'Adventures of Superman' on Radio: The First Great Adaptation
"Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!"
"Look! Up in the sky!"
"It's a bird!"
"It's a plane!"
"It's — Superman!"
Nowadays, those words are so inextricably tied to Superman that it's hard to imagine the character existing without them, but it wasn't the comic book page that brought them to audiences. It was the Adventures of Superman radio show, which debuted on this day in 1940 and would spend the next decade helping to shape the character and how people related to him, adding interesting twists and characters to the ongoing mythos and providing the source of genuine change in the world beyond the airwaves.