“Mild-Mannered Superman” was a project to fix a number of errors in the extant DVD copies of the 1941-1943 Fleischer Studios Superman short films. The series entered the public domain years ago which left it with no single copyright-holding custodian charged with overseeing the quality and completeness of the films. My intent with this project was to go through each DVD, try to spot discrepancies in each film, and patch together the most complete copy of each of the 17 shorts possible.

Where To Start

I can’t recommend the first few films enough. They’re gorgeous and exciting by any standard.







From there, I invite you to visit the YouTube playlist to see all seventeen films.

About the Films

Superman made his debut in 1938 in the pages of Action Comics and was an immediate hit. Within two years the publisher had a popular radio program on the air starring Bud Collyer and Joan Alexander as the voices of Superman and Lois Lane. Paramount then looked around for an animation studio to do short Superman films that would play in movie theaters before features, and approached Fleischer Studios, headed by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer. The Fleischers were making Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons and were one of the big animation houses at the time, alongside Disney and Warner Bros.

Animation quality tends to come down to budget. How much time did the animators have to work on their movie? Look today at most cartoons and you’ll notice how often only one character moves onscreen at a time. Scooby-Doo was famous for reusing backdrops frequently and having its characters make very few movements. On the other side, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs took three years to draw, and Walt Disney wanted to hold onto it and keep working!

Why are the Fleischer Superman shorts still remembered today, 75 years later? Because the studio had the money to really spend time on the animation. The story goes that the Fleischers thought doing an adventure serial would be too much work, so they tripled their normal asking price, thinking Paramount would immediately balk. Instead, Paramount wrote the check. The result is an absolutely beautiful set of hand-drawn short films that stand the test of time and are still an inspiration to animators today.

List of Films

Each film is on YouTube, and there’s a playlist of the entire series here. To read a few of my thoughts on each film and learn behind-the-scenes details about my restoration process, you can visit the page for each short, listed below.

They’re Free?

Fleischer Studios went out of business in the 40s and was absorbed by Paramount. For legal reasons the copyright of the films did not transfer so the movies entered the public domain. (You can read more about that on Wikipedia here and here.) This means anyone is free to share, copy, distribute, and edit the movies to their heart’s content. They’re even free to edit together the best bits from multiple versions into one, definitive edition.

About the Mild-Mannered Edition

Because the movies are in the public domain, anyone is free to package and sell them commercially. There are a number of editions of the series out there on DVD. I focused on five different versions:

“The Superman Cartoons of Max & Dave Fleischer” by Image Entertainment. “The Complete Superman Collection, Diamond Anniversary Collection” by Bosko Video. “Superman: The Ultimate Max Fleischer Cartoon Collection” by VCI Entertainment. “Max Fleischer’s Superman, 1941-1943” by Warner Home Video. Assorted copies downloaded from The Internet Archive.

None of the versions of the movies you can buy on DVD are perfect. Warner Home Video’s set did an extensive cleanup of the picture and colors but has a number of sound glitches, plays the wrong music over the closing logos in almost every short, and often doesn’t know which prologue belongs at the start of which film. Bosko Video’s set is generally complete and has good sound but superimposes the release date over the start of each film. Image Entertainment’s set was transferred from LaserDisc so the quality isn’t very high. VCI’s picture isn’t very sharp. Archive.org’s copies are generally low in quality; some are uploads of Image’s set.

My process in creating the Mild-Mannered Edition was pretty simple. I’d look at each set in Final Cut Pro, try to note the differences, and make judgment calls on which parts of which editions felt the most authentic. Then I cut together the films using the best parts from each set. Sometimes this was just a matter of putting Bosko’s audio track on top of Warner’s picture. Other times I had to do some more complicated patching to fix problems I found. If you scroll through the site you can read my notes on each film’s changes. I’m by no means a professional at this, but I’m confident that what you see is the best, most complete set of these films you’ll find.

The Future

I only had DVD sources to draw from, and I think the results look good, but the quality is nowhere near as high as what would be possible if I had access to 35mm prints. At some point maybe someone will put together a proper 4K restoration from either the original negatives or from good, existing prints. (And I’d be happy to consult on such a project!) Until then, I’ll post any new tidbits about the films that I happen to run across, and if a new set comes out I’ll certainly pop back with my appraisal of it.

Thoughts? Comments? Have Fleischer Superman news to share? Find me on Twitter @davextreme or on my website, david.ely.fm.

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