The Adventures of Superman: Season 03 (1954)

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For its third season on the air, the popular action series The Adventures of Superman switched over from black and white to color photography, a move designed to boost the series' profitability once color television became the rule rather than the exception. The switch to color put a strain on the show's already attenuated budget, which is one of the reasons that only 13 episodes were filmed this season, rather than the usual 26. By now, producer Whitney Ellsworth had abandoned all pretense of aiming the series at an adult audience, and was gearing the scripts almost exclusively towards the kiddie trade. To their credit, stars George Reeves (Superman/Clark Kent), Noel Neill (Lois Lane), Jack Larson (Jimmy Olsen), John Hamilton (Perry White) and Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson) did not "play down" to their audience, though their tongues were firmly in their cheeks when delivering the more puerile dialogue passages (witness Clark Kent's playful interpretation of the phrase "a hot deck" in the episode "Bully of Dry Gulch"). Otherwise, the series' youthful following was acknowledged by an overemphasis on purely comic episodes, the best of which is "Flight to the North", featuring all-purpose Superman supporting player Ben Welden and a young Chuck Connors. There is also a tendency to lay the series' "fantasy" angle on a bit too thick, as in the season opener "Through the Time Barrier", in which a wispy inventor (Sterling Holloway creates a time machine which thrusts the entire cast back to the Stone Age. And on occasion, the writers succumbed to the temptation to be satirically self-referential-- never more so than in "Great Caesar's Ghost", the title of which invokes the oft-shouted catchphrase of the dyspeptic Perry White. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi