Superman (1940s cartoons)
I grew up in Pennsylvannia. It was a small mining town, where many of the men, if not all made their living from mining the black dust to heat homes around the country.
It was a small place, the town, nestled between green shrubbed hills that were spotted with towering trees and the occassional home. We lived with my grandmother and grandfather. My father had returned from World War Two and was striving to make a living as a baker.
We used to listen to the radio for entertainment. That's all there was back then. Radio. And it was grand. The Shadow, The Green Hornet, Chandu...and on and on.
But my favorite was always the one with the triumphant music and the narrator's whose voice sent chills down my spine: Superman!
Then we moved to a number of other places I don't remember much as my father sought to make meaning of his life, as so many other returning soldiers did then, and do now also. He finally settled down in Oklahoma and we got our first TV, A big bulky thing made by RCA, black and white tube that showed all the TV programs. NBC was the big network back then.
And Superman came to TV, and also to the local theaters where it played out in bright, Technicolor, a vastly rich color format that was a feast for the eyes.
And Superman invaded the public mind and mania even more.
Above is the series of wonderful cartoons that were lovingly made, and lavishly designed to articulate the vision of the artists and the wonderful man that everyone proclaimed: It's a bird; it's a plane. No, it's Superman.
Chills up and down the spine, hair standing up on edge and thrills and chills.
Loved it then. Love it now.
Enjoy.
--John--
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
title card from the first Superman animated short produced by Fleischer
Studios.
The Fleischer & Famous
Superman cartoons
are a series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films
released by Paramount Pictures and based upon the comic book
character Superman,
and making it his first animated appearance.
The pilot and first eight shorts
were produced by Fleischer Studios from 1941 to 1942, while the
final eight were produced by Famous
Studios, a successor company to Fleischer Studios, from 1942 to 1943. Superman
was the final animated series initiated under Fleischer Studios, before Famous
Studios officially took over production in May 1942.[1]
Altogether the series lasted from 1941 to 1943
Although all entries are in the public
domain,[2]
ancillary
rights such as merchandising contract rights, as well as the original 35mm
master elements, are owned today by Warner
Bros. Entertainment. Warner has owned Superman publisher DC Comics
since 1969.
Contents
- 1 History
- 1.1 Development and initial entries
- 1.2 Transition from Fleischer to Famous
- 1.3 Later history
- 1.4 Related works
- 2 Influence
- 3 Availability
- 4 List of films
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 External links
History
Development
and initial entries
Only the first nine cartoons were
produced by Fleischer Studios; nonetheless, all 17 episodes
are collectively known as "the Fleischer Superman cartoons". In 1942,
Fleischer Studios was dissolved and reorganized as Famous
Studios, which produced the final eight shorts. These cartoons are seen as
some of the finest quality (and certainly, the most lavishly budgeted) animated
cartoons produced during The Golden Age of American
animation. In 1994, the first entry in the series was voted #33 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of
the animation field.
By mid-1941, brothers Max
and Dave
Fleischer were running their own animation studio, and had recently
finished their first animated feature film, Gulliver's Travels; they were
also well into production on their second, Mister Bug Goes to Town. Not wanting to
risk becoming overworked (which could compromise the quality of each project),
the Fleischers were strongly (but quietly) opposed to the idea of committing
themselves to another major project, when approached by their studio's
distributor and majority owner since May 1941, Paramount Pictures. Paramount was interested in
financially exploiting the phenomenal popularity of the then-new Superman comic
books, by producing a series of theatrical cartoons based upon the character.
The Fleischers, looking for a way to reject the project without appearing
uncooperative, agreed to do the series—but only at a (intentionally inflated)
per-episode-budget number so exorbitantly high that Paramount would have to
reject them, instead. They told Paramount that producing such a
conceptually and technically complex series of cartoons would cost about
$100,000 (in 1940s dollars) per short; this was about four times the typical
budget of a six-minute episode of the Fleischers' popular Popeye
the Sailor cartoons of that period.[3]
To the Fleischers' shock, instead of withdrawing its request, Paramount entered
into negotiations with them, and got the per-episode budget lowered to $50,000.[4]
Now the Fleischers were committed to a project they never wanted to do—with
more financial and marketing support than they had ever received for the
projects they had done.
