hood

/fixes

This was my introduction to the character Superman

Mom and Dad had it on vhs, I think

or maybe we rented it?

Either way, before I watched these I didn't know who Superman was

This would have been like

age 7

Oh man Lois just got GOT

Clark Voice: "This looks like a job-"
Superman Voice: "-for SUPERMAN!"

his register changed mid sentence

i kinda lost my mind watching this

what do you mean you could do this in 1941

You could you just had to do it all by hand

Animation used to rely more heavily on the artistic powers of individual animators

Milt Kahl Head SwagglesMilt Kahl was a very sought after animator because of his personal talent

His characters are CONSTANTLY wiggling their heads like this

specifically because doing that was a huge flex and really hard to do

No other animator could do it as well as he could

I thought that was interesting

BTAS is very Fleischer inspired.

Batman The Animated Series, 1990/1991 Pilot

and yes Batman never did ANY headwaggles

the good stuff

what's fascinating is that it doesn't mention ma and pa kent

it must predate that part of the mythos

fun fact: this is the series that gave Superman flight and x-ray vision.

the first part was because the animators couldn't make jumping super high look cool as they asked if they could just have him fly.

I have a DVD of all of these, even the one cartoon they tend to leave off more recent releases due to how screamingly insanely racist the mere title is. And yeah, it's amazing.

There was a comic someone did a bunch of years back which was a sequel to "The Mechanical Monsters", with the scientist who built the robots getting out of prison. He found a way to leave Superman out and still tell a brilliant and compelling story with that.

Really, the Fleischer Superman stuff is woefully underrated.

The Mechanical Monster is super influential

I do appreciate Lois isn't helpless, there's one episode where while she did get caught, she managed to evade them by leaping across catwalks and high-beams despite wearing heels and a long skirt... and her attempt to punch out some mummies (she did end up breaking her arms in the process)

any time Lois was made some form of helpless was an enormous disservice to both her character and Clark's - he wasn't always saving her because she couldn't do anything, he was always saving her because she's trying to do something that sounded good at the time but turned out to have some extreme element of danger she neglected to factor in

or that she felt was worth the risk, except she is unlucky as hell and probability is on the side of trying to kill her more often than not

the Silver Age has A LOT to answer for

a Lot

lot of regressive backsliding due to the wombo-combo of cold war nonsense and Seduction of the innocent so Lois end up as a helpless damsel trying to trap superman into marriage and Superman lost his working man hero aspects

and a huge amount of the immigrant backstory got glossed over, too

stuff that didn't get back to mainstream supes until really recently