Can't speak for adults, but I was nine at the time and it completely passed me by. Might just have been my particular age or where I lived, but Superman and those sorts of films were mot very popular, more something your Dad would watch on a Sunday afternoon - nothing like what the Marvel film franchise became around ten years later.

I'm kinda ashamed to say that the first I really heard about his injury was through listening to Eminem.

Regards Christopher Reeve's, it was just another story in a news feed for me. I was around for the first release and still think he was the GOAT. It was interesting to see him pop up a few times, like Michael Fox does now. I'm 59.

Nobody seemed to care that much. At least me and those around me. I'm 41.

I'm definitely old enough to remember the 1990s, but the first I even heard of him was sometime in the early 2000s from a poor taste comedy skit.

I don't think there's been any significant historiography of the subject.

So you'll have to settle for non academic anecdotal stuff. Which is the norm here on lemmy, but people seem to forget both that no community here has the ability to be as reliable as the parent sub, as well as that anecdotal information is still valuable, and valid for non academic purposes.

Yeah, Reeves being crippled^1 shook a lot of us gex-xers up. It wasn't that anyone thought he was immortal, or had super powers for real. It was that he was not only Superman on screen, he was the first pop culture icon of our age group to get fucked up. People dying sucked, but who else that was that big a name, that represented good met that kind of brutal injury? Nobody.

Which meant that a lot of my generation had a come to jesus moment where they realized that anybody could have one bad thing fuck their life up permanently. Before him, if you didn't experience it more directly via a loved one, or yourself, you were still young and disability hitting in a second wasn't on your radar.

95? I was in my early twenties and had grown up when Reeve was this larger than life figure. He fell off a horse. And never moved on his own again. I was a nurse's assistant, wiping the asses of people in the same condition, and it still hit hard. Not emotionally, it's very rare for me to have a proper parasocial response. But in the way I thought about my own body and health. As many people said at the time: if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.

That fact had always been true, but damned if him breaking his neck didn't make the point stick.

No idea about older people and George Reeves, he wasn't on my radar. Never heard anyone from that generation talk about it though, and a lot of my patients were in that age range.

^1 I use the term cripple as a cripple. I own that word for myself.

Yeah, it was a big "Aw, No effing way". But it was also a time when people put a lot of emphasis on looks being a special class, and there were comments like " Such a shame it happened to him, he was so good looking "

Yes, it was a pretty big thing nationally when this happened to Christopher Reeve. It was all over the news for a good long while and again when he passed. It was just the big freak accident that came out of nowhere, like what happened to Sonny Bono.