Influence
In 1985, DC Comics named Fleischer Studios as one of the honorees in the company's 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great for its work on the Superman cartoons. Writer/artist Frank Miller cited the influence of Max and Dave Fleischer, including them among a list of prominent Golden Age comics creators whose work he acknowledged at the end of his 1986 comics series, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The series strongly influenced the creation of the acclaimed animated television series Batman: The Animated Series, as well as the similar-looking Superman: The Animated Series. Award-winning comic book artist Alex Ross has also listed the shorts among the inspiration for his take on Superman's look.
The robot robbery scene from "The Mechanical Monsters" short has been echoed by several later works. In 1980, Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, created an identical robbery with a similarly functioning robot in the last episode of the second Lupin III TV series, a robot design he used again in his feature film, Castle in the Sky. The elements of the scene were borrowed again in 1994 for The Tick (animated TV series), specifically, The Tick vs. Brainchild (season one, episode 9), this time with the robbery committed by Skippy, a cyborg dog. The 2004 feature length movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (which Paramount released in several territories, WB also distributed in a few countries) kept the setting in the 1940s, but scaled up the scene from a single robot robbing a jewelry exhibition to an army of gigantic robots stealing city infrastructure. The movie gave a nod to its source following the robbery with the newspaper headline, "Mechanical Monsters Unearth Generators."
A 1988 music video for the song "Spy In The House of Love" by Chrysalis Records recording artists Was (Not Was) borrowed footage extensively from Famous' Secret Agent episode.
Read more about this topic: Superman (1940s cartoons)
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Important as fathers are, their influence on children shouldn’t be exaggerated just because they were ignored so long. There is no evidence that there is something especially good about fathers as caretakers. There are no areas where it can be said that fathers must do certain things in order to achieve certain outcomes in children. The same goes for mothers.”
—Michael Lamb (late–20th century)
“... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)
“The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)