It wouldn't matter at all. Him being dead wouldn't stop them from making movies or cartoons or video games or whatever else kids learn superheroes from. Kids are not reading comics and it was only 20 years ago. Lois and Clark, STAS, Smallville, etc would have all still been made.

>>77950124
Interesting question, casuals don't know him from comics but would knowing he's dead in comics reduce his pop culture status?

I guess it depends on whether there'd still be merchandise, cartoon, tv show and movie appearances etc...

>>77950164
>>77950177
I posed the question with characters like Gwen Stacy in mind. Sure, she makes occasional appearances in media and occasionally writers try to bring her back (via clone or shapeshifting or something like that) but for all intents and purposes, she is dead.

>>77950340
Funny how besides origin story characters she's the last of the dead-is-dead characters to stay that way.

>>77950124
Nobody would give a fuck, much like they don't now.

>>77950340
Gwen Stacy is not Superman. You'd need to kill him like in the 50s for it to be applicable not in the 90s after he's become a huge cultural icon because of the movies and shit. Nothing would have changed in the public perception.

In the DCU it might have been interesting. Though even then they would have brought him back eventually like Barry Allen, Supergirl, and Hal Jordan came back.

I don't think they ever intended for him to stay dead. I don't think they even considered it, although I don't have a single fact to back that up.

>>77950340
>in mind

Did you assume people here are mind-readers? Or why would you post Superman cover when you had on mind Gwen Stacy?

>>77950941
It was just a gimmick to get his popularity up. There's an interview on youtube of the creators and their intentions.

>>77951048
Actually, they wanted to have Superman and Lois marry but the higher ups said they couldn't do it until the then-current show did.

>>77951095
That has nothing to do with his death. His sales were down and they needed people talking about him again.

>>77950977
Maybe I wanted to hear answers to my interpretation of the question as well as others interpretation?

>>77951124
That's not what happened. They did this in place of them marrying. There's an entire documentary about this opposed to the "interview" you talked about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Zo7B9RJIM

They originally wanted to have Superman and Lois marry, the show executives wouldn't do let them so they killed Superman instead.

Would have been cool if Kal El actually stayed dead and another Kryptonian took up the mantle of Superman, instead of predictably bringing him back to life.

>>77951211
Could've been additional motivation, but the sales and popularity the story got is pretty clear that they wanted to get more people interested.

>>77951300
I don't know what to say anymore. Watch the documentary, all of the creators involved make it clear this was because their other big story had been shelved for some time.

>>77951343
I don't care enough to watch it. Also seems like a pretty stupid thing to do just cause they couldn't marry him off.

>we can't have Clark and Lois marry yet, guys
>so we'll just kill him off
wat

>>77951379
The marriage was going to be their big story and they wanted to keep up the momentum. It may not have been *as* big as his death, but their official marriage made the news too.

>>77951274
There weren't any other Kryptonians then, that was what the reboot did. Maybe you'd have gotten a Daxamite.

>>77950124
I wished they had took the "children of Superman" story arc and actually went with it, like having characters like Steel and Superboy and Captain Marvel try to fill in for him, and maybe the then Lex Luthor clone might have gotten powers and tried to become Superman and he gets a greater respect for supes after having to deal with the shit he deals with, and maybe several country's goverments try to make their own Superman to spread their influence through like "Truth, Justice and the X way" and stuff like that so one of the goverments creates their Superman with science, and the other is a robot and the other is like a mutant plant creature (since supes gets his powers from the sun), and maybe the older heroes have to return since Superman is dead and shit is going bad, and maybe the new Supermen can fight the bad guys just fine but they can inspire the people like Kal-El could, and maybe Louis is pregnant so they have to take care of the baby and maybe a alien invasion happens so the many Supes have to put aside their diferences and unite to fight that. And in the End everyone learns that Superman isn't and will never trully be dead as long as we hold true to his ideals he will live in all of us.