I found Superman on the back of a Corn Flakes box.
Okay, that’s not exactly true. Actually, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Superman. My first exposure to the Man of Steel was the animated cartoons produced by Filmation Studios in the late 1960s for Saturday morning audiences. Those seven-minute adventures – presented in groups of three within every half-hour episode – were my gateway drug to the monthly issues of SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS that started piling up in my bedroom somewhere around the second grade – and kept piling up for the rest of the 1970s. (And yes, I still have them all.)
But something happened at my breakfast table in 1974. It was something old but new at the same time, and it took my experience of Superman to an entirely different level.
Kellogg’s, the company that sponsored the Superman radio program for several years during its 11-year run from 1940 to 1951, made me an offer on the back of a Corn Flakes box that I couldn’t refuse: a four-record set of sixteen early radio episodes for just three cereal box tops and $4.75.
Four long-playing records, four episodes per disc, sixteen episodes in all. Superman, from the early days. On my record player. I’m fairly certain that my ten-year-old brain blew a fuse at the mere thought of it all.
Let me be clear: As breakfast cereals go, I did not enjoy Kellogg’s Corn Flakes when I was a kid. Fifty years later, I still don’t. I was more of a Cheerios guy back in the day, but Cheerios were a General Mills product, and General Mills box tops weren’t going to get me where I wanted to go with an offer from Kellogg’s.
It didn’t matter. With this much at stake, my breakfast cereal preference was irrelevant. I had a rendezvous with destiny, and I was not going to miss it. For the next couple weeks, I switched to the Corn Flakes lane and got into high gear – while at the same time scrounging for days under every sofa cushion, in every drawer, and around every corner of our house for $4.75 in loose change.
I cut up the boxes. My mother wrote the check. Everything went into the mail, and after tracking the comings and goings of the mailman and the occasional UPS truck for nearly an eternity, the LPs arrived in a carefully secured cardboard shipping package.
The Holy Grail from Krypton, by way of Metropolis, right there on my kitchen table.
I played them on a Silvertone portable record player – a small, red-and-white unit sold by Sears, with a single two- or three-inch speaker mounted on the front panel. It had been in our house since before I can remember, at least as far back as the mid ‘60s, when my older sisters used it to spin their Monkees albums.
This was a different kind of Superman, from a time that was long ago and mysterious. The recordings were a fascinating slice of storytelling magic from an era that I’d heard about from my father and finally had a chance to experience first-hand. And yet it was the Superman I knew well, the “champion of the weak and the oppressed” whom I had already counted among my all-time favorites.
The pictures were all in my mind, but they were glorious: Superman saving a passenger train from railroad saboteurs. Superman rescuing a woman trapped on an upper floor of a burning building. Superman destroying a death-ray machine stolen by a madman angling for world domination.
At the heart of it all was voice actor Clayton “Bud” Collyer as the Man of Steel, whose vocal cords seemed to defy all laws of physics. He had this uncanny ability to instantly modulate his voice in the middle of a line of dialogue from a tenor to a powerful bass as Clark Kent shed his mild-mannered guise and became Superman.
After countless spins, something about Collyer’s voice started to sound vaguely familiar. I realized that it was the same voice I had heard on all those Saturday morning cartoons a few years earlier. I later discovered that he had also voiced the Man of Steel in a series of well-crafted animated cartoon shorts produced in the 1940s by Fleischer Studios for theatrical release. Although he enjoyed a more high-profile career as a game show host in the early days of television, Collyer made Superman a thirty-year side hustle until his death in 1969.
If the Saturday-morning Superman cartoons of the 1960s were my gateway drug to comics, the Superman recordings of the 1940s were my gateway to the world of old-time radio – a playground I continue to visit as an adult. The medium’s brisk, inventive approach to storytelling still holds up several decades after glowing vacuum tubes and cathedral-style wooden cabinets have become museum pieces.
This weekend, DC Entertainment will reboot the Superman film franchise on the big screen, courtesy of director James Gunn and actor David Corenswet in the lead role. I’ll be there for it, just like I’ve been there for Reeve, Routh, and Cavill over the years. I’m confident that the visual effects will be impressive, and the story – just like the character himself – will be uplifting. But those four LPs – which I still keep in a closet more than fifty years later – convinced me long ago that one of the most compelling versions of Superman was a guy who was only heard and never seen, and some of the best Superman stories were the ones that unfolded in the theater of the mind.
Look up in the sky. And then close your eyes and listen.
It’s Superman.