Tag Archives: flight

Superman 1.57: A Man Can Fly

Superman: The Movie, , ,

So here’s a scene that we didn’t see in Superman: The Movie, straight from the shooting script:

The eagle bursts through a white cloud bank up once more into the clean blue air. After a short moment SUPERMAN does likewise, trailing the bird.

For a few moments we are privileged to witness this real beauty and poetry of flying as the eagle and SUPERMAN chase each other through the air doing banks, loops, and dives, swooping closely together like two beautiful fighter planes in tight formation.

The unspoken ceremony over, they silently acknowledge each other, then head off in different directions.

Obviously, that scene didn’t happen, because who has the time to choreograph eagles, but the interesting thing is that it made the cut all the way up to the shooting script. That says to me that they really didn’t know how hard it was going to be just getting Superman to fly in a credible way, without having to do a fucking raptor ballet on top of it.

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Superman 1.30: After Brando

Superman: The Movie, , , ,

As the ground pitched and buckled, Jor-El and Lara moved together across the floor of the great hall of Kryptonopolis. There was nowhere they could go; Jor-El knew that better than anyone. He’d tried to warn them, and had suffered for it.

The dying planet was in its final spasms, rock and crystal crumbling around them. Sliding, crunching sounds, unimaginably loud. They were lost, all of them, irretrievably lost, but Jor-El and his wife ducked and flinched, as everything they’d ever known fell to pieces around them. They continued to move down the hall, looking for — what? shelter? a way out? No hope, no time, but still they kept moving. What else could they do?

The floor gave way. The population of Krypton, a proud and noble people, falling and crying and dying, every one. A great darkness. A final, splintering crunch, and then a burst of light and sound that no one was left to witness.

And then things really started to go badly.

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Superman 1.29: Fear of Flying

Superman: The Movie,

And then, finally, triumphantly: Superman, revealed.

After Krypton and Kansas, after the Arctic and the Elders, after scherzos and Cheerios and Einstein and everything — here he is, looking exactly like we hoped he would. They gave us backstory and atmosphere, and possibly a little extra tedium, just to make sure that we really, really wanted him.

We are ready, and he has arrived. And he doesn’t look ridiculous at all, as we feared he would. He looks magnificent.

And he does what we’ve wanted him to do, most of all: he flies. Calm and purposeful, with his bright red cape trailing behind him, like a king.

Flying is Superman’s killer feature; it’s the thing that everybody loves best about him. When you think about Superman, the first thing that you think of isn’t his strength or his bulletproof body. You think about a man in a red cape, soaring across the sky.

Of course, it’s a clear violation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s original intentions for the character. Flying is specifically a thing that he shouldn’t do. And yet, here we are.

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