose revolver that I guess all archeologists have handy in case they run low on cash.

In any case, Barnack, with his secretary Alma (Jeanne Dean) tagging along, takes the box home with him. Leaving her alone with instructions not to open it she ignores his instructions and does precisely that with the result that the next instant she is stricken by some mysterious influence and rendered unconscious. Lois and Jimmy show up just a short time after this as does the returning Barnack, yet when Lois pleads for the archeologist to get help for her he snaps “You do it. I haven’t got the time.” Meanwhile at his curio shop (which includes a Superman puppet) Whitlock enters clutching the box which he has just retrieved from Barnack’s place after Alma lapsed into a coma (which suggests that he too ignored the stricken girl).  Barnack appears at this point and not only takes back what he thinks is the real box—but which in reality is a clever copy—but leaves Whitlock tied up and ready to be blown to smithereens by some nitro placed on a Cuckoo Clock by the always well equipped Barnack.  Luckily Superman comes to the rescue and the box is brought to the Daily Planet office. Not having learned by example, Lois also tempts fate by opening the container and like the others seems to fall victim to the curse, but when Clark a moment later tries the same thing a poisonous needle hooked up to the box with  a spring breaks off against his (steel-like) finger.

The doctor (played by Arthur Space, later the vet on Lassie) later wonders aloud to Perry White why Kent wasn’t hurt by the poison.

“That is strange. I’ll have to ask him about that,” White responds.

In any case, this deadly needle not only explains the secret of the box’s legendary curse, but hieroglyphics inscribed on it identify the antidote for the poison as a leaf found only beneath the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Superman flies there, lifts the structure (effectively staged as several huge foundation blocks) high enough to retrieve the curative plant and gets it back to Metropolis in time for a life-saving serum to be made. Meanwhile Jimmy who, despite knowing of Barnack’s violent tendencies (and being what appears to be a good foot shorter than the archeologist), physically confronts him alone at his home where at gunpoint the cub reporter is forced into an empty sarcophagus only to be subsequently replaced by Superman who then rounds up the doctor.

A slow-moving and somewhat limp script by Roy Hamilton doesn’t help this slightly disappointing episode anymore than Tommy Carr’s somewhat flat and disinterested direction. A bit more creative energy and pep are needed. The regulars handle themselves well as usual, but the action just feels tired and a bit forced. It’s not helped by Clark’s lame explanation that he didn’t feel the effects of the poison because of a protective band-aid on his thumb either.

However, what this episode really needed is—you guessed it—a mummy.

January 2007

SEMI-PRIVATE EYE

By Bruce Dettman

For the better part of the 1990s, I lived in an old downtown apartment building (circa 1915 or thereabouts) on Dashiell Hammett Way (formerly Monroe Street) in San Francisco. The famous mystery author resided at this same location for a short period during the early 1920s and while it is not known for certain which room was definitely his, quite a number of scholars have come to believe that it was the space I rented, No 9. Being a fan of detective novels, particularly of the so-called hardboiled school practiced by Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler and others, I delighted in the fact that I could very well be living in the same room where the embryonic seeds for his Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man might have taken root. I also came to hang out at John’s Grill, a famous local watering hole and restaurant a few blocks way, reportedly frequented by the author during his San Francisco days. One evening in the early 1990s, the eatery hosted a kind of Dashiell Hammett event. The actual statue from the film version of The Maltese Falcon was in town to be showcased and various Hammett enthusiasts and celebrities were on hand including Elisha Cook Jr. who played Wilmer in the original Warner Brothers movie—opposite Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre—and who was the last major cast member still alive. My intent was to have a few seconds with the actor myself, not so much to inquire about his participation in the over explored Falcon, but rather to quiz him about some of his lesser known roles including his  part in the second season episode of TAOS, The Semi-Private Eye. Unfortunately, as is so often the case at these affairs, he was instantly cornered and surrounded by a gaggle of local dignitaries, none of whom had the slightest idea of really who Cook was or what his screen career had entailed but who wanted to make sure they shared a photo op with him. He looked pretty old and frail by then—he would die not long after this—and it was a bit difficult to realize this was the same man who Jack Palance drilled so gleefully in the classic movie Shane which just happened to the first movie I ever saw. I made several attempts to reach him but the throng was too much and I finally gave up and settled for my beverage of choice and conversation with a retired cable car driver named Fred.

