The Magazines of the Day

Major Magazines of the Day Featured Articles about "It's A Bird It's A Plane It's Superman©". This week, we look at LIFE!

This week, we feature the LIFE Magazine article that celebrated the
campiness of the 1960s.

From LIFE Magazine:

Superman Soars Into Song

While Batman is making it on TV, his colleague in crime-busting, Superman, is heading for Broadway. The man in the red and blue union suit, an all-American hero since 1938, opens there this month in a new musical called It's A Bird...It's A Plane...It'sSuperman. In the $400,000 show, Superman, engagingly played by 6-foot, 4-inch, 220-pound Bob Holiday (above, flying over Times Square), faces three perils: (1) a revengeful M.I.T. scientist who has failed to win the Nobel Prize and is out to destroy Superman as a symbol of the world's good, (2) a snippy gossip columnist whose aim in life is to reveal Superman's real identity, and (3) the harness which lifts him up, up and away—as he sings songs like Pow! Bam! Zonk! At first, Holiday flew less like a bird or a plane than like a large crate being lifted by a crane—but his flight patterns have been improving. Besides flying, he beats up a whole gang of Chinese acrobat-crooks, tosses a robber's get-away car offstage and in a weak moment, he tells Lois Lane he loves her—but leaves her hurriedly to stop a nuclear missile headed for Metropolis.

In his book, Superman on Broadway, Bob records for posterity that:

I was supposed to be on the cover of LIFE, but was replaced at the 11th hour by a photo of Adam West as Batman. It was a disappointment, but I had no time to dwell on it.

And that's the way Bob Holiday always dealt with things like this. He recognized that it was a disappointment, he set the disappointment aside, and he got on with the next big thing in his life. He was a great role model for us all!

SupermanBobHoliday.com SupermanBobHoliday.com