The first cartoon in the series,
simply titled Superman, was released on September
26, 1941, and was nominated for the 1941 Academy Award for Best Short
Subject: Cartoons. It lost to Lend a Paw,
a Pluto
cartoon from Walt Disney Productions and RKO
Pictures.
The voice of Superman for the series
was initially provided by Bud Collyer, who also performed the lead character's
voice during the Superman radio series. Joan
Alexander was the voice of Lois Lane, a role she also portrayed on radio alongside
Collyer. Music for the series was composed by Sammy
Timberg, the Fleischers' long-time musical collaborator.
Rotoscoping,
the process of tracing animation drawings from live-action footage, was used
minimally to lend realism to the character's bodily movements.[3]
Many of Superman's actions, however, could not be rotoscoped (e.g., flying,
lifting very large objects, etc.). In these cases, the Fleischers' lead animators—many
of whom lacked training in figure drawing—animated "roughly" and
depended upon their assistants (many of whom were inexperienced animators, but
trained figure-drawers) to keep Superman "on model" during his action
sequences.[3]
The Fleischer cartoons were also
responsible for giving Superman perhaps his most singular superpower: flight.
When the Fleischers started work on the series, in the comic books, Superman
could only leap from place to place (hence the classic phrase,
"able to leap tall buildings in a single bound"). After seeing the
leaping fully animated, however, the Fleischers deemed it "silly
looking", and asked Action Comics' (which would later become DC Comics)
permission to have him fly instead; the publisher agreed, and wrote the flight
ability into the comics from then on.
Transition
from Fleischer to Famous
The Fleischers produced nine classic
cartoons in the Superman series before Paramount took over the Fleischer
Studios facility in Miami
and ousted Max and Dave Fleischer. By the end of 1941, the brothers were no
longer able to cooperate with each other, and the studio's co-owner Dave
Fleischer had left Florida for California, where he would eventually become the
new head of Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems
studio.[5]
After the Fleischers were removed from the company, Paramount renamed the
organization Famous Studios, placing Seymour
Kneitel, Isadore Sparber, Sam Buchwald, and Dan Gordon in charge of production. The sleek
look of the series continued, but there was a noticeable change in the
storylines of the later shorts of the series. The first nine cartoons had more
of a science fiction aspect to them, as they involved
the Man of Steel fighting robots, giant dinosaurs, meteors from outer space,
and other perils. The later eight cartoons in the series, which were all Famous
Studios productions, dealt more with World War
II propaganda
stories, such as in Eleventh Hour, which finds Superman going to Japan to commit acts
of sabotage
in order to reduce the morale of the enemy; meanwhile, an angered Adolf
Hitler had a cameo role at the end of Jungle Drums after Superman
foiled another Nazi plot.
Japoteurs was the first Superman short to be produced by Famous
Studios, but was released without any screen credit to Famous Studios; the
screen credit card stated, simply: PARAMOUNT Presents SUPERMAN In
TECHNICOLOR.
The first seven cartoons originated
the classic opening line which was later adopted by the Superman radio
series and in the live-action television series a decade later: "Faster
than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall
buildings in a single bound!" (The radio series also eventually used the
cartoon series' theme music.) However, for the final two Fleischer-produced
cartoons and the first of the eight Famous Studios-produced cartoons, the
opening was changed to "Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than
a locomotive! Able to soar higher than any plane!". For the remaining
Famous Studios-produced cartoons, the opening line was changed again to
"Faster than a streak of lightning! More powerful than the pounding surf!
Mightier than a roaring hurricane!" This series also featured a slight
variation of the now-classic exclamation (also from the radio series): "Up in the sky, look! It's a
bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!".
Later
history
Famous Studios ended the series
after a total of seventeen shorts had been produced, replacing it with a series
of shorts based upon Marge's Little Lulu.
The high cost of the series kept it from continuing in the face of budgetary
restrictions that were imposed after removing the Fleischers from the studio.
The first cartoon had a budget of $50,000 (equivalent to $779,265.31 in 2012),
and the other sixteen each had a budget of $30,000 (equivalent to $467,559.18
for each of the eight other Fleischer cartoons and $421,663.80 for each of the
eight Famous Studios cartoons), bringing the total cost of the series to
$530,000 (equivalent to $7,893,049.21 in 2012).[4]
In addition, Paramount cited waning interest in the Superman shorts
among theater exhibitors as another justification for the series' cancellation.[6]
The rights to all seventeen cartoons
eventually reverted to National Comics, who licensed TV syndication rights to Flamingo Films (distributors
of the TV series The Adventures of Superman).
