Or Richard Donner is a dirty, filthy liar

Okay, so for years I've bought the legend that Donner saved Superman from a really campy script. By the wonders of the Internet, some of those old scripts have surfaced and we can compare.

So, here's the campy script from David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton.

http://www.supermanhomepage.com/movies/ ... iginal.txt

And here's the "less campy" shooting script.

http://www.bigapricot.org/scripts/superman_I.txt

The so-called campy script is probably at about Superman Returns levels of camp. Otis is an idiot, but not a super-idiot. There's no comedy child abuse. Luthor constantly puts Miss Tessmacher in danger. The movie is much campier and dumbed down.

Neither script features the idiotic turn-back-time ending.

And if he's turning back time... why does he have to go the other way to get Earth to spin correctly?

Because he is not turning time back. He's physically making the Earth rotate the other way, which = Time Travel for some reason.

That bit was part of the second movie's script, by the way.

I'd love to know how that was supposed to work. Because he's only changing the bits with Lois Lane. Somehow by going back in time, he prevents aftershocks from happening... because earthquakes no better than to push their luck with Superman, I suppose.

The Superman II script is funnier, because he undoes the entire movie just to avoid dealing with Lois after sleeping with her. He's got the goods, now he doesn't actually have to step up and be her boyfriend... but somehow he doesn't have to go up against the Phantom Zone criminals again, because... reasons.

There's some seriously bad plotting in the Superman movies.

I could stop the second missile and avoided a whole lot of death and destruction... nah. I'll just pop in on Lois.

The rotating earth backward to turn back time doesn't bother me that much. It's like something that he would have done in the comics at the time. In that same year, 1978, in DC Comics Presents, Superman met Superboy at Legion headquarters when, according to DC's laws of time travel, it was impossible for the same person to exist during the same time period. Superman and Superboy solved the time paradox by flying at each other, smashing their heads together sending them back to their respective time periods in the past.

It's like Flash using the cosmic treadmill to travel through time. It's all just superhero fun.

Except Superman goes back in time to get out of calling Lois the morning after.

There's something so utterly pointless about both Donner time travelling moments. You could easily script your way around both without affecting the story at all. That's even before you get to neither making a lick of sense.

Right, but let's stop talking about Man of Steel.

"That was a really well-thought out plot." -- words never spoken about a Superman movie.

fixed

I said it about Batman Begins.

No you didn't.

Did you?

(I can't see why you would do such a thing)

Pics or it didn't happen...

Because I am a real Batman fan, not a fake one like you.

No big deal, it happens.

I sense mischief.

Nothing in that pic could be described as "well thought out".

The point of it in the first film is that Superman is not supposed to mess with "mankind's destiny," and he is totally cool wit dat, but then he meets and falls for Lois, and so he ends up disobeying his father's edict ... for the love of a lay-dee.

They didn't want to "script their way out of" the time-travel moment. They wanted to script their way into it. Lois dies so that Superman has a reason to travel in time, not vice versa.

(I know, it's still stupid. But that was why they did it.)

Ra's's conspiracy (is that the proper possessive form of Ra's?) is tied to Joe Chill; Scarecrow's gas created all of the Batman villains; Bruce is all tricksy in outsmarting Rutger Hauer. It all seemed clever to me at the time.

Is it not a well thought-out plot? Okay, my mistake. It's been a while, and I can't claim to care too much.

You've convinced me. Batman Begins is the greatest superhero movie ever.

Well played.

What a slut. Play a little "hard-to-get", would you?

Duke Silver is slut shaming me.

Well, if you didn't dress like that...