Max Fleischer's SUPERMAN "The Mad Scientist" (1941), the greatest VISUAL animated short in history?

Yeah, the damage when optical sound gets stomped on in multiple generations can be heinous. Just the problem of variable density vs. variable area is tremendous -- variable density could sound better, but if the lab screwed up the processing one way or the other, it went to hell very quickly.

When the studios want to spend the money, they can take the optical tracks to companies like Chace Productions in Burbank and really pull excellent sound off those old optical negatives. But even the Chace guys can only do so much. Three or four generations of optical ain't gonna yield anything over 7kHz -- there's nothing there but noise. And this is also predicated on the studios wanting to spend the money and using engineers with good ears and good judgement.

 

I was thinking those Supe shorts sound a few generations down. Very, very crunchy. Doesn't change the fact that the band simply wasn't as solid as those in NYC and Hollywood. Still so charming though. Love this stuff.

dan c

 

For Superman's 75th anniversary in 2013, DC Comics commissioned a two-minute animated short that touches on the character's iconic versions, including the Fleischer cartoon. It's really a must-see:

 

I'd have to go with Disney's The Old Mill. It was the first use of the Multiplane camera, which was a game changer in animation.

 

Ub Iwerks developed the multiplane camera with 4 layers available to provide a sense of depth in backgrounds after he'd left Disney. He used it several years before Disney used the mutliplane camera they'd developed for The Old Mill - watch the start of this ComiColor short from 1934 - definite layering of the background is easily seen in Iwerks' cartoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Wf4ki3WX4&feature=player_embedded

Disney understood the ways of the business world far better than Iwerks. He wasn't the first to build or use a camera/process to create a sense of depth in animation (and there were earlier devices used by others before Iwerks developed what we recognize as a multiplane camera), but Disney was the one shrewd enough to register the idea and be awarded a patent for the multiplane camera.

 

Fabulous cartoons. I bought one set on DVD but it was only in French (aaaargh!).
I will collect them off YouTube. I love Fleischer's work.

 

At 0:56 - insert Ted Knight's voiceover :
"Meanwhile - back at the Hall of Justice..."

 

I used to have The Mad Scientist on VHS when I was a kid in the 90's. I loved it very much, too bad I lost it.

 

They look pretty good in my "Superman Motion Picture Anthology, 1978-2006" Blu-Ray set from what I remember. Kind of a steal at $70.

Here's the cartoon content as listed on Amazon...

· First Flight: The Fleischer Superman Series

· Fleischer Studios’ Superman
Superman
The Mechanical Monsters
Billion Dollar Limited
The Arctic Giant
The Bulleteers
The Magnetic Telescope
Electric Earthquake
Volcano
Terror on the Midway

· Famous Studios’ Superman
Japoteurs
Showdown
Eleventh Hour
Destruction, Inc
The Mummy Strikes
Jungle Drums
The Underground World
Secret Agent

 

Didn't the Fleischers actually use a bouncing ball at the side of the frame, as a guide for this kind of thing (and that's was where the "Bouncing Ball" started), or was I misremembering that...?




Now playing on Ariel Stream: Alpinestars - Snow Patrol pt. 2

 

This looks like a gross video enhancement processor to me. I note that the company that made it went out of business last year:

http://www.vreveal.com/

There's an art to doing enhancement well, and this isn't it. Take a look at the Bond films if you want to see it done well, and they had the ability to apply different enhancement (or no enhancement at all) to different parts of the screen at the same time.

 

Thanks to this thread, I purchased the Image "Complete Fleischer Superman Cartoons" DVD.

Amazing they are all PD; Why is that? Copyright issues?

Evan

 

Yes, Lois is just not right for Kal-el. Superman #141 gave us Lyla Lerrol, drawn by the amazing Wayne Boring (Superman was ready to die happy, with her, on Krypton, before fate intervened...). But whatever her personal deficiencies, Lois as rendered in the Fleischer cartoons can be pretty brassy and occasionally interesting. And I like her look, but some of us are suckers for 1940s feminine style.

 

Actually, they did spend quite a bit of money on them. The problem is that decades of past studio managements tossed the negatives. Don't forget that Paramount owned the Fleischer Brothers' studio, not Warner Bros.

 

They didn't clean up the white spots and stuff like that ,which if they spent the money would be a improvement ,they look like a Olive release

 

They should've done a full dirt-removal pass, so there may have been some money issues. What I've found with really old films (prior to 1960) is you can spend upwards of $1,000 a minute on this stuff and only get the really big pieces of dirt out. At some point, everything that's left is pretty small, but it looks big when the rest of the frame is pristine. There is no truly automatic way to remove negative dirt (white dots) from HD or 4K video -- there's a lot of human intervention involved, or else lots of small details wind up getting removed. And all of this processing is done frame-by-frame. Very labor-intensive.

 

What they did was stunning, seeing as otherwise the best releases were print sourced directly and far inferior to what they could be.

But the WB release has various audio errors and glitches which were never corrected, and it has still not seen a Blu-ray release. (Example: "Truth and justice becoming "truth-justice") I still have my Bosko Diamond DVD for the correct audio.

I once asked the Archive if it was possible to do; they said they had no idea.