The Adventures of Superman (1959): 💥SUPERMAN to the RESCUE!💥

PSSHHHHHHT! Superman comes in for a landing. This show was so primitive that it's laughable now, but we ate it up. George Reeves didn't really have the build for it, and he didn't look so good in tights, but it didn't seem to matter. And we won't get into the murky circumstances of his death. (The myth is that he committed suicide by jumping off a building, proving he really COULDN'T fly in real life.) 

My brother Arthur used to lie across the back of the sofa and make "pssshhhhh" sounds. I was actually pretty scared of that intense, dramatic opening: "It's a bird!" "It's a plane!", and it really was pretty creepy to see Reeves standing there suspended in the middle of space while everyone exclaimed about it, and an American flag flapped in the background. ("Truth! Justice! And the American Way!" I won't get into the irony of THAT statement.) 

Fun fact: the announcer doing the famous "yes, it's Superman" voiceover was  Bill Kennedy, a radio host who later did a TV movie show called Bill Kennedy Showtime which I watched on Detroit TV. He often reminisced about various movies in which he played bit parts, as well as his radio career.