All eventually fell into the public
domain, due to National failing to renew their copyrights; thus, they have
been widely distributed on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD.[2]
Nonetheless, Warner Bros., via parent Time Warner's
ownership of DC Comics, now owns the original film elements to the cartoons.
Related
works
A 1944 Famous Studios Popeye the Sailor
cartoon entitled She-Sick Sailors parodied the Superman cartoons, two
years after production on the cartoons had ceased. In this cartoon, Popeye's
enemy Bluto
dresses up as Superman to fool Olive Oyl, and he challenges Popeye to feats of
super-strength that "only Superman" can do. The musical score for She-Sick
Sailors includes echoes of Sammy Timberg's Fleischer/Famous Superman
score.
The previous year, Merrie
Melodies did a parody starring Bugs Bunny
called Super-Rabbit.
In a rare move for a competing
studio, Leon Schlesinger Productions, producers of Looney
Tunes and Merrie Melodies (which were distributed by WB),
featured Timberg's Superman theme in Snafuperman,
a 1944 Private Snafu cartoon Schlesinger produced for the U.S. Army.
Paramount's involvement in the Superman
franchise did not end with the sale of the cartoons. In 1995, after being sold
to Viacom, Paramount's television syndication unit absorbed Viacom Enterprises, and as a result, Paramount
now held the TV rights to the third
and fourth Superman films,
along with the Supergirl film (which up to that point had
been held by Viacom). Full rights to Superman III and Supergirl
are now with WB, but Paramount still has some partial rights to Superman IV
(as part of the Cannon Films library), and TV distribution is now held
(on Paramount's behalf) by Trifecta Entertainment & Media.
Influence
 |
This
section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve
this article by adding citations to reliable
sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011)
|
The
robot's rampage in The Mechanical Monsters influenced
later animated works.
In 1985, DC Comics named Fleischer
Studios as one of the honorees in the company's 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great for its work on
the Superman cartoons.[7]
Writer/artist Frank Miller cited the influence of Max and
Dave Fleischer, including them among a list of prominent Golden Age comics
creators whose work he acknowledged at the end of his 1986 comics series, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.[citation needed] The series
strongly influenced the creation of the acclaimed animated television series Batman: The Animated Series, as
well as the similar-looking Superman: The Animated Series.[citation needed] Award-winning
comic book artist Alex Ross has also listed the shorts among the
inspiration for his take on Superman's look.[citation needed]
The robot robbery scene from
"The Mechanical Monsters" short has been echoed by several later
works. In 1980, Japanese animation director Hayao
Miyazaki, created an identical robbery with a similarly functioning robot
in the last episode of the second Lupin III
TV series, a robot design he used again in his feature film, Castle
in the Sky.[8]
The elements of the scene were borrowed again in 1994 for The Tick (animated TV series),
specifically, The Tick vs. Brainchild (season one, episode 9), this time
with the robbery committed by Skippy, a cyborg dog.[9]
The 2004 feature length movie Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow (which Paramount released in several territories, WB also
distributed in a few countries) kept the setting in the 1940s, but scaled up
the scene from a single robot robbing a jewelry exhibition to an army of
gigantic robots stealing city infrastructure. The movie gave a nod to its
source following the robbery with the newspaper headline, "Mechanical
Monsters Unearth Generators."
A 1988 music video for the song
"Spy In The House of Love" by Chrysalis
Records recording artists Was
(Not Was) borrowed footage extensively from Famous' Secret Agent episode.
Availability
The first "official" home
video releases of the series were by Warner
Home Video in 1987 and 1988, in a series of VHS and LaserDisc
packages called TV's Best Adventures of Superman. Four volumes were
released, where each volume contained 2 selected episodes of the classic 1950s
TV series Adventures of Superman (one
black & white episode and one color episode), plus a selected Max Fleischer
Superman short (marking the first "official" release of such
as Warner holds the original film elements).
Among the best reviewed of these
various releases was a 1991 VHS set produced by Bosko Video, the somewhat
incorrectly titled The Complete Superman Collection: Golden Anniversary
Edition - The Paramount Cartoon Classics of Max & Dave Fleischer
released as two VHS volumes which featured high-quality transfers from 35mm
prints. The Bosko Video set was later issued on DVD by Image Entertainment as The Complete Superman
Collection: Diamond Anniversary Edition in 2000. The Bosko Video release
was not associated with DC Comics or their parent company Warner Bros.
