Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Superman 40's revisited......



British artist, Des Taylor, has produced a nice collection of Superman images based on the
look of the famed 1940's animation series produced by the Fleischer Studio for Paramount Pictures; the artwork was presented in public at the recent London Comicon:























Des Taylor's Captain America:







Des Taylor's BATMAN & GREEN LANTERN



Fantastic young artist, don't you think?




Below; images from the original 1940's Fleischer cartoons:












  













                         





                                       Print version of Fleischer Superman (DC Comics)  

  



The Fleischer  Superman cartoons are a series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films released by Paramount Pictures and based upon the comic book adventures of Superman which had debuted in 1938.

The pilot and first eight shorts were produced by Fleischer Studios from 1941 to 1942, while the final eight were produced by Famous Studios, a successor company to


Fleischer Studios,  and associate of Paramount, from 1942 to 1943. Superman was the final animated series initiated under Fleischer Studios, before Famous Studios officially took over production in May 1942.

 Fleischer used rotoscoping in a number of his later cartoons. Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been mainly replaced by computers in recent years.
  
The Fleischer studio's most effective use of rotoscoping was in these action-oriented Superman cartoons, in which Superman and the other animated figures displayed very realistic movement. The technique was invented by Max Fleischer, who used it in his series Out of the Inkwell starting around 1915, with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown. Max Fleischer patented the method in 1917.

 Although all the cartoons  are now  in the public domain, ancillary rights such as merchandising contract rights, as well as the original 35mm master elements, are owned today by Warner Bros. Animation. 

The fantastic thing is that all these fabulous cartoons are now available on DVD at very reasonable prices.

You can also see them here on YouTubes:






Planetronix, Earth,
March 13, 2012.














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