There’s no new Supergirl tonight, so of course we’re sitting down with an old episode of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman to go on an Easter egg hunt (just one night late, we suppose).
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While “Requiem for a Super-Hero” doesn’t have quite the mountain of Easter eggs, cameos, references, and in-jokes that some of the previous episodes of Lois & Clark have, that isn’t to say it wasn’t fun to watch with a keen eye for DC detail.
Check out what we spotted, and chime in @comicbook if we missed anything!
More Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman news:
- Lois & Clark’s Dean Cain Comments On Teri Hatcher Supergirl Involvement
- Easter Eggs In Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’s “I’m Seeing Through You”
- Lois & Clark: Easter Eggs & Things You Might Have Missed In “Neverending Battle”
- Easter Eggs In Lois & Clark’s “Strange Visitor (From Another Planet)”
- Easter Eggs in the Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman Pilot
BASEBALL
This one’s kind of a forward-facing Easter egg: Superman playing baseball — and ultimately tossing the ball so far out of the field that a dog chasing after it got utterly baffled — happened a few years later in Superman Returns.
Heck, it’s a memorable scene at least in the sense that CinemaSins sinned the movie for “Superman is a dick to dogs.”
REQUIEM
Of course, the title itself is a nod to Requiem for a Heavyweight, a 1956 TV movie by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling which won a Peabody Award and ultimately was turned into a big-screen movie in 1962.
FAIR PLAY
This is absolutely not a DC reference, but we’d get busted by readers if we didn’t at least mention it.
Yeah, “Fair Play” is the slogan of Mr. Terrific, a DC superhero who’s been around since the Golden Age and who, presently, appears on The CW’s Arrow.
SAM LANE
Here, he’s a doctor. Not so much in the comics.
In fact, in the comics, Sam Lane was a military man, giving Lois numerous “Army brat” character traits like being slow to warm to new people (since she spent so much of her young life moving around, she didn’t form lasting relationships) and having the ability to kick four kinds of ass.
That last one, we guess, you can still learn from your dad’s work when he’s involved with boxing.
Eventually, Sam would be elevated to the role of Secretary of Defense under U.S. President Lex Luthor. During the Our Worlds at War event, he supposedly sacrificed his life to stop the villain Imperiex, but would later turn out to have survived.
In the comics, as here, he had a strained relationship with Lois, but not one that was so estranged as to be unsalvageable.
Like many characters on Lois and Clark, Same Lane was played by more than one actor; Doctor Lane was played by Denis Arndt in his first appearance, and Harve Presnell in subsequent episodes.
GET IN THE RING
There’s elements, of course, of the ridiculous in the whole thing of genetically-manipulated fighters mustering enough strength to tangle with Superman — but that’s not exactly without precedent. Hell, in the Dennis O’Neil/Neal Adams classic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, the Man of Steel tangled with The Greatest.
Here’s the story: Rat’Lar, the leader of a an alien race called the Scrubb, challenged Earth to pit its greatest champion against Scrubb’s own, with the idea that if Earth refuses, the Scrubb will destroy the planet from space.
Superman and Muhammad Ali each come forward to volunteer, with Ali objecting that Superman is both not tehnically human and also that his powers give him an unfair advantage and that Ali is objectively The Greatest.
Rat’Lar insists that Superman and Ali should fight one another on a world orbiting a red sun, so that Superman will lose his powers for the duration fo the battle and the better fighter would win. At the Fortress of Solitude, Superman uses Kryptonian technology to temporarily “disable” his powers so that he and Ali can train together.
The Superman vs. Muhammad Ali match is broadcast to Earth and thousands of other worlds throughout the DC Universe, with Jimmy Olsen providing color commentary. Once Superman is de-powered, Ali easily proves himself as the better fighter, beating Superman badly enough that Ali himself tries to stop the fight and have a technical knockout declared, only to have Superman collapse and be called as a true knockout while the conversation is taking place.
Next, Ali faces the Scrubb champion, an alien named Hun’Ya. Despite his typical bravado and trash talk — with some prompting, Ali predicts he’ll win the fight in four rounds — the champ struggles because, unlike Superman, Hun’Ya isn’t fighting without his powers.
