![]() ![]() You’ll never know how wonderful it is to be like Superman.” To which Clark responds, “No, Jimmy. But back in Perry White's office for a debriefing, Jimmy Olsen says to Clark, “Golly, Mr. It comes down to Superman to save the day in the end. What follows is a fun series of events that sees Lois and Jimmy flying, crashing through walls, and taking down the crooks with their new abilities. This is all pretty straightforward until Jimmy gets knocked on the head by one of Pepperwinkle's traps meant to subdue the crooks, and in his stupor he hallucinates that he and Lois take some Kryptonite pills that grant them the powers of Superman. When Jimmy Olsen blabs about the Professor's research, two greedy goons kidnap Pepperwinkle and finance his operation, hoping to get rich on ill-gotten gold. This time around, Pepperwinkle appears to have solved the age-old alchemical quest to turn scrap metal into gold. This final episode features Phil Tead in his occasional role of Professor Pepperwinkle, a bumbling scientist whose experiments tend to cause trouble for Superman. "All That Glitters", at least, was a light, fun story that ended with one of the most surprising and poignant lines of dialogue in the series. ![]() That fact, along with the fatigue and declining morale on set in later seasons, led to some lackluster and lackadaisical episodes. It's clearly one of the show's color broadcasts, which were so expensive at the time that little money was left for the cast, crew, and special effects. Don't get me wrong, "All That Glitters" is very silly. "Superman and the Mole Men" is certainly an atypical story for what Adventures of Superman would become in serial form, but it's a great introduction to the era.Īnd now we jump from the series' pilot to its final episode, one directed by Reeves himself. The conclusion isn't exactly a feel-good ending, but rather a bittersweet one. Superman's only allies in town are Lois, a rebellious doctor who volunteers to operate on the wounded mole man, and the local boss of the oil-drilling operation. At one point, Superman literally calls the townspeople "Nazi stormtroopers" and then takes their guns away from them after they injure one of the mole men. What's interesting in this tale is that Superman doesn't simply fight the diminutive mole men, but actually protects them from a violent and unruly mob that springs up. Before long, radioactive mole men from the center of the Earth crawl up through the six-mile deep hole and begin to cause a panic in the local community. While this certainly doesn't sound thrilling, things soon take a Twilight Zone type turn. "Superman and the Mole Men" took Clark Kent and Lois Lane out into the countryside in order to do a story on a small town's claim to fame: the world's deepest oil well. Rather than having Superman simply swoop in to save the day, this special actually attempted to use the hero to make some social commentary. Half police procedural and half sci-fi short, "Superman and the Mole Men" has a lot of the familiar elements that fans of the series would come to know and love, but it also has a fairly ambitious approach to storytelling. Our first episode on the must-watch list is actually an honorable mention because it's a two-part TV movie that served as the pilot for Adventures of Superman.
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