Superman's identity crisis
Los Angeles Times

Will the first and most elemental of superheroes be able to reassert himself as the paragon of the form, the hero that every other elastic-wrapped champion of justice can only yearn to be? Or will he be perceived as merely one more franchise along the entertainment superhighway? Or worse yet, will he come off as too simple, too old-school, even too corny for today's hero-savvy crowd?

Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow, Killing Monsters, and a number of Green Lantern comic books, wrote this thoughtful piece. I'm not really old enough to contend for some of his conclusions ...

That very corniness, of course, was half the secret to Superman's big-screen triumph in 1978. After a decade and a half of disastrous war, murdered and disgraced presidents, crime, inflation, drugs, cultural upheavals — in short, maybe the longest stretch of relentlessly nerve-shredding experiences in our history — Americans were overjoyed to allow an impossibly perfect hero to swoop from the neglected shelves of childhood memory and snatch us briefly from resignation.

I watched the Expanded Edition of the 1978 film recently and realized I had either forgotten or never noticed a few things:

• Jor-El is said to have discovered The Phantom Zone himself
• Martha Kent's middle name is Clark
• After Kal-El creates the Fortress of Solitude, Jor-El tutors him for 12 years "traveling through time and space"
• The plane that Superman saves is Air Force One
• Krypton has a 28-hour day
• John Ratzenberger is a nuclear missile control technician
• Unlike most of the movie, the dam scene now looks quite fake