Super Pup

One gift I got that's kept on giving: The Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition.

14 discs of Super awesomeness, jam packed with movies, pilots, cartoons, documentaries, interviews, deleted scenes and so much more.

Included on one of the 14 discs: the rarely-seen, never-sold pilot for The Adventures of Super Pup! Intended as a potential kids' series, it stars midgets wearing dog costumes dressed up as characters from Superman. It's shot on The Adventures of Superman set and it incorporates ample amounts of stock studio footage - including film of the Atomic bomb test at Alamogordo!

It's a brilliant curiosity, not even a finished product: half-way through, the show switches from color to black-and-white. I'm guessing that when it was pitched to sponsors, no one even noticed...I'd be surprised if they made it past the opening credits.

Inexplicably, Jimmy Olsen is replaced by a sock puppet mouse who narrates the thing, adding - ahem - comic relief, I guess. At one point, as the villains race away in a get-away car totally different from the one in the previous scene, the scratchy-voiced rat pops up to provide an explanation for the discrepancy. How meta. How very Stan Lee....hmmm. Come to think of it, the newspaper Bark Bent works for is called the Daily Bugle. I wonder...

Most interesting, it seems to anticipate one of my favorite cartoons, Underdog, proving that things that are creepy and surreal work perfectly fine in a cartoon. It also shows how poorly the producers dealt with the untimely death of George Reeves.

Here's a clip from a recent documentary - also included in this DVD collection - narrated by Kevin Spacey.