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Related stuff you might want!!!(commissions earned) |
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Jimmy Drake gets embarrassed when he has to do a report in front of his
class about his dad's occupation, and his dad has amounted to nithing more
than the doorman of the local movietheatre. Of course, Jimmy's dad has
also had to bring the boy up on his own, and he takes correspondence
classes to become an artist, but that just doesn'T cross Jimmy's mind
during his report ... In the meantime, 3 gangsters are planning a raid
on Jimmy's dad's movietheatre because it is displaying a fortune worth in
diamonds for some movie premiere. Their plan is pretty ingenious of
course, one of them, Shifty, is to engage the local sheriff in a shootout
out in the desert, and will see to it that the sheriff will call Superbox
(John Rockwell), the local superhero, for assistance, while the other two
engage in the actual raid, which should be a cinch with Superboy out of
the way. Sure, Shifty gets a few months in the slammer, but he'll leave
prison a rich man ... The plan works beautifully, except for one flaw:
Jimmy's dad, the movietheatre doorman, has seen the two robbers, too, and
now he draws them, just like he has learned in correspondence school -
pretty accurate drawings, too - and after the two crooks find their mugs
displayed in all the newspapers all over the country, they decide to kill
that pesky cinema doorman - and walk right into a trap set up by Superboy. And
Jimmy Drake? All of a sudden, he's mighty proud of his dad ... After
George Reeves' death in 1959 put an end to the then rather popular series Adventures
of Superman, someone in charge must have thought it might be a
good idea to try to repeat that series' success with a depiction of the
early (as in high school) adventures of Superman, or rather Superboy.
Sounds reasonable enough, and worked to some degree in comics, but this
pilot was never picked up for a series ... and the reasons are very easy
to spot: It's a bit too old-fashioned even for 1961 regarding the values
it transports ("always be proud of your father"), it's to strong
on message and weak on action to keep the viewer interested, and its Superboy
remains totally bland (something that never was the case with George
Reeves' Superman). Thus, the result is nothing but a
pedestrian smalltown story with a superhero thrown in. Disappointing!
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