Loved the parody that they did of that scene from Superman II on Family Guy.

Superman: "Take that!" (whips cellophane "S" at Zod, who's wrapped up; he falls over)

Zod: "Well. This is..."

Superman: "Inconvenient, huh?"

Zod: "Yes."

JB said:

I will indicate that we tend to refer to the powers individually -- heat vision, x-ray vision, microscopic vision, telescopic vision -- and that if, for some reason, they need to be referred to in the collective, the term is "super vision", two words. "Supervision" is a word that already exists, and has an entirely different meaning.

***

You remind me of an episode of the "Super-Chicken" backup feature on the "George of the Jungle" cartoon series.  In this particular episode, the title character kept making a gag out of the word "super vision" by saying things like "If I had any supervision, I wouldn't be flying around in this costume."  Of course, I was about eight years old at the time and had never heard the real-life word "supervision", so I totally did not get the joke until years later.

everybody notices George W. Bush's jacket-bulge?

What (from the UK)?

IMP.

In the reprints in DC Showcase Presents Superman, Superman's heat vision is at least twice described as the heat effect of his X-ray vision.

The concentration thing's not so remarkable. I'm sitting here ten feet from a TV being watched and listened to by other people, and until I want to, I don't even know what programme's on. I can be driving the car and realise that I haven't heard the last two or three songs on the stereo.

Unless I actually have - Hmm.

IMP.

stupid Mighty Morphing Cellophane Superman Symbol.  GAH!

***

Some of the odd things that Superman himself did in the fortress as a kid I attributed to him having set up things beforehand as a trap. 

Much of it seemed to be illusion or misdirection-the cellophane, the multiple Supermens who disappeared, and then his final trick switiching the lights.

That doesn't explain the finger levitiation by Zod but it worked well enough for me as a kid.,

Leave us not forget the strange powers that George Reeves' Superman had. He could walk thru walls, and levitate Lois Lane.

JB said:

The leaping turned into flight when the animators of the first cartoons found it more convenient to have Superman travel that way. His other powers increased in the way superhero powers tend to in all such characters -- with each writer trying to outdo what has come before. (See the thread on the size of the Hulk over the years!) Superman's greatest weakness, kryptonite, entered the lore when Bud Collier, who played Superman on the radio serials, wanted a vacation. The radioactive element was introduced to incapacitate the Man of Steel, so another actor could moan while Collier took his time off. Jimmy Olsen also emerged from the radio.

***

John, your comment makes me think how different that era was from today.  In those days (and I include a period up through roughly the 1970s) there was a single mythos which could be influenced by any of a variety of sources (comics, radio, tv, movies) and if the change "stuck", the other sources adapted.  But at any moment in time, there was a more-or-less unified notion of the character's status quo.  If you knew Superman from the comics (for example) then you knew exactly what to expect from a movie or cartoon short about Superman.

These days, that's not the case.  Every format seems to start "their version" of the story from scratch, and what facts you, the viewer, know about (for example) Tim Burton's Batman have little or no bearing on any other version of Batman running around out there.