Superman

Superman (1941)

Amazing! Startling! Superman is here!

After The Daily Planet receives a letter from a mad scientist threatening to wreak destruction with his Electrothanasia Ray, Lois Lane heads out in the hopes of getting more information for a news story.

Date of release
1941-09-26
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (129)
Runtime
10m
Genres
Action, Animation, Family, Adventure, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Director
Dave Fleischer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Superman
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Superman (1941), also known as The Mad Scientist, is the first installment in a series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films based upon the DC Comics character Superman. It was produced by Fleischer Studios and released to theaters by Paramount Pictures on September 26, 1941. Superman ranked number 33 in a list of the fifty greatest cartoons of all time sourced from a 1994 poll of 1000 animation professionals, and was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject.

Production

In 1941, Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to DC Comics' Superman property, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Paramount pitched the idea of producing a Superman series to its animation producer, Fleischer Studios.

Steve Muffatti was placed in charge of the first Superman short (at Fleischer and later Famous, the credited director served the roles typically ascribed to a film producer or supervising director, while the credited animators were the actual animation directors, and the animators and animation assistants were generally not credited at all). Stan Quackenbush handled the sequences of destruction in the city.

A steak being cooked was used for the sound of the Electrothanasia Ray, while the sound of Krypton being destroyed was created by recording someone wrenching an apple apart with their bare hands and then amplifying it.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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