So, get a load of this.
“Excuse me… sorry…” Engrossed in thought, Clark had stumbled against a woman in the street. She looked at him in disgust. “Watch where you’re going, you four-eyed moron!”
That’s on the first page of William Kotzwinkle’s novelization of Superman III, and it doesn’t get a lot cheerier from there.
The story so far: loveable loser, wind-up penguins, chaos in Calgary, Lois in Bermuda, casual attitude toward angels, uneaten potato salad, fake Art Deco, sackful of puppies, the bowling scene, half a soundtrack, and computers preventing people from relating to one another. Add six cups of comic relief, and stir.
It’s no wonder the Stokis family is barging in, demanding recompense. I feel exactly the same way.
Hapless hacker Gus Gorman has breached the firewall, and touched the face of God.
In a dimly-lit room, the machines are awakening, like a cavern of ancient dragons becoming aware of an intruder in their midst. He tames them, and brings them under his control. The ensorcelled computers mutter to each other, in their secret binary parseltongue. There are flashing lights, and whirring tape drives. A man has his finger on the ignition key of the world, and hacking is occurring.
One of the problems with Superman III is that there is not enough attention paid to Gus Gorman’s yo-yo. There, I’ve said it.
Everbody knows that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is the worst film of the 1980s, or the worst Superman film, or at least the worst Christopher Reeve Superman film, or whatever. It’s just the worst! This is common knowledge that everybody agrees with except for me.
Longtime readers of Superheroes Every Day will know that my coverage of Superman III is taking a long time, because dealing with the bowling scene takes a lot out of a person. And I have to say, the closer that I look at III, the better IV seems. Look, just hear me out.
They call it “Marvel Fatigue”, which is apparently a thing that happens to people who like something so much that they watch a lot of it.
“Is the world starting to get Marvel fatigue?” Gamerant asked in December 2021, one week before the debut of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which made $805 million domestic.
“Marvel Fatigue Is More Obvious Than Ever After San Diego Comic Con,” Thegamer.com asserted in July 2022, halfway between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($411 million) and Thor: Love and Thunder ($343 million).
“Marvel Fatigue Is Setting in with MCU Fans,” Screenrant declared in November 2022, a week after the premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($453 million).
“Marvel’s Kevin Feige has a plan to combat superhero fatigue. Will it work?” AV Club gasped in February 2023, two days before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had a $118 million opening weekend.
I swear, my greatest dream in life is that someday people will be as tired of me as they are of Marvel movies. Just imagine how much money I would make.
Continue reading Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania 100.1: The Problem is Not the Problem
I knew that they were coming; I just didn’t think it would be this soon.
As you’ll no doubt recall, my introductory post for the blog discussed singing cowboys, an unaccountably popular film genre from the 30s and 40s that spawned dozens of movies per year, and then disappeared completely from the American public consciousness. The fate of the singing cowboys looms large over the history of superhero blockbusters, suggesting that even the most successful genres can be abandoned and forgotten.
The singing cowboys will be back one day, when comic-book stories are tired and played-out, to fight once again for their place in the pantheon. They are the existential threat just over the horizon, ready to pounce when the superheroes stumble.
And even here, the cowboys remind us that the eternal sequel is never assured.
So we were discussing Clark and Lana’s picnic of peril yesterday, and if you’ve watched that scene, then you may have but almost certainly didn’t notice that it’s scored with forty seconds of the “Love Theme from Superman III”, which is not audible to the human ear.
As students of the cinema will readily appreciate, the difference, auteur-wise, between the Donner-directed Superman movies and the Lester-directed Superman movies is that Richard Donner gave a shit and Richard Lester clearly did not.
That’s why the flying scenes in Superman III are so disappointing. In the original movie, Donner was willing to spend untold months and millions perfecting the technology, while Lester figured you could just put a shot of Christopher Reeve holding his arms out on top of a picture of the landscape, problem solved.
But if you really want to see the full extent of Lester’s that’ll-do pragmatism, just look at the pathetic little patch of weeds that he chose as the location of the film’s picnic scene.
For almost one minute of screen time, the Superman III soundtrack is Roger Miller singing “They Won’t Get Me.” Why?
Superheroes Every Day 