Superman movie poll - most ridiculous moments in the series

Superman gets seduced and causes oil crisis (Superman III)

god i fucking love superman iii

this is not particularly ridiculous in itself, but it's always funny to me how a just-on-the-verge-of-becoming-famous Richard Griffiths is one of the terrorists trying to blow up the Eiffel tower at the start of Superman II (along with pre-Cheers John Ratzenberger showing up briefly in the first two films)

"what's a curl?"

the olympic torch one I thought was funny as a kid. I was thinking to write in the "sidewalk ballet" segment at the beginning of Superman III but it's great, not ridiculous.

To be fair all of these are very consistent with the tone and content of actual Superman comics

I saw at least 1 and 3 at the pictures at the time and Prior and Stephenson's antics delays delighted me at the time

"always" not "delays" cheers phone

only one I saw at the movies was IV and I didn't get any of the nuclear shit cos I was like 6

Prior is the only real reason to watch III - every scene he's in is hilarious. The junkyard fight is simultaneously awesome and goofy, partly down to the SFX technology of the time but also the dialogue and choreography (bad Superman stands still and does nothing while Clark throw tyres around him, Clark stands still while bad Superman drops an electromagnet on top of him, Clark wins the fight with - from the expression on bad Superman's face - looks almost like an act of autoerotica asphyxiation)

i haven't seen a single one of these but it has to be either "Superman gets seduced and causes oil crisis (Superman III)" or "Nuclear Man is destroyed and becomes an electrical grid (Superman IV)" for me

The fall-off between II and III is startling. II was funny, Zod and his associates were superb villains, the slapstick works, and Reeve was a pro making the changes from Kent to Supes. And it was the second highest grossing film of 1981. I still enjoy it.

Meanwhile in III everything looks like 1978 TV sci-fi. Pryor acts as if in a minstrel show.

To be fair all of these are very consistent with the tone and content of actual Superman comics

^^^ this.

i've never seen a better superhero movie than the first two of these. they are magical.

"Be nice to them, my dear. Blow them a kiss."

Sarah Douglas as Ursa is the coolest shit ever.

idk i think ii is a pretty flawed movie and iii is not only incredibly entertaining but cool

I love II but unlike others hate the Donner cut

I haven't seen III since the mid 80s but the woman getting turned into a cyborg scene has slowly mutated as a memory over the years into 'most upsetting scene in any 80s movie' and now I'm too scared to watch it again ha ha

III also made me a bit scared of combineharvesters for a few weeks

that Cyborg scene gave me nightmares as a little child and I didn't watch it again for the first time until two years ago and it actually triggered some of those memories :/

whew vindicated (oh no)

voted for the tower of Pisa bit anyway - it's such a weird joke but actually an entire movie/series of an 'evil' Superman going round fixing stuff but never saving people directly now that's got legs

I love II but unlike others hate the Donner cut

― if this site were a food it would have NO nutritional value!!!!!!! (Neanderthal), Wednesday, August 7, 2024 3:00 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm a forever stan for Lester's touches. Have y'all watched the extended cut shown on ABC in the mod '80s? To my knowledge never released. I own a VHS recording from NYD '86. Great stuff, the best Superman imo

i haven't but i'm guessing archive.org or something has it. need to check that. i hate that these mid-way cuts exist that aren't publicly available.

watching Supes IV as I work. you think this movie looked bad in the 80s, on one of those tvs with motion smoothing (which I refuse to turn off as I'm not the owner of the TV i'm using and don't wanna fuck it up), it looks like a bunch of kids using their school's news bulletin equipment to make a movie.

iirc, it has been a long time since i saw iv, but there's an astonishingly lit/staged/acted scene between lois and clark in that movie that is at total odds with the quality of the rest of it

oh yeah Reeve was bitter for years that they got such a shitty budget for IV, despite the big box office of the first three.

I went with “other” for the entirety of Superman III

I wasn't a comic book kid, so YMMV.

I hated the first one, then I saw a couple of reviews of II that said they didn't like the first one but II is good. Turns out I hated the 2nd one too, but this time so did the 3 friends I saw it with.

And now I will go away and stop crapping on this thing you like.

II had baddies that gave us a nice contrast to Luthor's smarmy preening. Plus really the ONLY quotables of the entire series.

Zod is relatively two dimensional but I dig Stamp's understated menace as opposed to Michael Shannon's nauseating take on Zod.

Jon Cryer, his flock of seagulls haircut, his...all of him (Superman IV)

His wha... *googles* oh GOOD LORD.

I for whatever reason mistook Cryer for Roland Orzabal as a 7 year old and wondered why Tears for Fears guy was a terrorist

I remember seeing Superman IV at the cinema, aged around 9, I guess? It's so bad, that even as a child who loved everything, I thought it stunk

I saw Superman III a few years earlier on VHS, loved it, and I have no reason to challenge that opinion by rewatching it. That's why I voted for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpTHrdemfQo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xUiCNlDeJk

its spin the earth

What about Superman throws his S emblem and it turns into a big piece of cellophane?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI1UVDOuMqE

another vote for "spin the earth, travel in time"

Oh...oh no, you've split up the truly delightful Ornery Superman moments from part 3. I don't know if it's even possible to choose just one.

FUCK MarkoP, how did I forget that one? I'd literally just rewatched it two days ago!

tbh with the 'spin the earth, travel in time', a true troll-ish director would simply have used it in every Superman film any time he failed.

"ahh fuck, I accidentally threw a bus full of kids into a ravine because I'm multi-tasking too much. back in time we go"

"whoops, completely destroyed that single family's house while fighting Zod and everyone died in the rubble. welp, I know how to solve this problem."

