The Adventures Of Superman!

Superman looks singularly heroic but still quite human in the drawing by Steve Ditko above. It was produced for an anniversary celebration of the Man of Steel. Though not technically an "atomic hero", I plan to revisit the most famous superhero, one powered by the radiation of our Sun itself. 

I want to look at the absolutely exquisite cartoons produced in the early 40's by the Fleischer and Famous Studios for Paramount. I'm always blown away by the craftsmanship in these earliest of adaptations of the hero to the big screen. 

Superman gets a bit more real when Kirk Alyn is tapped to portray the hero in two movie serials from Columbia. The animation is still important as it is used to showcase Superman in flight. The first introduces the hero and the second pits him against Lex Luthor, who also doubles as the "Atom Man" of the title. 

 

Most of my time though will be spent revisiting the classic Superman TV show starring George Reeves. These wonderful vintage shows are among the most pleasant and heartwarming adaptations of the great DC hero. I haven't watched these in nearly a decade or more and it will be great fun to dive into them again. 

And if time permits, I also want to take a look at those early 60's Superman cartoons created by Filmation. These were, along with a few well-handled comic books, my introduction to the character. 

I'll be using the 1976 tome Superman - Serial to Cereal to give me some background insights to these shows as the month rolls along. I'll not be reviewing them, so as to keep the focus on Captain Atom and Doctor Solar, but below is a review I did some time back of my favorite George Reeves outing as Superman. 

If you forced me to pick a single Superman feature as my all-time favorite, Superman and the Mole Men would get the nod. I love this delightful introduction to the George Reeves Superman which functions very effectively as a fable of mankind's fear of the unknown.

The Mole Men are small people who rise up out of a oil well hole which has sunk too far down. They emerge and are deemed hostile as humans get injured around them through a combination of fear and the innate radiation which emanates from the creatures themselves. They explore the small town in which they emerge and are met with fear by adults and ease with a small girl who warmly welcomes them into her bedroom.

This scene of the Mole Men lurking around the window scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a youngster. It seems a pretty naive scene today, but back then I was most affected by it. I love to revisit that tiny terror memory when I watch this one over and over. Phyllis Coates is effective as Lois Lane, though she is a particularly bitchy version of the character. No other regulars from the eventual Superman series appear.

This is a very good entertainment and gets my highest recommendation. So up, up and away amigos. 

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Cartoonapalooza!

Got my greedy greedy mitts on this ginormous collection of public domain cartoons. Of course many of them I have scattered here and there in other low-priced sets picked up through the years, but not all and having them all bundled into one space will push me I think to sample more thoroughly. There's nothing I like more just before I blink off into slumber than to scarf up a cartoon or two. Usually I'm snoring by the second one, but that reflects more on my weariness than the entertainment value of the cartoon. These seem ideal for months of nightly sampling as there are many varied and unusual cartoons here.

(Caveman Scratch, Colonel Bleep from planet Futura, and cowboy puppet Squeak.)

In fact I've already made one interesting discovery. How I've gone this long without some detailed knowledge of  the pioneering cartoon Colonel Bleep is beyond me, but I"m most impressed by this exceedingly limited by nonetheless imaginative animation from the earliest days of TV cartoons. Other unknown treasures await I'm certain.

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Superman 1941-1942!

The Fleischer Studos Superman cartoons of the early 1940's are still after all these decades arguably the finest adventure cartoons ever created. I think they are. The style, atmosphere, craftsmanship, storytelling and just everything add up to cartoons which are everything you want a superhero story to be and a Superman story in particular to be. They reflect Superman as what he was in the early Forties, a new hero who had burst onto the scene and was yet unencumbered by decades of backstories. He was a figure of mystery who appeared and disappeared and in the interim save people, property and most of Lois Lane.

We have weird world-beating menaces, ancient threats from prehistoric times, supernatural menaces, mad scientists galore, and plenty of Axis powers buffoons who want to threaten the tranquility of the common man. That these cartoons are so widely available makes folks think that perhaps they are valuable. But like peanut butter, just because it's relatively cheap, don't imagine it's not exquisite. And that's true for these animated adventures.


I won't bother to rumble through a summary of the cartoons. The Superman Homepage does a much better and more detailed job of it. If you've never seen any of these masterpieces of animation or just want to get another look, then take a gander at this.

These are the best of the best. Highest recommendation!

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Popeye 1941-1943!

