While I'm Thinking About It

While I'm Thinking About It

And here I thought I was done with Superman posts.

I have odd thoughts from time to time, which really shouldn't surprise anyone. Jack winds up with some of them, but others just won't work within the admittedly rather large confines of the unholy spawn of silly retail humor and time travel epic. This is one of them.

If you remember, when Superman Returns came out, some fuss was made that it took place in the same world as the Christopher Reeve movies, but only the first two. Superman III, the one with Richard Pryor, and Superman IV, the one with the subtitle, aren't part of the new continuity. At the time, I figured that was a bad choice; it would have been better to keep specific origin details kinda vague. Tom Welling or Gerard Christopher all grown up? Sure. Lois and Clark, the lost episode? Why not? Everyone knows who Superman is, just tell the best possible story. And why in the world do the only cameos go to contemporaries of George Reeves?

Sorry. I got off track there a little.

Anyway, my point is supposed to be that it's not so much that the third and fourth movies never happened, it's just that they haven't happened yet. Returns was retconned into the middle of the original series. With that in mind, I constructed the following new timeline in about forty seconds:

• Superman: The Motion Picture
• Superman II
• Superman leaves earth to investigate the ruins of Krypton.
• Lois wins the Pulitzer Prize
• Supergirl comes to Earth and fights Faye Dunaway. It's even mentioned in passing that Superman's off-planet.
• John Henry Irons builds his suit of armor and becomes Steel
• Neither hero has much of an impact on anything, because they're never mentioned when Superman Returns
• Then Richard Pryor's character provides Mike Judge with the idea for a large chunk of the movie Office Space. Superman remembers Lois's betrayal with Cyclops and romances Lana Lang for awhile (but then she turns into his mother, but that's kind of an odd place that we're not going to visit.
• Superman fails in his absurd "no nukes" mission, but that's okay because Captain Kirk's already saved the whales. Meanwhile, That Guy In the X-Men Movies Who's Not Wolverine must have suffered a rather gruesome fate, because both he and the Krypton Kid are nowhere to be seen, and Clark's proving he suffers from a textbook case of insanity by trying the same thing while hoping for a different result.