Adventures of Superman

Adventures of Superman stars George Reeves who plays Clark Kent/Superman with Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen, John Hamilton as Perry White, and Robert Shayne as Inspector Henderson. Phyllis Coates plays Lois Lane in the first season with Noel Neill stepping into the role in the second season 1953. Reeves's red-blue-and-yellow Superman costume was originally brown-gray-and-white, so that it would photograph in appropriate gray tones on black-and-white film. After two seasons the producers decided to film the show in color, a bold move at the time. Very few TV series were filmed in color in the mid-1950s. Color television was not yet standardized, and most viewers owned black-and-white sets and couldn't see the show in color, anyway. The visionary producers knew that color television was on the horizon, and predicted that the filmed episodes would be more valuable later. They were right: the Superman series ultimately commanded ten times the asking price for black-and-white programming.