You will believe a man can fly. Or in this case, a girl.
But not just fly. In Supergirl (review), the latest movie from James Gunn’s DCU, the Girl of Steel has her own particular style of flying, using the ability as a sort of unique form of martial arts at times.
“I kind of liked her having her own flying style, because I think she’s so herself in every sense of the word,” star Milly Alcock recently told me. “She can only ever be exactly who she is, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t conform.”
But it’s been quite a journey to go from the early days of onscreen Kryptonian flying to today’s high-tech methods – and it’s rarely been an easy path along the way.
So with the help of the Woman of Tomorrow herself, Milly Alcock, and Supergirl’s director Craig Gillespie, let’s trace the earliest attempts to depict super-flight in movies and TV, and the heights that have been achieved in the modern DC movies.
The Fleischer Shorts and the ‘Effortlessness’ of Flying
Of course, there’ve been a ton of superhero movies over the years, and many of them have featured some form of flying or another. But Superman- and Supergirl-style flight has always been the trailblazer to which all other airbound characters have looked. In the case of Alcock’s Supergirl, she flies in a manner similar to her cousin, as we saw in last year’s Superman, but then she adds in a kick here or a punch there – melding her fighting with her flying.
“I hadn’t got to see Superman at the point that we were doing these flying sequences, and there was this discussion of the physics of it and how fast it is,” Craig Gillespie explains. “Rob Inch, our stunt coordinator, had a lot of input, which I liked. And it’s like for him, it was this effortlessness. She didn’t have to crouch down and jump. It was something that was very intuitive and easy to do, so he had a lot of input on that.”
‘I hadn’t got to see Superman at the point that we were doing these flying sequences, and there was this discussion of the physics of it and how fast it is.’
That sense of the ease of flight can actually be traced all the way back to the first onscreen depiction of Kryptonian flying, the animated Fleischer Superman shorts from the early 1940s. Interestingly, while Superman was rotoscoped in that cartoon series – which is to say, much of the animation was traced over live-action shots – the actual flying of course could not be achieved this way. This gave the animators a free hand, in a sense, and the result was a sort of balletic dance through the sky that enabled them to chart some of the earliest movements of the Man of Steel. (Also, fun fact: This series marked the first time that Superman used flight as his regular mode of transportation as opposed to just jumping around Hulk-style.)
Leaping forward 40 years or so for a quick aside, the beloved by many/forgotten by even more TV series The Greatest American Hero tackled the question of how exactly flight would work. Like, do you just start levitating upwards, or is there some kind of forward thrust needed to get going? The show posited the opposite of the effortlessness that Gillespie wanted with Kara.
In the series’ pilot episode, William Katt’s hero of the title, Ralph Hinkley, is trying to figure out how to take off for his first flight. He’s approached by a young boy who’s been watching nearby and is obviously a comics fan. The kid points out what Ralph’s doing wrong: “You gotta run like three steps, and jump with your hands out in front of you,” he explains. And what do you know? It works!
You can see why the makers of the show introduced ideas like that. And really, it’s something that even the modern superhero movies continue to struggle with. Putting aside the fact that the Greatest American Hero never really mastered his powers over the course of the show’s three seasons, characters like this always run the risk of being too powerful. Says Alcock, “How would we make it harder for [Kara]?”
“My input was more like disabling the flying, like having her be poisoned,” Gillespie says of his attempts to de-power Kara in the new movie. “It’s the tricky part of Superman or Supergirl – that they’re so all-powerful. It’s like how do you make them compromised?”
That said, the makers of the earliest attempt at a live-action Superman really didn’t have to worry about their version of Kal-El seeming too powerful…
You Will Believe a Man Can Fly… Sorta
In 1948, Kirk Alyn became the first live-action version of the Man of Steel in Columbia Pictures’ 15-part movie serial, titled simply Superman. Here, the filmmakers must’ve figured that the Fleischer cartoon worked well enough, and so they simply cut to an animated version of Superman for the flying scenes. It’s kind of cool, sure… but it’s also kind of jarring by today’s standards.
(Oddly enough, even Tim Burton resorted to this kind of trickery back in 1989’s Batman, though in that case it was just to show the Dark Knight standing on the balcony of a skyscraper. Kinda weird, eh, Tim?)
But let’s be fair here to Kirk Alyn and directors Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr. They were working with what they had at the time, and hey, fans finally had their first real, live Superman on the big screen.
The resources at the disposal of Warner Bros. and DC Studios would probably boggle the minds of Bennet and Carr. For example, Alcock and Gillespie told me that the shot of Supergirl flying into a karate kick was achieved in-camera, as opposed to through CG or some other visual effect.
“That’s in camera, and we had that massive fight sequence in the middle of the movie, and we started off in almost six weeks on that stage,” Gillespie tells me. “Robin, who was our stunt coordinator, came over at one point with all the ratcheting and the cabling of those flying sequences. There was eight miles of cable. And he said, ‘I’ve never used eight miles of cable.’ It’s that one shot, which was the stunt double. Mickey, and from way up the top of the set, she flies down about 50 yards and kicks…. That was half our day.”
From Mole Men to Flying-Fu… and Beyond
By 1951, the first proper Superman movie was released with Superman and the Mole Men, which gave us George Reeves as the Man of Steel. Reeves would go on to play the character for another seven years on the TV series Adventures of Superman, and it was in this era that audiences finally got their first live-action flying sequences for the DC hero. In fact, this particular style of flight would become de rigueur for years to come as far as the rarefied field of super-flight went.
How it was achieved was relatively simple. A device called “the pan” was hidden under Reeves’ costume. Mounted to a pole, it allowed for limited movement such as pitching and rolling. And hey, laying on your belly with a wind machine blowing your cape never looked as cool as it does here!
20 years later, flying was taken to the next level with the Christopher Reeve incarnation of Superman. The whole “you will believe a man can fly” tagline originated here, and man, they weren’t kidding. As budgets increased and technology improved, a variety of new methods were implemented to make Superman soar, including a combination of wire-rigs, blue screen mattes, front projection, and more… But only after – according to producer Ilya Salkind – the production lost some $2 million on failed flying tests.
This was also the period where the first live-action Supergirl appeared, with Helen Slater starring in the 1984 spin-off to the Christopher Reeve series. Slater’s version of the character was given a few more feminine touches to her flying, but it was mostly the same approach as her cousin over in Metropolis.
Still, once we really believed a man – or girl, or woman – could fly, there was no going back. Modern films have continued to perfect the art of flight, even while looking for unique spins on it, like Alcock’s flying-fu, if we can call it that.
And yet, no matter how advanced or unique superhero flight becomes, there will always be one universal truth according to the actress.
“I was like, ‘I can fall. I can actually fall. I can actually hurt myself,’” laughs Alcock . “I have the bruises to prove it!”
Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
