09/22/2023
71 years ago today on September 19th, 1952, the Adventures of Superman premiered. It was an American television series based on comic book characters and concepts that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created in 1938. The show was the first television series to feature Superman and began filming in 1951 in California on RKO-Pathé stages and the RKO Forty Acres back lot. Cereal manufacturer Kellogg's sponsored the show. The first and last airdates of the show, which was produced for first-run syndication rather than for a network, are disputed, but they are generally accepted as September 19, 1952, and April 28, 1958. The show's first two seasons (episodes 1–52, 26 titles per season) were filmed in black and white; seasons three through six (episodes 53–104, 13 titles per season) were filmed in color. George Reeves played Clark Kent/Superman, with Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen, John Hamilton as Perry White, and Robert Shayne as Inspector Henderson. Phyllis Coates played Lois Lane in the first season, with Noel Neill, who previously played Lois Lane in the film serials Superman (1948) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), stepping into the role in the later seasons. Superman battles crooks, gangsters, and other villains in the fictional city of Metropolis while masquerading "off duty" as Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. For nearly all of the series' episodes, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, Clark's colleagues at the office, found themselves in dangerous situations that only Superman's timely intervention can resolve. The opening theme is known as The Superman March. In 1987, selected episodes of the show were released on VHS. In 2006, the series became available in its entirety on DVD to coincide with the DVD release of Superman Returns, the first Superman feature film to emerge after almost two decades without such a movie. The feature film Hollywoodland, released in 2006, dramatized the show's production and the death of its star, George Reeves.
