15 thoughts on “Completely Useless”

  4. One thing I liked about Mr. Incredible is that he got out of shape in middle-age and had to go to the gym. Supes should get gray hair and a paunch, maybe a little drinking problem and ED, then have to get himself back together. Great story line.

    It also always bothered me that he could hold an airplane by the nose in his hands. Too much disbelief required, I mean in his ability to alter the properties of the aluminum so it would have the required tensile strength.

    I also wondered how he started and stopped flying. I mean, suppose he jumps up — how does he start flying, instead of returning to earth because he’s just stuffing the basket? Does he flex some internal sphincter muscle? Is it the hand position — out front in dive position means “start flying,” down at the sides means “stop?” Is it a Harry Potter command — he has to mutter Flydocious supersonicus! under his breath?

    Itnerestingly, the original Superman did not fly — he merely executed enormous leaps. I dunno when he started actually sailing around apparently under power. And how the heck does he exert roll control, anyway, without any kind of rudder?

  6. Superman developed flight pretty early. One of the early issues had a John Henry-type battle between Supes and Lex Luthor. Lex would bring out a machine, Superman would try to beat it. Lex brought out a high altitude airplane, Superman flew higher by doing a super flutter-kick. I think that was the end of super leaps.

    Superman’s heat vision used to be an outgrowth of his x-ray vision–he would emit x-rays from his eyes and they would heat up what he was looking at. Eventually they combined Superman’s x-ray vision, telescopic vision, and microscopic vision into Super-Vision–he could look at tiny things far away under a rock so long as the rock didn’t contain lead.

    Superman’s x-ray vision acts more like the sense of perception in the Lensman stories.

    In one of the many origin stories, Superman didn’t develop super powers because of exposure to a yellow sun–due to the advanced science of Krypton, all Kryptonians had super powers (apparently some sort of genetic engineering).

    In the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie, Supes seemed able to cancel inertia in any object he touched–Lois could fly as long as she maintained contact with Superman. This isn’t incompatible with the negative mass hypothesis presented here.

  7. As I understand the story, the original director of Superman II was Richard Donner. He had some difficulties with Gene Hackman and they eventually replaced him with Richard Lester. Somehow this resulted in almost all of Marlon Brando’s lines being cut. Lester then proceeded to add the ridiculous Eiffel Tower plot and a whole lot of inappropriate comic relief.

    In 2006, Richard Donner released his director’s cut. The most obvious change is that the film now has pacing.. you actually feel like stuff is happening. General Zod and his flunkies are no longer camp, they actually seem like the unstoppable heartless bastards they are. All the way up to the 1 hour 40 minute mark, the film is renewed and exciting.

    Then he snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Superman leaves Lois on the roof garden of her apartment and flies off into the night.. this would be a *perfect* time to fade to black and end the film, but no. Donner has superman do the flying around the world thing to turn back time and undo *the entire film*. Quite apart from the fact that everyone hates this absurd power, the gaping plot hole it introduces is: why did he need to defeat Zog before he did that? And why was this stupidity perpetrated? Just so Lois’ knowledge of his secret identity can be reversed. Gah!

    And then *after* reversing time and deleting *everything* that happened, Clark Kent goes back to the truck stop where the jerk beat him up and gives him a pummeling. This seemed petty in the Lester cut – would Superman really beat up a human just for revenge? In the Donner version it just makes no sense at all.

  8. Once we learned about action and reaction in HS, we determined simply that Superman’s diet was rich in legumes.

  10. I don’t think that gas pressure (even that which could be contained by a super colon) would be sufficient for a sphincter rocket to generate much delta V (besides, the gas would cool on expansion, something like his frost breath). Maybe he’s able to shoot lasers out the other end as well? Besides being able to light his own flatulence (which might have been fun as a boy scout), he could super-heat the gas before expelling it, giving him an extremely high Isp. Of course, it’d be a bad idea to be directly downstream. Hmm. Maybe the cape is to cover the char marks in his shorts?

  11. I thought methane (a significant component of poot gas) was a good rocket fuel? The rectum of steel should make a decent combustion chamber, provided Kent has more than ordinary muscular control. The only problem I see is oxidizer, but maybe a ramjet operation is plausible if he flies with his mouth open.

  12. It’s Super-secret Kryptonian technology that he didn’t find until after the Lex Luthor/John Henry story — and he doesn’t tell anybody it’s tech so they don’t see him as weak or try to steal the tech from him.

    Batman suspected, but he determined he’d have to extort the knowledge from Supes somehow and that would mean spilling the beans on just how much kryptonite he really has stashed away.

  13. Maybe his sphincter is also a warp drive nacelle. Sphincter-warp factor 8…..ENGAGE!

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