If nothing else, Semi Private Eye is a great showcase for Jack Larsen’s comedic skills and he accounts himself beautifully. His Humphrey Bogart impression is not so over-the top as to seem unduly exaggerated nor so subdued that you don’t get it. It’s a nice balance.  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Cook is Homer Garrity, a Metropolis gumshoe (who even Superman knows by reputation) whose life the  Man of Steel saves when some enemies of the shamus secretly dump a chimney of bricks on him as he strolls down the street (Superman defies physics by simply tossing the bricks back up on the roof where they perfectly re-assemble themselves). Garrity thinks almost being clobbered by the masonry is just an accident but Superman is not so sure and departs with the suggestion that “If I were you I’d look up once in awhile.”

Meanwhile, Lois is in one of her periodic moods to prove that Clark is Superman. This time around she rigs a phone book with fifty pounds of weight so as to expose his super strength, but he gets wise to her scheme and (as usual) outwits her (by switching phonebooks and when she shows up in his office tossing the book into her lap). This only infuriates her more and she decides to hire a private detective (the aforementioned Garrity) to follow Kent which she is certain will once and for all reveal his double identity. (Did it ever occur to Lois that Superman, who has saved her skin—not to mention the whole world’s—many times over has a reason for his disguise and that it would be counter productive to betray this?) Things get out of hand however, when she and the detective are kidnapped by a couple of crooks named Noodles and Cappy (Douglas Henderson and Richard Benedict) whose successful blackmailing business has been compromised by an earlier Garrity’s investigation and who were behind the earlier shower of bricks. This opens the door for Jimmy, who seems to have mighty romantic notions about the private eye business, to slip on fedora and trench coat and a lisping Bogart accent and go after the crooks himself. The twosome aren’t too impressed by either his getup or persona, however, and soon Jimmy, thanks to a trap door, finds himself stuck along with Homer and Lois in a basement which the two baddies marinate with lethal gas bombs. Superman gets to the root of all of this, of course, and all ends happily ever after with the bad guys ju-jitsued into dreamland by Jimmy and the detective.

This is as a kind of an interim piece for the show, a transitional crossroad of the series which lies between the violent noirish content of the first season and the often adolescent tenor of the final two years. Despite the fact that the criminals are obviously willing and able to kill (dumping the chimney, exploding the lethal gas bombs) it’s hard to take them too seriously. Even had Jack Larson’s wonderful comedic turn not by itself dulled what could have been the hard edges of David Chantler’s storyline (murder, assault, kidnapping, and blackmail) the somewhat tongue-in-cheek performances of Henderson and Benedict, the latter much scarier in the first season’s Night of Terror, greatly marginalized the threat posed by the gangsters. George Blair kept his directorial touch light and mostly relaxed and it’s a stretch to think anyone is ever in any real danger.

It is still a lot of fun though thanks to Larson whose comedic timing is impeccable, and Cook who gives a wonderfully deadpan and understated performance which flies in the face of the tough persona of the fictional private eye then gaining momentum as a stable of early TV.

I still wish I would have cornered Cook that night a few years back and talked to about his memories of the show and how he was the first guy I ever saw murdered on the screen but it just wasn’t to be. And by the way, Fred the cable car driver kept confusing him with Wally Cox.

