So I’m wandering around YouTube and I see a few posts of clips from the old Superman TV series.  I used to scramble for the TV set every day after school to watch these, and to this day still feel a little thrill whenever I hear the harp and strings trilling the intro to the theme music. The series first aired in 1952, a year before I was born, and the last episodes were finished and aired sometime in 1957 or 58.  I became an avid childhood fan sometime around 62 or 63 when the episodes began appearing on local after school TV.  I think the first episode I ever watched was Panic In The Sky, which many fans say was the best episode of the series. 

I was in elementary school, and our TV set back then was a black and white vacuum tube affair with rabbit’s ears antenna resting on the top of the set.  That was actually the typical setup in most homes back then. You turned the thing on and then you had to wait a minute or so for all the tubes to warm up before you saw or heard anything.  And even then it usually took another five minutes or so for things to settle down and you got a picture that wasn’t fuzzy and didn’t flutter or roll.  Often this was accompanied by a lot of fiddling with the rabbit’s ears.  Luckily by the time I got home from school the TV had already been warmed up from playing all of grandma’s daytime TV soap operas.  If I got home from school early it was As The World Turns.  If I got home late it was General Hospital.  Thankfully, in their infinite wisdom and greedy willingness to exploit a much younger and more easily dazzled audience that the local TV station operators knew wouldn’t sit still for Will Doris Find Out That Ted Is Her Long Lost Brother Before She Marries Him, after 4PM the soaps gave way to Superman, Astro Boy, Supercar, and The Cisco Kid.

I saw several posts on YouTube of the opening titles for various seasons  of Superman.  So just for kicks and grins I clicked on the opening titles for the first season.  In the comments below I saw this…

(5 months ago)
Brings back great childhood memories!

(3 months ago)
Sure does.
I used to watch this on Nick at Night when I was 8 or 9. Was a great show.

Arrggh…!  For the record, Nick at Night was spawned off of Nickelodeon in 1985, by which time I was 32.  Am I that old?  Vacuum tubes?  Rabbit’s ears?  Yeah…I reckon.  Damn.  How did that happen?