Watch! Back on the Air! It’s . . . Good Old ‘Superman’!

Jim Hambrick telephoned from a New York hotel room, sounding as excited as a 5-year-old kid who just tugged on Superman’s cape.

And why not?

Hambrick and Superman actually are old friends, having met a long time ago in that fantasy world that little boys create and then inhabit. They don’t realize it at the time but it’s the best world they’ll ever know, peopled by heroes who never let them down and landscaped with endings that are always happy.

“Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . !”

Hambrick couldn’t even read and write when he got hooked on the “Superman” TV series starring George Reeves. Over the years, Hambrick maintained his contact with Superman, first as just a kid in love with a super-hero but then as an adult with something of a personal passion. His Fountain Valley home became a Superman museum and he came to be recognized, with a hard-core group of about 3,000 others around the country, as a true Superman trivia scholar.

That’s what led Hambrick, now 37, to New York this week to help celebrate the Nickelodeon cable TV channel’s purchase of all 104 “Superman” episodes and its plans to begin airing them regularly next Monday night. To prime the pump, Nick will have “Superman” marathon programming for much of this weekend, starting tonight.

Hambrick’s love of Superman has sent him on a mission of sorts. After all Superman did for him, he figured, why not try to help out the Man of Steel?

To that end, Hambrick has tried for several years to clear the smudge surrounding the death of George Reeves, TV’s Superman. Officially, Reeves committed suicide on June 16, 1959, but Hambrick says Reeves was murdered as the result of his involvement in a love triangle.

“The police investigation was very shallow,” Hambrick said. “They just took everybody’s word for what happened.” The story put out at the time, Hambrick said, was that Reeves was despondent because he couldn’t overcome his Superman image. The truth, Hambrick said, is that Reeves had numerous offers.

Still, the headlines shook a generation of kids. “In the newspapers,” Hambrick said, “the headlines all said, ‘Superman Kills Himself.’ They didn’t say, ‘George Reeves Kills Himself.’ ”

Hambrick, who already owns copies of all 104 episodes, said he’s looking forward to tonight’s airing of “Superman and the Molemen,” the one-hour feature that served as the pilot for the series. In that episode, Molemen come up from the center of the Earth through an oil well.

Hambrick also recommends the “Panic in the Sky” episode in which Superman gets amnesia from bumping into an asteroid made of Kryptonite.

Not that we wanted them to, but you have to wonder why Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson could never figure out that Clark was Superman. “It’s kind of like a secret between you and Clark Kent,” Hambrick said. “A lot of times they’d get real close, like one time Clark was taking his shirt off and Jimmy Olson was standing behind him.”

Why did so many of us love Superman? “It was the way George came across as a serious, no-nonsense type of guy, who was believable, fighting for truth, justice and the American way, stamping out evil . . . and the fact that he could fly,” Hambrick said. “They made that believable and the format was easily understood by children.”

Hambrick said the series’ first season in 1952 was more violent than subsequent years because Whitney Ellsworth, who had been the Superman comic book editor, took over the TV reins. Just as he had toned down the violence for comic books, Ellsworth did the same for TV.

For Hambrick, the fascination “started when I was 5 years old. I was hooked on it and I have been ever since. Growing up without a father was where I was at that age. He was kind of a father to me. I related to him like Jimmy Olson did.”

Like Hambrick, I’ll be watching as many “Superman” episodes as I can in the weeks ahead. I’ll probably recite the opening sequence every time and be amazed and warmed at how easily I remember the episodes.

But as long as we’re on the subject, I’ve got a beef with the critics, too.

When you do one thing exceptionally well, you tend to get overlooked for your other attributes. And I’ve always had a nagging feeling that Clark didn’t get his just deserts for being the top-notch newsman that he was.

So to the new generation of Superman fans, a suggestion: Spend less time watching Superman change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel and more time studying Clark Kent writing on deadline.

Take it from a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, poor Clark had the much tougher job.