The Return of ‘The Stolen Costume’

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The Return of ‘The Stolen Costume’
By Philip Schweier
July 24, 2025 - 11:23

The Adventures of Superman premiered on television in 1952, and many fans of the series regard its first season as their favorite. Storylines were more mature, and it would be a season or two before the show descended into campiness. A stand-out episode of season 1 is “The Stolen Costume,” in which a small-time gangster uses Superman’s costume in an attempt to blackmail him.

Ace and Connie appear grainy and scratched in a screenshot of "The Stolen Costume."

However, when the series was released on DVD several years back, that particular episode stood out for other reasons. Rather than a clear, clean version (as much as one could achieve with 50-year-old footage), the digitized film is worn and choppy. Some fans felt that Warner Home Video should have made a greater effort to present the best possible version. It’s often a subject of discussion on Facebook and other social media.

The half-hour episode opens with T-Bone, a professional burglar on the run from the police. In a desperate bid to escape, he climbs through the window of the first available apartment, inadvertently opening a secret closet. Inside, he discovers Superman’s costume, left behind while Clark Kent is at the doctor’s office being examined for the Daily Planet’s group insurance. Realizing there’s more to the hidden closet than he understands, T-Bone grabs the suit and slips out the back of the building, where he is injured by an eager officer’s bullet. Mortally wounded, he makes his way to the apartment of Ace, a small-time crook (played by Dan Seymour) and his squeeze, Connie (Veda Ann Borg). Before breathing his last, T-Bone tells them where he found the costume, and the indestructible nature of the costume convinces Ace and Connie that they’ve discovered a major clue to Superman’s secret identity.

Frank Jenks

Meanwhile, Clark Kent is frantic to locate whoever took his costume. He enlists the help of private detective Candy Meyers (played by B-movie regular Frank Jenks), who agrees to help even though Clark is unable to explain what exactly has been stolen.

Connie visits Clark’s apartment building, where she mistakes Candy for Clark Kent. Making the connection between Clark Kent of the Daily Planet and Superman, Ace and Connie are convinced Kent and Superman are one and the same. But they mistake Candy for Clark, and the private eye is kidnapped at gunpoint.

Witnessing Candy’s abduction, Clark follows Ace and Connie back to their place. As Ace is about to put Candy to the bullet-proof test, Clark bursts in at super-speed and knocks Candy unconscious so he doesn’t overhear their discussion regarding Superman’s costume. Convinced they have the upper hand, Ace and Connie are eager “to put the whammy on the Superman racket, but good.”

Rather than negotiate, Superman’s short-term solution is to fly Ace and Connie to a distant mountain top, where the frozen terrain will prevent their escape. After promising to return with food and supplies to build a shelter, Superman leaves, but Ace believes they've been abandoned. He convinces Connie they can climb down, only for the treacherous ice and snow to lead to their grisly doom.

And therein lies the likely reason for the disappointing quality of the film footage. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, the target audience for the serialized adventures of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers – and of course, Superman – was your average 12-year-old boy. He expected a lot of action and thrills for his hard-earned dime, and the producers were happy to deliver. By 1950, serials had faded from theaters, and the writers and technicians accustomed to working fast and cheap migrated to television.

When Superman flew onto TV screens in 1952, children of the post-war baby boom were perhaps 7 years old, at most. Moms across America were reportedly upset at the show’s level of violence. Ace and Connie’s morbid demise – albeit by their own hand – can be deemed one of the more gruesome moments of the first season. For this reason, some of the markets that broadcast the show may have excluded the episode from rotation. While fresh prints of other episodes were better maintained, “The Stolen Costume” may have been overlooked as a cost-cutting measure.

However, die-hard fans of the series can enjoy a cleaner copy of “The Stolen Costume,” thanks to Archive.org, the Internet’s repository for a variety of programming and publications that may or may not be in the public domain. Season 1 (26 episodes) of the Adventures of Superman is available in its entirety, as well as season 2 – also 26 episodes, all in glorious black & white. The four remaining seasons are reduced to 13 episodes each, to defray the added expense of filming in color. Producer Whitney Ellsworth rightfully believed shooting in color would make the series more marketable when color TVs became the norm.

Click here to enjoy the first season of the Adventures of Superman.