Trivia / Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

• Acting for Two: Superman and Lois both have their share of lookalikes. Teri Hatcher plays dual roles as Lois and her clone (Clois) in Season Three.
• The Cast Show Off:
  • Cain was a college football star until a shoulder injury. During the show's run he wanted to remind people that he was still a strong athlete by appearing on an American Gladiators celebrity edition. Plus there was that one-on-one game with Bo Jackson.
  • In "I've Got A Crush On You", Teri Hatcher sings the eponymous musical number. In the third season, she followed up with "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", written by Jimmie Cox in 1923 and recorded by many blues artists including Bessie Smith and Janis Joplin.
  • Michael Des Barres (Murdoc from MacGyver (1985)), who is also a musician, sings an awesome Hair Metal ballad in "Wall of Sound."
  • Kenneth Kimmins does a spot-on impersonation of Sean Connery. And no, it doesn't pertain to the plot.
• Creative Differences: Deborah Joy LeVine, developer of the series, didn't want Clark and Lois to get married until the Series Finale; ABC felt otherwise, resulting in her being kicked off the show at the end of season 1. There was also some conflict about demographics, with the network wanting to feature Superman more in order to pull in the most lucrative 18- to 35-year-old white male viewers.
• Creator Couple: Jon Tenney, who played Ching, was Teri Hatcher's husband at the time.
• Enforced Method Acting: In this version of the mythos, before Superman shows up, Lex Luthor is shown to be an adrenaline junkie, staring down cobras and punching out sharks. There was only enough money to film one of these scenes, and the snake wrangler evidently ate up the safety budget, so John Shea had to stare down a poisonous snake for real.
  • According to Shea, another scene had him yelling at the top of his lungs into a phone while waving a cigar around. Some ash fell on his hand and badly scorched it, but he was forced to keep his game face on or else ruin the closeup. When the director called cut, everybody yelled 'great job!' as though they'd witnessed a skilled actor at the height of his powers.^note Indeed, they had. The greatest actors are the ones who can Throw It In! when such things happen.
• Executive Meddling: There were fights between the writers, the execs, and the fans as to whether Lois and Clark would tie the knot in the show.
  • Also a good example of Pandering to the Base by the fourth season. The fandom, specifically one corner of it, had far too much influence on the show, resulting in the ridiculousness of villain after villain wanting to break them up. You know, instead of actual cases and stories.
  • It got so bad the episode they got married was called "Swear to God, This Time We're Not Kidding". Phew, good thing they weren't getting desperate or anything.
  • It also interfered with the comic book marriage which would have originally happened in 1992 but was postponed to coincide with the TV show marriage. The resulting gap in their story arc led Jerry Ordway (the then-current writer/penciller of The Adventures of Superman) to comment, "Let's just kill him." The rest is history.
  • Before the show even got on the air, it caused this to The Adventures of Superboy — Warner Bros. feared that having two different Super-shows on the air would confuse people; not only that, but they didn't have any control over Superboy (the Salkinds had chosen Viacom to distribute instead; they hadn't sold their TV rights despite selling the Superman film rights to The Cannon Group). WB filed a lien to prevent the Salkinds from doing any more Superboy stuff, and this resulted in that show getting canned and it being Screwed by the Lawyers for many years.
• Fake Nationality: Patrick Sullivan is played by an English actor, hence the unconvincing brogue.
• Fake Russian: A pair of fake Ukrainians in "Lucky Leon". (Including Mark Rolston).
• I Am Not Spock: Averted. Dean Cain admits that hearing 'Hey, it's Superman' in the supermarket takes some of the sting out of being typecast, while John Shea can't even show his face in China without hearing, "Ooh, Rex Ruger!"
• Irony as She Is Cast: Dean Cain is afraid of flying in real life.
• Method Acting: John Shea took Lex Luthor very seriously. Not only did he study Nietzsche, but he checked himself into John Jay College of Criminal Justice in-character to get a diagnosis on 'his' pathology.
• The Other Darrin:
  • The notable changeover from Michael Landis to Justin Whalin (as Jimmy Olsen). The main issue behind Landis' removal was that he looked too old to be a believable Jimmy. And though he played the comedy well, he was a bit too cool to be Clark's sidekick.
  • Lois' family is completely overhauled from Season 2 onward. Harve Presnell and Beverly Garland take over the roles of Sam and Ellen Lane, respectively (it helps that Garland looks a lot like Teri Hatcher). Lois' sister Lucy is played by two women before dropping off the map altogether.
