Arena — Season 1, Episode 160: The Comic Strip Hero
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
This week Arena patrols the skies above Metropolis in search of the legend that is SUPERMAN ... Meet Kirk Alyn , the first celluloid-Superman and Christopher Reeve the latest; Dr Fredric Wertham , Superman's greatest living adversary; Joanne, the model for Lois Lane ; Dave ' Darth Vader ' Prowse, who turned a 13-stone weakling into The Man of Steel and, for the first time on British television, Superman's creators, the legendary Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.