ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Today Bulldogtreker and I downloaded all seventeen of Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons from YouTube and starting playing them on our TVs while chatting on Facebook.

The cartoons are a little over ten minutes each, so the total running time is about 170 minutes, or 2 hours and 50 minutes. The artwork is consistently great, the music is terrific, and the stories are highly imaginative and action packed!

But Max Fleischer Studios only produced the first nine of the seventeen cartoons, after which Paramount took over, fired the Fleischer brothers, and renamed the organization Famous Studios.

Here's what the Wikipedia article says about the studio change.

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.

If you get in the mood to watch a Superman cartoon, here's the whole collection.

Enjoy!

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_________________ Superman 01 - Superman


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_______ Superman 02 - The Mechanical Monsters


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__________ Superman 03 - Billion Dollar Limited


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_____________ Superman 04 - The Arctic Giant


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______________ Superman 05 - The Bulleteers


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_________ Superman 06 - The Magnetic Telescope


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___________ Superman 07 - Electric Earthquake


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__________________ Superman 08 - Volcano


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_________ Superman 09 - Terror on the Midway


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_________ Superman 10 - Japoteurs


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________________ Superman 11 - Showdown


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______________ Superman 12 - Eleventh Hour


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_____________ Superman 13 - Destruction Inc


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__________ Superman 14 - The Mummy Strikes


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_______________ Superman 15 - Jungle Drums


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________ Superman 16 -The Underground World


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_______________ Superman 17 - Secret Agent


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

These are a great example of the Golden Age Superman at his best!

Superman (1940s cartoons)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Fleischer Superman cartoons are a series of animated short films released in Technicolor by Paramount Pictures and based upon the comic book character Superman, and making it his first animated appearance.

A total of seventeen shorts were produced. They were originally produced by Fleischer Studios, releasing the pilot and eight cartoons in 1941 and 1942 before being taken over in May by Famous Studios, a successor company, who produced eight more in 1942 and 1943. Superman was the final animated series by Fleischer Studios, before Famous Studios officially took over production.

Although all entries are in the public domain, 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.

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.

A great anecdote from the era that I've never heard before :

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.

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.

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.

[Gord Green]

[Bud Brewster]

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What gorgeous examples of the artwork from these great cartoons!

I just hope they don't vanish in a few months because they're all hotlinked! That happens sometimes when you steal the bandwidth of the source site without their permission.

Just a word to the wise, folks. If you don't want your post to suddenly lose its jpgs, put them on sites like Hostpic, Photobucket, Imagur, or some other jpg hosting site.

Then they won't suddenly be gone and spoil your post!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

[Skullislander]

I also downloaded these HD Fleischer SUPERMAN shorts and I also have them as extras on the Superman live-action movie set.

They are brilliant works from the period and in fact overall I prefer the Fleischer output to Disneys [regarding shorts].

A fair few Betty Boop shorts are availible in HD on youtube as well and these are the clearest I have seen them outside of the theater experience.

[Custer]

An ad from Action Comics #46, just after the third Fleischer cartoon had been released...

[Pow]

I have the dvds for this sensational looking animated series.

Wonder what it would have been like if the Fleischer Brothers had done a Batman animated series of cartoons with the same stunning quality as Superman?

[Gord Green]

Pow, check this out!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFwOS2R9o_8

[Skullislander]

Wow! The style of these is top-notch!

[Gord Green]

Beautiful work by Bruce Timm in homage to the Fleisher brothers.

[Bud Brewster]

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I discovered yesterday that the eight cartoons made by Famous Studios are not only much less exciting than the Max Fleischer cartoons, their range from 1 to 3 minutes shorter than the Fleischer cartoons!

I was very disappointed in them.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Skullislander]

They employed a lot of the same artists who had done the earlier Superman and Popeye cartoons, so it must have been a fault in the way Famous was run by the new management.

Famous output always looked less impressive than the quirkier Fleischer stuff, to me at least.

[Gord Green]

I think a large part of the difference is the writing and subject matter. The FAMOUS toons were more wartime propaganda and anti Axis in tone. Therefore there was less attention paid to characterization and more emphasis paid to the message.

I would have loved to have seen CAPTAIN AMERICA and the INVADERS or ALL WINNERS SQUAD done in the flavor of the 40's era!

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has this interesting trivia item under the first Superman cartoon by the Fleischers.
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Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer were reluctant to take this assignment because it would require much more realistic designs and animation than they usually used. They tried to discourage Paramount by stating they would need a budget of around $100,000 per short, four times the budget of an average Walt Disney cartoon, which then had the highest budgets in animation. To their shock, Paramount executives agreed to at least half the amount, which made the Superman series--in adjusted dollars--the biggest-budgeted animation series in film history.

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)