The Popeye cartoons from the years 1941-1943 reflect the many transformations going on in the world at large which would find itself engulfed in a world war and the unfortunate dissolution of the Fleischer Studios when the brothers fell out in a tragic way.

These cartoons feature a new and different Popeye. As the United States goes to war, the Fleischer Studios are more than happy to offer up propaganda to support the effort and the Popeye cartoons become a bastion as Popeye himself joins the navy and trades in his traditional togs for Navy whites. Many of the cartoons are about various aspects of war preparation, such as ship building and weapons development. Also on hand are some particularly nasty stereotypical Japanese characters who become the mainstay villains as Bluto becomes merely a rival and not an enemy. There is now a real enemy out there.

The cartoons themselves are full of movement and energy but still alas lack the charisma of the earliest Fleischer Studio efforts. In fact the Fleischer Studios disappears as the brothers Max and Dave fell out. Even before Paramount had seized control of the operations, and renamed it "Famous Studios".

The Fleischer Studios were never the peer of Disney, though they did rival esteemed West Coast operation. The cartoons, especially the daffiest of the Popeye cartoons capture a time and place in the history of the United States looked over by other firms which operated in balmier climes. The hustle and bustle of a claustrophobic NYC gave the earliest Popeye cartoons so much distinctive character.

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Popeye 1938-1940!

The cartoons from 1938-1940 featuring Popeye here are still lovely examples of early Fleischer Studios animation, but it's clear to anyone that some of the inventiveness has departed and instead the creators are beginning to rely increasingly on the core plot of Popeye fights Bluto over Olive.

Also we have the unfortunate debut of the four nephews who are arguably the worst things the Fleischers added to the Popeye canon. As dream characters as they are in the cartoon in this collection they are a curious diversion but they will become sadly a mainstay of many of the later cartoons. Likewise the introduction of Poopdeck Pappy as a regular feature allowed the creators to trim down Popeye's own irascible nature and still find that voice in the cartoon. Popeye as the mainstay was being diminished somewhat.

There is one final two-reel color cartoon in this collection, Popeye in the role of Aladdin, a final nod to the Arabian Nights. It's not as lovely as the two previous outings, lacking depth and richness of backgrounds which make the earlier efforts so utterly wonderful. But nonetheless, it's a sturdy effort and a lot of fun in many respects.

The Fleischer Studios moved out of NYC and shifted operations to sunny Florida during the period these cartoons were developed and the lack of a cluttered urban setting can begin to be felt as the animators seem to be drawing on the real world they live in to inform the cartoons.

These cartoons are still very very good. But you can see that the creators are honing off the rough edges and as it turns out those edges are what give the earliest cartoons so  much zip.

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Popeye 1933-1938!

I love Popeye cartoons. Like most of my generation, I grew up on these vintage theater short animations thanks to television which in the 1960's was hungry for content and found in these old cartoons from the Fleischer Studios a character and a fictional world which appealed to youngsters of the Summer of Love as much as they had long before for generations bred during the Great Depression.

These are the original Fleischer Studio cartoons, the ones which first brought the burly Sailor to the big screen. Popeye of course was the creation Elzie Segar in his Thimble Theater comic strip. From the moment he stepped onto the field Popeye, an older and ugly sea-faring grouch captured the imagination of the public. In the cartoons by the animators at Fleischer, Popeye's pugnaciousness became the centerpiece of many a weird and wild cartoon which always ended in the Sailor punching the daylights out of Bluto, or whatever human or creature had raised his ire during the course of the action.

In these cartoons Popeye and his best girl Olive Oyl are often joined by the hamburger-eating Wimpy, and from time to time other members of the Thimble Theater gang pop up. But always the main emphasis is on movement and on action, and by action I mean raw visceral potent cartoon violence, the kind I grew up on and which has left me a better man for it.

These cartoons are urban masterpieces, showing a world of the city by animators who lived in the city of New York. The world of Popeye in the early days is a somewhat seedy one, one recognizable to a whole swath of Americans who were on hard times themselves. In later years the settings and atmosphere would become more suburban and upscale, but in the beginning the world we see is rough and tumble and one which the audience could find out their window, almost.

The backgrounds of these earliest Popeye cartoons are masterpieces, actual photographed models which spun to accommodate the animation which bounced along in front of them. These weird images give the Popeye cartoons a depth of field unlike any ever in cartoons. And this look holds for the earliest color Popeye efforts, two-reel cartoons which take the Sailor Man and his cohorts into skewed lands from the pages of the Arabian Nights.

