It’s hard to believe that it has been 85 years since Superman first appeared on the big screen as an animated character. On September 26, 1941, Paramount released Superman, the first of what would become 17 theatrical animated shorts. The first nine were made by Fleischer Studios, with the final eight produced by Famous Studios after Paramount took control of the operation. When you go back and watch these cartoons today, it is easy to understand why they have remained so popular with Superman fans and animation fans all these years later.
What really stands out is how good they look. These weren’t made like throwaway cartoons that audiences watched before the main feature. Fleischer Studios treated Superman like a movie, with detailed backgrounds, dramatic camera angles, elaborate effects and some incredible use of light and shadow. Their version of Metropolis had a distinctive Art Deco look, and the city often feels like something out of a 1940s Hollywood production. Superman himself has a real sense of weight and power, which is pretty remarkable when you remember that all of this was being done by hand.
There is a great story behind why the cartoons were so ambitious. Paramount wanted Fleischer Studios to make Superman, but the Fleischers knew exactly how expensive and time-consuming the character would be to animate. They reportedly quoted Paramount around $100,000 per cartoon, apparently hoping the studio would decide the project was too expensive. Instead, Paramount negotiated the first short down to $50,000, with the following cartoons costing about $30,000 each. So the Fleischers ended up making Superman anyway, and they decided that if they were going to do it, they were going to do it right.
They certainly did. The animators used rotoscoping and live-action reference, along with painstaking hand-drawn animation, to give the characters and action a realism that was unusual for the period. The first short was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, which gives you some idea of how impressive the work was. These cartoons were being shown in movie theaters at a time when animated shorts were normally considered part of the program rather than the reason people came to see it.
Superman changed that. The character was already enormously popular thanks to his comic books and radio program, and audiences wanted to see him on the big screen. The animated series helped turn Superman into an even bigger attraction, with the shorts playing in thousands of theaters. Some theaters reportedly even saved the Superman cartoon for the end of the program because audiences were so eager to see it. Think about that for a minute. People weren’t just sitting through a cartoon because it happened to be playing before the movie. They were showing up because they wanted to see Superman.
The popularity of the cartoons is even more impressive when you remember what audiences were actually seeing. These were roughly ten-minute animated shorts, yet Superman had become enough of an attraction that theaters could use him to help draw people into the theater. The character had only been around for a few years, but by 1941 he was already one of the biggest names in American popular culture. The Fleischer cartoons took that popularity and put him on a screen in a way audiences had never seen before.
The cartoons also had an effect on Superman himself. When the character first appeared in the comics in 1938, Superman was a powerful hero who could leap enormous distances, but flying had not yet become the standard part of his abilities. The Fleischers realized that having Superman constantly jumping around would look awkward in animation, so they asked for permission to let him fly. They got it, and the animated version helped cement the image of Superman as the flying Man of Steel. Flight was subsequently adopted into the comics in 1943. The Fleischers didn’t simply invent the idea of Superman flying out of nowhere, since the character had already appeared flying in other Superman media, but their cartoons played an important role in making flight part of the character’s standard image.
That is one of the fascinating things about these shorts. They weren’t simply taking Superman from the comic book and putting him on a movie screen. The animators were figuring out what Superman should look like and how he should move when he was no longer confined to the pages of a comic. Along the way, they created images and ideas that became part of the character’s larger identity, including the dramatic transformation of Clark Kent into Superman and the famous opening introduction, “Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!”
The popularity came with a price, though. These cartoons required an enormous amount of time and work, and the Fleischers were already dealing with serious financial and management problems involving Paramount. The relationship between the Fleischers and the studio had deteriorated, and in 1942 Paramount took control. The Superman series continued under Famous Studios, but the Fleischer era was over. The complete run eventually ended in 1943 after 17 theatrical shorts.
And this is where I have to admit something. I still watch these cartoons on YouTube, and I don’t watch them because I feel like I should appreciate them simply because they’re important pieces of animation history. I watch them because they’re still fun. You can put on a Superman cartoon made in 1941 and, after a few minutes, you stop thinking about how old it is and just get caught up in the story.
Sure, you can see the age. The animation is obviously from another era, and some of the material reflects the time in which it was made. But the artwork, backgrounds, music, action and the way Superman moves still work. In fact, some of it looks better than you might expect from something that is 85 years old. There is a care in the artwork that is easy to appreciate, especially when you realize how much work went into every scene.
There is also an innocence to these cartoons that I really like. Superman is the hero, someone is in trouble and he goes to help. The stories aren’t buried under years of continuity or complicated mythology. You don’t need to remember what happened in six other movies or understand three different universes. You just watch Superman save the day, and there is something refreshing about that simplicity.
