This is the first ever live action (mostly) adaption of Superman, long one of my favorite characters–a 15 chapter serial (serialized films that were released in cinema matinée screenings over successive weeks) from Columbia pictures in 1948. It starred Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, Tommy Bond, and Carol Forman. I’m going through it (and its sequel) chapter by chapter. Read here for where it all starts.
Superman to the Rescue (Chapter 8)
Directed by Spencer Bennett and Thomas Carr
Runtime: 14 minutes (I realize that in the version of this that I watched, after Chapter 1 they didn’t include the opening title sequence, so this might be slightly off.
Spoilers!
Super-feats: Superman uses his strength and fighting skills to beat up the crooks threatening Jimmy. Later, he flies to the top of a large rocky cliff where the truck has been ambushed. When the bad guys launch a Kryptonite rocket at him, he catches it and immediately throws it back at them! Then he leaps down to the truck, gleefully lets the crooks’ bullets bounce off his chest, and puts both of them into a headlock, eventually knocking them both out. Then he flies off to Jones’ Crossing where the Spider Lady is planning to blow up the train that is really carrying the Reducer Ray.
Comments: The direction of the resolution to last chapter’s cliffhanger is a little confusing. Superman shows up to save Jimmy from the furnace, as expected, and he does so by clunking the heads of two of the thugs heads together (his specialty move), and beating up the other ones. But when one of them sloooowly open the box constining the Kryptonite, he sloooowly back away. Then thug idiotically throw the Kryptonite at him. He dodges it and it falls into the furnace!
At first I thought that we didn’t see Superman do anything to prevent Jimmy from being fed into the furnace. It just seemed like the belt stopped moving. But on closer re-watch I noticed that we do see him flip a lever. So I guess I think that could have been a little clearer.
And you’d think that Superman, with his great speed would have no problem stopping the crook before he could get his little lead box open, and you’d think the crook would just use the Kryptonite to weaken Superman so he get control of the situation, instead of literally throwing his one weapon away.
But it’s good for us, because it leads to a fantastic shot of Superman fighting all four bad guys at once—throwing them all around like rag dolls, except this time, they aren’t played by rag dolls but by stunt men. It’s pretty convincing.
And it’s also good for the crooks, because it turns out that when the Kryptonite burns up, it turns into a Kryptonite gas, and Superman goes down anyway.
He only escapes because Lois of all people shows up blowing a police whistle. The crooks are more scared of the police than failing their boss, it seems, and they high-tail it out of there. It’s hard to find good help.
But it’s great to see Lois do something so useful. And she could only do it because she was following Clark around against his wishes, so good for her.
With all that cleared up we get into the real plot for this chapter, which involves Dr. Hackett having built a Kryptonite rocket launcher that he wants to use against Superman. At the same time, the government wants Superman to deliver the Relativity Reducer Ray (remember that? It’s been a while since we really talked about) to a university to study, and Superman decides to use this as a trap to draw the Spider Lady out.
Thus we get this whole story sequence where the Spider Lady is plotting to ambush the truck delivering the Reducer Ray (which she knows about thanks to her “Washington contacts” and his Dr. Hackett’s weapon against Superman. But Superman, it turns out, is using the truck as a decoy to lure her out, and the Reducer Ray is really on a train elsewhere.
But then the Spider Lady finds out about this and tries to tell her men to call off the car ambush, but her two guys don’t get her signal because they’re listening to the radio instead. Like I said, good help is hard to come by.
I really hope we get to see her dispose of some underlings after this.
Nonetheless Superman and the Kryptonite bazooka end up in the same place, and that leads us to the second awesome moment of the episode, when Superman catches the rocket mid-flight and throws it back at the crooks who shot at him.
They jump out of the way but the rocket goes up in fiery explosion!
Along the way with all of this we get some more standard beats with the leads. Lois accuses Clark of being a coward, Perry yells at everybody and Jimmy stands around looking befuddled. Slightly more interesting is some of the stuff going on with the bad guys. The Spider Lady’s right-hand-man, Driller, offers Dr. Hackett to get him away from her for the right price. Hackett turns him down, intimating he might be wanting to take over the operation himself some day. Then Driller goes to the Spider Lady and it turns out she was behind his offer to test Hackett, and we see that she is determined to use him and then get rid of him when she needs to.
Hackett, incidentally, is a bit of a jerk in this episode. It was his idea last chapter that the crooks try to capture Superman and attack him with the kryptonite. But here he tells them that their methods are clumsy and stupid, and that they should use his special weapon (which he’s not finished with at this point) instead.
Cliffhanger ending: An explosion is set off to disable the train carrying the Reducer Ray as Superman races to stop it.
Will the vengeance of the Spider Lady again menace Lois Lane? Will her desperate call for help go unanswered? For the stirring answers, see “Irresistible Force,” chapter nine of “Superman,” at this theatre next week!
Other Thoughts:
• Clark again has to pretend to be beaten up so he can turn to Superman to stop the crooks going after the decoy truck. This of course endangers the driver who is with him. Of course, this guy doesn’t seem all that worried.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