  • Terry Kiser plays H. G. Wells in two episodes out of four, with Hamilton Camp standing in for him as an older incarnation.
  • Jor-El is played by two actors (three if you count his silhouette in "Never on Sunday").
  • Inspector (Or Detective; the show can't decide) Henderson is first played by Brent Jennings, before undergoing a Race Lift with Richard Belzer. In the fourth season, he reverts to black again, this time played by Mel Winkler.
  • In a strange case of The Other Darrin, there are two version of the Toyman in this series. The first, Winslow Schott, is a Child Hater named after the comic book Toyman's real name and is played by Sherman Hemsley. A second villain (this time explicitly referred to "Toyman") appears in Season Four, hews closer to the original comic depiction, that of a creeper who actually prefers the company of kids.
  • Jon Tenny, the original actor for Ching, was unable to return for the fourth season. He is replaced by Mark Kieley in the premiere episode.
• Playing Against Type: In Ghosts Drew Carey plays a shifty con man while Kathy Kinney plays a rather kind and browbeaten ghost who serves him.
• Real-Life Relative: Dean Cain's mother, actress Sharon Thomas, has a brief cameo in 'Season's Greedings' as the customer who gets into a fistfight with Lois over a toy doll. She's also the waitress Maisie in 'The Green, Green Glow of Home.'
• Recycled Set: "Smallville" in season one is pretty obviously a redressed Metropolis set.
• Screwed by the Network: The series was actually a lock to return for a fifth season early on in the fourth, but the network wanted out (likely due to declining ratings). The series wound up being put on hiatus for a time, but when it came back, there was no promotion and ratings fell even further. Even worse, by the time cancellation was definite, the series was stuck with one heck of a loose end.
• Star-Making Role: For Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher.
• Technology Marches On: The introduction of the Kents in season one had a gag where Lois expected them to be technologically clueless and behind the times, up until Martha offers to let her use the fax in her office. Today having a fax machine is itself incredibly behind the times.
  • On the second episode, when faced with a court warrant and the option to take their computers instead, Clark prods Lois on not making backups "on floppy disks"; today, you would use USB drives and/or cloud storage. The importance of backups themselves, however, has not aged at all; if anything, today Lois would be considered to not be doing her job properly if she didn’t do proper backups (assuming the Planet itself was not making sure of this, though it would still be her responsibility to be sure she was saving files to the right location to be backed up).
• Throw It In!: Right before the Closing Credits in "Ghosts" Teri Hatcher waves a spatula around and splatters (an offscreen) Dean Cain with egg goop. Her reaction was so funny that they evidentially chose to leave it in.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Gerard Christopher from The Adventures of Superboy won over the casting director with his audition. Then he read for the producers and won them over too. Then they read his resumé, found out he had already played Clark, and passed on him on the spot since they wanted a new face.
  • Kevin Sorbo was in the running to play Clark/Superman. In fact, it was a toss-up between him and Dean Cain. (skip to 6:09 for the good stuff.)
    Cain: I heard his audition, too. I was like, "Oh, I got this."
  • Several very famous actresses auditioned for the part of Martha Kent, all of them inspired by the "silver haired farm matron" in the Christopher Reeve films. K Callan showed up in a pink track suit and sneakers and was almost instantly given the role.
  • An earlier script for "Seconds" had Mindy Church team up with Lex to try and kill Superman, and being punished for her crimes.
  • Lex Luthor was going to be the villain of "Soul Mates" instead of Tempus, but John Shea was filming something else and couldn't make it.
  • The unmade Season 5 would have revealed that the baby left at Lois and Clark's doorstep was a Kryptonian royal, stowed away for his own safety. He would rapidly age into a pre-teen, and develop his own powers. Ultimately he would have left the earth to return to his own people.
• Word of God: According to executive producer Brad Buckner, the baby that Lois and Clark found on their doorstep in the series finale was supposed to be Kryptonian royalty. Had they gone to a season five, the storyline was supposed to be Lois and Clark protecting the baby from potential assassins.
• Written by Cast Member: Dean Cain wrote "Season's Greedings" and "Virtually Destroyed" (from a story by himself and Sean Brennan); Teri Hatcher co-wrote the notably Lois-centric "It's A Small World After All."
• You Look Familiar:
  • In the first season, Leslie Jordan plays a scientist who invents an Invisibility Cloak. He returns the next season as Resplendent Man.
  • He's not the only one. A number of character actors turned up in different roles throughout the series. Lois' mafioso friend in "Foundling" ('I know guys who know guys') turned up a few episodes later as a harried gunshop owner.

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