What? Making the choice to actually read the content in that horrible mess of button-pushing marketroid bullshit left me feeling the kind of dirty a shower can’t fix.
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You poor thing.
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Yes I read that story awhile ago. It again illustrates how everything is a remix and is built upon stuff before it. Some times not even realizing what you are copying.
Speaking of Fleischer cartoons, I would be remiss with out mentioning the Superman cartoons. (Superman was borrowed heavily from Doc Savage in the pulp magazines.)
ETA -
Q: Why did so many people not recognize that Superman was NOT a bird or a plan in the early 40s?
A: Day drinking.
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Except that Helen Kane knew exactly what she was doing, by most accounts.
For some reason, my kid and I were on a ‘retro Superman’ kick a few years back and we streamed quite a few eps from that series.
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Right, but Fleischer didn’t appear to know she copied someone else when they used her as inspiration.
ETA - it is like when film directors copy a favorites trick, not realizing they got it from somewhere else as well, or were inspired from something else.
Cartoon Network WAAAAY late at night used to show the old Popeye cartoons. I loved them too. The really old ones were the best, I thought. In black and white.
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You wuz right. They were strange to watch as a kid. I recall there were a few operatic ones too. I wonder why the magic was taken out of animation? Early Mickey was magical, but the Disney movies were realistic, very little morphed into something else, they had a consistent reality. The trippy stuff in BB is when everything is fluid or anthropomorphized, cars and candlesticks and windows and whatever.
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Even more fundamental question: why did people find birds and planes so noteworthy that they had to be loudly pointed out in public?
I drew a short one-off comic about 20 years ago that opened with a scene of the Metropolis Skywatchers Society. One person points up shouting “It’s a bird!” Another responds “It’s a plane!” A third guy wearing binoculars says “No, dude. She’s right. It’s just another bird.” A fourth person takes a drag at her cigarette and declares “This club bites.”
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Well, in the early '40s, commercial aviation had only been around for 30 years, and was pretty exotic unless you were rich. There’s a wild montage in Disney’s 'Victory Through Airpower" illustrating the evolution of aviation up until then. Victory Through Airpower was essentially a propaganda film advocating the creation of a US Air Force to battle the Japanese.
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That’s just it: in the case you provide the eye sockets haven’t expanded at all; hence the creepy bulging.
The unnerving effect in the Betty Boop instance is that the eyes appear dramatically enlarged in a way that would require some cranial reshuffling to achieve.
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That still doesn’t explain why people would gather around and exclaim “it’s a PLANE!” in a city where far more exotic things like mechanical monsters and atomic super-men were weekly occurrences.
Not to mention the “…it’s a BIRD!” crowd. I’m sorry, but if you’re older than two and you still think seeing some random bird in the sky is noteworthy enough to alert everyone in the vicinity then you clearly don’t have enough excitement in your life.
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Well, seeing a bird in a polluted city might be kind of noteworthy, those being the glory days of smoke-belching industry and big gas-guzzling cars and all. But, yeah, it was a pretty corny opening, all things considered. And the dude was ‘faster than a locomotive,’ which wouldn’t be all that fast if you’ve ever waited at a crossing in the Midwest for a freight train.
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Wait, wasn’t it “faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive?”
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Didn’t the sequence usually start with “what’s that in the sky?”.
…which evokes the “it’s a bird (you idiot), it’s a plane (you blind fool)”, etc.
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There’s a middle aged man in my neighborhood who does get very excited about seeing a bird but he’s got the mind of a two year old.
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Old Tom and Gerry Cartoon (the Fred Quimby ones) were excellent (though a few were hideously racist); the violence was so inventive.
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Agreed; that’s good the stuff.
Unfortunately, that’s true of most popular American cartoons from certain time periods.
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We can work out the mass of original Superman, roughly.
Let’s assume a supersonic bullet doing about 500 m/s, and a 100t locomotive doing about 30m/s. The kinetic energy of the locomotive = 1/2mv2 or about 45MJ (I’m assuming a locomotive of the period, not a Shinkansen which would exceed the LHC bunch energy mentioned above). Fitting this back to 500m/s gives us a mass of around 360kg. Of course, the uncertainty of the comparisons gives some wiggle room, but it’s more likely that he was slower than a supersonic bullet since he never seems to produce a sonic bang, so that would make the mass even higher.
Not only is it amazing that Clark Kent went undetected, it’s just as well that Superman never seemed to have a sexual relationship with his lady friends.
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Clark Kent must be finding some way to avoid medicals, as I can’t see any doctor being happy about someone with a BMI of 99.2.
Maybe the Daily Planet doesn’t care about him avoiding anything to do with medical insurance.
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I’ve worked that one out. He secretly flaps his hands to generate lift when he stands on the scales.
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