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"Lita the Leopard Woman" The...
"Lita the Leopard Woman"
The Adventures of Superman Radio Serial - January, 1942Historians and reviewers of older entertainment media often walk a particularly thin line when it comes to accounting for the portrayals of race and gender in these works. The onus is to be honest about the contemporary relevance of the portrayals without exhibiting a prejudice for modern cultural standards, which is why you’ll so often see soft language such as “not-quite politically correct” and “it was a different time” used to explain the presence of sexist and racist slurs, slights, omissions and stereotypes in the reviewed material.
The impression given by this soft language is that there was no backlash, condemnation nor resentment at these offenses and insults at the time, and that it’s only by virtue of looking back from our more enlightened era that we find something wrong with what we recognize as overt racism and sexism - which all manner of civil rights and equality documents from the time prove demonstrably untrue. What was lacking in this bygone era was a cultural machine which actively discouraged and socially penalized antics like blackface, minstrelsy and slurs.
This is worth addressing because of the content of this episode’s script - you may recall Perry White’s strident “anti-Orientalism” from the earlier radio episode “Teeth of the Dragon”. Facing the Japanese double-agent The Leopard Lady in this installment of the program, and now fully at war with Japan, Perry’s bravado is doubled down and infectious – even the narrator and Clark find themselves waxing rhapsodic on the insidiousness, oiliness and guile of the “untrustworthy Oriental” …
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