While Ali fights, Superman recovers. Disguised as Ali’s cornerman Bundini Brown, the Man of Steel sabotages the Scrubb armada from inside their command ship — but in trying to take on the armada by himself, he finds himself injured and floating in space.
Back in the ring, Ali manages to overcome Hun’Ya and knocks the Scrubb champion out of both the fight and the ring in the as-previously-predicted fourth round. When Rat’Lar, furious at Superman’s sabotage and Ali’s victory, prepares to renege on his agreement with Superman and Ali and attack Earth anyway. Hun’Ya, an honorable champion, is having none of that and deposes Rat’Lar, taking control of the Scrubb for himself, helping to rescue and revive Superman, and making peace with Earth as Rat’Lar had promised.
After returning home, Ali reveals that he had deduced Superman’s civilian identity as Clark Kent, but assures the Man of Steel he won’t tell. The two embrace, and Ali declares them to both be The Greatest.
Ironically, the comic was delayed a handful of times and by the time it was finally released, Ali had lost his championship to Leon Spinks. He would defeat Spinks later in the year and reclaim the title, but at the time of the comic’s publication, Ali wasn’t the heavyweight champion. It didn’t change –hell, even the actual loss to Spinks, and other losses he’d had before and would have after didn’t change — the fact that he was The Greatest, and that this comic is a singular piece of pop culture history that likely could never have been made at a different time or with a different fighter.
Recently, big chunks of the story were reimagined — even with art by Neal Adams! — in an issue of Harley Quinn’s Little Black Book, which pitted her against the Man of Steel.
3rd RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD
Lex Luthor here identifies himself as the third-richest man in the world, with a net worth of over $20 billion, and he names off the only two peole above him.
Neither is Bruce Wayne, so while we’ll never get a definitive answer as to whether Bruce exists in this continuity, he either doesn’t — or he doesn’t have as much money as Lex.
That’s mostly relevant because Bruce has “bought out” or at least out-bought, Lex before in the comics.
SUPERMAN!
That life-sized Superman standee Lex is throwing darts at has actually been on the show before!
He appeared in the previous episode during the “Superman Day” scene, in one of the vendors’ booths.
EARTHQUAKE!
For a show that centers on the relationship between Lois Lane and Clark Kent, it’s kind of surprising that we’ve never heard anyone crack a joke about the “earthquake” in this episode.
Of course, in Superman: The Movie, Lois dies during an earthquake created by Lex Luthor, and Superman, in a rage, flies around the planet fast enough to force it to revolve backwards, turning back time (yes, we know that’s not how time works) so that he can save her.
METAL MEN
Given the fact that in both the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity (which was canon at the time) and the post-Flashpoint continuity (which remains largely still intact), Lex Luthor was responsible for the creation of the cyborg supervillain Metallo, it’s easy to see this as a kind of test-drive to see whether that character would work in the world set up by Lois and Clark.
While the show would largely avoid costumed supervillains in favor of powered-up thugs, military types, and other plainclothes-style villains (inspired, as it was, by The Adventures of Superman, which did the same thing), we would eventually get a version of Metallo in season 2. A petty criminal who is dating Lucy Lane, John Corben would be shot during a crime gone wrong, and ultimately rebuilt as a Kryptonite-powered cyborg by a LexCorp scientist…
…of course, there was no overt reference to the Metallo project having anything to do with Sam Lane’s parts — although given LexCorp’s investment in him, it wouldn’t be an unreasonable line to draw.
STEEL vs. STEEL
When the robotically-enhanced boxers finally begin their attempts to pummel Superman, Max Menken proclaims “Steel versus Steel! That’s how I’d promote it!”
While Max’s promoting days are likely over at this point, that doesn’t mean somebody else can’t horn in on his idea — for instance, writer Karl Kesel, who would eventually write The Adventures of Superman #539, wherein Superman fights a cyborg villain and “Man of Steel vs. Man of Steel” is the cover copy used by editorial.
