Eighty-five years ago this month, Superman soared off the pages of comic books and into animation, for the first time. These short subjects, produced by The Fleischer Studio, were among their most ambitious productions.
Leonard Maltin notes this in his book, Of Mice and Magic: A History of Animated Cartoons, writing: “These cartoons are without question the most cinematically sophisticated the studio ever produced. The camera angles are indeed dramatic and thoughtfully chosen. Each shot flows into the next, with a variety of pans, dissolves, and other linking devices. Effective use is made of shadows in practically every scene, and such qualities as speed, weight and depth are vividly realized.”
The first short in the Fleischer series, aptly entitled Superman, (also known as The Mad Scientist), debuted on September 26, 1941, and now celebrates its 85th anniversary.
Directed by Dave Fleischer, the short opens with the familiar heroic narration: “Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” There is then background on Superman’s origin: Krypton’s destruction, a baby from the planet being sent to earth via spaceship, the baby being found on Earth and taken to a nearby orphanage, growing up to develop his powers and adopting the secret identity of Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet.
The plot then introduces a mysterious figure known only as “The Mad Scientist,” who sends a threatening note to the Daily Planet, promising to strike back against those who mocked him by launching his devastating “Electrothanasia-Ray” at midnight at an unspecified target.
Editor Perry White (Julian Noa) assigns Clark Kent (Bud Collyer) to cover the story. Still, eager reporter Lois Lane (Joan Alexander), decides to pursue the lead herself, jumping in a small plane and flying out to the Mad Scientist’s (Jack Mercer) remote mountain observatory-laboratory (where he plots alongside his pet vulture). Once there, the scientist takes Lois prisoner and demonstrates his weapon’s power, using it to destroy bridges and buildings across Metropolis.
As this happens, Clark slips away to become Superman, flies to the rescue, frees Lois, foils the attack, and captures the Mad Scientist, hauling him off to jail. Afterward, Perry congratulates Lois on the story, but she credits the rescue to Superman — with Clark, listening in, giving the audience a knowing wink.
The short uses beautiful, dramatic, atmospheric staging. One of the first shots of Kent, Lane and White in the Daily Planet office has the flair of film noir, and the Mad Scientist’s lair features stylish angled images and moody lighting.
With the talents of such animators as Frank Endres and Steve Muffati, the character animation in Superman is stellar; the shorts also show meticulous planning, and the animators had to get comfortable drawing more realistic characters and action.
This is evident in the short’s finale, where Superman confronts the scientist, battling lasers that destroy the lair in a well-choreographed and exciting sequence.
In his book, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, author Michael Barrier noted: “Bob Bemiller, who animated on the series, remembered that the Superman shorts were produced with the care given like that to the Fleischer features; the storyboards were more detailed, the layout drawings were more dramatic.”
The first Superman cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short. Seventeen Superman cartoons were produced from 1941 through 1943. Other titles and adventures included The Mechanical Monsters (1941), Electric Earthquake (1942), The Mummy Strikes (1943), and 1942’s Japoteurs, which included World War II propaganda.
The Fleischers produced the first nine Superman shorts, with the remaining films made by Famous Studios after the Fleischer Studio dissolved in 1942.
Superman was named one of The 50 Greatest Cartoons in Jerry Beck’s 1994 book of the same name (it came in at 33). As professor and author M. Thomas Inge said of the short, in that book: “The Art Deco settings, the flat character designs and the use of color to create mood combine to elevate the films to a level of pure artistry seldom seen in animation outside of Fantasia the year before.”
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
In this early recounting of the origin of Superman, there is no Jor-El and Lara, and the infant is found on earth by “a passing motorist” and taken to an orphanage, so there is also no Jonathan and Martha Kent. These characters would be added by the time the origin story was filmed for television in Episode One of “The Adventures of Superman.”
In his early days in the comic books, Superman didn’t actually fly, but rather took long leaps to get from one place to another. In the Fleischer films it’s often hard to tell whether Superman is flying or leaping, although particularly in the early ones it looks more like leaps. Certain elements of the Superman mythos have been so etched into our consciousness that we see what we are accustomed to seeing. I never noticed, until I knew this about the early Superman, that the flying in these cartoons may be leaps instead.
