Max Fleischer's Superman 1941-1942

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The infant of Krypton is now the Man of Steel: Superman!” Produced by Max Fleischer at the dawn of the 1940s, the 17 animated shorts collected here signaled the first big screen incarnation of the great comic book superhero (and Superman never looked more beautiful in flight or heroic in action). While the stories evoke the adventure serials and genre films of the time (“The Mummy Strikes” is very much a superhero take on the Universal mummy movies), visually these cartoon classics are more like superhero film noir pieces, revolving around a stalwart hero in a shadowy city of super-villains, supernatural monsters, and (in later entries) Axis spies. Combining giddy stunts and last minute rescues with creepy horrors and deadly killers, Warner is labeling this boxed set as “intended for the adult collector and not suitable for children,” a reflection of the fact that some of these WWII-era cartoons contain nationalistic war propaganda featuring insensitive and sometimes offensive racial caricatures. While these animated shorts have been available on DVD in other collections, the cartoons in this “authorized edition” are remastered from the original source materials, and while a few suffer from surface scuffs and scratches, the overall image quality is sharp and the colors are vibrant. DVD extras include a pair of featurettes—the first, a simplistic look at the superhero myth; the second, a much more interesting tribute to the Fleischer shorts—as well as a sneak peek at the upcoming DVD release of the animated feature Green Lantern: First Flight. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)