The Arctic Giant - WWII Era

This is one of my favorites. Decades before Gojira(Godzilla,) there was The Arctic Giant.

Check out the detail in the generator plant under the museum. I just get the feeling that these guys went and looked at the real thing in many cases, which seems to be something very few animators from that time cared about.


Where did talent go these last 60 years? Now we have computer programs running on vast arrays of physics simulators, that don't do as well as these folk did in 1941.

I will be posting about a dozen of these World War 2 era Superman cartoons over the next week or two.

Please pay close attention to the animation. The animation of the people isn't the best, but any time there is structural drawing or something that was considered high-tech for the day, the animation is incredible.

I don't know how to describe it really, but there is a mixture of realism in the cars and buildings mixed with a sense of fantasy in the other elements that just really, really WORKS to make these a fun time.

There is a lot of politically incorrect stuff in some of these, so please remember the times these came from before whining about that.

This is where we came from, not where we are now.

Produced by the Fleischer studios, the same folks that brought you Popeye cartoons, and the early ad piece "In My Merry Oldsmobile" which is also available here.