November 2006

THE GOLDEN VULTURE

by Bruce Dettman

When you were a kid, pretending to be a pirate was a bit different from other flights of role-playing because, well let’s face it, pirates were mostly bad guys. This created a bit of a dilemma for my generation since we Baby Boomers traditionally gravitated towards the right side of the law. We were quick-drawin’ cowpokes, wrong-rightin’ town marshals and honorable cavalry officers saving settlers and fightin’ redskins in the old west. We stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and took on the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge during WW II. We were detectives solving tough cases and even Superman flying over our backyards. Pirates, however, placed some demand on a rigid sense of right and wrong infused in us by the likes of Hoppy, Captain Midnight and Matt Dillon. Still, there was an allure to pirates, to their independence and swaggering bravado and on more than one occasion I fashioned an eye patch, “borrowed” one of my mother’s earrings and tied a bandana around my head. Hawaiian Punch doubled for rum, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t imagine my Dalmatian, as good an actor as he was, as a convincing parrot.

My most significant introduction to pirates on the screen was the scene-stealing, scenery-chewing Robert Newton in the film Blackbeard. I had previously also viewed Wallace Berry as long John Silver in Treasure Island, but Wallace’s Long John was a bit of a pussycat (he even cried in one scene) and made little impression on me. And, of course, there was Captain Hook from Peter Pan (one version animated by the Disney folks and the other a live musical production featuring Cyril Richard as the one-armed, alligator-fearing villain to Mary Martin’s Peter) but again, this was entertaining stuff but not gritty or realistic enough for me.  Newton, however, was as mad as a hatter: cruel, dangerous and certainly not likely to break into a song and dance routine. The Newton film ended with an unforgettable scene depicting Blackbeard buried up to his greasy head in the sand awaiting a much deserved drowning death from the invading surf. With all of these traits solidified in my embryonic noggin, the image of the pirate as barbaric, ruthless and cagey was born.

The other actor who made a large impression on me during this period was not a traditional pirate but rather Peter Whitney as Captain McBain,* a modern-day (circa 1953) version of the breed on the second season’s episode The Golden Vulture.  As a kid, I found Whitney’s portrayal strangely unsettling although on viewing it as an adult (well, chronologically at least) I’m not altogether certain what specifically so bothered me about the characterization. I have a hunch, however, given the seaman’s mostly harmless demeanor at the beginning of the show and the rapid switch to tyrannical and murderous villain by the end of the episode, that such a drastic metamorphous was unfamiliar to me and therefore disturbing to a young mind not yet indoctrinated to the mercurial whims of the human psyche.

The action begins when Jimmy Olson (Jack Larson) is out enjoying himself fishing at the seashore—you would have thought he would have had his fill of angling in The Evil Three—and discovers a floating bottle with a message in it which he takes back to the folks at the Daily Planet. Lois (Noel Neill) smells a scoop and with Jimmy tagging along—and not letting Perry or Jimmy know what they’re up to—they visit the salvage ship, the Golden Vulture, alluded to in the message. There they meet McBain who Lois’ wrongly thinks is just a bombastic blowhard but who is actually in league with the ship’s owner in a clever scheme to turn stolen jewelry into phony pirate loot that they sell for big profits to museums. On top of this, McBain is a sadistic bully who torments his crew including Scurvy (played by Vic Perrin, a one time very busy radio actor, whose voice would later become familiar to millions as the unseen host/narrator of TV’s THE OUTER LIMITS) who in an attempt to communicate to the authorities on shore penned the note that Jimmy found in the bottle. Lois continues to play it cool while McBain rattles on, but Jimmy opens his mouth when Scurvy (can this really be the guy’s name?) enters the room with a duplicate of the bottle and the crazy captain decides to get rid of the meddlesome reporters. While Lois and Jimmy are getting into this jam, Clark, investigating on his own, is discovered onboard and finds himself pursued by the entire crew with no time or place to turn into Superman (one has to wonder if at this point Reeves was intentionally having a bit of fun when he pauses, looks around and says “Stuperman, where are you?”).  Eventually (minus his glasses) he’s cornered and made to walk the plank by McBain who now actually fashions himself a real pirate. Seconds later Superman lands on the deck and we have an enjoyable but somewhat comically staged fight between the sailors and the Man of Steel (who seems to be having the time of his life devising different ways to eliminate his attackers). With the whole gang subdued and tied into sailor knots, Lois and Jimmy implore him to save poor drowning Clark but Superman’s response—as he intentionally takes his sweet time going to the reporter’s aid—borders somewhat on the cruel (“He’ll have to hold his breath a bit longer”) since Lois and Jimmy truly believe their colleague could drown at any moment. In any case, he finally exits and Clark comes to the surface. Lois, not seeing Superman fly off, begins to put two and two together until Clark intentionally pulls her into the water and the idea disappears.

