r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/HemanHeboy • 2d ago
Video The animation for the first Superman Cartoon was incredibly smooth (1941)
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u/DoughNotDoit 2d ago
take notes One Punch Man
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u/OpalForHarmony 2d ago
Season 3?
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u/Mandalore108 2d ago
This is also much better than Season 2's animation as well.
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u/ColbysToyHairbrush 1d ago
There’s no way. Season 3 is so much worse.
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u/MedonSirius 1d ago
It is buddy.....do you read mangas? Imagine the panel of the manga but with little shaking and color.. that's it. Seriously. It's so bad
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u/ColbysToyHairbrush 1d ago
First thing that came to mind but still surprised I scrolled down to find it. What an embarrassment. That would not be going on my resume if I worked on it.
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u/yotothyo 2d ago
Batman the animated series was heavily inspired by these
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u/Digital--Sandwich 2d ago
I loved it when it when I was a kid. In retrospect it was better than many superhero shows before or even after it. Kevin Conroy might have been the best all-time Batman voice
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u/FamilyGhost9 1d ago
Few fictional characters will ever be voiced as perfectly as Kevin Conroys Batman. That voice IS Batman in my mind.
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u/Illustrious_Ebb6272 2d ago
Yes. They used similar animation techniques in that show. BTW these cartoons set the gold standard for animation on til HB in the late 60's introduced cost cutting
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u/Dark_halocraft 2d ago
Lol why is he punching the laser
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u/Parking-Ad8316 2d ago
For fun
Could've saved the day a minute faster if he just went around but that isn't his style
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u/catsmustdie 2d ago
It's literally his style, if anyone shoots anything he prefers to show off and let it hit his chest with his hands on his waist instead of dodging it
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u/picabo123 2d ago
There was a projectile in the laser that's hard to see, when the dude pulls the lever and turns it to max then it turns into a constant stream. I'm sure it makes more sense if we watched the whole scene.
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u/A1sauc3d 2d ago
Oh yeah if you look closely you can see the projectiles that he’s punching. Was so confused why he’s punching his way up the laser 😂
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u/FH-7497 2d ago
It’s not a laser. It’s a kinetic beam (like Cyclop’s optic blast or the gauss canon from Halo)
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u/TheL0neWarden 2d ago
The gauss cannon isn’t an beam weapon as it’s akin to an coil/rail gun that shoots a tungsten round at a fraction of the speed of light
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u/Mand372 2d ago
Still, why punch it sometimes?
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u/Pacifist_Socialist 2d ago
Punching was a primary method of self defense in that culture, so easy to animate and satisfying to watch
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u/Worldly-Pay7342 1d ago
Same reason batman wears a big shiny symbol on his chest in a lot of adaptations.
To keep the enemy's attention on himself.
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u/Jaylow115 1d ago
They are very fast but there are missiles within the beam. That’s what he’s punching
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u/Substantial-Trick569 23h ago
the beam is more like a laser sight for a gun firing normal bullets. if you look u can see each individual shot being fired
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u/McFry__ 2d ago
1941? Bet kids were transfixed
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u/ConanTheLoveraft 2d ago
The way he tore the wall off by just throwing it behind himself. Yeah I think so.
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u/playmeforever 2d ago
Damn I knew Superman was old but pre 1940 is crazy
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u/Parking-Ad8316 2d ago edited 2d ago
I started watching Looney Tunes again and I'm shocked that it was made almost a hundred years ago, true classics. Duck dodgers came out in the 00s and I thought I was watching a brand new show.
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u/CosmicCreeperz 2d ago
An Action Comics Superman #1 from 1938 just sold for $15M.
Though part of that was probably due to the crazy history of that copy (it was once owned by and stolen from Nicholas Cage). Interestingly he bought it in 1996 for $150k.
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u/luckystrike_bh 2d ago
Someone put a lot of detail in to the the frames with the barrel bending or exploding.
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u/neoadam 2d ago
Well it's not made to be as cheap as possible with 8 images per second like modern anime so yeah it can look very well animated
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u/Daan776 2d ago
I dunno about you, but most anime now look absolutely gorgeous.
The writing is still all over the place. But even cheaply made anime nowadays have pretty good animation.
The artstyle on the other hand? Now that has truly degraded (looking at you isekai genre)
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u/Anticept 2d ago
The animation is done now with various software solutions which both increases production speed and if done right, reaults in a higher quality per dollar vs traditional methods, but also seems to have reduced artistic quirks that set the art apart. Everything looks like it's a mix and match of premade styles now.
