“I call him Mad Dog Toberoff,” says Henry, explaining how Toberoff dug through the University of Wisconsin–Madison archives (to which David Susskind, one of Get Smart ’s producers, had donated his papers) to find support for the claim. Henry says Warner Bros. settled with him and Brooks, though neither he nor Toberoff would say for how much, citing a confidentiality clause.

“God bless him,” says Larry Cohen, the writer-director of It’s Alive. “No one else does this. Most people don’t want to alienate the studios.”

Laura Siegel Larson can’t remember a day that her family wasn’t fighting with Time Warner. Like Lois Lane, she became an investigative journalist, winning 13 Emmys for her local television reporting before multiple sclerosis left her unable to work, in 1994.

Her reporting skills came in handy when Larson almost single-handedly gathered the documentation needed to file the Superman copyright-termination claims back in 1997. At the end of his life, Larson says, her father had discovered his right to file those claims; it was his dying wish that she and her mother pursue it.

“To our family, it was the height of irony that this symbol of justice and assistance for the little guy—this creation my father had come up with—ended up resulting in decades of hard times for us,” Larson says. “It was wonderful that my dad, before he passed away, knew that there was hope.”

Whether those hopes are fulfilled will be decided in a U.S. District Court in Riverside County, 40 miles east of Los Angeles. Currently, both sides are pressing for partial summary judgments, seeking to resolve certain issues of fact before the Superman case goes to trial. Toberoff says he is in no hurry; the longer the case drags on, he asserts, the more leverage he gains.

That’s because in 1997, when the Siegels filed for termination, copyright law permitted only a creator’s direct descendants to make such a claim. Since Shuster had no children, his estate could not file. The law has since changed. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 allows other heirs and executors to make claims and also gives copyright holders who miss the initial 56-year window a second chance to terminate a grant of copyright, at 75 years. This means Shuster’s estate can try to reclaim its Superman copyrights 75 years after Action Comics No. 1 was published—in 2013.

Toberoff grins a cocksure grin. “Guess who represents the Shuster estate?”