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While 1984’s Supergirl is very much a low-budget attempt to cash in on the majesty of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, it does maintain the world that Richard Donner established in one regard. Midway through the film, Supergirl (Helen Slater) strikes a classic hero pose to face off against two baddies.
“I am Kara of Argo City, daughter of Alura and Zor-El,” she says with confidence. “And I don’t scare easily.” Unfortunately, she says those words to a witch called Selena, portrayed by Faye Dunaway at her hammiest. With just a flick of her finger, Selena flings Supergirl into an A&W vending machine.
How could anyone defeat the Maid of Might with such a simple gesture? Any comic book loving reply guy would be quick to answer that Kryptonians like Kara and Kal-El are vulnerable to magic (what, exactly, “vulnerable” means is subject of much debate, but that’s not important right now). That fact makes Selena a compelling villain, one who brings something different than the standard baddies in Superman-related movies: the Luthors and the Zods we’ve seen time and again. No matter the iteration, the pair offer a familiar, and often sci-fi, threat. By contrast to that bog standard villainy, however, is Selena, a sorceress who reminds viewers that Superman and Supergirl are so much weirder than the blue clad boys and girl scouts they’re so often portrayed to be.
Both Superman and Supergirl have a host of magical and fantasy-based characters in their history. In Superman #14 from 1942, just four years after Superman’s first appearance, the Man of Steel gets thwarted by a pianist called Krazinski, who uses magical hypnotism to befuddle Superman. That same issue sends Superman to an undersea city, foreshadowing Lori Lemaris, a mermaid and love interest.
Beyond Lori, other magic-based characters frequent Superman’s world time and again. The fifth-dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptlk is one of Kal-El’s oldest and strongest adversaries, a trickster who can only be defeated by being tricked in turn to say his name backwards. Supes regularly fights the Silver Banshee, victim of an Irish curse. As a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superboy served alongside the magical Princess Projectra of Orando and battled the wizard Mordru. The oddball comics of the postwar, early code era dabbled in many other genres as well, including fantasy stories that saw Superman face off against mythical heroes Hercules and Samson, or joining King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.
The fantasy aspects are even more pronounced in Supergirl’s stories. She interacted with most of the same magical characters as her cousin, including Mxyzptlk and Mordru. But she had her own strange adventures, most famously involving her flying horse Comet, who changed into a human via a spell from the witch Circe and who dated Supergirl for some time. Supergirl counts among her rogues gallery the sorcerer Zond, the sorceress Nightflame, and more recently, Legion baddie the Emerald Empress, whose Emerald Eye of Ekron has magical properties.
Dunaway’s Selena may have been invented for the movie, but she’s very much in line with these eerie antagonists. Supergirl writer David Odell and director Jeannot Szwarc follow the tone and world established by Silver Age DC Comics. The Argo City of the film may look like the science-focused Krypton of Richard Donner’s movies, but it counts among its citizens the wizard Zoltar (Peter O’Toole), who holds a powerful MacGuffin called the Omegahedron. When Kara arrives on Earth and masquerades as human girl Linda Lee, Selena and the sniping warlock Nigel (Peter Cook) use their powers not just to find the Omegahedron but also to mess with Kara’s romance with groundskeeper Ethan (Hart Bochner, playing a very different type of white knight than he did in Die Hard).
The mixed-up identities, goofy romance, and earnest emotional outbursts in Supergirl fit right alongside the stories of the era, stories that formed the bedrock of the character. Even though several different versions of Supergirl have appeared since the original version died in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths #7—including a blob of shapeshifting goo, a fallen angel bonding with a teen girl, and a midriff-baring escapee from Darkseid—both the comics and adaptations keep coming back to the original version that debuted in 1959, the one who had all the magical fantasy adventures.
In fact, the next Supergirl movie will likely continue this fantasy turn. Written by Tom King and illustrated by Bilquis Evely, the 2021-2022 comic book series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow certainly has its sci-fi elements, as Kara and Superman’s dog Krypto go across an alien planet, and even some aspects of a True Grit–style Western, as it is narrated by a young girl who wants revenge against the man who killed her father.
But Evely presents the story as high-fantasy, as announced by the cover of the first issue, which shows Kara raising a sword into the sky. The series imagines Supergirl as a type of wandering warrior or a knight of old who walks into a situation and helps the defenseless, pledging her allegiance to a quest. She even reunites with Comet, albeit back in horse form.
James Gunn has announced one of the rebooted DC Universe’s next movies will be Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, and starring House of the Dragon‘s Milly Alcock as Kara. We don’t know at this point how faithful to the comic the movie will be; Gillespie’s previous films I, Tonya and Fright Night don’t have much fantasy, Western, or sci-fi in them. However, it’s hard to believe that Gunn and DC Studios co-head Peter Safran would stray too far from the source material, especially since the comic’s writer Tom King is also part of Gunn’s coterie of creators.
If indeed Woman of Tomorrow holds true to the comics, then it will be returning the all-important fantasy aspect back to the House of Steel. It will make Superman, Supergirl, and the entire DC universe that much more wonderful and strange, and it will be following in a trail blazed by Selena and Supergirl, one magical finger flick at a time.
The post Supergirl Is the Only Movie to Remember That Superman’s World Needs Magic appeared first on Den of Geek.