The sound performance on the earliest Popeye cartoons is as weird as the look. A gravelly voice is given to the Sailor from Segar's pages and oddball moan is adapted for Olive. These voices will be refined in the earliest cartoons as Jack Mercer and Mae Questel eventually become the voices which will define the character for multiple generations to come.

If you've never sampled these awesome animations, I heartily recommend this first volume filled with not only Popeye cartoons but loads of background information on animation history as well as samples of the earliest cartoons from Fleischer Studios and others. This is a trove for any cartoon fan.

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The Cinematic Worlds Of Gulliver!

Gulliver's Travels is one of the great unread classics of literature. Most folks know the story in some basic way. They know that a man ends up shipwrecked on a distant land in which he is a giant and is surrounded by tiny people Lilliputians. Some folks even know that the man later ends up in a land of giants in which he is the tiny person. But few know that he also travels to a land of besotted intellectuals and aged immortals, and later to a land where horses rule and people are called "Yahoos". All that said, the story has often been seen as ripe for cinematic adaptation.

The Fleischer Brothers saw the story as a vehicle to elevate their cartoon studio and remain a viable competitor to Disney which had altered the animation landscape with Snow White. The Fleischers were given enough money from Paramount at last to make the kind of large-scale animation which might compete. The adventures of Gulliver seemed likely and we get the studio producing a handsome bit of animation, which despite its incredible charms fell somewhat flat. Here is a delightful link with much more about the classic film.

Some few decades later, the team of Charles Schneer and special effects guru Ray Harryhausen turn their Dynamation engine on and try to bring the tale of the classic to the big screen with live actors in The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. Well to begin with, one of the three worlds is the rather realistic world of England, so we're left with Lilliput and the land of the giants Brobdingnag. Kerwin Mathews is sufficiently appealing in the title role as a doctor seeking to make his fortune so that he and his love Elizabeth can live in some level of comfort. He ends up in Lilliput by himself and later Elizabeth turns up in Brobdingnag. It's all rather confusing really, as this is the least of the many movies made by Harryhausen. For one thing, there is only really one creature, a crocodile that Gulliver dispatches with relative ease. The use of forced prospective and other techniques is fine but nothing really different than what was seen in other movies.

All in all, the epic of Gulliver, despite its appeal hasn't really been brought to the screen with the vigor it needed to make it work fully.

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Eye-Popping Popeye Poster!

Amazing! Here's a glimpse of a delightful poster assembled from stills of every Fleisher Studios Popeye cartoon. A near decade of Popeye at a glance! Go here for details on this wonderful labor of love.

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Ghosks!

 No one battles the supernatural with more spirited enthusiasm than Popeye the Sailor Man. Whether he's confronting the "ghosk" of his ancestor "Patcheye" or some nameless spook, after the initial shock, he charges ahead with his usual gentle grace and subtle charm.

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The Superman Cartoons!

I've collected them on VHS and I've collected them on DVD many times over. It once was a challenge to find all of them, but then I picked up a collection of the Fleisher Studio cartoons featuring Superman in chronological order. The Bosko collection is from 1991 and was originally on VHS. I picked up the DVD version several years ago, but somehow I've never sat down and watched them all in order. I did yesterday. And it was enlightening. I knew that after the first nine cartoons the Fleisher studios essentially disbanded and became Famous Studios. Reading the credits you can see that many of the same talents stayed on board to guide the Man of Steel in these mini epics. These are very entertaining cartoons, wonderfully and briskly paced adventures of high order. The early ones are high sci-fi and high fantasy. Superman battles comets, giant dinosaurs (in a cartoon that reminded me a lot of Beast From 20,000 Fathoms which inspired Godzilla), and robots. The later cartoons show Superman fighting the war and offer up some neatly constructed propoganda. Lois Lane is in all but one of them and she's her usual annoying self, creating havoc and once in a while proving useful. Superman in these cartoons is an enigma to the public, a impossibly powerful force who shows up in times of crisis and then disappears. Neat touch. Needless to say these are lush and beautiful cartoons, full of vivid and lively images. Since I'm also watching Popeye cartoons right now, it's interesting to see analogs between the two. Watching these in order it's neat to see the evolution of the character and how he's percieved. Sometimes his might is incredible and sometimes he seems all too vulnerable to mundane threat. Superman fights the enemies of WWII on both fronts, underworld Hawkmen, giant gorillas, jewel theives, and madmen of all stripes. Great stuff! Rip Off