Superman II 2.46: The Blowdown

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It’s the ultimate battle between good and evil, or if not quite that, then at least the ultimate battle between cheerful and cranky. I don’t know if anybody’s in the market for one of those, but here it is happening anyway.

Three Kryptonian supercriminals from the other side of a twirling parallel hell have descended upon New York City, where they’ve challenged Earth’s greatest hero to a game of three-on-one grab-ass, hurling each other into things and engaging in general endangerment.

Caught between glam rock and a hard place, Superman has been knocked off the playing field for a moment, so the nearby movie New Yorkers — once again demonstrating that they’ll do anything for a good time — have turned on their snooty overlords, armed only with sticks and traffic cones.

And then the villains start to blow.

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Superman II 2.45: Things I Want to Tell You

Superman II

Man, it feels like old times, right? Like, back when I was writing about the first Superman movie, I had an endless fund of boring production details to talk about, and it took me forever to get through a single scene. That drive for documentation pretty much dried up by the time they made the sequel, so I’ve been able to move along through this movie without getting too tied up on anything in particular.

But there’s a lot going on with the big New York dance number, which is giving me more than a week of material to dig into. So today, I’m going to tell you a few things that I think are interesting about this scene.

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Superman II 2.44: The Grim Barbarity of Lois Lane

Superman II

But Superman was doing a lot more in 1981 than kicking the President in the face and promoting cigarettes, of course. On the comics rack, he was appearing solo in Action Comics and Superman, in team-ups in World’s Finest and DC Comics Presents, and as part of a superteam in Super Friends and Justice League of America. Superboy also had his own monthly book, and there was a miniseries called The Krypton Chronicles, so there was a lot to keep up with.

And just in case that wasn’t enough Supercontent, DC also published a bumper-sized Dollar Comic called The Superman Family, which featured an extra five stories about Supergirl, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Clark Kent and the alternate-dimension Mr. & Mrs. Superman. This is the story of how that worked out.

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Superman II 2.43: Marlboro

Superman II,

Okay everybody, time to light up. This week, I’m talking about the big Metropolis battle sequence, and I have to take a minute today to appreciate the staggering amount of product placement strewn around the set.

This battle is the main action sequence in the movie, the one scene that everyone remembers as the showdown between Superman and the Kryptonian villains, and that made it ground zero for advertising firms trying to get their clients’ logo onto the screen.

Now, the original intention was that the producers would film both Superman and the sequel at the same time, so I assume that the main advertising space was booked by the time they started shooting in 1977. But then there was a break in the production, and during that time, Superman became a huge hit at the box office, so I expect more companies started lining up to buy placement in the film.

I think that’s why this scene ended up so chock full of brand logos, because this was the big sequence still to be filmed, and the Salkinds could just keep making deals all the way until production started up again. I mean, there’s always more wall space, somewhere.

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Superman II 2.42: Save My Baby!!

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Now, I have to admit that this one has a pretty good excuse, compared to other Save My Baby Ladies in her weight class.

Your typical Save My Baby Lady has left her infant unattended in a flammable apartment building playing with a pile of oily rags while she goes out to the pachinko parlor, and she comes home just in time to realize that she’s going to need a superhero, tout suite. “Save my baby!” she cries, and all of a sudden it’s everybody else’s problem, as seen in Backdraft, Spider-Man and Hero at Large.

In this instance, the Save My Baby Lady has made the simple mistake of going out shopping with her baby, while three sky tyrants beat the hell out of a guy in aerial warfare directly overhead. One of them just got knocked into the Empire State Building, and the radio antenna snapped clean off, now plunging in the direction of down towards this formerly carefree consumer.

Everybody else has the good sense to scuttle for shelter, but Save My Baby Ladies have a strict stand-your-ground policy. “Oh, my god!” she screams. “My baby!” And then she tries to cover it with her body, which is sweet but not a lot of help.

I mean, I don’t want to blame the victim, although to be honest, they are trending super blameable right now.

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Superman II 2.40: The Reshoots

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Perry White and Jimmy Olsen are worried. Standing in Perry’s office at the Daily Planet on this unquiet night, they fret about the fate of the world.

“I can’t understand it,” Perry grouches, pacing across the room. “Where is he? I mean, he shows up every time a cat gets stuck in a tree, and now he’s decided to pull a disappearing act.”

Jimmy starts pacing too. “Yeah, well, maybe we just haven’t figured out his game plan,” he offers.

“Game plan!” Perry huffs. “It’s fourth down, the two-minute warning has sounded, and the ball’s deep in our territory. Just how brilliant do you have to be? I mean, uh —”

And then he stops, realizing that Jimmy is pacing exactly in step with him, and grimaces at the copy boy.

It’s a cute moment, which gives Jimmy and Perry one of their vanishingly few moments of cuteness in the sequel. But was it worth rebuilding the Daily Planet set?

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Superman II 2.39: Lost in Place

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Enter Lex Luthor, unnecessarily.

I mean, we’re already looking at a worst-case scenario for the Earth, now entirely in the possession of three bug-eyed monsters from Planet K, who don’t really have a plan for what’s going to happen next. The trio is already bored with literally everything in the world, and since they haven’t even thought of redecorating their office, it seems like they’re not very good at cheering themselves up. Honestly, the only thing that they know is destruction, which they indulge in when they’re happy and also when they’re not happy.

So sending in Lex Luthor, the greatest criminal mind on Earth and this movie’s C-plot, is not technically necessary to move the story forward. But the movie is hedging its bets on the villainy, throwing in a more engaging character as backup just in case the three Kryptonians get boring, which they have.

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Superman II 2.38: A List of Things That Our Kryptonian Overlords Don’t Care About

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#1. Focus groups.

Obviously, “Kneel Before Zod” is going to be the main theme of our re-education program, as we transition to a fully Zod-based society. It’s a simple message of global submission that everyone can understand. However, it’s not testing as well with all demographics, especially the elderly and the injured, who are having trouble getting into the correct kneeling position. It’s important to pay attention to the injured demographic, because there are a lot more of them now than there used to be.

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Superman II 2.37: Another World

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Everything seemed possible back then. If a movie about fishing could make $260 million and a movie about film-serial space battles could make $307 million — and now they were making a big-budget special-effects movie based on Superman, of all the crazy things — then maybe what people wanted was lighthearted, high-concept blockbusters. All they needed was a big idea, preferably somebody else’s.

“Comics Strip for Next Film Cycle,” Variety reported in 1978, proclaiming that “the next cycle of big budget films will be centered on comic book characters.” Then they rattled off a list of comics with a film in development — Flash Gordon, Popeye, Tarzan, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, The Phantom. They even mentioned a live-action movie based on Marmaduke the Great Dane, which seemed deeply unwise. It was like last call at Kevin Feige’s place.

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