The Superman Cartoons!

I've collected them on VHS and I've collected them on DVD many times over. It once was a challenge to find all of them, but then I picked up a collection of the Fleisher Studio cartoons featuring Superman in chronological order. The Bosko collection is from 1991 and was originally on VHS. I picked up the DVD version several years ago, but somehow I've never sat down and watched them all in order. I did yesterday. And it was enlightening. I knew that after the first nine cartoons the Fleisher studios essentially disbanded and became Famous Studios. Reading the credits you can see that many of the same talents stayed on board to guide the Man of Steel in these mini epics. These are very entertaining cartoons, wonderfully and briskly paced adventures of high order. The early ones are high sci-fi and high fantasy. Superman battles comets, giant dinosaurs (in a cartoon that reminded me a lot of Beast From 20,000 Fathoms which inspired Godzilla), and robots. The later cartoons show Superman fighting the war and offer up some neatly constructed propoganda. Lois Lane is in all but one of them and she's her usual annoying self, creating havoc and once in a while proving useful. Superman in these cartoons is an enigma to the public, a impossibly powerful force who shows up in times of crisis and then disappears. Neat touch. Needless to say these are lush and beautiful cartoons, full of vivid and lively images. Since I'm also watching Popeye cartoons right now, it's interesting to see analogs between the two. Watching these in order it's neat to see the evolution of the character and how he's percieved. Sometimes his might is incredible and sometimes he seems all too vulnerable to mundane threat. Superman fights the enemies of WWII on both fronts, underworld Hawkmen, giant gorillas, jewel theives, and madmen of all stripes. Great stuff! Rip Off