TV adaptation of the campy 1960s Broadway musical concerning a mad scientist who enlists a rival reporter and a group of gangsters to push the Man of Steel into a mental breakdown.TV adaptation of the campy 1960s Broadway musical concerning a mad scientist who enlists a rival reporter and a group of gangsters to push the Man of Steel into a mental breakdown.TV adaptation of the campy 1960s Broadway musical concerning a mad scientist who enlists a rival reporter and a group of gangsters to push the Man of Steel into a mental breakdown.
Lesley Ann Warren
- Lois Lane
- (as Lesley Warren)
Stuart Goetz
- Jerry Siegel
- (as Stuart Getz)
Gary Owens
- Narrator
- (voice)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThis show was based on the 1966 musical of the same name which was considered the biggest Broadway flop of its time, closing after 3 1/2 months and costing $600K (equaling over $5 million in 2022). Although the play was praised by critics and audiences, it wasn't well promoted and found itself in direct competition with ABC's unexpected hit Batman (1966), which had just begun airing on TV twice a week. As a matter of fact, Superman's debut was intended to be heralded on the cover of Life Magazine, but it was ultimately reduced to a small sidebar in a flashy cover story about Batman. This heavily reworked TV special was an attempt to recoup some of the show's financial losses and to boost interest in licensing it for high school and regional theatre productions, but ABC buried it on their late-night schedule for both broadcasts.
- GoofsDr. Sedgwick's dates on the Nobel Prize winners are inaccurate. Richard T. Zsigmondy was awarded it in 1925, not 1938, and Sir Chandra V. Raman got his in 1930, not 1949. Also, although he didn't cite a date, Harold Urey received his award in 1934, so he would not have been in direct competition with Sedgwick, who didn't earn his P.H.D. until 1938.
- Crazy creditsEach cast member is shown in a brief clip that accompanies their name in the end credits sequence, and then - unusually - many of the crew members are similarly credited with an on-set photo.
- Alternate versionsThe heavily bootlegged version is just titled "Superman." The original broadcast version featured the complete name and included an additional card in the end credits with copyright information.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
- SoundtracksWe Need Him
Music by Charles Strouse
Lyrics by Lee Adams
Sung by David Wilson, Nita Talbot, Joanna Kerns, Ronnie Claire Edwards, Udana Power, and Chorus
Featured review
This 'Superman' can't fly.
"It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" was the unwieldy (and comma-less) title of a 1966 Broadway musical that ran for less than four months. The score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams produced not a single hit song ... although "You've Got Possibilities" was recorded in England by Matt Munro. 'Superman' was such a resounding failure that, years later, when Martin Charnin approached Strouse to write the tunes for a musical comedy about Little Orphan Annie, Strouse almost refused because he'd already had one flop musical about a comic-book character! ('Annie' became the biggest hit in Strouse's songbook.)
Many bizarre (or Bizarro) decisions were made in the musical 'Superman', chiefly the decision to eliminate most of the established characters. The Broadway musical has no Perry White, no Jimmy Olsen. (They show up briefly in this tele-version.) Superman wastes a lot of time fighting some larcenous Chinese acrobats (played by white actors) who seem more like Batman's sort of villains. The main villain here is an evil scientific genius in the tradition of Lex Luthor ... but he isn't Lex Luthor. Apparently the producers of 'Superman' didn't want to pay DC Comics for the rights to use the Luthor character, so they named their villain "Doctor Abner Sedgwick". In the Broadway production (but not in this TV version), the actor playing Dr Sedgwick wore long flowing hair, just to make sure we all understood he wasn't the famously chrome-domed Lex Luthor.
The lead character in the 'Superman' musical isn't even Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane or anyone else in the established superhero canon: it's Max Mencken (who?), an egotistical reporter at the Daily Planet who wants to destroy Superman due to sheer envy. Mencken actually has more time onstage than Superman and Clark Kent together! (And more songs.) In 1966 the big-name Broadway actor Jack Cassidy was looking for a star vehicle, so the 'Superman' production team built up the minor role of Mencken in order to attract Cassidy and take advantage of his box-office name value. This was a fatal error: a musical about Superman ought to be ABOUT Superman.
'ABC Wide World of Entertainment' wasn't so much a TV series as it was an irregular time slot. In the 1970s, whenever ABC-TV had a piece of programming that didn't fit any established niche, they bunged it into whatever late-night slot was available and called it 'Wide World of Entertainment'. The most notorious example of this was the 'Monty Python' special which ABC-TV aired at midnight: several Python episodes were drastically recut to fit the time slot, provoking a famous lawsuit from the Python comedians.
The 1975 television production of "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" -- transmitted under ABC's 'Wide World of Entertainment' rubric -- is a re-staging of the Broadway show, with a new cast. This is a VERY bad musical special, done on a criminally low budget. The entire production is filmed on a cramped sound stage. The musical numbers, which were bad in the first place, are staged in a very unimaginative manner.