Bud Collyer makes a nice vocal transition between his Clark Kent voice and his Superman voice. Joan Alexander would later go on to voice Lois again in the Filmation cartoons. And it’s always fun to hear Jack Mercer doing other voices than Popeye, proving his range.
At first, and for several decades, the concept was that Superman was his “real” identity and that the Clark persona was a disguise. By the 1980s and beyond, the powers-that-be at DC determined that Clark Kent was his real self, while Superman was his public persona. This fits more with modern sensibilities and makes the character more relatable. It also made possible the dynamics of the “Lois and Clark” TV series as well as “Smallville.”
Superman has appeared many times in animation, but perhaps never as effectively as in the Fleischer/Famous series. In any case, these cartoons paved the way for all of the super heroics that followed. Super Friends, anyone? Or Superman: The Animated Series? Or…
I thought Bruce Timm and Paul Dini’s series was quite good and a nice contrast to their dark Batman series as the tone of Superman was a bit lighter (which some people failed to get in later media projects).
Plus, it was the first animation project to feature Supergirl other than an ad in the 70’s.
The Fleischer animations gave us the myth of Superman, the DCAU tv show gave us Cark Kent. The latter is more substantial but it is a shame those stories were confined to TV budgets.
It wasn’t bad despite being done overseas. At least the animation was much better than the low-budget Filmations (even if it was done in the U.S.).
I wonder if many moviegoers in 1941 laughed at Max Fleischer’s “Superman” just because it was a cartoon, and they felt that that was the appropriate response. While I recognise the Fleischer/Famous Superman series as an extraordinary achievement in the art of animation, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch any of them without laughing.
I confess that I’ve always found Superman to be a somewhat ridiculous figure. When I was a boy, my friends and I used to laugh at the “Adventures of Superman” syndicated TV series, for example, when Superman stood imperturbably in the path of oncoming bullets but ducked when the bad guys threw their guns at him. As teenagers, we laughed at the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie when our hero, having failed to save a dam from destruction, turned back time by orbiting the earth at faster-than-light speed. I was a young adult when I discovered the Fleischer Superman cartoons, in which the world is threatened principally by independent scientists who, apparently singlehandedly, construct vast infrastructures of laboratories, power generators, and engineering marvels, without ever arousing the suspicions of anyone at the Daily Planet or the Metropolis Police until it’s nearly too late. Oh, and the occasional gorilla.
Take, for example, the mad scientist in the premiere cartoon, who builds an Electrothanasia-Ray to wreak vengeance on all the people who laughed at him; but when you look at that haircut of his, can you really blame them? Or the dapper mastermind behind “The Mechanical Monsters”; but if you had the wherewithal to create and control your own army of giant flying robots, why would you bother to steal jewels? Then there are the cultish “Bulleteers”, possibly the same gang who hijacked the “Billion Dollar Limited”, in their matching hoods and mauve jumpsuits. The defrosted dinosaur in “The Arctic Giant” is simply too goofy-looking to be menacing; it looks like a refugee from one of Dan Gordon’s Stone Age cartoons. And let’s not forget “The Magnetic Telescope”: when Clark Kent finds out that Lois Lane is in danger, does he rush to her rescue, faster than a speeding bullet? No. He takes a taxi.
Don’t get me started on “The Underground World”.
Still, I love these cartoons and can watch them over and over again. I’m also very pleased with the beautiful restorations of them that have become available in recent years. Plus, Fleischer’s Superman was a big influence on the Batman and Superman animated series of the 1990s, which were some of the finest cartoons of that decade, and that’s really saying something. All thanks to Superman — and to Max Fleischer!
Speaking of superheroes, is there any chance of a 60th anniversary Animation Cel-ebration of “Space Ghost” before the year is out?
Well, the original Superman comics were a bit looser and simpler and not overly deep and complex in plot than the more modern comics (not to mention the storylines don’t go on for way too long compared to today).
I think it must be quite expensive to maintain those robots!
Was it really directed by Dave Fleischer? I thought he just had them credited that way. Anyway great cartoon. I think most adventure serial short features tend to drag, but these hold up because they boiled down all the most exciting parts to fit into 7 minutes.
I’ll always wish some other studios had imitated them with other characters. Superman might have been the first but there was no shortage of superheroes by that time. Imagine if they had done similar shorts with Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, Basil Wolverton’s Spacehawk, or Will Eisner’s the Spirit.
