Superman: The Movie - 1978 - The Mistake Of Superman

Superman: The Movie - 1978

The Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve I forgot were some of my favorite movies and I was just watching them. These are the classic Superman movies and watching them today have made them become some of my favorites in my movie collection. It's not that I didn't like them before, I just forgot how awesome they are.

At the time when they made Superman The Movie there were no cel phones or internet and the Daily Planet newspaper was all done by typewriter in the movie. Not only that because I am doing work on book stuff, comics and music (yes I spend a lot of time researching on the internet) to make it myself in "the biz" they call it I have noticed some great historical information about films like Superman The Movie 1978 as well as more stuff about their characters in Superman and the morals in the story.

Why was Superman The Movie so huge?

Well for one it is a whopping three hours long with an all star cast including Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando who played Superman's father on Krypton. 

What is the big deal though about Superman The Movie? The number one thing I can think of is the new Movie Magic special effects at the time. In fact Superman The Movie in 1978 is just one year after the release of the original Star Wars 1977 and you can see the effects of the Star Wars special effects and music score that are also present in Superman The Movie.

You have to remember this was before CGI Computer Effects and movies like Star Wars and Superman The Movie were done way different than today with a more hands on approach, which to me feels more "organic" with the more hands on effects.

Movie special effects are mostly secrets from the film industry and studios do not reveal how they made trade secret special effects that people would copy to steal their business, movies like Star Wars 1977 and Superman The Movie 1978 have a similar look and feel to them which was the basis for the huge movie special effects in the blockbuster 1980's movies.

Huge 1980's blockbuster movies like Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back & Return Of The Jedi, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Die Hard one etc. all have a similar look and feel to them as Star Wars 1977 and Superman The Movie 1978 which is the basis for the huge special effects craze in the 1980's.

What is important about that is movie studios protect how they do all that and make their special effects but you can clearly see their efforts in movies like Star Wars 1977 and Superman The Movie 1978. In fact, they are my favorite movies with those older special effects in them which was way more expensive than today's CGI effects because of the manual labor involved in creating the films. I was also a kid back then and those movies have a special meaning to me growing up with stuff like that.

The important thing to remember is movies like Superman The Movie paved the way for the 1980's huge special effects craze in Hollywood, that's what makes it a great movie.

In the movie Superman's mistake is revealed. That is what I got from watching it today.

In the story of Superman when he first started and revealed himself as being Superman he went to the news and did a news interview in the story in his first days as Superman and made a critical mistake in his youth that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

What happened was he revealed his Biography to the Daily Planet Newspaper which they printed in the news, in the story he revealed that he was from the planet Krypton and that it had blown up in the 1940's and he escaped and crashed on Earth.

Superman should have never said that.

Criminal Mastermind Lex Luthur read the story and used it to crack Superman's weakness. Luther began scientifically researching Supernova's and looking for meteorites as samples on Earth that crashed with Superman to find samples of Superman's home planet Krypton.

What Lex Luther found was the "element" Kryptonite that was not present on Earth. Kryptonite made Superman normal while on Krypton but on Earth the lack of it helped to give him super powers. Luther found the Kryptonite because of Superman's mistake in revealing his origins which is Superman's main weakness. 

I think that is a great moral in the story of Superman, never reveal your true origins in a situation like that, someone might research that and find your weakness. If Superman had never revealed his origins to the newspaper no one would have ever found out his weakness to Kryptonite present in meteors from the destroyed planet Krypton, a mistake that he made when he first started that will permanently haunt him because everyone knows what hurts him because of Lex Luther's scientific analysis of his story about his origins.

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