The Golden Vulture directed by the usually on the mark team of director Tommy Carr and writer Jackson Gillis, has always been one of my favorite episodes and unlike a few past favorites that have wilted a bit with time and distance, I still enjoy this one immensely. Reeves is obviously enjoying the particular show, and Whitney remains a memorable bad guy—if not quite the fearsome villain as I recall. The action stuff is well—handled and the night setting on the boat is effectively claustrophobic.

Although I have not played pirate in over forty-five years, I still like a good Jolly Roger yarn. I have, however, substituted the real thing for the Hawaiian Punch. Yo-Ho-Ho.

*I have seen this name spelled several different ways in various sourcebooks.*

September 2006

A GHOST FOR

SCOTLAND YARD

By Bruce Dettman

When you’re young and lacking the adult defenses of experience and maturity necessary to insulate you from a wide array of imaginary terrors, the world can be a pretty scary place, as I can readily testify. For instance, we had a large pile of wood behind our garage and one horrifying day I was certain I glimpsed a giant boa constrictor coiled menacingly atop of it. For months I wouldn’t get near the spot. Several years before this I swore I had seen a gorilla visit my brother and my bedroom in the middle of the night, that I had actually crawled out of my crib and petted the remarkably docile simian. Then there was the old lady who lived by a nearby creek with, it was rumored, a houseful of killer cats. How any hundreds of times did I walk several blocks out of my way to avoid that harmless abode?

Other fears, less local but just as potent, came to me courtesy of our twelve inch Packard-Bell TV set which my parents bought back in 1953. After all these years I can still see the chestnut colored cabinet, the round-shaped controls and the dinky speaker. However modest by today’s standards, it not only magically delivered into our living room Davy Crockett, Crusader Rabbit, Jack Benny and Zorro, but it also brought forth elements which prayed substantially on my adolescent fears and insecurities. Oddly enough, at least in my case, these were rarely culled from the so-called big scary moments that intruded upon the minds of many of my friends. I was not, as an example, scared by the Frankenstein Monster tangling with the Wolfman, by Kong going after Fay Wray, by the Mummy drinking Tana Leaves or the Blob ingesting an entire community. What bothered me was rarely predictable and still, to a certain degree, is. A couple of these I still recall: a certain Twilight Zone episode about a woman going down into a hospital morgue and meeting a sardonically grinning attendant (“Room for one more, honey”), the haunting main musical cue from the show One Step Beyond and an Alfred Hitchcock Presents concerning a house sealed off from a violent storm—and a reported serial killer—save one open window in the basement which the camera repeatedly focuses on. All of these and several more tapped into some vulnerable psychic spot in my adolescent brain and sent shivers up my spine. On such nights, going to bed I would force my Dalmatian ahead of me into my darkened bedroom. Better him than me, I figured.

TAOS  also was responsible for one scary scene that stood high on my list of TV fright moments, although to this day I’m not altogether certain why it made such a noteworthy impression on me.  It was in the second season’s A Ghost For Scotland Yard when Brockhurst’s magnified head is seen to be floating in the night sky.  Even today when I watch this scene and observe actor Leonard Mudie’s fiercely skeletal noggin’ I can dimly recall the uneasiness I felt as a boy observing this. The music had something to do with this, I suppose, and Tommy Carr’s atmospheric direction, but mostly that disembodied head just got to me. Sometimes there’s no point in trying to figure these things out, particularly nearly fifty years after the fact.