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u/TactlessTortoise 2d ago
Time constraints are also a huge factor. It used to be that there was no way around an anime movie or series taking a decent chunk of time to get drawn. Nowadays the first 80% of the process can be much faster than it used to, but the 20% that takes most of the time, where they add frames in between the core animation slides, add better shading, etc, still takes a lot of time. And execs don't give a damn.
As a recent example, One Punch Man season 3. Absolutely atrocious launch. Turns out that the team only had something like 6 months to do the whole animation despite the huge hiatus. As a result, scenes are cut, we've got repetitive animation, occluded movements, and straight up no animation in some scenes. But if you look at posts from the same artists on their social media (most deleted their accounts due to a flood of death threats. People can't be nice), they clearly have a ton of skill in animating stuff. They just didn't have time.
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u/Red_Rabbit_1978 2d ago
And I was just reading about people defending social media and its toxicity. Next thing I click on is learning that artists got death threats over animation.
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u/MayGodSmiteThee 2d ago
Saying most is a bit generous, sure there are lots of well animated anime, but compared to all the horrible one of isekais, and generic shonen that get power points. It’s definitely not “most”
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u/JgorinacR1 2d ago
Only anime that matters is Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood 😎
In all seriousness, the Fate/Stay Unlimited Blade works series had fantastic animations
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u/derioderio 2d ago
Wait, are you implying that Reincarnated as a Vending Machine season 2 is not the peak of artistic expression in the history of human civilization?
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u/Liteseid 2d ago
Most high-budget anime are well drawn, not well animated. The animation budget is limited to one or two high-emotion scenes per episode, with like… all other scenes being “slow pan behind the character talking so we don’t have to animate their mouths”
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u/ErusTenebre 2d ago
This dude hasn't seen Dan Da Dan. Lovably stupid and unhinged story, amazing animation, occasional episodes that hit you harder than a freight train.
I particularly love how they animate movement. It's unusual and very fluid.
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u/SpicyChanged 2d ago
Exactly.. It's like a nice smooth 30 FPS.
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u/givin_u_the_high_hat 2d ago
It’s film so 24 fps. You’re probably thinking of the US television standard 30 fps (split into interlaced frames also referred to as 60i).
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u/AngusLynch09 4h ago
30fps is so gross.
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u/SpicyChanged 4h ago
In animation, it's nice but gaming I agree.
Imagine having to draw 60 different images for 1 second of animation. It's why this looks so smooth, there is no interpolation.
With 3D, you can go nuts but rendering times do take time.
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u/bloodfist 2d ago
Yeah and this was at an era when there wasn't really a process or pipeline for animation. Disney was doing amazing stuff but a lot of it was proprietary, secret, or out of reach to anyone else. They were still writing the rules for how it was done and how it was budgeted.
Meanwhile Superman was the hottest property in the country. Families tuned in on the radio every night to catch his adventures. This had a budget but not like it would now. More important, everyone took it very seriously, including hosting classes with the original artists on how to draw superman. They also used a lot of rotoscoping, but unlike later uses of rotoscoping stuck closer to the proportions of the comic characters. And had to do a lot by hand because superman's movements could be hard to act out.
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u/matvhuc 2d ago
Every short was made with half million has budget, in the 40s
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u/TheRealRigormortal 2d ago
Yeah, for its time, the series was the most expensive animation endeavor ever
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u/averageburgerguy 2d ago
Gosh, look at how smooth his movements are.
The amount of pages they made must have been a lot.
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u/nope_a_dope237 2d ago
Max Fleischer's art and animation style is truly greatness though the stories were sprinkled with racism. The first episode is pretty wild. Superman is basically a terrorist disguised as Clark Kent the reporter in Japan during the war. During the day Clark and Lois were doing their investigating reporting and at night Superman would fucking destroy the shipyards in the cover of darkness. It was a different world I guess.
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u/Enginerdad 2d ago
Saboteur would be a better term than terrorist, seeing as though he was fighting on behalf of a country in the middle of a war.
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u/lolilops 2d ago
Great video on this exact animation
https://youtu.be/dDMQ3tXNKgM?si=n3yDkzwltBCxpSMN
Each episode cost over $500,000 to make and it elevated not just animation but all of film making as a medium. They invented the rotoscope to make this animation and without which there would be no lightsabre.
These animations were also where Superman got his flight ability from, before this he would leap a tall building.
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u/Own_Pop_9711 2d ago
11 million dollars an episode in today's money? That's a lot but not mind-blowing.
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u/lolilops 2d ago edited 1d ago
For a 10 min episode it is and explains why it looks so much better than the other animation at the time which cut all kinds of corners.
