Looks like this book just came out... Flights of Fantasy: The Unauthorized But True Story of Radio & TV's Adventures of Superman Says Mark Waid:
The book is well-written, well put-together, detailed without being mind-numbing (okay, to be fair, YMMV), and a testament to stupendous research. It's by far the definitive work on the radio program, which I've been researching myself for nearly thirty years, and it's a first-rate study of the George Reeves TV series as well. Author Hayde takes nothing for granted and meticulously debunks a lot of the old, labored anecdotes that we've long since come to accept as fact (such as the old story that George Reeves' role in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY was trimmed to near-nothing because audiences were too distracted by "Superman," or that kryptonite was invented for the radio "so Bud (Superman) Collyer could get vacation time by playing `unconscious' "-neither true). The episode guides in the back are the best I've ever seen and include pages and pages of unfilmed "lost scenes" from the original scripts and detailed synopses of two unfilmed episodes even I had never heard of. Kudos.

You need to be a member of Captain Comics to add comments!

Join Captain Comics

Votes: 0
Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • Many thanks, sir, for alerting me to this. This will most definitely be on my shelf.

    One section of my library that has not grown in the last decade or so is my books of television and television-related topics. That's because they have also declined from the shelves in bookstores, as well. Oh, it's easy enough to find stuff on current hit shows, in which I have little or no interest. But books on the older programmes---which twenty years or more ago were reasonably frequent---have dried up. I suspect that, when once such things would have appeared in books, people are now resorting to web sites.

    There is always McFarland & Company, a smaller publisher out of Jefferson, North Carolina---it puts out dozens of books on older television, especially the lesser known shows. But they tend to be a bit expensive, even for me. So I buy only two or three books from McFarland a year.

    I had no idea this book was on the market. Much obliged to you, Alan, for telling me about this!
  • Did Cat Yronrode ever release the George Reeves book she used to talk about? I remember reading she felt Reeves did not kill himself and suspected someone of murdering him, but said if you wanted to find out to buy the book. Then it was cancelled while she was asking for advanced orders.

  • cat yronrode never released the Steve Ditko bio either. Tho, iirc, some of the manuscript was destroyed in a flood.

  • It's not likely Ditko will give any interviews. I know Graham Ingels hated hearing from fans and threatened to sue one if he ever contacted him again.

     



  • Allegedly Ditko was onboard with the project, but when Cat contacted his family members in Pensylvania, he withdrew his support. This was some 30 years ago and memory is fuzzy..

     

This reply was deleted.