Get with the program…
Inaugurating the essence of the “green star in the distant heavens” that is Krypton, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced the newspaper-reading public to Superman’s homeworld with this explanatory panel on January 6, 1939…
Superman’s origin is probably one of the best-known of all superhero origins, even in the current age of superheroic over-saturation in the media. This undoubtedly owes a great debt to the same phenomenon which the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are presently enjoying -- namely, it’s in all the movies and tv shows.
The Man of Tomorrow’s media has been almost shockingly consistent, as far as his origin story goes. Despite the bells and whistles that demarcate a change in eras and creative vision, his origin is pretty much the same in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel as it was in Action Comics No.1. It’s such a well-known origin that Grant Morrison was famously able to get it down to eight words -- “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
In Superman’s first decade alone, the origin is re-told with little variation between the comic books, the comic strips, the prose novel, the serials and the animated shorts. In fact the only Super-media to go rogue was The Adventures of Superman, the character’s wildly popular radio program.
The Adventures of Superman is known for introducing some of the canon’s longest-lasting stalwarts: Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, the Daily Planet, the Superman-Batman team and Kryptonite all debuted over the radio waves. They even got most of the origin accurate on the first try, and are responsible for the first dramatic telling of Krypton’s destruction -- but where they went afield, oh boy.
“Boys and girls, your attention please…”
...opens the first episode of The Adventures of Superman on February 12, 1940. The introduction hadn’t yet settled on the familiar “Faster than a speeding bullet…” introduction in all of its nuance. Nonetheless, it’s pretty good on the important details: That Superman is a “champion of the oppressed” and is additionally “no larger than an ordinary man!” Good to know.
Jor-L as depicted in 1948 by Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye, words by Bill Finger.
The story begins in the chaos of the great halls of the Science Council, the ruling body of Planet Krypton. Standing before them, the planet’s greatest scientist and worst public speaker -- Jor-El, voiced by Ned Wever (High School Confidential, The Shaggy Dog) -- is getting shouted down for being a climate realist. “Krypton is doomed!” he announces, only to get mocked, and cast out of the chambers.
He returns to his home laboratory with his tail between his legs, going so far as to lie to his wife Lara -- voiced by Agnes Moorehead (Citizen Kane, Bewitched) -- that he never bothered to state his concerns the council. “It, uh … didn’t come up,” he says convincingly of his planet’s impending destruction.
Instead, the conversation turns to Jor-El pointing out the distinctions between the superhumans of Krypton and the feeble idiots of Earth, to which he plans to relocate his small family after the apocalypse. Lara’s displeasure at being rehomed on the planetary equivalent of Otisburg is voiced but unaddressed. Jor-El is a bad listener, too!
Further debate is called on account of Planetary Apocalypse. The sudden shaking and splitting of Krypton is portrayed with claustrophobic terror and abject chaos. Choking smoke fills the air, molten rock erupts from long-undisturbed plains, and mountains crumble in what is, simply put, the foley artists turning their pockets out. They didn’t leave a metal sheet un-wobbled or a handful of dried beans un-flung. Combined with Agnes Moorehead proving her bona fides with her explicit descriptions of the burning death of an entire world -- ““The sky - it’s fiery red. The mountains! Look, the mountains are falling in!” -- and then crying her son’s name as the world splits into “millions of glittering stars” … well, folks, it’s pretty good. A big round of applause for how The Adventures of Superman portrayed the destruction of Krypton.
Now -- as for everything after that ...
Krypton dies in this sequence from the daily newspaper strip.
“The Baby From Krypton …”
In the series’ second episode, Krypton is a distant memory and the infant Superman is well on his way to Earth! It will, in fact, only take him twenty-five years to make the trip, according to the radio play. Of some mathematical concern is that the first episode of the series also established Krypton as sharing Earth’s orbit, although positioned on the opposite side of the sun. Understanding that I admit, out of the gate, that I am no mathematician or rocket scientist or … space geographer … or such, but surely the ship could have made the journey in a scant six months if it just didn’t move at all. We’ll catch up!
Bud Collyer, Superman’s voice on radio and animation, feigns a look of interest in his counterpart’s four-color adventures.
Surely if Jor-El had just launched it above the atmosphere and, say, tied a string to it -- surely, young Kal-El would have arrived on Earth tout de suite. Hell, fire him the other way around! It’s quicker! I assume he’d precede the debris of the shattered Krypton by just long enough to watch our planet get completely destroyed by an asteroid bearing his parents’ corpses...
Nonetheless, when Superman (Bud Collyer) emerges from his capsule, he is FULL-GROWN, FULLY-DRESSED and ROWDY AS HELL. The future champion of justice is new to Earth and already wound up to beat the back teeth out of crime and tyranny! All he needs is a little help in finding his way …
Hovering over Indiana, Superman spies an out-of-control trolley bearing two hapless passengers on a mad dash to death at the bottom of a hill. Almost too eagerly, he zips to Earth, crashing through the roof of the Tooner-KILL Trolley and safely liberating both passengers. This he does by uttering a phrase, by the way, that is spoken so often on The Adventures of Superman that it really should be rubbing shoulders with “This is a job for Superman” and “Up Up and Away,” and it is this: ONE UNDER EACH ARM! Honestly, it works its way into the scripts every three months.
Landing “safe and sound in a field,” the rescued professor and his excitable son Jimmy (no relation, I don’t think) are only moderately amazed at the antics of their union-suited savior. Superman introduces himself -- “In this world of yours, men would call me a Superman!” -- and makes plain his mission on Earth -- to wale the tar out of bad guys! Only he doesn’t know how to proceed.
Superman spies a trolley in danger, from a 1941 trading card set.
With surprising brevity, the Professor and Jimmy suss out Superman’s needs. “You want to,” pauses the Professor thoughtfully, “meet men, is that it?” Effectively, yes! For this, they quickly decide that he will need a more familiar name and a job. Guess how long this takes. Five seconds later, Jimmy blurts out “Clark …. Kent!” as a name, possibly thinking of his favorite candy bar and cigarette, and looking forward to having one of both as soon as he’s out of this increasingly involved and already slightly homoerotic disaster of a trolley ride. The Professor blurts out something about being a newspaperman, and that ends up being good enough for Supes!
At this point, our hero flies off and the Professor and Jimmy vanish into limbo, never to be seen again. Sort of. I know, I know what you’re thinking, and sure, yes, he could be Jimmy Olsen. Sure. But. It was never even remotely tied together in the show, so it’s only a headcanon. Enjoy it. I am. But I’m gonna move on.
It took a few more years for the radio show to re-tell the origin, and by that time they had gotten on the same page with everybody else.
With comics’ wonderful habit of building alternate universes around distinct media incarnations of their characters, however, this wonderfully stupid origin doesn’t have to die. There’s almost surely a world out there where Superman went from infancy to adulthood in a silver space-cigar, pooping and breathing in the same metallic cylinder for two-and-a-half decades, eating god knows what, until he pops out like cork over Indiana and smashes up some public conveyance, before dashing off to commit himself to a life and career based entirely on the suggestions of two probably-concussed near-crash victims.
Somewhere in the multiverse, when trouble arises, victims of injustice and circumstance alike are heartened to hear the cry of their world’s champion of right, ringing through the sky: “ONE UNDER EACH ARRRRRRRMMMMM!!!”
Making trolleys safe from coast to coast …
If you’re interested, you may listen to the first two episodes of The Adventures of Superman radio program — and many more — at the Internet Archive.
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