CREDITS SUPERMAN, 1978 dir: Richard Donner Christopher Reeve Marlon Brando Gene Hackman Margot Kidder Ned Beatty Trevor Howard Terence Stamp Susannah York Harry Andrews

“Your name is Kal-El. You are the only survivor of the planet Krypton. Even though you've been raised as a human, you are not one of them. You have great powers, only some of which you have as yet discovered.”

The wheatfields of ‘Smallville’, Clark Kent’s childhood home, are around Calgary in Alberta, Canada, as is the beautiful lakeside setting where Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) and his cohorts commandeer missiles.

The ‘Daily Planet’ building is the splendid art-deco News Building, 220 East 42nd Street between Second and Third Avenues, New York, formerly the New York Daily News Building (the fifties TV series of Superman famously used Los Angeles City Hall, 200 North Spring Street, downtown LA).

The roof, from which Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) is rescued from the ’copter crash, is the US Post Office Building, 450 Lexington Avenue at 45th Street (though, in 1992, a 32-story office tower was added to the historic eight-story building).

Lois’s apartment is 240 Central Park South, from which she and Supes go for a night-time spin around the Statue of Liberty.

Luthor's lair is supposedly beneath Grand Central Station, and that is the real concourse, where Otis (Ned Beatty) is tailed to the rail lines beneath, though the hideout itself is an imaginative set built at Pinewood Studios in the UK.

Superman’s feats involve saving a school bus on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and rescuing Jimmie Olsen from the collapsing Boulder Dam, Nevada.

The ‘San Andreas Fault’, which opens up to swallow Lois, was filmed at at Red Rock State Park near Gallup, New Mexico (the area has been renamed Superman Canyon).

Bryn Singer's addition to the series, Superman Returns (2006) was filmed at the increasingly popular Fox Studios in Sydney, New South Wales, which also hosted the filming of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith.

Not surprisingly, the real locations are around the Sydney area. This time around, the ‘Kansas’ farm of Mrs Kent (Eva Marie Saint) was built at Breeza, 30 miles southwest of Tamworth. The ëVanderworth Mansioní, inherited by Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is Rivendell Hospital, Hospital Road, Concord West on the Parramatta River (please note that, unlike many filming locations, this is still a working hospital). The home of Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) is on the artificially created James Cook Island in Sylvania Waters, setting of the legendary 1992 reality soap. The raid on ‘Newhart Federal Bank’ uses University House at the University of Newcastle, around Civic Park and King Street, Newcastle.

Superman (Brandon Routh) gently lowers the runaway car down by the fountain in Martin Place, which you might recognise as the ëvirtualí street where Neo (Keanu Reeves) is distracted by the woman in the red dress in The Matrix. ëMetropolis Museumí, from which Luthor steals the lethal crystal of kryptonite, is the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney, while ëMetropolis General Hospitalí, in which the injured man of Steel recovers, is not a hospital at all, but Wynyard Station, York Street.