IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE! IT'S SUPERMAN AT 80!

Siegel and Shuster.  

Jerry and Joe.

Both the sons of immigrant Jews who escaped life in Russia.

One in the United States.  The other in Canada.  They met as alienated school boys in not very Jewish Cleveland.

Together, in 1938, they created Superman, who, according to a scholar, "was an immigrant figure whose desire was to fit into American culture as an American.”  To this day that remains something that taps into an important and sadly, racist aspect of American identity.

As a child of in the 1950s,  just like most any other child, I too was a refugee.  Not from Europe, but rather from the faraway land of Childhood  Imagination, a country whose roots ran deep and compelled me to re-visit over and over again. sometimes by the hour.

In my tender years, the real, actual world was far too vast, incomprehensibly complicated and overrun with VERY LARGE people who seemed to go off and do mysterious things which rewarded them with money in varying degrees.

Grown-ups, for the most part, spoke their native tongue language which was the Valyrian of its day.   It was used as a form of communication whose code we could not possibly be broken. It’s not like we had Native Americans next door to help out.  Years later, of course, I got that it was a device that was employed to protect me from hearing any threatening parent to parent intel that might frighten me.

In the day the message was clear:  You are not one of us and that hat kind of alienation, coupled with the kind that we experienced in public school through bullying, class system rejection or through my own personal evaluation system, whose results wildly fluctuated from day to day like a volatile market,  made me desperate to search for a hero who would help me feel protected.

And in flew Superman equipped with what must have been some kind of invisible industrial sized fan which kept his cape to triumphantly waving and flapping like a crisp American Flag.

Comic books in those days were our fantasy outlet internet.   The bandwidth was our effusive capacity for fantasy, which simply could not be contained and could light up our minds like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

We didn’t just read them, we FLEW into them, entering  a dimension of bold primary colors, where commandment worthy rules of AMERICAN life were strictly honored and enforced and where each week, when any outsized villain dared to violate them, they were brought down to their knees in some twenty or thirty pages thanks to the invulnerable powers of Superman.

Before me, there was the old radio series, starring Bud Collyer in the titular role, who later was the amiable perennially bow-tied Clark Kent-like host of a game show like Beat The Clock. 

Every Superman episode featured a scene in which Clark Kent changed into his Superman costume, an effect which Collyer conveyed by shifting voices while speaking the phrase "This is (or "looks like") a job for Superman!" his voice always dropping when becoming Superman.

I have listened to them and they are thrilling to this day.  They welcome you as a fantasy partner to fill in the canvas that they are describing.

George Reeves was our TV Superman which was shot on such a tiny Kellogs budget that for the entire run of the series (they could have called it a “cereal”) all the main characters wore the same outfit which was fine to us, because all we had were school clothes and play clothes, a pair of sneakers and a pair of nice shoes, but more importantly, all we cared passionately about was the costume that hung behind the secret panel of Clark Kent’s bedroom closet.  

The opening was and remains permanently etched and forever preserved in the clay soft Metropolis of our brains:

Narrator: Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Man 1: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird.

Woman: It’s a plane

Man 2: It’s Superman!

Narrator: Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands. And who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. And now another exciting episode in the adventures of Superman.

When I was five or six., I went to school wearing my Superman outfit underneath my clothes.  I remember sitting in class, ready for danger.  Ready to fly out the window at a moment’s notice should my superheating pick up anything that required my immediate rescue participation.

At three o’clock I would run into an alley, strip off my outer Clark Kent layer (I had lens-free frames) and I would  “fly home.”  

Minutes later, I would be dragged back by my earlobe, to where I had dumped my clothes, at the hands of my sainted/exasperated mother who at once marveled at my boundless imagination, while at the same time, often wished and no doubt secretly prayed for a much easier, normal kid.

A few kids in the day were killed, leaping off of buildings.  Think of how powerful their need to escape and feel the sheer wind delight of flight must have been before they began to taxi down across the rooftop tarmacs toward, leaping headfirst over the edge towards the infinite sky.

I kept reading comic books well into my teen years.  Then came the movies.  Christopher Reeve.  The first two were the keepers.  The ones that followed became, well, far too broad and comic book silly for this Hollis, Queens hero worshipper.

There was one issue in the day that actually dealt with what Superman and Lois would be like as wobbly, cane-assisted old people and it was horrible.  They were both bitter and full of regret and the story was saved by their mutual decision to end out their days with each other, fulfilling  Lois’s 30 year OCD campaign to hold out until she married him.

And now here we are, April 2018, a date which sounds like the title of a Science Fiction story about the future, Superman and Lois are indeed 80, and true to the standards of the Entertainment Industry, for which I have tolled for some 30 years, they have had a lot of work done and look Jane Fonda great.  I don’t think I could deal with them if they looked Aging Starlet post-surgical horrified, which, if you think about it, has successfully captured,. Twilight Zone style, their true reaction to how they really feel about themselves.

George Reeves and his Dr. Denton-like suit are still alive and well on DVDs.  So is Kirk Alyn’s Superman whose serials featured Noel Neill as Lois Lane.  Alyn was like a chorus boy version of Superman, the kind that Charles Laughton might have fancied.

The old comics are still nesting,  as ready for action as I once was, deep within the hidden universe of my closet, just like Clark’s uniforms.

