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Tag: Superman

“Superman IV” at 35:  How the “Worst Comic-Book Movie Ever” Epitomizes What We Refuse to Admit about Superhero Fiction

Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace, unanimously reviled for both its unconvincing visuals and cornball story, inadvertently accomplished the theretofore unrealized dream of scores of nefarious supervillains when it was released on this date in 1987:  It killed Superman.  (Or at least put the cinematic franchise into two-decade dormancy.)

But a closer examination of the film suggests its objectively subpar storytelling might in fact be far more faithful to the spirit of the source material than today’s fanboy culture would care to concede.


Thirty-five years ago today, my mother took me to see Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace (1987).  Afterwards, we met up with my father at Doubleday’s, a neighborhood bar and grill that was the last stop on Broadway before you’d officially crossed the city line into Westchester County.  The restaurant had a hot-oil popcorn machine in the far corner, and when I went to refill our basket, I spied a man seated at the bar, nose in a copy of USA Today, the back panel of which boasted a full-page color advertisement for Superman IV.

When he caught me studying the ad, he asked, “Gonna go see the new Superman?”

“I just did.”

“Yeah?  How was it?”

“It was amazing,” I said, and I absolutely meant it.  Sensing my sincerity, the gentleman pulled the ad from the bundle of folded pages and handed it to me as a souvenir.  When I got home, I taped it up on my bedroom wall.

The theatrical one-sheet for “Superman IV” looks like a textbook “Action Comics” cover from the ’80s

Sidney J. Furie’s Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace is not amazing.  It is, in fact, commonly regarded as one of the worst comic-book movies ever made—if not the worst—in eternal competition for last place with Batman & Robin (1997) and Catwoman (2004).  It suffered from a notoriously troubled production:  After the diminishing returns of Superman III (1983) and spin-off Supergirl (1984), series producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind sold their controlling interests in the IP to the Cannon Group, the schlockmeister studio responsible for the American Ninja, Missing in Action, Breakin’, and Death Wish franchises—not exactly the optimal custodians of a series that had started out, against all expectation, so magnificently.

Richard Donner’s Superman:  The Movie (1978) was and remains the finest specimen of superhero cinema ever presented, at once ambitiously epic and emotionally relatable.  It pulls off the impossible in so many ways, first and foremost that it absolutely made us a believe a man could fly, which had never been credibly accomplished before.  Credit for that goes not only to the VFX team, which won the Academy Award for its efforts, but to Christopher Reeve, who delivered the movie’s most timeless special effect:  endowing profound dignity and genuine vulnerability to a spandex-clad demigod.  Even the lesser Superman films—and we’ll talk more about those soon enough—are elevated by Reeve’s extraordinary performance, which occupies a lofty position, right alongside Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, in the pantheon of defining interpretations of folkloric icons.

What’s also so remarkable about Superman is how many different tonal aesthetics it assimilates.  The opening sequences on Krypton with Marlon Brando feel downright Kubrickian; Donner somehow channels the cosmic splendor of 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), only to then transition us to Smallville, as warm and fertile as Krypton was cold and barren, which evokes the same spirit of sock-hop Americana George Lucas conjured to such success in American Graffiti (1973).

The remainder of the movie shifts fluidly from His Girl Friday–style newsroom comedy (the scenes at the Daily Planet) to urban action thriller à la The French Connection (the seedy streets of 1970s Metropolis) to Roger Moore–era 007 outing (Lex Luthor’s sub–Grand Central lair, complete with comically inept henchmen) to Irwin Allen disaster film (the missile that opens up the San Andreas Fault in the third act and sets off a chain reaction of devastation along the West Coast).

Somehow it coheres into a movie that feels like the best of all worlds rather than a derivative Frankenstein’s monster.  Up until that time, superhero features and television, hampered by juvenile subject matter and typically subpar production values, seemed inherently, inexorably campy.  The notion that a superhero movie could rise to the level of myth, or at least credibly dramatic science fiction, was unthinkable.  Superman is the proof-of-concept paradigm on which our contemporary superhero–industrial complex is predicated.

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Tim Burton’s “Batman” at 30—and the Cultural Legacy of the Summer of 1989

In order to appreciate the state of commercial adolescence to which Generation X has been disproportionately consigned, one needs to consider Tim Burton’s Batman in its sociocultural context:  how it inadvertently provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults.


