This is a list of Adventures of Superman

Adventures of Superman (TV series)

Adventures of Superman is an American television series based on comic book characters and concepts created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The show is the first television series to feature Superman and began filming in 1951 in California...

episodes. Much of the Superman

Superman

Superman is a fictional comic book superhero appearing in publications by DC Comics, widely considered to be an American cultural icon. Created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster in 1932 while both were living in Cleveland, Ohio, and sold to Detective...

 "formula", in all forms of its media presentations, involves Superman rescuing someone, either one of his colleagues or another person or persons. In those cases, success is largely a matter of Superman simply "getting there on time" to save the day. Some of the strongest episodes in the series tend to be the ones where Superman himself is in peril, either due to exposure to the presence of kryptonite, external forces, or from some other daunting challenge.

Several episodes raise the threat of exposing Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent

Clark Kent

Clark Kent is a fictional character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Appearing regularly in stories published by DC Comics, he debuted in Action Comics #1 and serves as the civilian and secret identity of the superhero Superman....

. The only humans to know for sure, other than Clark's adoptive mother, are a few villains in some episodes, whose discovery leads them to their deaths before they can tell anyone else. Two animals, a dog named Corky and a burro named Carmelita, also know Kent and Superman are one and the same. The only other entity to know, apparently, is a computer.

Beginning with season three the series began to take on the lighthearted, whimsical tone of the Superman comic books of the 1950s. The villains were often caricatured, Runyonesque

Damon Runyon

Alfred Damon Runyon was an American newspaperman and writer.He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the...

 gangsters, played with tongue in cheek. Violence on the show was toned down further. The only gunfire that occurred was aimed at Superman, and of course the bullets bounced off. Superman was less likely to engage in fisticuffs with the villains. On occasions when Superman did use physical force, he would take crooks out in a single karate-style chop or, if he happened to have two criminals in hand, banging their heads together. More often than not, the villains were likely to knock themselves out fleeing Superman. Now very popular to viewers, Jimmy Olsen

Jimmy Olsen

Jimmy Olsen is a fictional character who appears mainly in DC Comics’ Superman stories. Olsen is a young photojournalist working for the Daily Planet. He is close friends with Lois Lane, Clark Kent/Superman and Perry White...

 was now being played as the show's comic foil to Superman. Many of the plots featured he and Lois Lane

Lois Lane

Lois Lane is a fictional character, the primary love interest of Superman in the comic books of DC Comics. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, she first appeared in Action Comics #1 ....

 being captured, only to be rescued at the last minute by Superman.

Scripts for the last season did not hit the campy lows of the previous two years and reestablished a bit of the seriousness of the show, often with science fiction elements like a Kryptonite-powered robot (a left-over prop from "The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters"), atomic explosions, and impregnable metal cubes. In one of the last episodes, "The Perils of Superman" (a takeoff on The Perils of Pauline

The Perils of Pauline (1914 serial)

The Perils of Pauline is a motion picture serial shown in weekly installments featuring Pearl White as the title character. Pauline has often been cited as a famous example of a damsel in distress, although some analyses hold that her character was more resourceful and less helpless than the...

), there was indeed deadly peril straight out of the movie serials: Lois tied to a set of railroad tracks with a speeding train bearing down on her, Perry White

Perry White

Perry White is a fictional character who appears in the Superman comics. White is the Editor-in-Chief of the Metropolis newspaper the Daily Planet.White maintains very high ethical and journalistic standards...

 nearly sawed in half while tied to a log, Jimmy in a runaway car headed for a cliff, and Clark Kent immersed in a vat of acid. This was one of three episodes directed by George Reeves

George Reeves

George Reeves was an American actor best known for his role as Superman in the 1950s television program Adventures of Superman....

 himself, in an attempt to inject some new life into the series. Noel Neill's hair was dyed a bright red for this season, though the color change was not apparent in the initial black-and-white broadcasts. Although Reeves's efforts did not save the series from cancellation. "Perils of Superman" is regarded as one of the best episodes.

The numbering scheme in the following list is derived from the purely consecutive numbering used in Superman: Serial to Cereal.

Series overview

All six seasons of this series have been released on four DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 box sets by Warner Bros. Home Video.

Season		№ of episodes	Premiered:	Ended:	DVD set release date
	1	26	1952.09.19	1953.02.27	2005.10.18
	2	26	1953.09.18	1954.03.13	2006.01.17
	3	13	1955.04.23	1955.10.15	2006.06.20
	4	13	1956.02.18	1956.06.16
	5	13	1957.03.08	1957.05.31	2006.11.14
	6	13	1958.02.03	1958.04.28

Season 1: 1952–53

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Season 2: 1953–54

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Season 3: 1955

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Season 4: 1956

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Season 5: 1957

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Season 6: 1958

Ep	№	Title	Directed by:	Written by:	Original air date

Sources

• IMDb: Episode List for Adventures of Superman
• Superman: Serial to Cereal, by Gary H. Grossman, 1976
• Adventures of Superman. Complete series DVD. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 2006, 2007.