In the Broadway version, the nearest thing to a hit song was "You've Got What I Need, Baby", a duet sung by Mencken and Sedgwick when they decide to team up in a plot to kill Superman. Staged on Broadway, this was a rousing up-tempo number that efficiently closed the first act. In this 1975 TV version, the song is stodged down so that Kenneth Mars and David Wayne can perform it with arthritic slowness.
A (very minor) musical high point occurs in the song "You've Got Possibilities" when Loretta Swit, as the villainess, attempts to seduce mild-mannered Clark Kent, whom she doesn't realise is really Superman. When Linda Lavin performed this number in the Broadway production, there was an element of suspense when she sang the line "underneath, there's something there" while she started to unbutton Clark's shirt ... nearly discovering the big Superman "S" underneath. This clever staging was omitted in the TV version, and nothing better is brought in to replace it. Swit's singing voice is smoky and appropriately vampy, but weak.
This TV special does have one poignant moment that didn't occur in the Broadway original, when Superman meets two teenage fans named Jerry and Joe who want to write stories about him and draw pictures of him. This is a subtle reference to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real-life teenagers from Cleveland who created Superman in the 1930s and sold the character to National Periodical Publications. I wish that "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" had more moments like this. I'll rate this terrible show only one point out of 10. Pass the Kryptonite.
Many bizarre (or Bizarro) decisions were made in the musical 'Superman', chiefly the decision to eliminate most of the established characters. The Broadway musical has no Perry White, no Jimmy Olsen. (They show up briefly in this tele-version.) Superman wastes a lot of time fighting some larcenous Chinese acrobats (played by white actors) who seem more like Batman's sort of villains. The main villain here is an evil scientific genius in the tradition of Lex Luthor ... but he isn't Lex Luthor. Apparently the producers of 'Superman' didn't want to pay DC Comics for the rights to use the Luthor character, so they named their villain "Doctor Abner Sedgwick". In the Broadway production (but not in this TV version), the actor playing Dr Sedgwick wore long flowing hair, just to make sure we all understood he wasn't the famously chrome-domed Lex Luthor.
The lead character in the 'Superman' musical isn't even Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane or anyone else in the established superhero canon: it's Max Mencken (who?), an egotistical reporter at the Daily Planet who wants to destroy Superman due to sheer envy. Mencken actually has more time onstage than Superman and Clark Kent together! (And more songs.) In 1966 the big-name Broadway actor Jack Cassidy was looking for a star vehicle, so the 'Superman' production team built up the minor role of Mencken in order to attract Cassidy and take advantage of his box-office name value. This was a fatal error: a musical about Superman ought to be ABOUT Superman.
'ABC Wide World of Entertainment' wasn't so much a TV series as it was an irregular time slot. In the 1970s, whenever ABC-TV had a piece of programming that didn't fit any established niche, they bunged it into whatever late-night slot was available and called it 'Wide World of Entertainment'. The most notorious example of this was the 'Monty Python' special which ABC-TV aired at midnight: several Python episodes were drastically recut to fit the time slot, provoking a famous lawsuit from the Python comedians.
The 1975 television production of "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" -- transmitted under ABC's 'Wide World of Entertainment' rubric -- is a re-staging of the Broadway show, with a new cast. This is a VERY bad musical special, done on a criminally low budget. The entire production is filmed on a cramped sound stage. The musical numbers, which were bad in the first place, are staged in a very unimaginative manner.
In the Broadway version, the nearest thing to a hit song was "You've Got What I Need, Baby", a duet sung by Mencken and Sedgwick when they decide to team up in a plot to kill Superman. Staged on Broadway, this was a rousing up-tempo number that efficiently closed the first act. In this 1975 TV version, the song is stodged down so that Kenneth Mars and David Wayne can perform it with arthritic slowness.
A (very minor) musical high point occurs in the song "You've Got Possibilities" when Loretta Swit, as the villainess, attempts to seduce mild-mannered Clark Kent, whom she doesn't realise is really Superman. When Linda Lavin performed this number in the Broadway production, there was an element of suspense when she sang the line "underneath, there's something there" while she started to unbutton Clark's shirt ... nearly discovering the big Superman "S" underneath. This clever staging was omitted in the TV version, and nothing better is brought in to replace it. Swit's singing voice is smoky and appropriately vampy, but weak.
This TV special does have one poignant moment that didn't occur in the Broadway original, when Superman meets two teenage fans named Jerry and Joe who want to write stories about him and draw pictures of him. This is a subtle reference to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real-life teenagers from Cleveland who created Superman in the 1930s and sold the character to National Periodical Publications. I wish that "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman" had more moments like this. I'll rate this terrible show only one point out of 10. Pass the Kryptonite.
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- F Gwynplaine MacIntyre
- Mar 19, 2003
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