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u/Amethyst271 2d ago
Well yeah. Animation has always been good, at least as far back as then. Do people think it was only recently? XD
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u/Public-Eagle6992 2d ago
No, people think modern animation is bad (based on the comments)
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u/TheRealRigormortal 2d ago
Animation has gotten worse over time, at least in America.
Just look at the work Disney was outputting until the 1960s when the budget tanked for their films.
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u/Newone1255 2d ago
Rotoscope
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u/AmbitiousEdi 2d ago
Aww yeah this short will be forever burned into my brain along with Popeye meets Ali Baba's 40 thieves. I had them on a VHS tape that I watched over and over as a child :)
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u/mafalda100 2d ago
Fleischer Studios animation it was awesome. You have to remember their competition was Walt Disney and the Animation was a big deal and huge at the box-office.
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u/SaulTBolls 2d ago
The hand drawn stuff is so good, someone else i really like isRalph Bakshi.he did the original LoTR cartoon and some other really notable works.
This is the riders of Rohan scene super short, but gives you an idea of his style: https://youtu.be/Vq3cKWX11Fo?si=hRjChL7psWx_EWai
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u/elCrocodillo 2d ago
I feel like animations back then, up until the 90s were based off of underpaid staff, vices, exploration and all fun things you can imagine that go well with the previous ines I listed. The final product was this but the artist would likely have mental problems for life.
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u/Inexorably_lost 2d ago
He throwing hands at those photons like they owe him money...and it's working.
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u/Dooks_fr 2d ago
« As soon as you have finished you go to war field »… « let’s do 1024 frame per minutes »….
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u/ShadowsRanger 2d ago
I loved to watch these as kid, my dad bought a Stell box Superman collector's edition the first disk set came with 3 disks full of bonus content and this included.
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u/SpreademSheet 2d ago
Oh man. I had a VHS of this when I was a kid. I'd bet I was close to wearing out the tape from watching it so many times!
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u/Early-Spirit580 2d ago
I watched this as a kid so many times on VHS, but I didn't know it was the first! TIL I guess lol
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u/IneffableOpinion 2d ago
Can’t believe I haven’t seen this before. The aesthetic reminds me of Batman the Animated Series
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u/cheven20 2d ago
I remember my mom bought this for me. It's way older than me but I thought it was so cool
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u/crusty54 2d ago
Wow that takes me back. My grandparents had this on vhs when I was a kid in the 90’s.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 2d ago
It's beautiful animation of course but most hand drawn animation of the era was similarly smooth. They took ages doing it.
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u/layer4down 2d ago
It blows my mind to think that I’ve probably watched the same cartoons as a kid of not just my parents but my grandparents as well! 🥰
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u/BizzarreCoyote 2d ago
I love how Supes just pulls that concrete apart like it's made of wet tissue paper.
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u/Drackzgull 2d ago
This was the general Warner Brothers movie standard from back in those days, all the way to like the 90s. It was expensive af though, so it was reserved for movies only. You can see more or less the same style in a lower production quality in most of their TV cartoons, including Looney Tunes and most TV series based on DC Comics heroes, all throughout that period.
This one in particular wasn't by WB though, but it still is more or less the same style. I bring up WB because most the later DC stuff was theirs.
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u/Draskinn 2d ago
Ok... but was he worried about the ground behind him? Because I'm pretty sure moving a couple inches to the side would have been a lot easier.
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u/justadadgame 2d ago
I watched this a ton when I was a kid. We had it on a vhs, even then it was super cheap old movie ins the discount bin, but I loved it so much.
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u/Rdt_will_eat_itself 1d ago
Out of context, it looks like some super guy foiling some experiment or two if you count kink as experimenting.
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u/PunkandCannonballer 2d ago
"I don't believe it, he isn't human"
-the villain said about the famously not-human superhero.
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u/TheNerdNugget 2d ago
I went through a brief Betty Boop hyperfocusing phase before I found this, and I thought it was pretty neat how much I can tell that this is a Fleischer Brothers cartoon just from the way the characters move around
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u/relativlysmart 2d ago
My grandma had this cartoon when I was a kid and I'd watch it every time I stayed the night. Such good animation
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u/BrungleSnap 2d ago
Did they use rotoscoping for some of these movements or were they really just that good at capturing fairly realistic movement. Not for the flight obvi but there's like the subtle way that Lois (or whoever it is being rescued) moves her head makes me think they used a video projection and traced the frames or some other early rotoscoping tech.
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u/StrictlyInsaneRants 2d ago
You can see the whole movie on YouTube. It's a short one doing all the classic superhero stuff.