This image aside, the episode is fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is having Clark and Jimmy away from Metropolis and covering a story in Europe. Although the entire cast of TAOS is always a joy to watch with their terrific chemistry and talents on display, I always find it enjoyable to see those episodes where a couple of the characters are isolated away from Metropolis—The Deserted Village, The Haunted Lighthouse, Rescue and Czar of the Underworld, for example—and able to play off each other in a more concentrated and intimate manner. This time it’s Clark and Jimmy with Lois only making a token appearance during a phone conversation.

Heading back to the States (from Sweden) they stop off in England to see Sir Alfred McCredy (Colin Campbell), an old friend of Perry White’s. The whole country, it seems, is all abuzz anticipating the return of Brockhurst, an unbalanced Houdini-like magician who has been dead for five years but has vowed to return to seek vengeance on his enemies. Sir Alfred, once the magician’s manager, has been signaled out as one of his main targets and is pretty nervous about the situation even though, for some odd reason, he keeps large framed photo of his arch enemy hanging in his living room. Equally upset is Sir Arthur’s sister Mabel (played by the always deliciously ditzy Norma Varden, perhaps best known to film goers as the woman who allows psycho strangler Robert Walker to use her neck for practice in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train). As it turns out, the siblings have every reason to be afraid, not because Brockhurst does return from the dead, but because he’s been alive all the time (having faked his own vehicular death) and just biding his time to return and carry out his murderous plans which call upon his talents as both a magician and a mimic. He doesn’t reckon, however, on Superman.

Initially, however Clark Kent wants absolutely nothing to do with covering such an outlandish story and tells Lois just as much. He actually works up quite lather about the whole thing which doesn’t seem to make much sense but maybe he doesn’t think Superman should be away from Metropolis any longer or perhaps he has a hot date or more White Sox tickets.  Jimmy, of course, wants nothing to do with the reported ghost but almost becomes one of Brockhurst’s victims himself. Jack Larson, for the record, is particularly charming and likable in this episode. He’s always good, of course, but when Jimmy is frightened you really feel it in the same way you empathized with his mounting fear in The Haunted Lighthouse. I think it’s the way he uses his eyes. Again, I recall being pretty unnerved myself when Jimmy finds himself locked in a spooky carriage house with Brockhurst closing in on him with his unsettling delivery of the line, “Crazy am I? I’ll show you!”

Another two good scenes take are set at a news stand where the magazine vendor (Clyde Cook) first warns the “Yank” (Jimmy) about how Superman shouldn’t tangle with Brockhurst and at the show’s conclusion when he apologizes for believing in the magician and gives the cub reporter a Superman comic which Clark also gets a big kick out of.

It’s a strong episode with a nifty script by the always dependable Jackson Gillis, memorable performances by all concerned and even a few chills tossed into the mix.

For a few seconds, watching the show in the dark in an attempt to get the full measure of mood out of it and try to rekindle the acute fear I experienced half a century ago, I have to admit I wouldn’t have minded having my old dog with me again.

August 2006

MAN IN THE LEAD MASK

By Bruce Dettman

Psychologists would probably have a field day with me on this, but I have always had a thing about masks. Today my living-room and den walls are decorated with a wide array of ones I have collected from around the world as well as those my friends have brought me from their travels. I guess this pre-occupation dates back to when I was a kid and my favorite action characters concealed their identities behind disguises, from Zorro and the Lone Ranger to Batman and the Shadow, and I spent considerable time with safety pins and discarded clothes fashioning my own versions as well. For me the idea of a masked avenger, cloaked in mystery, was the ultimate heroic image. My all-time favorite masked hero was the character the Copperhead from the great 1940 Republic serial The Mysterious Doctor Satan which I saw on Saturday afternoon TV in the 1950s. The robot-battling Copperhead sported a kind of metallic serpent-like mask which I simulated with my yellow rain hood. I’m certain the neighbors wondered why I was running around on sunny days wearing this getup, but I suspect they early on became accustomed to my overripe imagination.