"I farted near an open flame and it caused a three alarm fire that killed 20 people, time to turn the Earth back"

great poll idea. cyborg easily. "spin the earth" is absolutely bonkers but in this way that's perfectly, definitively Superman. belongs to the wide-eyed wonderland spirit of Golden Age comics in general, and Silver Age DC specifically. yes, why not?

I always wanted to start a sub-thread of "villains who are created in a lengthy transformation scene only to be completely destroyed/killed mere minutes later".

Reeve was hot as fuck as Evil Supes.

it's not particularly ridiculous, but I think my favourite moment in any of these films is Terence Stamp and the Kryptonians showing up at the Daily Planet by smashing a giant hole in the wall and stomping in, followed by Gene Hackman strolling casually past the big hole and walking through the door before carefully closing it behind him.

Reeve was hot as fuck as Evil Supes.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, August 8, 2024 1:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

otm.

the cyborg scene in III was indeed disturbing, but even as a kid I knew the film overall was a big step down from II

I know this was a byproduct of too much left on cutting room floor of original cut, but I always giggle in II at how Clark's newfound life as a mortal lasts all of ten minutes.

Like literally his first dinner date after transforming, he gets beat up and wishes he was Superman again, while Lois basically insinuates she's no longer attracted to him cos he got beat up

it's not particularly ridiculous, but I think my favourite moment in any of these films is Terence Stamp and the Kryptonians showing up at the Daily Planet by smashing a giant hole in the wall and stomping in, followed by Gene Hackman strolling casually past the big hole and walking through the door before carefully closing it behind him.

― Platinum Penguin Pavilion (soref)

"You should see the White House, they'll be cleanin' it for months!"

"Even with all their accumulated knowledge when will these dummies learn to use a door knob?"

The cyborg scene was disturbing but dear God, the hoops they jumped through to get there.

Computer becoming self aware at 11th hour, turns on its creators. Skynet's predecessor but it's as effective as a food processor with a stuck start button

when I was a kid I had this dream that the Superman sequels went beyond IV and got so bad and perfunctory that they called one of them Superman Next

kinda sad that never materialized. Superman Returns is devoid of this goofery and suffers for it. and I hate the Cavill flicks

Flying round the world backwards must win.

Vera becoming a cyborg was my total favourite when I was tiny
I remember watching Office Space and going HEY THEY'VE NICKED THAT OFF SUPERMAN 3 only for them to acknowledge same seconds later
Bad Supes doing all the naughty stuff is fun

My write-in would be the red man and green man (traffic crossing lights) having a fight

Despite watching I-III (and Supergirl) endlessly as a child I have never been allowed to watch Superman IV

My write-in would be the red man and green man (traffic crossing lights) having a fight

oh god that was soooooooo fuckin Bugs Bunny level goofy

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Beatty's idiocy bugs the shit outta me.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I like the earth spinning causing time travel. it's such a goofy idea to include as the climax of a film. it's hard to figure out what idea they were even going for:

1. sun cycle going backwards causes time to go backwards
2. entropy reversal
3. time zones nonsense
4. superman going faster than light like the flash

also the S clingfilm is an entertaining mess of an idea that richard lester tossed in there.

The movies have too much of Hackman's Luthor as comic relief, rather than being a bastard, which he's much better at.

This is great
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNUu6Lf9mVU

I never noticed the uninterrupted take before - I love the thought of Reeve offstage, dropping his flying wires and hustling into a suit (if that's what's happening)

i think kidder is in front of a film of superman taking off (read that somewhere recently... dunno if it's accurate).

how ever it was done that whole scene is fantastic.

that makes sense - great trick

i love lois's lost-in-a-dream expressions around 1.30-1.36

One thing missing is Luthor's plan in the first film to steal the nuclear weapons - he had Miss Teschmacher dress up as Marilyn Monroe and pretend to faint in the road in front of a nuclear convoy. From what I remember he had to do it twice! On the one hand Valerie Perrine was mighty fine, but when people say that Superman 2 had stupid moments they're viewing the original film with rose-tinted glasses because it also had stupid moments, lots of them.

I was also going to say that Valerie Perrine was a late 1970s version of Adrienne Barbeau. But Adrienne Barbeau was already a late 1970s version of Adrienne Barbeau. I'm just glad that they both existed. And continue to exist! I think they're both still with us.

I remember rewatching the original film on DVD in the early 2000s and thinking that Marlon Brando and the Krypton scenes were much better than I remembered, and the first two-thirds of the film were fantastic, including the actor who played teenage Clark, and the bits in Metropolis where Superman fights crime and catches a helicopter. But it just fell apart when Lex Luthor appeared, because beyond the very first scene he's played as a joke in that film. His plan to synthesise Kryptonite is just arbitrary nonsense and his villainous plot is ridiculous.

It struck me that if you took the first two-thirds of Superman, and then grafted them onto an edited version of Superman 2 - with Gene Hackman as a supporting character - the resulting film would be terrific. But superhero films had to learn to walk before they could run, and the first film was the walking phase.

Also, the credits sequence is still awesome, and they cheaped out with the later films by using a simpler version of the whoosh effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk1aQx9hTaE

I am still to this day creeped out by the moon sequence at the beginning of Superman 2. People generally don't die in the OG Superman films but those people on the moon died horrible, horrible deaths.

Zod is relatively two dimensional

stoked to sob my way through this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX-B3HMlMfY

Yeah, that'll be a great watch. And in terms of the original film, not only those credits: more than once I've just watched the film up until he completes his training and flies out of the Fortress of Solitude. After all the origin-story tropes over the years in superhero films, that one still works and takes just enough time, and the gambit of another actor than Reeve really works so well.