Warner Bros. Discovery has carefully remastered Max Fleischer’s iconic set of 17 animated Superman short films from the original 35mm source elements. They will all come together in Max Fleischer’s Superman 1941-1943. It will be available to buy digitally on HD and on Blu-ray May 16.

Superman made his comic book debut in 1938, first appearing in Action Comics #1. From there the Man of Steel grew in popularity through the pages of comic books as well as his radio program. Max Fleischer brought the world’s first superhero his initial animated spotlight. He produced 17 theatrical animated shorts from September 1941 to July 1943 that further grew the world’s love for the superhero from Smallville.

It is through these shorts that Superman’s character profile was elevated as they added many significant aspects to his canon. These include coining many of Superman’s patented catchphrases and attributes that are so iconic to this day.

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According to Warner Bros. Discovery, their remastering process started with a 4K 16-bit scan of Fleischer’s original 35mm successive exposure negative. Staying true to the original theatrical aspects ratio of 1.37-to-1, the highest quality raw image was then scanned and then entered into the recombine process utilizing special proprietary software to merge the successive exposure Technicolor negatives into a single RGB color image.

This resulted in pristine animated shorts that have been restored to the animators’ originally intended production quality.

Radio actors Clayton “Bud” Collyer and Joan Alexander reprised their roles as Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane from the Adventures of Superman radio show for the animated series and will now be enjoyed in Max Fleischer’s Superman 1941-1943.

Max Fleischer’s Superman 1941-1943 will be available on May 16, 2023, to purchase Digitally in HD
from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Vudu, and more, and on Blu-ray at major retailers
both online and in-store.