The Special Edition of the Daily Planet that's packaged with Perry White is, amazingly enough, an actual newspaper. That is, it's not plastic and it has more than just squiggly lines printed on it. The accessory is actual paper with honest-to-god ink on it. Hot damn!
And that's not all - the text isn't just greeked! Greeking, of course, is the design/layout term for filling a space with non-sensical text (like most of Shocka's reviews) just to show what the final product will look like. You've probably seen greek somewhere before. The phrase generally starts with "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit" and then a few other things before repeating. The frequency and variety of the lettershapes approximates the way most Western languages work.
What most people don't know is that it comes from a real source, an examination of ethics written by Cicero. "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit," which pretty much means "no one loves pain itself, seeking it and craving it just because it is pain." Cicero was writing in 45BC - the Marquis de Sade wouldn't be around for another few centuries.
Anyway, the Daily Planet isn't greeked - it has real text, though it is a bit confusing. This is obviously taken from a real story, but since the final product is too small to read with the naked eye, they didn't bother with having it make sense. Well, just to underscore the importance of always taking pride in your work, we're going to share the entire text with you, our readers.
Immediately beneath the Daily Planet masthead is the edition and price. The paper was apparently on sale Friday, November 4, 1968, for $2.00. Now, think for a moment: no paper cost two dollars in 1968. A new car didn't cost $2.00 in 1968! Plus, Nov. 4 was a Monday. The font for "1968" doesn't match the rest of the line, either, so it was obviously a drop-in.
We move down to the ridiculous banner headline: "Bridge Holds Until Last Minute!" Not only is that a point size reserved for when we go to war, no one uses exclamation marks in a headline. The subhead reads "Collapse Waits For Workers To Get Clear." Fair enough, but also remarkably huge for a story about poor engineering. The story below the headline is three columns wide, though the text doesn't actually flow between them:
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anti-invasion forces, said their reason was supposedly "so the world could bear witness to our defeat. Rather, we will use it to see that those monsters are sent back to their ships with their antennae between their legs!" Ambassador Aleksandr Belonogov, |
want to give in to terrorism. And that's all this alien threat is - base terrorism of the worst kind." Vernon Walters, the United Nations |
to regain their pre-invasion status."
In his closing remarks, DeCuellar |
All that talk of aliens and surrendering the heroes makes me think of DC's Invasion crossover - considering that the company released a commemorative Daily Planet to go along with the miniseries in 1988, what do you think the odds are that DCD dredged up the old films for that edition and used them to flesh out this accessory? By the way, November 4th? A Friday in 1988. I think we have a winner.
There's another Superman-related blurb on the front page, "Inside! Child Saved From Mountain Fall!" The back page of the paper is the sports section, and there are more clues that this is of a more recent vintage than the 1968 date would have you believe - including a Sports Trivia corner that makes reference to an event in 1985 that obviously occurred in the past, and a baseball story that includes Jose Canseco and a young rookie named Mark McGwire. Seriously. The sports stories all seem to be taken from real papers, with a rather clumsy "find and replace" run to change the team names to reference Metropolis and Gotham City.
Overall, this is a very cool little accessory, and the fact that there's real text at all is more than most companies would have done. Who cares if you'd need a jeweler's loupe and an electron microscope to read it? It's like a smoke detector - you can sleep better at night knowing it's there.
P.S.: if anyone wants to read the sports stories, just say so and we'll post them, too...
