Showdown

I love the Fleischer Superman cartoons. The animation is smooth and fluid with vivid colors. The distinct art-deco style, vintage science fiction imagery, and use of noirish shadows gave them a look unlike any other cartoons. The music and voice work is superb. They're fun, accessible, enduring animation classics. While this is a cartoon from Fleischer Studios' successor, Famous Studios, it still tries to maintain the Fleischer style.

In the eleventh in the series, someone disguised as Superman is committing crimes all over Metropolis. Lois and Clark are assigned to cover the opera and, while there, Lois has a run-in with the impostor. Clark wastes no time changing into his red & blues and confronting the fake. Impostor Superman leads the real Supes to his boss, who won't be taken easily. The second Superman short from Famous is their best and one of the most different in the whole series. It's the closest any of the shorts come to being a comedy. The fake Superman is very funny. An interesting note is that Jack Mercer and Jackson Beck, who voice the fake Superman and his boss respectively, also did the voices of Popeye and Bluto in Popeye cartoons.

A SUPERMAN Cartoon.

Someone, disguised as Superman, is pulling off a series of daring robberies throughout Metropolis and it's time for the real Man of Steel to force a SHOWDOWN with the Big Boss behind it all...

This was another in the series of excellent cartoons initially created by Max Fleischer for Paramount Studio. They feature great animation and taut, fast-moving plots. Meant to be shown in movie theaters, they are miles ahead of their Saturday Morning counterparts. Bud Collyer is the voice of Superman; Joan Alexander does the honors for Lois Lane.

This is the second Superman cartoon made by the Famous Studios which was an outgrowth of the original Max Fleischer Studios after the ouster by Paramount of him and brother Dave. Being the eleventh overall, this animated short is interesting in that the villain is...Supes himself? Actually, it's someone dressed as him that's doing all the stealing of jewels for his boss. When Lois and Clark are assigned to review an opera, that not-too-convincing-Superman-doppelganger shows up to get more bling. Wanna guess who also shows up? Well, I won't tell but I'm sure you already know. Anyway, this short is unique as for once, Lois doesn't get captured and the robbers aren't anyone wanting to destroy or conquer the world. But that also makes this a little less exciting. Still, Showdown is worth a look for that slight difference in Superman plots.

Someone disguised as Superman is committing robberies all over Metropolis. He's doing it under orders from The Boss (that's all he's ever called--and he sounds like Orson Welles!). Immediately the police start searching for Superman. One night Lois Lane and Clark Kent are covering the opera. The fake Superman decides to rob the patrons there that night. Lois scares him off---but Clark decides to meet him face to face and get to the bottom of this.

This has to be one of the quickest-moving Superman cartoons I've ever seen. It moves like lightning and (for once) Lois is NOT captured or put in danger. I do love how she casually jumps into the police car (in her beautiful new dress) to join them as they go after the villain. It's never explained how they KNOW where The Boss is though. Who cares? This is fun, fast and beautifully animated. A definite 9.

Besides the comic-book superheroics, an interesting thing about some of these old Superman cartoons is the role of the narrator. They all begin with a voiceover from an unseen narrator who introduces the general concept of Superman, of course, but I'm talking about a character as narrator. In the original "Superman" (1941), Lois Lane was the storyteller; the film we saw was or became the story she wrote as a reporter for The Daily Planet. In this one, "Showdown," Lois takes a back seat to Supes and his alter ego--or double--Clark Kent. Added here is another doppelgänger for the man of steel in the form of a crook impersonating him (as, meanwhile, his crime boss impersonates Edward G. Robinson).

The short doesn't conclude with a story by Lane, either, but with Kent waking up from a snooze. One may read this as him continuing his impersonation of not being Superman, but another way to look at it is that the entire story of doubles (Clark/Superman and two Supermans) was Clark's dream after a boring night at the opera. In this final scene, Lois says she has a story to tell him, but we never hear it. This is Clark's story.