Superman 75

I'm geeking out about this pretty hard, so I'm posting it to every blog I look after.

Back in the spring, it was announced that Zack Snyder, the director of Man of Steel, would be partnering with Bruce Timm, one of the main creative forces on everything DC animated from Batman: The Animated Series through to their straight-to-DVD animated films, to produce a special animated short film to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Superman. 

The film premiered this past weekend at the New York Comic Con, and it's now hit the Internet.

A little more about the film's production.  The Cartoon Network in the USA does this programming block called "DC Nation," where they show all the DC Universe cartoons, and sprinkle some exclusive animated shorts in between the programs.  When it was announced that Snyder was directing Man of Steel, Timm approached him and asked if he'd like to contribute one of these animated shorts.  Snyder said, "Let me think about it, and I'll get back to you."  When Snyder got back to Timm, he said, "I want to tell the entire history of Superman in 1 minute."

Well, right away, they knew that 1 minutes wasn't going to be enough, so they expanded it to 2 minutes.  Timm admits that, even at 2 minutes, they had to make some pretty significant cuts.  Timm himself says he regrets not being able to squeeze in the Superman serials of the 1940s, where Kirk Alyn became the first man to play Superman in live action.  And I'm seeing a large amount of nerd rage online that Dean Cain and Lois & Clark was left out.

Enough of this.  The short!




Like I said, geeking out about this pretty hard.  From its beginning, showcasing the Max Fleisher shorts of the 1940s, the classic ending to the Christopher Reeve films, and a nice shout-out to the 1990s animated series.  And the clip in the middle from the old Atari 2600 game seems kind of random.

One note about the music:  it was composed by Hans Zimmer, who did the music for Man of Steel, and I'm really glad he gave his new Superman theme the back seat to the classic John Williams theme.

The short is all over the Internet.  It goes into rotation with the DC Nation shorts on Wednesday night, and it'll be a bonus feature on the Man of Steel DVD and Blu-Ray when it comes out on November 12.

And most of the information about the production comes from Entertainment Weekly's article on the film.