Paul Simpson takes a running hop out of the nearest window to catch up with TV’s first Man of Steel, 1952’s Adventures of Superman…

“Monday nights are thrilling nights on channel 7 [in Los Angeles], with famed Superman and his unequalled feats of daring bringing to TV viewers entertainment of the highest order.”

So wrote one critic when the first season of The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves as the Man of Steel, finally hit the airwaves on 19 September 1952, well over a year after production had been completed. It was the start of six seasons of adventure, during which Superman, aided by his friends Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Inspector Henderson of the Metropolis Police Department, battled crime lords and supervillains.

This wasn’t the first time that Superman had been seen on screen. Since the early 1940s, there had been a series of highly regarded animated shorts, alongside the long-running radio series, which had been co-developed by pulp fiction author Robert Joffe Maxwell. In 1948, Kirk Alyn donned the tights for two movie serials. “We did 15 [instalments] the first year,” recalls Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane in the serials, and would take over from Phyllis Coates as the TV Lois for the second season onwards, “and they sold well, so Columbia made another year.”

National Comics (the forerunners of DC Comics, the publishers of the many Superman comic-books) realised that television was the next medium that Superman should conquer, and moved Robert Maxwell from the radio series to take charge of the new project. A pilot script was prepared which would be released into cinemas in case the hoped-for television sale failed to materialise.

For the all-important roles of Superman and Clark Kent, the producers cast George Reeves, at that stage a 37-year-old actor whose credits included a role in Gone With the Wind. (Stories that he was spotted by a casting agent for Superman when he was sunbathing on Muscle Beach are just that – stories.) Phyllis Coates was cast as hard-hitting reporter Lois Lane. “They auditioned a lot of people. I read for it, then was called back a second time. They felt I had the quality – it was that simple," she said in one of her few later interviews about the role. Superman and the Mole Men was filmed in 12 days on a Culver City movie studio backlot in the summer of 1951, and released that November.

By that time the other 24 episodes that would comprise the first TV season had been completed. Eighteen-year-old Jack Larson was cast as Jimmy Olsen, the cub reporter who idolised Superman. “It was so funny with Jack’s agent,” Noel Neill laughs. “Jack wanted to go back to New York and go on the boards there, and his agent said that this job was only for 13 weeks, so he should do it, take the money, then go back East. Nobody would ever see the show. And here we are, many years later still waving the flag!” Veteran movie actor John Hamilton played the gruff Daily Planet editor Perry White, with his exclamation of “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” and his demands of “Don’t call me Chief!” while fellow veteran B-movie player Robert Shayne was a new character, Inspector Henderson of the Metropolis Police Department.

For a time it seemed as if Larson’s agent’s prediction would come true, and it was only when cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s sponsored the show that it came on air. The TV series began with the origin of Superman, taken mainly from George Lowther’s 1942 novel, The Adventures of Superman. Just before their planet Krypton exploded, Jor-El and Lara sent their baby son Kal-El to Earth, where he was adopted by a childless couple named Eben and Sarah Kent, who named him Clark. Following Eben’s death, Clark decided to move to Metropolis, and took a job on the Daily Planet. When danger beckoned, Clark would quickly change into the red and blue costume of Superman, made for him by Sarah from the blankets from his spaceship, and fly to the rescue.

However during that first year, Superman’s foes were far more of the Sin City variety than the supervillainous. Facing racketeers who were threatening his beloved Metropolis, or battling psychopathic murderers, Superman had no hesitation in using his superhuman powers. “Tell me where [Lois and Jimmy] are or I’ll break every bone in your body,” he threatens a thug at one point.

In living colour

The first season was filmed in black and white, with Superman actually wearing a brown and grey costume that suited the monochrome cameras, and it suited the nature of the tales being told. However from 1954 onwards, the episodes were shot in colour, even though the technology to broadcast them as such still lagged behind. Superman’s suit accordingly returned to its comic-book roots, although since the episodes were still being viewed in black and white, the colours needed to be extreme versions, with the blue suit becoming almost turquoise by the sixth year.

After filming had been completed on the first season, the actors had gone onto other projects, and when National requested a further 26 episodes, Phyllis Coates turned them down, despite being offered five times her former salary to reprise the role of Lois. Whitney Ellsworth, who had been promoted to producer to bring a lighter touch to the series, turned to Noel Neill, who had played a less belligerent Lois alongside Kirk Alyn.

“I just played Lois as myself, a working woman,” Neill says. “I never met Phyllis – it was just one of those things that happened, fortunately for me.” When she was first cast, Neill had rushed out to buy a Superman comic book (“They were a boys’ thing in those days, definitely,” she laughs) to see what the character was like, and she maintained her interpretation through the remaining episodes. “I just went on being a working woman,” she says. “The scripts were pretty well self-explanatory, nothing out of the ordinary.”

As sponsors, Kellogg’s had a certain influence over the direction of the show, and it’s noticeable that as the years go by, the hard edge that had characterised the early episodes disappeared. “They cut down the violence in the show,” Neill says, “they were only interested in selling cereals to children. We had to keep it very neat: no blood, no broken bones.” The humour was increased, as Lois and Jimmy found themselves tied up yet again by the villain of the week. Slowly but surely, the series changed from the ‘detective’ serial of the first season into a children’s superhero adventure programme.

Unlike the Columbia serials, which used animation to show Superman flying, George Reeves was actually seen in flight. Originally this was done with wires, but after an accident when one broke during filming of the first season, this was changed, and Reeves would use a springboard to leap into the air and then if necessary a stuntman on wires would take off. A combination of back projection and rotoscoping were used to create the illusion of the airborne superhero.

Breakneck pace

During the 13 weeks of production for each series of 26 half-hour episodes, the pace was breakneck. “Every day we would work with one of the heavies for an episode, get him signed off, and then another heavy for another episode would come in, and we would work with him,” Noel Neill recalls. “Then for the last two weeks of the shoot, we would do all of the stuff in the Chief’s office for all 26 episodes. It got so confusing: we would know ahead of time what we were shooting from the call sheets, but we would have to try to remember whether we were mad or happy or whatever. John Hamilton, bless him, had this big desk, and we’d be standing round it talking to him. He would have all these papers on his desk, and they were his lines!”

After each batch of 26 episodes was shot, National had an option on the actors within a two-year period to return to film more. “We worked a little bit in 1953, 1955 and 1957,” Neill recalls. A new batch of episodes were in pre-production in 1959. “George was a very consummate actor, and he was going to direct some of the new episodes,” she explains. “The producer’s office had called to say we’d got 26 more scripts from New York and would I like to come by some time and see if the old suit still fitted? I did, and I saw George. He was very happy: he was going to do a B-type movie, then he was going to direct some of our episodes. He said,‘Noel, I’m a little old to be running around in my underwear.’”

However, on 16 June 1959, George Reeves was found dead, an apparent suicide. His fellow cast members refused to believe the verdict, and the question of whether he was murdered remains to this day... His legacy as The Man of Steel lives on, with the 104 episodes of The Adventures of Superman still playing in syndication around the world to this day.

This article originally appeared in Dreamwatch Issue 142.