Word: supermanly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Letdown. In Des Moines, Iowa, an eight-year-old Superman fan, James Henderson, put on a Superman suit, jumped off the second-story landing and crashed. Said he, with a sprained ankle, "The darned thing wouldn't work...
...same new discoveries in photography are used throughout this new movie with no additions. Scenes are played both in semi-darkness and in complete darkness. The actors walk through so many shadows that one feels as though he were seeing Superman walk through walls. Shadows become too real and destroy the mood they were supposed to create. In contrast, light, when used, is too concentrated and too brilliant. There is no reality of illumination, and this alone is the source of the picture's weaknesses...
...insist, most of all, "upon the limited competence, indeed upon the fallibility of every man, be he ever so uncommon," and hardly less, upon the belief that "the mass of common men are, in the long run, less likely to be wrong than the individual judgement of any superman...
Artistically, Superman shorts are the movie cartoon at its worst. Superman looks and acts like a wooden puppet. So do all his playmates. There is little that his creators-the old Fleischer Studios (now Famous Studios, Inc.) at Miami, Fla.-can do to improve their hero-even King Disney can't animate human beings satisfactorily. But they did manage to give him a new voice recently. His old one wasn't manly enough. Now it booms...
...Superman in the Volcano shows the wonderworker rescuing his newshen pal, Lois, from a belching crater, splicing a broken power line with uninsulated hands, blowing a sluice in the mountain so that a lava flow will miss the metropolis. There is never any suspense, since Superman always wins, no matter what happens. But his idolators (of all ages) seem satisfied to see him flex his muscles. This vicarious satisfaction has made Superman Paramount's most popular and profitable short, despite the $65,000 it costs to make each cartoon. So popular is the muscular moron that 114 female artists...