Friday, December 31, 2010

R.I.P. 2010: the 50s

›
Early boomers will remember them (l to r starting at the top): Art Linkletter (TV's People Are Funny ) Pernell Roberts ( Bonanza ), sin...

R.I.P. 2010: the 60s

›
Early and middle boomers remember them from the 60s: Lynn Redgrave ( Georgy Girl), Robert Culp ( I Spy ), Ted Sorenson (Special Counsel an...

Kate R.I.P.

›
Kate McGarrigle in 1976, when she and her sister Ann were first achieving recognition as the McGarrigle Sisters. They really blazed the trai...

R.I.P.: 70s, 80s

›
Some of those we lost in 2010 who made the 70s and 80s brighter for Boomers: (l to r across) James MacArthur ( Hawaii Five 0), Irving Kirs...
Monday, October 25, 2010

Leaving "Leave It To Beaver"

›
Barbara Billingsley died recently, setting off a surprising number of "End of an Era" stories--surprising because she and Leave It...
Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Heroes of the Greatest Game Ever

›
Today is the 50th anniversary of what some experts call the best baseball game ever (and not all of them are from Pittsburgh)--the seventh g...
Saturday, October 09, 2010

Happy Birthday, John Lennon

›
John Lennon would have turned 70 today. For a reminiscence , see this post at 60's Now . Click collage to enlarge.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Adventures of Superman, Baby Boomer Hero

›
For more than seventy years and counting, Superman has been a hero in comic books, on the radio, in animated, low-budget serial and big bu...
1 comment:

›
The first of the superheroes has been bending steel with his bare hands since 1932, in comics, animation, on radio and television and in mov...

›
But early Boomers probably started, as I did, with the George Reeves television series, The Adventures of Superman. I knew nothing about Su...

›
Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! I made sure to watch every episode. I talked about Superman, and...

›
This year, author Tom De Haven published a kind of tour of such adventures in their various media, in Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Yale.)...

›
De Haven breezes through the early comic history, dwelling for awhile on the odd attraction of the first Action Comics cover (above.) But h...

›
But as Superman became more popular, he became a commodity, a franchise, and so in the comics he became an upholder of the establishment: “...

›
This Super-arc was repeated on radio and TV. As author De Haven notes, many of the film and TV conventions and characteristics common to Su...

›
But he also returned to fighting for social justice: he was “ repeatedly unleashed...on religious bigots and the Klu Klux Klan during the l...

›
The next step was television, although producers tested the waters with a low budget feature film in 1951, Superman and the Mole Men. At it...

›
While most of the stories in the first TV season were based on radio stories, the first to air in his second season was a recapitulation of...

›
But it is these first season stories that I remember most vividly, as I’ve confirmed by seeing them on DVD. The cast was the same throughout...

›
Though all 6 seasons were originally broadcast in black and white beginning in 1952, the last three seasons were filmed in color. They were...