Masks obviously played a big part in the second year episode The Man In The Lead Mask, not surprisingly, given my near obsession with such disguises, one of my favorite entries at the time.  The years have taken their toll on the premise, however, and it no longer ranks so high on my preferential list. It’s not a bad show, but it’s a bit talky and George Blair’s direction a tad flat. Moreover, the script by Leroy Zehren and Roy Hamilton contain certain plot elements which not only don’t work, but which are pretty outlandish. Now to be honest, the plots, aside from a very few TAOS episodes such as Panic In The Sky and Superman In Exile, have never been all that important to me. They are merely the incidental frames on which my favorite elements -- the familiar characters, the interplay of the actors, the music and the action sequences -- are hung. Still, you have to expect a bit of logic from a storyline, even from a show based on a cartoon character. Before I get to this severe lapse in logic in this particular show, I should first describe that the plot has to do with a guy named Marty Mitchell who sets up a plan to con a group of fellow crooks into believing he -- with the help of a gifted plastic surgeon – can, for the substantial fee of $50,000, alter their facial appearance, but more importantly their fingerprints. The fly in the ointment is that these guys have been on the run or hiding for a long time and are low on bucks. To get a hold of the necessary cash for the surgery they must venture out and commit crimes wearing the same sort of lead mask Marshall used earlier in the show to burglarize a post office, this to hide their identity as wanted criminals. But as Perry White (who we are informed had a twenty year career as a police reporter) says early on in the show “A trick mask isn’t exactly inconspicuous.” Now there’s a no brainer that doesn’t seem to resonate with anyone else. Nonetheless, the gang does go out wearing these masks and not one is caught committing their crimes even though the police dispatcher is head to describe the series of crimes by men wearing “those same lead masks.” This isn’t exactly a shiny day for the Metropolis Police Department; three guys walking the streets in large lead masks and no one arrests or even stops them!! See what I mean about logic?! In the end Superman discovers the whole thing is a great big ruse and the bad guys are vanquished.

A few cast notes. The fake plastic surgeon (Foley) is John Merton, a familiar bad guy in scores of movies whose son, Lane Bradford, was featured in the same season’s Jet Ace as Perry White’s nephew.  John Crawford, who plays Morrill (who, by the way, had he been wearing a seat belt wouldn’t have sustained the injuries he did when Superman stopped his speeding car), is John Crawford, later the country sheriff in The Waltons.  Paul Bryer, balding in the pin-striped suit, was briefly seen (but not heard – no dialog) in the first season’s A Night of Terror. A bit of a blooper here as well. When Superman takes on the crooks at the conclusion he is unmistakably seen knocking Bryer on his keester. The very next second, however, we see Bryer on his feet empting his gun at the Man of Steel. These things happen.

One scene I particularly liked is when Kent and Inspector Henderson are playing darts in the policeman’s office. Reeves and Robert Shayne had good chemistry on the screen and I always enjoy their scenes together. There’s friendship between them but also a kind of rivalry and competition. It works well. One question though. Isn’t Kent with his super aim taking undue advantage of Henderson by continuously beating him at the game and then making him buy him dinners as a result?

The show ends with Jimmy getting one of the lead masks stuck on his head and Superman pretending (wink) not to be able to free him from it. The irony here, from what I have read, is that in rehearsals actor Reeves, who suffered from mild claustrophobia, did experience trouble extricating himself from one of the things.

By the way, at the diner just across the street from the Daily Planet, Lois tells Clark she needs a $10.00 raise for a new hat. Let’s hope she got it. Doesn’t sound as if Lois was making much more than Noel in those days.

