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Finally watched Superman 3 again after all these years on dvd and it sure doesn't get any better with age.

You know you're in trouble right from the start with the lame opening credits. What were they thinking?! I bet people walked into the theatre and thought it was some other movie.

Then we have a woeully watered down Richard Pryor going through the motions.
I bet his character probably has just about the same screen time as Superman if not more. It sure seems that way.

And of course, the villians are a retread of the ones in the first movie. A Superman movie is only as good as its villians, and the ones here are cookie cutter,

The only good thing about the movie was near the end when Superman turns into a baddie. But apart from that, the movie pretty much stunk. And even the effects weren't really any good.

What were the opening credits like? I don't remember.

It was some kind of akward slapstick routine or something you'd find in the Three Stooges or even the cartoons. It was a lame attempt at "light hearted humor".

The only part of this I enjoyed was when he was bad Superman and sitting in thebar breaking the liquor bottles by thumping them with peanuts.

Richard Pryor was way over the top in this.

The biography I read of Richard Lester had an interesting chapter on this film. Lester was paid tons of money to direct it (above his typical fee or percentage), FU money they were calling it. Leading people to claim he held his nose and directed what he knew was going to be a lousy movie anyway, since the Salkinds were giving him enough money that he wouldn't have to take directing jobs he didn't want ever again. Lester admits he was paid very well, and admited that the film wasn't up to the standard he wanted, but denies he took on a film he knew was awful going in.

I'll have to dig the book out for more details. Might post more if I do.

I didn't mind the comic bit at the beginning. It was one of the more clever parts of the movie. But turning the whole thing into a semi-comedy seemed like a weird choice. I suppose the movies were getting more lighthearted as they went along. Superman had a touch of humour, Superman 2 had quite a few funny bits that worked very well. I guess the pattern in Hollywood is if a little is good, then a lot should be fantastic, and so we got Superman 3. Making action-comedy out of it was bad enough, but who came up with the idea of mating a Superman movie with a Richard Pryor comedy? Pryor just seems so out of place here, and it's even weirder when they make him as much the star of the picture as Reeve.

What really bugged me, even when this movie came out, was the thoroughly unbelievable way they handled the whole computer thing. Not that it was uncommon, at that time, to overestimate what people could do with a computer, but this was ridiculous. Pryor takes a night-school course and becomes a super-hacker. I can accept the idea that he's supposed to have some innate talent in this respect, but it's a huge stretch. Then he's used for some fairly unremarkable jobs by a tycoon who should have people with far more expertise (and competence) at his disposal. And if that's not bad enough, he suddenly becomes an expert in designing computer hardware as well. On a few scraps of paper, he draws up plans for an enormous, artificially-intelligent computer with all manner of defensive mechanisms, missiles, ray guns, and the ability to turn people into cyborgs. Then they just up and build it for him, and it works perfectly. What the hell?