daemon@decwrl.UUCP (02/29/84)
From: akov68::boyajian
Responding to a few recent messages:
I already posted a message to net.movies (not to net.tv, though) ex-
plaining one possible way that Superman recovered his powers. As to Jerry Green-
berg's other questions and a couple of responses to them:
1) Why does he have to lose his powers if he falls in love with a human?
"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Larry Niven is in A HOLE IN SPACE, not
TALES OF KNOWN SPACE (and to be unreasonably picky, it's a speculative essay,
not a short story). Anyone who has not read it is encouraged to do so.
3) Why is he hurt when the Kryptonian bad guys throw various objects
(particularly the bus) at him. If I recall my comic books correctly
these objects could only hurt him if they were made from Kryptonian
materials.
This isn't necessarily an inconsistency in the movie, neither do I buy the ex-
planation that the super-people are imparting sufficient momentum to the objects
in question. After all, invulnerable is invulnerable. It's been my impression
that the Superman in the movies isn't as powerful as the Superman in the comics.
This doesn't bother me, since I don't feel that the movies need to be totally
consistent with the comics on this point (they aren't on other points).
4) Why didn't Superman or some earthling think of defeating the bad guys
by exposing them to Kryptonite?
Well, it would seem (going by the first movie) that Luthor, Miss Teschmacher,
Otis, and Superman are the only people on Earth who even know what Kryptonite is
or what it can do. And again, the stuff just isn't that common. This was always
a problem in the comics. As Larry Niven put it (in the aforementioned article),
enough Kryptonite fell to Earth that Krypton would had to have been a dwarf star
companion to a red giant. How likely would it have been that an exploding planet
light years away would have caused a rain of Kryptonite meteors on Earth? Hell,
even *one* is improbable!
A couple of comments to Barry Margolin:
As I understand it, the reason Brando's scenes were excised from SUPER-
MAN II was because of greed on the Salkinds' part. On top of the $3.7 million
that he got for playing Jor-El, Brando was guaranteed a percentage of the prof-
its. By cutting his bits out of SUPERMAN II, they didn't have to pay him any
percentage of *that* film.
Secondly "("Superman" and "Superman II" were shot as one film, but re-
leased a year apart)" is not strictly true. While it is true that they were
originally shot as one film, when Richard Lester took over from Richard Donner
as director, they scrapped most of what Donner had shot for SUPERMAN II, and re-
shot it with slight changes in the storyline. The figures vary according to the
source, but generally it's said that only 15-20% of the finished film was stuff
that Donner originally shot. I don't know what changes were made in the story-
line except for one: it was originally the first movie's first missile (the one
aimed for Hackensack that Superman deflected) exploding in space that freed the
Phantom Zone trio. This was changed to the elevator bomb when it became evident
that the film would be finished much later than it was originally planned. It
was *originally* planned to release the two films a year apart, but it was actu-
ally more like 2-1/2 years apart (2 years if you count Australia getting it six
months before we did). They didn't want the second film to take place immediate-
ly after the first.
--- jayembee
(Jerry Boyajian, DEC Maynard)
UUCP: (decvax!decwrl!rhea!akov68!boyajian)
ARPA: (decwrl!rhea!akov68!boyajian@Shasta)