The Superpup Effect...

Years ago, I bought a copy of a movie called "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla." It was dirt cheap, and with a title like that, how could I not? So I brought it home and started to watch it. I got maybe fifteen minutes into it before I had to shut it off. Didn't even get to any scenes of Bela Lugosi. One of the two main characters spent the entire time doing a bad Jerry Lewis impersonation that grated on my nerves like nails on a blackboard. Eventually it got to the point where I just couldn't continue. And so the DVD sat around for years, collecting dust, and I hardly dared to look at it, much less try to watch it again.

Flash forward to a couple of years ago. A friend of mine loaned me a boxed set of Superman DVDs. In addition to all the mainstream Superman movies, it was loaded with special features and obscure stuff that most people had never even heard of, much less seen. Among these things was a failed pilot called "The Adventures of Superpup."

Adventures of Superpup was conceived because George Reeves had killed himself (or possibly died under mysterious circumstances, if you've seen Hollywoodland) while the Superman TV show was at the height of its popularity. And in the wake of this tragedy, the network executives proceeded to ask one question: "Is there any way we can keep making money off of Superman?" There were still a bunch of sets left over from the show. There were still a bunch of kids who wanted to see Superman, and would pay big money for whatever cereal he endorsed. So a pilot was produced, and that pilot was The Adventures of Superpup. It used whatever was left over from the Superman TV show, only instead of people the show was about dogs. Played by little people wearing dog masks, with character names like "Bark Bent" and "Pamela Poodle," who were reporters for the Daily Bugle.

If you're thinking that sounds awful, you don't know the half of it. It's physically painful to sit through. I could drive myself half mad trying to comprehend exactly what any individual person involved in the production of this pilot could possibly have been thinking at the time, but I'd really rather not give it any more thought than I have to. Suffice it to say, this was a terrible TV-watching experience.

So after this abomination was over, I went over to the shelf where my copy of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla was sitting, virtually untouched for a good seven or eight years. I popped it in the DVD player and proceeded to watch it, beginning to end, without so much as a cringe or a flinch. Up until that moment, it had been the worst cinematic monstrosity I had ever seen in my life. But now suddenly, by comparison, it wasn't all that bad.

I call this the Superpup Effect. When you endure something so abysmal that anything else seems fully tolerable, almost easy, by comparison. Frequently accompanied by the assertion, "Yeah, this is bad... But hey, at least it's not as bad as Superpup!"