Giant Freakin Robot

Christopher Reeve will always be my Superman. Maybe it’s because I was watched that movie a thousand times growing up, and it won a space in my heart when I was old enough to know that it was just a movie…but still young enough to believe, just a little, that a man really could fly. And while Donner’s Superman has its failings, the stuff it got right, it got really right. Marlon Brando’s speech to Kal-El, backed by John Williams’ perfect, iconic score, will give me chills and choke me up within mere seconds. This was an iconography, an act of legend-building, that still brings me right back to six years old, sitting on my living room floor and watching with wonder as a strange visitor from another world took flight and saved the day. I remember actually feeling tears fill my eyes when Christopher Reeve appeared on Smallville and they subtly worked in Williams’ score. It was magical.

So what would happen if you replaced the soundtrack for the Man of Steel trailer with Brando’s Jor-El speech to his infant son, and with John Williams’ score? The word is “goosebumps.”