Comic book stores today are like visiting the Louvre.  You know walking in that you cannot see everything. There are seventy million different comic books published, evidently by the second and they have become as alienating as my parents.  Just like the 500 plus show offerings of cable, there are just WAY too many choices.  I often fall asleep trying to make it through the TV channel guide.  I literally suffer carpel television syndrome.

Back in the day simplicity appeared like the doting parent of a full time, working angel. Nothing was more complicated than our one or two sandwich choices, milk with or without chocolate,  watching Howdy Doody or selecting on pure impulse which rock to throw or which errant stick to rescue which could be instantly converted into a swashbuckling sword or twirling Bat Masterson cane.

The fantasy lives of children not only unify and fully accepts them, but it makes them instant citizens of a wall-free country, not unlike downtown Neverland, which actually encourages its potential inhabitants to immediately apply for permanent residency, which I  have to admit, is sadly where I still live today.  My need to escape the tyranny of my mother’s bi-polar madness, by losing myself in the safe house of my room, where I would dress up, become someone else and disappear into the ether of fantasy, mirrors exactly all my years working in studios and on sitcom staffs, where l pretty much did the same thing.  Just with more alcohol, drugs and Spartacus quality combat in the writer’s room coliseum where you fought to the death to get the attention you desperately needed, by getting your pitched line into that week’s script which was not unlike subway rats wrestling for the melon rind in a take-out container filled dumpster.

Hollywood encourages, no, insists, that you stay young for as long as is humanly possible, and when you start to implode like a Southwest turbo engine from the very same kind of fatigue, you are pretty much shown the door which ushers you into a room that is made up of one solitary thing: a cliff.

I luckily was able to gurney my way out of there, Zelda Fitzgerald style, get the hell out of Dodge and Mercedes and find my way back, far more successfully than Thomas Wolfe, to my native once upon a time New York where I sit now, no longer requiring pants, writing to my heart’s delight.  I even have a new series on HULU, “There’s Johnny” (as in Johnny Carson, 1972 Burbank) which I co-created and co-wrote with Paul Reiser.

The TV that is housing our humble little show, is the very one that once housed Superman.

Mission accomplished.  When I was under contract at Disney I wandered on to the old Zorro set which was still standing.  To me, it was like stumbling into Vatican City.  Thankfully there was a stick nearby to aid me in my daring do with an invisible Sgt. Garcia.

Today, when immigration is such a hot point issue, where the Germans are blaming the Jews for….no. Wait.  I meant White “Christians” blaming African Americans, Mexicans, Muslims and, once again, appearing in the role of scapegoats, Jews,  for the reason that America evidently,  is not so great anymore, we need Superman more than ever.

Lately, comic books have been rebooted, like movie series, starting all over again.

And I’m willing to bet that we can all do the very same thing.

The problem right now is that  what we have now is a whole other kind of “hero.”   

One who claims to have superpowers and yet crashes like the Wright Brother’s early planes at Kitty Hawk over and over and over and over again.

And yet despite his obvious inability and astonishing, foul and often racist language, he remains unscathed.   

In this comic book, his kids Snarky and Shifty, Jr. continue to shamelessly shill his brand, making one shifty deal after another all over the world, while the GOP led by Jughead doppelgänger the unctuous and treasononous Trey Gowdy orchestrates ways to destroy the Mueller investigation by setting up Ron Rosenstein to be fired because he is ’uncooperative,” (they are asking for classified information of a current investigation that they KNOW he cannot give them) while in back east in Metropolis, Southern District of New  career prosecutors in the office’s elite public corruption unit, which has a track record of convicting politicians on both sides of the aisle battle the newest villain, The Fixer for whom Trump will do anything to save.

In the scenario, everything is like the Bizzaro version of Superman, where bad is good and good is bad.

James Comey rightfully compared Don Trump to a mob boss and to add one more comic book reference into the mix, we’ve got ourselves a corrupt and staggeringly selfish GOP who, by all appearances, are criminals right out of Dick Tracy.  They are all buffoonish, transparent and all work for the “boss.”

Can you imagine what it’s like to be a child today?  Hearing what they’re hearing?  Seeing what they’re seeing?

What is their escape?  Where do they get to go when again thanks to your current GOP led congress, they have all been Sandy Hooked and Parkland forced to live in abject fear; to be fully aware that they can be assassinated standing in the playground or while grabbing a cup of jello on a cafeteria lunch line.

We need to put an end to this reality that we are living with for their sake and for our individual sanity.  We all have to become SUPERMEN and SUPERWOMAN to save the day.

We have to stop being so polite and passive while Sarah Huckabee opens that bumpkin, lie-spewing pie hole of hers and instead of SCREAMING at the TV when either she or her mob boss shows up to DEFEND himself AGAIN, we have to take IMMEDIATE AND FIRST RESPONDER action.

We have to be LOUD in his let me eat cake, FAT face.

We have to continue to DEMONSTRATE.

We must INVADE the streets of Washington when the GOP does the next outrageous thing, like Mitch McConnell refusing to allow a bill to be voted on which would protect Bob Mueller.

We have gone from DC comics to Washington D.C. where our arch villain, the Soviets, continue to literally get away with murder, do whatever they want to us, poison our democracy, without sanction, simply because of what they obviously have on Ritz Carlton Dossier Trump.

Hey, at least we have a Man of Steele again.

#Superman
#DC
#Cohen
#Trump