It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman! (USA TV, 1975) 92 min color DIR: Jack Regas. PROD: Norman Twain. SCR: Romeo Muller, based on the libretto by David Newman and Robert Benton. MUSIC: Charles Strouse. DOP: Urve Kuusik. CAST: Kenneth Mars, Loretta Swit, Lesley Ann Warren, David Wayne, David Wilson, Phil Leeds, Harvey Lembeck, Allen Ludden, Al Molinaro, Malachi Throne, Michael Lembeck, Joanna Kerns. (5 Minutes To Live)
All right, so you’ve seen a twelfth-generation bootleg of The Star Wars Holiday Special, and you think you’ve seen the piece du resistance of bad television? Well, for competitive viewing, you must dig up this abomination, originally released on ABC’s Wide World of Entertainment on a late-late night time slot.
This TV special was based on the ill-fated Broadway musical of the late 1960s, but since late night TV was being filled with such mind-warping stuff, someone must have thought that this would play for some stoned insomniacs. Good lord, this is a film to make people swear off drugs forever.
David Wilson (I know- who?) makes his debut as Superman, but you forget about this gimpy superhero about as quickly as the writers do. Instead this song-and-dance abomination spends more time with David Wayne (as mad scientist Abner Sedgwick), and Loretta Swit (as gold-digging columnist Sydney who is always trying to get her sequined gloves all over Kenneth Mars’ mad dog editor Max Mencken than with the Big “S”.)
Mencken and Sedgwick get together to wipe Superman off the planet. This may be a blessing in disguise, as then we wouldn’t have to sit through a later musical number where the Man of Steel battles the dancing gangsters (including Malachi Throne, Harvey Lembeck and Al Molinaro!), replete with onscreen cartoon sound effects (“BAM” “POW”) right out of the Batman TV series. Boy- after seeing this pathetic musical (whose cheap cartoonish sets are the best thing in it), one begins to feel that old TV show Cop Rock was simply… misunderstood.
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #16.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.