Super Duper
Unless you’ve been hiding out in your own Fortress of Solitude, you probably have noticed a hunk of hoopla more powerful than a locomotive promoting a certain blockbuster movie opening this week. “Superman Returns” on Friday, but you can catch up with the Man of Steel right now, as ReFrederator presents a special 5 film mini-festival of his original cartoon adventures, all in glorious Technicolor.
Nowadays, Hollywood prefers its comic book adaptations to draw heavy parallels with classic mythologies and ancient tragedies. But the 17 Superman cartoons released in 1941 through 1943, play a lot more like American Tall Tales of the Paul Bunyan variety — especially today’s episode, “Magnetic Telescope.” Produced by Max Fleischer, this one is an animated non sequitur, a great example of the patently ridiculous made palpably believable, all with a straight face. Hey, they even lift a couple of ideas from an early talkie, “Betty Boop’s Ups and Downs”!
The antagonist is not so much a mad scientist as a deeply irritated and fairly unreasonable scientist. The guy is sucking heavenly bodies out of surrounding solar systems to hover a mile or so over Metropolis, just so he can gawk at them close-up and personal. When the authorities get a little edgy about some cosmic debris bouncing off the general population, HE throws a hissy! Before you can say “interplanetary collision” the dude with the red cape dukes it out with a full fledged comet a chip shot away from downtown. Lois Lane is around too, and, say, doesn’t she look super herself in the neat little turban?
“Strictly Super Week” zooms forward tomorrow with another thrilling installment!
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On June 28th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Lois does look great! The whole cartoon does. It’s no surprise that “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” borrowed the look and feel of this series.