That doesn’t mean everything has aged perfectly. The wartime cartoons in particular contain material that reflects the attitudes and propaganda of the 1940s, and some of that can be uncomfortable to watch today. But you can recognize those things for what they are without losing sight of what makes the animation special. At the heart of these cartoons is a very simple idea: Superman is here to help people.
If you’ve never watched the Fleischer Superman cartoons, there are five I would start with. The first is Superman, also known as The Mad Scientist, from 1941, simply because this is where the whole thing begins. It was also the short that received the Academy Award nomination and immediately showed audiences that this was going to be something different from the usual animated short.
Then watch The Mechanical Monsters from 1941. This is probably the one I would recommend to anybody who wants to understand what makes these cartoons so special. Superman battling giant flying robots through a beautifully drawn Metropolis still looks incredible, and there are scenes in this cartoon where you have to remind yourself that you’re watching something made in 1941.
Billion Dollar Limited from 1942 is another favorite because it takes the action out of the city and puts Superman into a fast-moving train adventure. The pacing is great, the backgrounds are beautiful and the whole thing feels like a little Hollywood action movie. The Arctic Giant is another must-see, especially if you want to see how the Fleischers could take something as crazy as a giant dinosaur running loose and make it feel completely believable within the world of the cartoon.
I’d round out the five with Terror on the Midway. Superman dealing with escaped animals at a circus gives the animators plenty of opportunities to show off, and they take advantage of every one of them. These five aren’t necessarily the only great shorts in the series, but they give you a pretty good idea of why the Superman cartoons have remained so popular for 85 years.
And if you really get into them, don’t stop at five. All 17 are worth seeing, especially because the series gives you a chance to watch the animation evolve over the course of two years. There are plenty of other favorites in there, including The Bulleteers, The Magnetic Telescope, Electric Earthquake, Volcano and Destruction, Inc. Even the later Famous Studios cartoons are worth watching because they show what happened to the series after Paramount took control.
I’ve also found a current YouTube compilation that makes watching the whole series pretty easy. FFF Best Ever | Full Family Films has a little over two hours of Superman cartoons assembled in release order, beginning with Superman from September 26, 1941 and ending with Secret Agent from July 1943. The video description lists all 17 shorts and identifies the presentation as 4K HDR.
The YouTube compilation is not the same thing as Warner Bros. Discovery’s official restoration. Warner Bros. Discovery released its own restored collection in 2023 after scanning the original 35mm source material in 4K 16-bit and rebuilding the Technicolor images. The official release was made available digitally and on Blu-ray.
Still, for somebody who just wants to sit down and watch all 17 cartoons without hunting around for them individually, the YouTube compilation is a convenient option. The fact that you can now watch these cartoons in such clean presentations is pretty amazing when you consider that the originals were made more than eight decades ago.
We’ve had Christopher Reeve, Henry Cavill and plenty of other actors play Superman. We’ve had enormous superhero movies, computer-generated effects and stories that have become increasingly complicated. Animation itself has changed more than anyone in 1941 could have imagined. Yet I can still go on YouTube, find one of those old Fleischer cartoons and enjoy watching it, which says a lot about just how well they have held up.
The influence is still easy to see. Bruce Timm and the artists behind Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series drew inspiration from the look and feel of the Fleischer cartoons, particularly the dramatic lighting, strong shapes and Art Deco influence. Generations of animators have looked back at this work and found something worth borrowing, which is pretty impressive when you consider that these cartoons were created before most of the technology we take for granted today even existed.
But for me, the biggest compliment is much simpler. These cartoons are 85 years old, and I still want to watch them. They were ambitious, expensive and groundbreaking, but they were also entertaining, and that’s what ultimately matters. They had a sense of wonder, they had imagination and they had an innocence that is hard to duplicate today.
The Fleischer Superman cartoons helped change animation, helped shape the way Superman looked on screen and influenced generations of artists who came after them. They also proved something Hollywood hadn’t fully appreciated before: audiences would show up for a cartoon because they wanted to see the character in that cartoon. The little animated Superman shorts had become an attraction in their own right.
And maybe that is the best way to celebrate them 85 years later. I can still sit down, find one of these cartoons on YouTube, press play and have a great time watching Superman fly. The technology has changed, the movies have gotten bigger and the superhero universe has become infinitely more complicated, but those old Fleischer cartoons still have something that is hard to manufacture. They have imagination, energy, atmosphere and, most of all, an innocence that makes them feel timeless.
Eighty-five years later, the Man of Steel is still flying, and those old cartoons are still worth watching.
If this article made you think, brought back a memory, or made you see something differently, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at sandboxworld@gmail.com. I read every message personally and, with your permission, may feature your thoughts in a future article because the best stories are the ones we share.
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