American Icons: Superman

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Disguised as a mild-mannered reporter, Kurt Andersen explores the history of Superman with cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman, director Bryan Singer, novelists Michael Chabon and Howard Jacobson, and the 1978 Lois Lane, Margot Kidder. Is this strange visitor from the planet Krypton derivative of Jewish mythology? Can one superhero wield ultimate power for a moral good? And what’s up with the blue tights?

(Originally aired July 6, 2006)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:06.3	Studio 360
0:08.3	You see it and you instantly know that this figure somehow is something bigger and bolder and more flamboyant than the rest of us.
0:24.4	He's godlike in his capacity for action, his power, his ability to act in the world. At the same
0:29.5	time, he's subject to unrequited love. He's calm and aware and non-judgmental.
0:35.7	He's the Nietzschean fantasy ideal all wrapped up in a red cape.
0:40.5	This is a man that can move stars from their planets.
0:43.2	This is a man that can charge around the galaxy.
0:45.5	This is the man that can make time turn back.
0:48.8	Faster than a speeding bullet.
0:50.7	Primary colored, extremely simple, really strong.
0:53.7	More powerful than a locomotive.
0:55.5	He's an embodiment of how people might want the world to be.
0:58.7	Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.
1:02.6	Looking back on it, it feels like it's always been amongst us, you know?
1:06.7	Up in the sky.
1:07.6	Look!
1:08.1	It's a bird!
1:08.9	It's a plane!
1:10.3	It's Superman!
1:14.5	Yes, that's Superman.
1:16.9	Blue tights, red cape, dark hair, strong jaw from a galaxy far far away.
	...

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