1985 from a record store in Portsmouth shopping centre. An astounding
twenty-seven and three-quarter (more or less) years ago, which means
I've now had it for more than half my life. To me, this is absolutely mind-
staggering, because it seems like just a few years ago since I bought it
and it's been played only a handful of times at the very most in all that
period. In fact, most of those spins occurred only recently when I dug it
out to transfer to CD and it took two or three attempts to get it right.
The B side of the album features two SUPERMAN radio broadcasts
from 1947, the first being markedly inferior in audio quality to the second,
as well as to the earlier episodes on side A, which hail from 1945 & 1946
respectively. Also, the adoption of the SAMMY TIMBURG theme from the
MAX FLEISCHER Superman cartoons lends an immensely juvenile air
to the later radio programmes which doesn't do them any favours in the
slightest. I'd imagine that digitally restored, superior-sounding versions of
these episodes have been issued since this album was first released in
1984 (I know that the earliest episodes from 1940 have been), but, to be
honest, I doubt it will make listening to them any more interesting from
a purely historical point of view.
Strangely enough, a lot of what was destined to become part of
Superman lore first happened on radio. KRYPTONITE, JIMMY OLSEN (if I
remember correctly), the SUPERMAN/BATMAN team-up, and the famous
call to action as ol'Supes took flight: "Up, up and awaaayyyy!!!" One of
the more interesting aspects of the album is a selection of extracts from
interviews with BUD COLLYER, the radio and cartoon voice of Superman
and CLARK KENT. Certainly worth having in my collection, and perhaps
I'll listen to it again in another twenty-seven and three-quarter years.
6 comments:
1985- all Italian knitwear and Live Aid- seems immensely far away to me, more distant than 1975. In the spring, I left home to move to Glasgow for the first time. Renting a room in Kent Road, I lived on sausage and chips in the Equi Cafe.
Despite 50s-style haircuts and final exams, however, it seems impossibly long ago. I didn't like the 80s much- the 90s were better.
It's the usual paradox for me, I'm afraid. On one hand it seems like only last week; on the other, it feels like centuries ago.
AFAIK, the radio show was the first time Superman and Batman worked together as a team. When Batman guest starred in Superman #76 in the early 1950's, the foreword on the splash page said that the two had never met before. Maybe DC did not accept the radio show as canon, or maybe they just forgot. Actually, in the 1940's, Superman and Batman appeared together twice in All Star Comics (as honorary Justice Society members), and regularly on World's Finest covers (but not in the stories themselves). Between the radio series, All-Star Comics, and World's Finest Comics, there must be at least four different versions of the characters' first meeting. And that is not counting any post-Crisis reboots.
I'd have to assume that it didn't accept the radio show as canon because the show's origin of Superman is slightly different from the one in the comics. Regarding the two early 'first' meetings, I think they later reconciled them in some way - along the lines of one being when they first met and the other being when they first discovered each other's identities. I'd have to dig out my reprints of them to check, but it was something like that.
You are right. World's Finest #179 reprinted Superman #76 and WF #94 (which retold the team's origin in a flashback), IIRC. The introduction to the Superman story was edited, changing "have never met" to "don't know each other's secret identities."
Someone was obviously asleep at the wheel when those srories were first printed, eh? Otherwise the discrepancy would have been caught before publication.
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