The weekly theatrical debut of a new franchise tentpole, voraciously bulling aside the $200 million–budgeted blockbuster released a mere seven days prior, is par for the course nowadays, but back in 1989—thirty summers ago per the calendar, though seemingly as recently as yesterday by the nebulous barometer of memory—we’d never before experienced anything like that.

That was the year that gave us new entries in such ongoing adventures as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, James Bond, and Back to the Future, lowbrow comedies Police Academy, Fletch, and Vacation, as well as slasher staples Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween—to say nothing of launching all-new franchises with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Major League, Pet Sematary, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Look Who’s Talking.  To anyone who’d grown up in the nascent home-video era—that period in which all the aforementioned series (save 007) were born and could thusly be re-watched and obsessed-over ad infinitum—1989 was the Christmas of summer-movie seasons.

Tim Burton's "Batman"
Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989)

But none of those films, huge as many of them were, dominated the cultural spotlight that year as pervasively as Tim Burton’s Batman, released on this date in 1989.

Out of the Shadows

I can hear my thirteen-year-old nephew now:  “One superhero movie?  Wow—how’d you handle the excitement?”

Yeah, I know.  But it was exciting.  I was thirteen myself in 1989, spending most of my free time with my grade-school gang at the neighborhood comic shop down on Broadway, steeped in a subculture that hadn’t yet attained popular acceptance.  Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) had been the only previous attempt at a reverent comic-book adaptation, and, creatively and financially successful though it was, most of that goodwill had been squandered in the intervening decade by a succession of increasingly subpar sequels (through no fault of the marvelous Christopher Reeve, who makes even the worst of them watchable).

Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in “Superman: The Movie”

As for Batman:  It’s crucial to remember, and easy enough now to overlook, that in the late eighties, the prevailing public perception of the character was not Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, but rather Adam West’s “Bright Knight” from the self-consciously campy acid-trip of a TV series that had aired twenty years earlier.  In the wake of that show’s cancelation, a concerted effort was made by the character’s creative custodians at DC Comics—first Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and most effectively Miller with his aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns—to reestablish Batman as the “nocturnal avenger” he was originally conceived to be.

“Dark Knight Triumphant” (July 1986); art by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

But if you weren’t following the comics—and, in those days, few over thirteen years old were—the predominant impression the name “Batman” conjured wasn’t the ferocious Miller rendering above so much as this:

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The Man Behind the Mask: On the Creation of Batman—and Rewriting Authorship Itself

Pop quiz:  Who created Batman?

Even if you think you know the answer, it’s very possible your information is outdated.

Detective Comics no. 27, the first appearance of Batman

Detective Comics no. 27, the first appearance of Batman

In 1939, illustrator Bob Kane (1915–1998) was tasked by DC Comics editor Vin Sullivan to devise a character for Detective Comics that could complement—and ideally capitalize on the success of—the costumed hero who had the year earlier made his debut in the pages of Action Comics:  Superman.  Inspired in equal measure by Leonardo da Vinci’s 1485 design sketches of an “ornithopter,” a 1930 mystery movie entitled The Bat Whispers, and the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks, the commercially savvy Kane managed in short order to assemble the Bat-Man “from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts” (Grant Morrison, Supergods:  What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York:  Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 17).  Part nocturnal predator, part avenging angel—with a secret identity as a millionaire playboy, to boot—Batman was the Gothic (k)night to Superman’s sunny savior of the day.  An enduring icon had, against astronomical odds, been created, albeit removed from a narrative framework:

“‘When I created the Batman,’ admitted Bob Kane, ‘I wasn’t thinking of story.  I was thinking, I have to come up with a character who’s different,’ and as an artist he was clearly more concerned with pictures than plot.  [Writer Bill] Finger, however, was a born story man, blessed with enough pictorial sense to realize what would work in comics” (Les Daniels, Batman:  The Complete History, [San Francisco:  Chronicle Books, 1999], 23).

Finger, a friend and former high-school classmate of Kane’s, further fleshed out the character, whom he saw “as a combination of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckler D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (1844) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes” (ibid.), and wrote countless Batman scripts in the years that followed.  By even Kane’s own admission, Finger embellished and contributed to many aspects of the mythos (including rechristening what was initially New York as “Gotham City”), yet was never credited as co-creator of Batman:  “Bob Kane had made his deal with DC Comics on his own, and Finger was merely Kane’s employee” (ibid., 31).

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