Below The Fold

Yeah, it’s true.

Turns out, Kryptonite wasn’t even necessary at all. All it took was 52 years, a fall from a horse, quadriplegias, and heart failure to do in the Man of Steel. Come to think of it, that does sound fairly involved. Maybe he was a little more super than we realize.

Hmmm…well, Superman I and II singlehandedly created the 80s prototypical hero flick. Superman III made it a farce and Superman IV –well that did the same thing for hero flicks that Godfather III did for the mob genre, which is to say not destroy it, necessarily, but certainly put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth for a while… like a gin and tonic with too much quinine.

Still, Chris was the first actor I ever emulated, running around with a tiny red cape with a little snap my mother sewed together when I was three. I flew all over the backyard, stopping locomotives and leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

My dad’s generation had Zorro and Robin Hood. We had Superman.

The comics became too convoluted, after a time. The last Superman I bought (aside from the Stan Lee version—which was a bit too anticlimactic) was the one where he died. Some random alien monolith with no backstory did the job, and I remember thinking that this was one of the two worst deaths possible for a 20th Century pop icon, the other being the death of Captain Kirk in Star Trek Generations. Man, they really screwed that one up, didn’t they—the greatest space cowboy in history gets a $2 rock pile on some planet no one ever heard of by some Brit he only just met.

But before all that, Superman was everything—there was nothing he couldn’t do. No feat of strength was too great, no feat of speed was too fast. He was smart and obscenely powerful yet wholly merciful and kind. He could wield the power of a god, and tempered it with the humanity of Mother Theresa.

And Chris Reeve perfectly embodied every bit of it. Reeve brought him to life on an oversized screen that seemed built to display him. He was strong and graceful, with a boyish grin and curled cowlick that reminded us all of his Smallville, Kansas upbringing. Just watching him on screen, you knew you’d trust your children to him. He was the Last Boy Scout.

It wasn’t that way for George Reeves, though. George was my father’s Superman. He was stoic and strong and just a bit too pontiferous. In the end, Superman killed George Reeves.

But not Chris. Superman gave Chris the life that helped carry him through the final years after his life and the accident that left most of his body utterly useless. Even in the wheelchair, though, you could see the big red S on his chest and the sky blue tights and the cherry-red cape propping him up all on their own. Superman was his champion as much as he was ours.

Chris is gone, and Superman is yet undergoing another transformation. And I’m sure I look forward to seeing how that one bears out. But in my mind, the standard is set, and the bar is pretty high… perhaps too high to leap over in just a single bound…