Superman has faced his share of super-villains over the years, including Bizarro, Mr. Mxyzptlk and, of course, Lex Luthor. But for this third installment of the highly-successful franchise, he would take on the likes of a comedic icon Richard Pryor, a bumbling yet promising computer programmer in the 1983 offering, Superman III.

Corporate megalomaniac Ross Webster is intent on destroying the Columbia coffee crops. To achieve his goal, he dispatches an employee, Gus Gorman (Pryor,) to Clark Kent’s hometown of Smalltown to reprogram a weather satellite. Gus is, for the most part, a perpetual loser but he does have one formidable talent – computer programming. Unbeknownst to him, however, Clark (aka: Superman) is back in Smalltown himself, rekindling a high school romance with Lana Lang and trying to get back to his old roots.

Eventually Superman catches wind of the computer programmer and shuts down his operations, infuriating the big boss, Webster. He orders Gus to create a synthetic substitute for Kryptonite but the prodigious programmer hits a few snags, thanks to a few components that register as “unknown.” Fearing ruthless repercussions from the big guy if he fails, Gus decided to fill in a few of the blanks, and uses cigarette tar as one of the unknown ingredients.

His faux-Kryptonite has unexpected results on the caped one, splitting Superman into two entities, one good and one decidedly evil. While these two battle it out for supremacy, Gus has managed to create a new sinister super computer for his boss. Soon, the Man of Steel has his hands full against the pernicious processor, which leads to him chasing a nuclear weapon through the Grand Canyon.

Even with most of the cast returning for Superman III (including a brief appearance by Margot Kidder as Lois Lane,) audiences didn’t quite connect with the film. While the two previous movies occasionally had their comedic moments, they tended to take things a little more seriously overall than in Superman III and filmgoers weren’t quite ready to see their beloved franchise lean more towards laughs than suspenseful drama. Learning from this misjudgment, the fourth film, released in 1987, would once again return to the more serious side of the superhero, with nary a comedian to be found.