The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This early Superman animated effort is truly vintage, it has that same animation and audio style as most cartoons of it's time and clearly very Warner Brothers influenced.Less serious than most of his outings this is a 10 minute silly short seeing our hero foil the dastardly plans of an evil scientist with a death ray.Plain, simple, harmless but hardly entertaining.The Good:Highly nostalgicThe Bad:Very shortSillyThings I Learnt From This Short:Every mad scientist needs a crow sidekick

The Fleischer "Superman" series was so important to me as a child, I looked back on these with great joy. This is the first of the shows and involves the introduction to our hero. They veer away from the comic book beginning by short cutting a bit. They ignore the Kent family, putting the little space traveler in an orphanage, having him discover his gifts on his own. The adventure involves a mad scientist who develops a kind of destructive ray. He uses it to destroy a bridge, killing many people trapped on the span. Lois circumvents Perry White's decision to send Clark and her to do a story on this guy (how they found out where he was is never explained). Of course, she gets grabbed and tied up immediately by the guy, and while she watches, he begins to destroy stuff. We don't need to look at how it ends, but there is a nice quality to these cartoons that really struck home with me as a child.

Superman (1941) ** 1/2 (out of 4) The first of seventeen shorts produced by Max Fleischer for Paramount. This one has Lois Lane investigating the story of a mad scientist who is going to use a deadly ray to cause havoc all over the city. Soon Lois is taken hostage and it's up to Superman to save the day. This was the first film in the series that I had ever seen and I'm going to watch them in order but so far I really wasn't too impressed. That's not to say this is a poor film because it certainly isn't but I was expecting a lot more from the Fleischer boys. I read at IMDb that this was the most expensive cartoon made at the time and I find that hard to believe because part of the problem I had with the film was its look, which I thought was rather cheap. I also didn't care to much for the vocal work but it didn't bother me too much. The story itself was pretty simple and straight-forward, which was another thing that could have been improved. The film does fly by pretty fast and while nothing is above average, the entire thing does stay average and mildly entertaining.

If I were to develop X-ray vision that allowed me to see into the minds of Sup's most fervent fans, I still may never be able to fathom the appeal of these soulless, bloodless, cliche-riddled adventures. It's as if a cartoon talent agent noticed the impossibly wooden prince from Disney's "Snow White", took him aside and promised him a new outfit and his own series. The Fleishers put painstaking care into these films, but it's impossible to care what happens to these robotic, semi-rotoscoped humanoids. This series seems to be the start of a woeful institution of films that are long on technical expertise and devoid of all personailty. And I still think Clark Kent's glasses wouldn't fool Mortimer Snerd, although The Tick would likely buy it.