“You’re not going to shoot those little creatures. In the first place, they haven’t done you any harm. In the second place, they may be radioactive.”

Quaint and sluggish by today’s standards, Superman and the Mole Men has Clark Kent and Lois Lane visiting the world’s deepest oil well. Since apparently the earth is hollow and filled with creepy little munchkins with bald bulbous heads, when what is presumably the world’s longest drill punctures the mole-sphere and releases the radioactive critters, they creep up to the surface of the earth and begin terrorizing the town of Silsby. But not really terrorizing; their crime is their odd appearance. Real riveting stuff. It wasn’t the first silver screen adaptation of the Man of Steel—the Kirk Alyn-starring Superman and its follow-up, Atom Man vs. Superman, both played in serialized form at theaters in the preceding few years—but the film is not really geared toward the big screen anyway. Rather, it served as a springboard for The Adventures of Superman television series that starred George Reeves, who assumes the role of Clark Kent/Superman here. It served as the series’ unofficial pilot, and as such, watching the hour long film feels less like watching a movie than watching a really bloated television episode.

Compared to the Kirk Alyn serials, Mole Men is a snoozer. Very little action (something I usually prefer, but come on, I’m watching a Superman film), a self-serious Superman, and a ham-fisted message about treating strangers with kindness. Reeves is plenty charismatic in the role and his flight takeoffs and landings are already well-practiced. He gets to bend a rifle with his bare hands and absorb quite a few bullets. His padded costume makes him appear variably muscular and silly. But his enemies are not the mole men who have climbed up from the center of the earth to investigate its surface. He actually doesn’t really have any enemies (notice the title reads “and” not “vs.”); he’s more of a political peacekeeper between the two factions who relies more on big stick diplomacy than the action hero of the comics. His big moment is a speech to a mob that wants to break into a medical facility and kill an injured mole man.

Now I’m going to give you one last chance to stop acting like Nazi stormtroopers. All I’m telling you is that that little creature in there has as much right to live as you do. Don’t forget, you invaded his world. You sank a pipe six miles into the ground. When he climbed up, you set dogs on him, shot him.

I can only take so much overt moralizing, especially when there is little else in the film worthy of attention. Like The Day the Earth Stood Still (which was released the same year), Superman and the Mole Men is now seen as an intentional reaction to the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, and the film is not very subtle in going about it. For instance, when an old man sees the curious creatures, he has a heart attack and dies. When they crawl into the bedroom of a little girl, the unjaded child asks them to play ball with her because she has not yet had her worldview tainted by society.

As Lois Lane, Phillys Coates is a go-getter with a tough edge, much like Margot Kidder’s portrayal in the Christopher Reeve films. She is resilient, level-headed, and sassy; an intellectual match for Clark Kent, who wasn’t as distinct from his alter ego as most adaptations have him. This was likely because Superman isn’t on screen a whole lot, and so Clark Kent was kind of “standing in” for Superman. Clark Kent is not the awkward self-conscious oaf that we expect. Instead he is an assertive moral teacher, the voice of tolerance against the screaming mob. He also does not hesitate to toss on a smock and help a doctor remove a bullet from a wounded mole man. I haven’t seen much of The Adventures of Superman, but surely George Reeves’s portrayal here is much too straight-faced to have kept it for a children’s series. In any case, I see nothing here that would have caused such a stir with children as the series obviously did.

Shot in less than two weeks on a studio backlot, Superman and the Mole Men is simply an altogether different thing than what audiences were expecting several decades later when the 1978 film hit theaters, let alone what audiences expect today. Film studios hadn’t come anywhere close to figuring out how to produce superhero films, and they weren’t marketing them to adults. For a low-budget effort thrown together as a way to recoup potential losses if the television series flopped, it turned out alright, and has aged about as you would expect. Its sincerity is admirable, and though it would have been nice to see at least a wrinkle or two in trying to convey their message with subtlety, can I really ask that of what is essentially an extended episode of a children’s television show?