When was Bob Clampett doing studies for a John Carter of Mars cartoon? (I also ask because the test reel has a brief shot of planets similar to the animated introduction to “When’s Your Birthday?”(1937), which I looked into while wondering if the special effects of “The Heavenly Body”(1944) (a comet hitting the Moon) could be cgi, that is, cartoon graphics inserted.)
As it was back then, serials were the venue for heroics, able to produce twenty-minute shows for weekly showing, even with rocket or human flight. Although I admit, Plastic Man would likely have needed cartoon depiction!
Oh that sounds neat. I’m not the biggest John Carter fan but I would’ve to have seen an adventure cartoon from Clampett.
If I recall my reading, the John Carter test animations were done a few years before Fleischer’s.
Brian Fies used “The Mechanical Monsters” as the basis for his graphic novel “The Last Mechanical Monster.” Here he details how he created it: https://brianfies.blogspot.com/2023/03/behind-story-last-mechanical-monster.html
There’s a lot of Citizen Kane flash in the staging and angles. They’re making a case for WHY this is a cartoon, doing things live action couldn’t yet do (affordably). They’re also veiling things animation couldn’t yet do: realistic humans who could Act. Such characters in Disney’s”Snow White” and the Fleischers’ own “Gulliver’s Travels” were heavily rotoscoped and dependent on broad body language; the real performances were left to expressive, squash-and-stretchable characters. When possible the realistic characters had minimal interaction.
As time went on the Superman cartoons grew more confident about realistic characters, building a whole cartoon about a mildly comic thug impersonating the man of steel with no distracting spectacle. Something that wouldn’t have taxed the resources of the live action show.
Oddly recalling a Brad Bird quote about “The Incredibles”, something about how grabbing a coat lapel was a bigger challenge than some of the big battle scenes.
I grew up on the Filmation version of Superman, which I thought was pretty good for the time. Years later I saw the Fleisher shorts and was blown away by the visuals and action sequences. For me, Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends series proved the nadir of The Man of Steel’s animated career.
I still like the filmation version. I like how casual Superman was through everything. You could just about imagine him checking his watch while fighting an alien (except they wouldn’t have taken the extra time to animate that).
The better episodes seemed to have been written by Oscar Bensol. I particularly enjoyed the one with the Prankster where Superman pulled out a trick from Wile E. Coyote’s play book
Drew, I agree the Filmation version of Superman was worth watching. I can still recall a few specific episodes, I also liked their Superboy segments.
I would kill to see a Justice League movie that looks EXACTLY like these beautiful Superman shorts.
These cartoons were readily available on VHS tapes in the 1990’s and on discs by the early 90’s. It could be due to their lapsing into the public domain after the Fleischer brothers were deposed by Paramount, but whatever the cause, the prints that were used for these releases were horrible!
Only in the past few years have good digital transfers become available.
The legal positions of everyone involved might make an interesting subject for a contemporary feature film. The subject being, who REALLY owns Superman? In the purely intellectual property sense, that is, not simply the legal one of who signed what contracts and when. Siegel and Shuster, (or their estates) the innocent young artists who signed the rights to their original character away for a pittance? The fiendish, greedy executives at Paramount Pictures who had no scruples about abruptly kicking the Fleischers out halfway through the series? DC Comics, whoever owns that “little” empire now, or…?
Never mind, as such a film would be much more interesting to corporate lawyers than to the millions of superhero fans— a pretty small audience, in comparison. Tiny, even!
But I’d buy a ticket.
Oh yeah, I’d want to see a movie about that. There’s the new book Superman Wars out about it. It could be a good documentary. Maybe they could add allegorical battle sequences for Superman’s legal cases – Superman vs. Wonder Man and Captain Marvel for their infringement cases, and then his most difficult battle of all – against his own creator
The Mad Scientist sounds a lot like Pop-eye. Always loved the art in these though.
Okay, mild-correction: According to Keith Scott’s book Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, Perry White (at least in the first Fleischer short) was voiced by Jackson Beck, not Julian Noa.
My introduction to these cartoons actually was through an 1960’s reprint of a c1942 comic book story in which Clark and Lois go to the movies and see a Superman cartoon. Here’s Jim Korkis’ earlier post: https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-lost-fleischer-superman-cartoon/