I was thinking about buying Superman: The Movie (1978) yesterday and so checked it out at amazon.com. There are a couple of versions. The first DVD from 2001. The four-DVD set from 2006. And now the Blu-Ray version.

Looking over the choices, I got a sense of how much the great communication tool of our age — this thing here — is on autopilot. First, plugging in “Superman: The Movie” into amazon's search engine brought back the following options, in order:

1. Superman: The Movie (Blu-Ray)
2. Full Metal Jacket (Blu-Ray)
3. Stir of Echoes (Blu-Ray)
4. Superman: The Movie (Four-Disc)
5. Superman: The Movie (2001)
6. Superman: The Movie (HD-DVD)
7. Swordfish (Blu-Ray)
8. American Psycho (Blu-Ray)
9. The Devil's Rejects (Blu-Ray)
10. Superman: The Movie (soundtrack)

Stir of Echoes? American Psycho? Top results, indeed.

More bothersome, to me anyway, was the cast list for the 2001 version. The film apparently starred, in order, Vass Anderson, Harry Andrews, Ned Beatty and Marlon Brando. That's it. The four-disc set gave us more familiar names (Reeve, Kidder, Brando, Hackman) but the new Blu-Ray version goes alphabetical again: Kirk Alyn, Vass Anderson, Harry Andrews, etc. This list is even more problematic because Alyn did star as Superman, but in the 1948 serial, so the listing might confuse the few people actually searching for that one.

Both of these errors, by the way, are quality-control issues, but, because I'm cynical, I assume the search-engine mistake is intentional — a way of getting unwanted Blu-Ray discs before our bloodshot eyes — while the alphabetical listing is an unintentional, autopilot, no-one's-paying-attention error. Expect to see more of both.

Oh, and Vass Anderson? He played Third Elder.

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