"The MIDNIGHT MURDER SHOW!"

[Great Rao]

Ladies and Gentlemen, heeeere's Johnny!

"The MIDNIGHT MURDER SHOW!"

[Spaceman Spiff]

Yay! You just gotta love a Bronze Age Superman story a la Cary Bates! Thanks for putting this up, Rao!

Having Steve Lombard as a guest host is Johnny's second favorite thing. What's first? Having an unclean yak sit on his dinner!

Hey, can anyone identify the guests on the show? Hank Aaron is obvious, but who are others? I'm guessing the guy is Clint Eastwood, but I don't have a clue about the lady. They should have Earth-One names, too. How about Hank Moses and Clint Westwood?

[ShinDangaioh]

Hmm.  

1974?  2 years before Star Wars came out.  

I think the only way to figure this out is to dig up People magazie 1974 in review issue.   Could be an actress, a singer, or a fashion model.  Maybe even Holly from Price is Right.  She looks like Holly, but I'm not sure

At any rate, this is a good story that shows Superman using his brains over his muscle.  I do like the mad scientist bit.  Instant sonic booms.

[Johnny Nevada]

Very entertaining story :-)

Question: did any (real-world) weekday late-night shows actually start at midnight in the 70's? Earth-One's Eastern Time Zone-dwellers must've been an awfully sleepy bunch come morning...

Hmm... no idea who the woman's supposed to be, but alternate names for the Earth-One Hank Aaron and Clint Eastwood... um... how about "Henry Allen" and , um, "Cliff Westwood"?

Finally: this story came along *three* years before Star Wars came out (SW came out in '77... my sister was being born around the same time it debuted in the theater...)

[TELLE]

To quote Touch McCoy:  "no --no, it just ain't possible!"

How fast must Superman be moving to get there between the click of the mechanism and the actual bullet hitting Johnny?  Where was this just discussed?

[Spaceman Spiff]

Question: did any (real-world) weekday late-night shows actually start at midnight in the 70's? Earth-One's Eastern Time Zone-dwellers must've been an awfully sleepy bunch come morning...

IIRC, The Tonight Show was 90 minutes for many years, then cut back to 60 minutes sometime around 1980. Where I lived (ET), it always started at 11:30. The real night owls stuck around for The Tomorrow Show. IMHO, Tom Snyder was a sure cure for imsomnia.

Hmmm . . . NBC also has The Today Show. Did they ever have The Yesterday Show?

Regarding the Earth-One counterparts of Earth-Prime people, I'm going to start a new topic on the "Superman" category.

How fast must Superman be moving to get there between the click of the mechanism and the actual bullet hitting Johnny? Where was this just discussed?

I was waiting for someone to ask about this. This is the real hole in the story. Consider that Superman couldn't even start moving until the sound of the click reached his ears! Sound travels at about 1100 feet/second near sea level. So figure about 5 seconds per mile from the kidnappers' hide-out to the WGBS studio. Superman must have known the hide-out was very close, otherwise he would have left the studio after Johnny was dead!

[ShinDangaioh]

He might call it super-hearing, but it is something entirely different.  Along with telescopic vision.

The ability to HEAR something on a planet elsewhere in the solar system, does not rely on the speed of sound or the medium seperating Superman and the source of the sound.

Telescopic vision is in the same boat.   The Green Sun Supergirl story is the perfect example of this.  Supergirl was able to SEE what was going on during the present of a planet, despite being several hundred light years away

Calling it super-hearing and super-vision is just shorthand for a different power altogether.

[Spaceman Spiff]

He might call it super-hearing, but it is something entirely different. Along with telescopic vision.

I don't know how super-hearing and super-vision are defined in today's Superman comics, but back in the 1970s they were generally governed by the laws of physics. I say generally, because it really depended on the writer's knowledge and attention to detail. In "Last Son of Krypton", Elliot Maggin said Superman could hear only within a sound-conducting atmosphere.

Telescopic vision is in the same boat. The Green Sun Supergirl story is the perfect example of this. Supergirl was able to SEE what was going on during the present of a planet, despite being several hundred light years away

A similar scene appears in "The World's Greatest Heroine", where Superman and Supergirl use their telescopic vision to look at another world. Once again, however, that is just a mistake by the writer. There was never a suggestion anywhere in pre-Crisis comics that Superman could "see" faster than light or "hear" faster than sound.