The Dollar Store Superman
Thirty-five years ago, Superman celebrated his golden anniversary in style. DC Comics marked the occasion with the giant-sized Action Comics #600 with a story by superstar artists John Byrne and George Pérez, the Smithsonian hosted a yearlong exhibition “Superman: Many Lives, Many Worlds,” and the Man of Steel starred in a Saturday morning cartoon produced by Ruby-Spears as well as a syndicated live-action series Superboy, covering Clark Kent’s college years.
Comic books were on newsstands coast to coast, t-shirts were readily available at shopping malls nationwide, and every five-and-dime had at least a few toys or coloring books on the shelf with that familiar red S-shield proudly on display.
But one Superman product in particular was inescapable that year. One thing that could be found in every late night convenience store, department store, mom-and-pop corner store, every flea market, and every video rental place...but didn’t earn a dime for DC Comics or their parent company Warner Bros.
Due to the vagaries of copyright law, the Superman animated shorts produced by Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios from 1941 to 1943 fell into the public domain when Warner Bros. failed to renew the copyright on those 17 cartoons. As a result, dozens of fly-by-night video companies, hoping to capitalize on the explosion in popularity of VCRs and the burgeoning home video market, issued their own editions of the classic Superman animated shorts. Although the initial publishers may have been working from vintage film reels or were fortunate enough to find decent copies of these cartoons that aired on local television stations in the 1970s and 1980s, many simply dubbed copies from other home video releases, repackaged them, and sold them as their own.
Eager to capitalize on the home video market themselves, stores that wanted to carry low-cost VHS tapes filled rack space with cheap public domain content, including Superman, The Three Stooges (always the same handful of shorts, “Malice in the Palace,” “Disorder in the Court,” “Sing a Song of Six Pants,” and “The Brideless Groom,” which had accidentally fallen into public domain in the 1960s), plus other animated cartoons that had slipped through the cracks of copyright law.
The target audience for these videos was undoubtedly the Mom-and-Grandma market, who could be counted on to pick up videos featuring familiar characters for the kids at home, gladly dropping two or three dollars on a tape instead of the $40 or more (a small fortune back in the 1980s!) that more contemporary, popular characters would have commanded for home video purchases.
And so a new generation of viewers discovered the classic Superman cartoons. I say “viewers” instead of “fans,” because it was nearly impossible for those of us who’d grown up on Christopher Reeve’s Superman and the Saturday morning Super Friends cartoons to see what all the fuss was about when we were introduced to the Fleischer cartoons—and usually the same three or four of them—on grainy, murky video transfers with sloppy, inconsistent audio tracks. The action sequences felt slow and tedious, and after two or three of them, you’d actively be looking for chores to do around the house so that you wouldn’t have to finish the tape.
The artwork on these tapes, usually but not always trying to avoid copyrighted elements like Superman’s famous logo and S-shield, ran the gamut from “pretty good with markers in high school” to “that caricature artist that makes all the kids cry” to “yes, I can get my brother-in-law to draw Superman for you, yes, he works cheap, and yes, he can draw in in the car on the way to the printer.”
Eventually, thankfully, Warner Bros. cleaned up and remastered these cartoons for a proper DVD release, and in 2006, fans (and yes, I’ll use the word “fans” this time) who purchased the newly restored Superman and Superman II movies were treated to all 17 of the classic Superman shorts, restored, and remastered, and for the first time in generations, we could see what all the fuss was about, and why animators like Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm of Batman: The Animated Series fame turned to them when developing their own animated superhero cartoons a half-century later.
Subsequent home versions have been released periodically since then, including a standalone DVD collection and, just this month, in a single-disc Blu-ray collection, complete with mini-documentaries about the films and their impact on animation and on Superman himself. And with really terrific cover art, too.
The latest edition, Max Fleischer’s Superman: 1941-1943, presents these cartoons as they’ve never been seen before, cleaner and crisper than they would have been during their original theatrical presentation 80 years ago. Animation purists may be dismayed at the lack of grit and scratches on this latest collection, but the colors are vibrant, the sound is crisp, and you don’t have to look any further than your favorite dollar store, flea market, or grandma’s house to scratch that “I want these Superman cartoons to put me to sleep” itch that you can only get from public domain VHS tapes.
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