Superman: The Blog

Yes, that subtitle says it all. Let’s face it, people have wanted to see Superman and Lois Lane get married for decades. It wound up being one of the longest courtships in the 20th century, exceeded only by Popeye and Olive Oyl. In many circumstances the marriage served as a way to trap one of…

How many versions of Superman II are out there? Let’s count them all up… First, there’s the theatrical version of the film that was released in 1980-81 (also unofficially and colloquially known in fan circles as The Richard Lester Cut. Then there’s the extended TV cut that was shown three times on ABC in 1984,…

As we move into the next third of the second draft script, beginning on page 104, we find Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Steve Lombard flying to Iran to cover the terrorist threats to that country’s oil refineries. The second draft script follows exactly as it did in the first draft script, with…

As we pick up on page 96, we find that Clark Kent is reporting on the decrease in crime in Metropolis all because of Superman, and nothing has changed in this beat. But it’s the next sequence that Mario Puzo fully expands upon and creates in the second draft script. In the first draft we…

Picking up with page 67 of the script, we find Perry White chewing out Clark, Lois, Jimmy, and Steve about making up the entire story about Superman’s emergence in Metropolis. Two things leap out about this sequence. First, it is Perry who comes up with the name Superman in the story. This brings to mind…

As we pick up on page 37 of the second draft script, Mario Puzo revisits Clark Kent’s journey north. At this point Puzo still refers to him as Superman. This owes to the then-current assumption in the comic books that Superman was the real person and Clark was the secret identity. The second draft follows…

After my last blog examining the Smallville scenes in the second draft of the Mario Puzo scripts, I had a number of people comment on Mr. Puzo’s note that Superman: The Movie would have not worked had the scenes been filmed in sepia format. Mind you, this was Mario Puzo’s idea according to his note…

As we pick up on page 23 of the second Mario Puzo script, we find that the story has not changed all that much where the majority of the Smallville sequences are concerned. However, Puzo had added a few things that seem… interesting. When the infant Kal-El’s starship journeys to Earth, Puzo makes the following…

After the completion of the first draft script in July 1975, it becomes clear that Mario Puzo had laid a decent amount of the framework for the final versions of Superman and Superman II at this early stage. Every story has to start somewhere, and the story of the two Superman films begins with this…

Before I begin this next analysis of the Mario Puzo scripts, I owe you, the reader, an apology. Early on, when I began my analysis of the first draft script, I had commented that the characters of Professor Vakox and Kru-El were original creations of Mr. Puzo. As I started my research for this blog,…