Since comic books may have such diverse effects on children, from distortion of human values to nightmares and violent games, one must make clear to oneself what psychological mechanisms are involved. The influence consists in a continuation or repetition of the contents of the stories in life, either in thought or in action. The simplest mechanism is just plain imitation.
This factor of copying in action a detail from a comic book has been brought home by the cases where children hanged themselves.
It is in the youngest children that one can see the process of imitation most clearly at work. A four-year-old boy in Florida looked through his brother's comic books, and his mother found him under a tree stark naked, with a long knife in his hands. Stunned, she asked him why he had undressed himself, and what he was doing. He replied, "The man in the comics did it." Later he showed her pictures where some Mongols" had a white man stripped naked and one of them had a long knife to cut out the American's tongue.
In California a very handsome six-year-old boy on his way home from school one day trudged to the top of a steep cliff. An ardent comic-book reader, he had translated his reading into practice and made for himself a flying cape or magic cloak. Taking a brisk run, he jumped off the cliff to fly as his comic book heroes did. Seriously injured, he told his mother, "Mama, I almost did fly!" A few days later he died from the injuries he had received.
How the comic-book defenders can deny the role of imitation in good faith is hard to see. During one of the debates in the British House of Commons, where the defense of English children against American comics was discussed, one member, a former judge, mentioned a case he had tried. Some juveniles had attacked another child on Hampstead Heath in London. He summed up his Opinion: "Their crime was in fact imitative. They had seen the glorification of violence as illustrated in these comics; they had seen how the heroes used the rope, the dagger, the knife and the gun; they had seen how they were glorified, and they simply imitated the example of the heroes portrayed in these lurid publications."
George Reeves as Superman promoting Superman play suits in the 1950s.
Sometimes it is contended that imitation is far too simple a mechanism to explain anything in the behavior of children. Does not modern psychology know much more now about the complex behavior of human beings, about unconscious factors, infantile experiences and similar factors? This argument is pseudo-erudite and utterly false.
A similar misunderstanding is sometimes found in popular writings about modern physics. It is true that the general theory of relativity embraces complex happenings in the physical world. But that does not mean that for innumerable simple happenings the laws of gravitation are not adequate. If an apple falls from a table, Newton is enough for our understanding of how to keep the apples on the table next time. For that we do not need Einstein. Newtonian physics is a special case of Einstein's physics. Just as the laws of gravitation were not abolished by Einstein, so the psychological mechanism of imitation is not abolished in its field of application by the deeper psychology of Freud.
NOTE: Have yet to find any newspaper articles from the early 1950s confirming stories about kids trying to fly like Superman by jumping off roofs, etc. but there is this study from the National Library of Medicine (for modern context).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2083410/
Fred’s Video Collection
"Batdance" is almost two songs in one - a chaotic, mechanical dance beat that changes gears into a slinky, funky groove before changing back for the song's conclusion. The track is an amalgam of many musical ideas of Prince's at the time. Mashed with the Batman and Robin serial (1949). Directed by Spencer Bennet. Cinematography by Ira H. Morgan. Edited by Dwight Caldwell and Earl Turner.