By the time Superman first appeared in live-action motion pictures, in the 1948 Columbia serial Superman, the character had already conquered several show business outlets. Created by teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June, 1938, published by National Periodicals Publications (later known as DC Comics). Siegel and Shuster had first intended their Superhero to be a comic strip; the first comics pages published were reordered panels of several weeks' worth of their comic strip submissions. Superman was a huge hit on the magazine racks, and was soon adapted to a variety of other media. A Superman comic strip began running in the nation's newspapers just a year after the comics debut, in 1939. In 1941, a series of cartoons animated by the Fleischer Studios (of Popeye fame) began, and in 1942 Random House published a novelization, written by George Lowther. Perhaps most importantly, The Adventures of Superman began as a radio series, first heard in 1940 in a few markets, then - beginning in 1942 - nationwide on the Mutual Network. The series was enormously popular, and the radio writers created many of the soon-to-be familiar elements of the long-lasting Superman mythos, including The Daily Planet, Kryptonite, and the Jimmy Olsen and Perry White characters.

The character of Superman was a decade old by the time he appeared in live-action motion pictures. National Periodicals signed a deal for a 15-chapter serial with Columbia Pictures, and retained the right to approve the actor cast in the lead role. Not surprisingly, Columbia assigned Sam Katzman to the project; Katzman was currently producing the bulk of the studio's low-budget programmers and serials. The actor ultimately cast in the title role was a Hollywood bit player and one-time Broadway actor named Kirk Alyn. As Alyn recalled in a 1978 interview, "I had done about six films for [producer] Sam Katzman. One day, he called and asked me if I'd like to do Superman. I had never heard of it and didn't know what he was talking about. 'Is it a movie or a publicity stunt?' He told me it was a motion picture and if I was interested to go down to the studio right away and meet a couple of guys from ...National [DC Comics]. They wanted to approve the guy who was going to play Superman on the screen. When I got down there, they stared at me and said, 'Yeah, he looks like Clark Kent, but let's see what he looks like with his shirt off.' Fortunately, I was in good shape at the time. 'Kirk,' the guy said, 'take your pants off.' I was shocked. 'Now, wait a minute...' I began. 'Look, Kirk,' he said, 'you're gonna have to wear tights in the movie. I have to see what your legs look like.' The entire audition took about 15 minutes. Sam told me to go downstairs and sign the contract. When I got downstairs, a girl told me that they had auditioned 125 guys in the last two weeks. 'You mean I'm not the first one Sam called?'"

Alyn later found out that what most helped him land the role was that the DC Comics editors felt that he, more than any of the other applicants, fit their image of Clark Kent. Alyn continues: "That and the fact that a lot of the guys they interviewed could barely speak English; a lot of Greek wrestlers, fighters and big muscle men. They must have gotten so tired of looking at those people that when I walked in they said, 'For cryin' out loud, sign him up, he's all right.'"

Kirk Alyn had also been a dancer on the stage, and that experience came into play when performing stunts as The Man of Steel. For the flying scenes, for example, Alyn later said, "I didn't need a trampoline to help me get off the ground. And I did it gracefully! Being Superman, I had to do everything gracefully, because everything was supposed to be easy for him. If I leaped off the top of a building, I had to land gracefully. I couldn't land flat on my feet the way a stunt man would do it." Actually, for the majority of the flying scenes in Superman, the stunts were performed by neither Alyn nor a stuntman. In an unusual move, a number of the effects shots were performed by a Superman appearing through cel animation drawings. Frequently, Alyn would simply disappear behind a boulder or other obstacle, only to have an animated Superman emerge. The animated flying effects are not up to the standard of the earlier Fleischer cartoons, but they are still quite good; they were done by Columbia's in-house cartoon unit (the team responsible for The Fox and the Crow series, among others) and directed by Howard Swift.

Although he may not have performed a lot of stunts due to his animated stand-in, Alyn did have at least one close call on the set. In an early chapter, Superman must hold together the torn rails of a railroad track, allowing a train to pass safely. (A variation of this scene, by the way, appeared many years later in Superman: The Movie - 1978). Alyn was to later say, "I was positioned 18 inches away from a railroad track with a train barreling by at 90 miles an hour. Now, if you don't think that's scary, nothing is. If the slightest thing had gone wrong, it would have been all over for me. ...Fortunately, the train whizzed by me before I knew what was happening."

Superman was very successful for Columbia Pictures, and they followed it up with another 15 Chapter serial, Atom Man vs. Superman (1950). Kirk Alyn later recalled, "It was great fun playing Superman - When I was a little child, my father never let me play cops and robbers. Now, there I was playing Superman. I was getting it all out of my system. It was marvelous."

Producer: Sam Katzman
Directors: Spencer Gordon Bennet, Thomas Carr
Screenplay: Lewis Clay, Royal K. Cole, Arthur Hoerl, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Cinematography: Ira H. Morgan
Film Editing: Earl Turner
Art Direction: Paul Palmentola
Set Decoration: Sidney Clifford
Special Animation Effects: Howard Swift
Cast: Kirk Alyn (Clark Kent / Superman), Noel Neill (Lois Lane), Carol Forman (Spider Lady), Tommy Bond (Jimmy Olsen), Pierre Watkin (Perry White), Jack Ingram (Anton), Terry Frost (Brock), George Meeker (Driller), Nelson Leigh (Jor-El).

by John M. Miller