# 3185f FDC - 1998 32c Celebrate the Century - 1930s: Superman arrives

 

Issue Date: September 10, 1998
City: Cleveland, OH
Quantity: 12,533,000
Printed By: Ashton–Potter (USA) Ltd
Printing Method: Lithographed, engraved
Perforations: 11.5
Color: Multicolored

 

Happy Birthday Max Fleischer

Fleischer was the second of six children born to an immigrant tailor. The Fleischer family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1887. Fleischer attended the Mechanics and Trademan’s School and trained in commercial art at Cooper Union (the site of Abraham Lincoln’s famed 1860 Cooper Union Address). He then worked as an errand boy and later cartoonist at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

After marrying his childhood sweetheart, Fleischer took a job as an illustrator for a Boston catalog company before returning to New York to serve as Art Editor of Popular Science magazine. During this time he also wrote books, including Noah’s Shoes.

Soon Fleischer’s interests turned to animation. In 1914, Fleischer invented “rotoscoping,” which was a method where animators traced out live-action movements captured on pictures to create cartoons. Fleischer first used rotoscoping to trace the movements of a man in a clown suit – with the man being his brother, Dave. The character created by Max and Dave became Koko the Clown (sometimes spelled “Ko-ko”). Fleischer patented the rotoscope in 1915 and used it extensively for his early animation series, Out of the Inkwell for Bray Studios.

In 1924, Fleischer introduced the now-famous “follow the bouncing ball” technique in his animated sing-along Song Car-Tunes series. The first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation, My Old Kentucky Home (1926), included a cartoon dog telling viewers to sing along as the ball landed on each letter. This short introductory clip preceded Disney’s Steamboat Willie by two years.

In 1928, Fleischer joined the film industry in its transition to sound. He created the Talkartoon series and its star dog, Bimbo, in the cartoon Hot Dog. In 1930 he introduced Bimbo’s girlfriend, a poodle-human hybrid. The following year her dog ears became hoop earrings and she became a human woman named Betty Boop, dubbed the “Queen of the Animated Screen.” She grew so popular, Talkartoons was eventually renamed Betty Boop Cartoons.

By this point, Fleischer was one of two leading animation producers, with the other being Walt Disney. But their styles were quite different. Fleischer’s cartoons were sophisticated and surreal and featured dark humor and adult psychology.

Fleischer received another patent in the 1930s for his Stereotipical Process, a three-dimensional background effect. To create this effect, a circular diorama was placed behind the main action cells and rotated a click with each frame, creating a dramatic sense of depth.

One success during this period was Superman. Paramount had wanted to capitalize the comic’s success with a cartoon series. However Fleischer was busy working on his two films and didn’t want his staff to be overworked. So he asked for a budget of $100,000 – about four times the usual budget of one of their shows. To his surprise the studio entered into negotiations, settling at $50,000 per short. In spite of his initial objections, Fleischer committed his team to the Superman cartoon, which proved to be one of the studio’s most popular. It featured very realistic drawing and intricate scoring seldom-seen at the time. The first episode was even nominated for an Academy Award, but lost to a Disney cartoon. As an interesting side-note, the Fleischers introduced Superman’s ability to fly. In the comics he could leap from place to place, but they thought this looked silly in animation, so they got permission to make him fly.

Fleischer went on to work as head of the animation department of the Jim Handy Organization. There he produced training films for the Army and Navy for the war effort. After the war, he supervised the production of the first Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer screen appearance – a cartoon short sponsored by Montgomery Ward. Fleischer then revived his Out of the Inkwell series, producing 100 color shorts for television. He reportedly formed a friendship with Walt Disney, who now employed many of Fleischer’s former animators.

After suffering failing health for many years, Fleischer died on September 11, 1972. Time magazine later dubbed him “The Dean of Animated Cartoons.”

Click here to see some of Fleischer’s cartoons.

 

Superman was created in 1934 by two Cleveland teenagers, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. The duo had hoped to land their hero in the newspapers with a daily adventure comic strip, but had no luck; editors and publishers felt that their hero was simply too strange. While Siegel and Shuster shopped their hero around to comic strip syndicates and comic book publishers, their work on characters like Dr. Occult started appearing in DC Comics. Finally, in June 1938, the Man of Tomorrow made his debut as the lead feature in Action Comics #1.