Another DVD was Superman: The
Ultimate Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection from VCI Entertainment released
on May 30, 2006, a month prior to the release of the film Superman
Returns. DVD features included: all 17 animated shorts digitally
restored in Dolby Digital 2.0 audio; a bonus cartoon: Snafuperman
(a 1944 Warner Bros. wartime parody of the Fleischer cartoons, featuring Private
Snafu and produced for the U.S. Army); "Behind the Cape" synopses and fun
facts with each cartoon; a DVD fold-out booklet with notes on the series; bios
of the voice actors, producer Max Fleischer, and Superman; a bonus trailer for
the 1948 Superman serial with Kirk Alyn;
and a recorded audio phone interview with Joan
Alexander (the voice of Lois Lane). This release, like the Bosko Video
release, was not associated with DC Comics
or their parent company Warner Bros.
A more "official" release
from restored and remastered superior vault elements was released on DVD on
November 28, 2006 as part of Warner
Home Video's Superman film re-releases. The first nine cartoons were
released as part of the four-disc special edition Superman: The Movie set, and the eight
remaining cartoons were included on the two-disc special edition Superman II
set. The entire collected Fleischer / Famous cartoons were included in the box
sets The Christopher Reeve
Superman Collection and Superman Ultimate Collector's
Edition, where both sets also included a 13 minute short documentary on
the history of these cartoons, entitled First Flight: The Fleischer Superman
Series. This documentary (which was included on the Superman II
two-disc special edition DVD) features interviews with surviving members,
relatives and biographers of the animation and production team, also
contemporary animators such as Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series), Paul Dini
and Dan Riba
(Superman: The Animated Series)
who detail the influence these cartoons have had on their own works. Upon this
release though, there was controversy by some consumers over why Warner's chose
to release these animated shorts amongst the Superman films DVD releases
instead of packaging them as their own complete individual DVD release.
In December 2004, Warner placed made
the shorts (albeit with the Paramount logos stripped out of the opening and
closing sequences) available for free download in mp4 format on its Toonami Arsenal Web site.
They posted one episode per day with the final episode, "Secret
Agent", going live on New Year's Day 2005.
Another came on July 1, 2008, when
Warner Bros. released the shorts on iTunes, via their DC Comics sections.
Fourteen of the shorts are available for $1.99 for every two, while the other
three are all in one video for the same price.
On April 7, 2009, yet another
release was made, this time a collection of all the cartoons released by Warner
Home Video as the first authorized collection from the original masters, titled
Max Fleischer's Superman: 1941-1942 with a suggested price at $26.99;
the set included one new special feature in the form of "The Man, The
Myth, Superman" featurette, along with an old special feature seen in
the Superman II 2006 DVD release entitled "First Flight: The
Fleischer Superman Series".[10]
List
of films
As all of these cartoons are now in
the public
domain,[2]
free downloadable links from the Internet
Archive have been provided.
Fleischer
Studios
Title
|
Original release date
|
Notes
|
Superman (a.k.a. The Mad Scientist)
|
September
26, 1941
|
The
short film Superman
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
November
28, 1941
|
The
short film The
Mechanical Monsters is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
January
9, 1942
|
The
short film Billion
Dollar Limited is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
February
27, 1942
|
The
short film The Arctic
Giant is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
March
27, 1942
|
The
short film The Bulleteers
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
April
24, 1942
|
The
short film The
Magnetic Telescope is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
June
15, 1942
|
The
short film Electric
Earthquake is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
July
17, 1942
|
The
short film Volcano
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
August
26, 1942
|
The
short film Terror on
the Midway is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
Famous
Studios
Title
|
Original release date
|
Notes
|
September
18, 1942
|
The
short film Japoteurs
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
October
16, 1942
|
The
short film Showdown
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
November
20, 1942
|
The
short film Eleventh
Hour is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
December
25, 1942
|
The
short film Destruction,
Inc. is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
February
19, 1943
|
The
short film The Mummy
Strikes is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
March
26, 1943
|
The
short film Jungle Drums
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
June
18, 1943
|
The
short film The
Underground World is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
|
July
30, 1943
|
The
short film Secret Agent
is available for free download at the Internet
Archive
|
See
also
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