Look! Down In The Pond! It's A Fish!

Apparently, birds and planes are noteworthy in Metropolis 

Today, Jeremy takes on the Man of Steel himself, Superman!  I don't know if he has kryptonite in his pants or something, but we'll all find out together.  

I don't really have a problem with Superman.  I mean, once you accept the fact that there's an alien who crash landed in middle America who derives great physical powers simply by virtue of the fact that the earth's sun is yellow, then you're already most of the way there.  Sure, there's some suspension of disbelief there, but it's a comic book, so we as a whole can be largely okay with that.  My problem lies with the people of Metropolis. 

Say it with me, folks..."Look!  Up in the sky!  It's a bird!  It's a plane!  It's SUPERMAN!"  

So, this phrase has become fairly quintessential Superman lore.  It originated in 1939 as the introduction to the radio program "The Adventures of Superman."  You've all heard it before, and didn't pay much attention to it because you knew full well it was merely a way to introduce Superman.  But let's actually think about what's being said here, shall we?  

"Look!  Up in the sky!  It's a bird!"  

Let's stop there, which is what the first speaking person did before being corrected by somebody else saying that it's a plane.  This is a remarkably stupid thing to say.  This person stopped whatever it was they were doing to force other people to stop whatever they were doing to look up into the sky because they saw a bird.  THAT'S WHERE BIRDS GO, IMBECILE!  Of course there are birds in the sky.  Where else are you supposed to put them?  They're birds...they fly.  Why is it so noteworthy that the skies over Metropolis contain a bird that somebody feels the need to point it out to me?  

"It's a plane!"  While also looking up at the sky.  This one may have made a little more sense in 1939, but not that much.  It's basically the same concept.  Planes go in the sky.  If you look up and see a plane, that's probably pretty standard fare these days, but flight was still somewhat newish in 1939.  Let's look at aviation in that age.  

The Wright Brothers' first flight was in 1903, so it's not as if airplanes were completely novel concepts.  Cell phones were first introduced to North America in 1983, so they've been around for around the same amount of time that air travel had been in 1939.  In 1983, if you saw somebody carrying around one of those Big Stupid-Looking Car Phones, it was a novelty.  Now, 33 years later, the only people who get a raised eyebrow out of you are people who don't have their own mobile phone with them at all times.  Similarly, if you saw an airplane in 1903, it was an experience.  36 years later, planes were more commonplace.  Commercial air travel had begun, Boeing introduced flight attendants in 1930, The DC made its debut in 1936, and 1.2 Million people per year flew on a commercial airliner by 1938.  So, in 1939, when Superman first hit the radio airwaves (Yes, the first comic book featuring Superman was in 1938, but we're not dealing with that right now, nor the fact that Superman's ability to actually fly didn't come about until later in the 1940s...he just jumped really high), it could not have been all that special to look up into the sky and see a plane.  

The people of Metropolis suck.