July 2006

The Big Freeze

by Bruce Dettman

Before I began writing this piece I sat down and tried to recall the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. I finally decided, weighing one chilly episode against another, that this would have to have been the occasion back in college during spring break when two friends and I went on a weekend camping trip into the Northern California boonies, normally not the warmest time in this part of the state. As I recall, we had skipped a traditional  dinner for an all vino banquet and eventually decided what a great idea it would be to pitch our ancient tent near the thrashing sounds of the Pacific Ocean, too near as it soon turned out. I dimly recall the sensation of waking in the darkness, feeling something rising up beneath me like a great shapeless monster and pushing me upwards, smelling the recognizable scent of musty canvas as the roof of the tent collapsed on us then suddenly being under water. We three geniuses survived, but only barely. We swam to shore, realized that we had left everything in the tent including our wallets, swam back to fetch what we could (never realizing until then how much a waterlogged sleeping bag could weigh) then returned to the beach. Upon reaching our car, however, we realized we had another problem, that the car keys had not been salvaged and now residing at the bottom of the ocean along with my copy of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and my new sunglasses, my buddy’s guitar and assorted cans of chili and ravioli. And for the next hour, soaked to the skins and wearing only T-shirts and shorts, as we struggled to get into that VW bug, tried hitchhiking and even attempted to wrap some sheets of nearby cardboard around us we just about froze.

None of this, of course, is in the same league with Superman being exposed to temperatures reaching 2000 degrees below zero in The Big Freeze.  This title, by the way, has always sounded a bit out of place on TAOS, something straight out of a gritty and dark film noir. Jack Webb, creator of Dragnet, used “Big” to introduce all his early shows both on radio and TV (The Big Crime, The Big Caper, The Big Girl). Wonder if David Chantler, who wrote the screenplay, for this episode was a detective fan?

In any case, this fourth year color episode was a favorite of mine even though even back then I much preferred the early shows.* I always seemed to be a fan of plots where the Man of Steel’s powers are challenged or even stripped away. Superman suddenly being rendered vulnerable was sort of an adrenalin rush – you were afraid for him but also were mesmerized and thrilled by wondering how he would meet this test whether from Kryptonite, radioactive poisoning, or, as in this case, being turned into a human popsicle. It was somewhat like going to horror films and looking forward to being scared by the Creature of the Black Lagoon or even The Blob. Even though you knew they’d be destroyed in the last reel you loved being threatened and terrified.  Similarly, you wanted Superman to triumph but also wanted to see him in a dangerous predicament worthy of his powers.

The predicament this time comes as a result of yet another of TAOS’s seemingly inexhaustible array of mad – or at least highly eccentric – scientists. This time around it’s Doctor Watts (Rolfe Sedan), a little fuddy-duddy of a guy with a peculiar speech pattern who rigs up the ultimate ice house to freeze Superman (possibly only until he thaws out, possibly longer or even forever. Watts is not certain nor does he care). He must have been working on the idea for quite awhile given all the equipment he’s amassed (both Clark and one of the bad guys describes his lab as looking like the inside of a TV set) but the immediate goal, working for underworld kingpin Duke Taylor (George E. Stone, best known as Chester Morris’ sidekick “The Runt” in Columbia’s Boston Blackie mystery series from the 1940s) is to remove Superman’s interference on election day so Taylor’s handpicked candidate can win Metropolis’ mayoral post.  Taylor’s right-hand goon Little Jack is Richard Reeves, familiar to TAOS fans from such earlier episodes as No Holds Barred and Jet Ace.

Tucked not so subtlety beneath the action plot is an obvious civics lesson. Yes, Superman is in serious trouble and his plight is the central focus, but what this episode really is about is the American electoral system and the responsibility of exercising ones franchise (Jimmy, by the way, is not yet old enough to vote). There are lots of comments and asides about people not voting and the dangers of voter apathy. One particular line of dialog has Lois almost flippantly remarking that there is no threat to the election process because Superman will be around. Clark doesn’t like this and says as much:

“Sometimes, Lois, it’s not wise for people to depend on Superman to keep their own house in order.”

Both