User Reviews

A beautiful blonde (who is never named) is running away from some men who are shooting at her. Clark Kent intervenes and is knocked out, captured and tied up by the men. It seems the woman is a secret agent--she has a list of saboteurs and their evil plans. She must get the list to Washington. The police try to escort her but they are also attacked by the saboteurs. The woman escapes but becomes trapped on a bridge about to be crushed. Will Superman find out and save her?

This is barely a Superman cartoon. Lois Lane is nowhere to be found (but that blonde sounds a LOT like her). It plays more like a WWII drama with plenty of violent shootouts (I was really surprised to see a cop shot down out of his motorcycle) and action. Superman only pops up at the last few minutes to save the day. But the action more than makes up for his absence. Pretty good. A 6.

Clark Kent has an argument on the phone with Perry White about what to cover as a reporter. Just as he hangs up, a couple of cars zoom by shooting at one another. Clark/Superman jumps on the back of one of the cars and is taken to the hideout of some German saboteurs. The police have been giving chase and have lost the trail. Out of the front car steps a beautiful blonde who demands to be taken to the police station where she tells the authorities that she is a secret agent and has infiltrated the organization and has a portfolio full of important documents that must be delivered to the proper people. She gets a a police escort but they are ambushed and she runs. What ensues is her admirable effort to hang on to the documents. Meanwhile, Clark is playing possum. By the way, this is the seventeenth and last of these Fleischer Superman cartoons.

"Secret Agent" was the 17th and final Superman cartoon produced by Paramount Pictures. Made in 1943, it came at the end of a run that started with nine cartoons produced by the Fleischer brothers who left Paramount in 1942. In contrast with the other Superman cartoons, this one is essentially a straight-ahead action-crime thriller with less of an emphasis on Superman and more on a group of spies and saboteurs trying to stop a gorgeous blonde (an undercover Fed) from getting her list of names to Washington DC. There are high-speed car chases, shootouts with the police, and a climax on a moving bridge platform. Superman doesn't even show up until the last two minutes. Other than a relatively brief display of his powers, there are no science fiction elements. It all takes place at night in richly detailed urban settings. It's an astounding, breathtaking work and indicates a possible direction American animation could have taken had it followed the lead of American comic books the way the Superman cartoons did.

What if the filmmakers here had used this same style of animation to do a series of Batman cartoons in the 1940s, film noir style? What if an entire animated theatrical feature had been done in this style? Think of the possibilities. Perhaps American animation wouldn't have been stuck for decades in the Disney/Hanna-Barbera mold which ultimately dominated American animation. As it is, it took Japanese animators some 40 years after "Secret Agent" to show us how crime thrillers could be presented vividly in animation with THE PROFESSIONAL: GOLGO 13 and CRYING FREEMAN, although with considerably higher quotients of bloodshed and violence.

Right, well I have to say that the 1943 "Secret Agent" animated short "Superman" feature extinguished itself from the previous many short stories in the series. The storyline in this particular short story was way more action-packed than the previous ones.

And the fact that it was made in 1943, during World War II definitely showed, as the bad guy in this short story looked astonishingly similar to Adolf Hitler, and even spoke German as well. Coincidence? Or just some hidden American war propaganda? Well, you know the answer already. And with some thrown in American patriotism as Superman flies past the American flag and salutes it. Regardless, it was a fun 8 minutes to sit through, and definitely one of the more enjoyable of short "Superman" features from the 1940s.

The art style in this 1943 short story was a bit changed in comparison to the earlier ones. There was more details added to the faces of the characters, and it looked a bit more real in a way. Definitely not a bad thing.

If you enjoy the old "Superman" animated stories, then "Secret Agent" from writers Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Carl Meyer is definitely well-worth sitting down to watch.

My rating of directors Seymour Kneitel, Dave Fleischer and Steve Muffati's 1943 animated short feature "Secret Agent" lands on a six out of ten stars.

A SUPERMAN Cartoon.

A pretty, blonde SECRET AGENT has the paperwork to prove the guilt of an evil group of Nazi saboteurs. On the run, with her life in terrible danger, only Superman can help her now...

This was another in the series of excellent cartoons initially created by Max Fleischer for Paramount Studio. They feature great animation and taut, fast-moving plots. Meant to be shown in movie theaters, they are miles ahead of their Saturday Morning counterparts. Bud Collyer is the voice of Superman; Lois Lane does not appear in this story.

This is the seventeenth, and final, Superman cartoon made by the Fleischer/Famous Studios and as such, it was quite a very exciting one! There's no Lois Lane in this one but there is a blonde secret agent from Washington, D.C. who sounds a bit like her (not surprising since she's voiced by Lane's Joan Alexander). She's being chased after by some Nazi saboteurs who's being followed by Clark Kent on the trunk of their car. I'll stop there and just say that with all the shootouts and some dangers involving some wire towers and a moving bridge, Supes has some work cut out for him! The action here is so intense that if there had been a letter ratings system then, this short would probably have been rated PG! So on that note, Secret Agent is definitely worth a look for any Superman completists out there.

This is the final Superman cartoon from the Fleischer Brothers. It does seem odd that this extremely patriotic and propaganda-infused cartoon series would end mid-WWII. Perhaps they just weren't very popular. Or, perhaps the animators were needed for government work. Sadly, being the last, it's also among the least of the films in the series. Part of it is because Clark/Superman only utters one line! The film begins with Clark Kent on the phone. His boss insists he cover some boring event and Clark weakly protests with his only line. Suddenly, cars come crashing by--chasing another car and firing at it repeatedly. Clark jumps onto the back of the vehicle giving chase and follows them to their headquarters.

The lady in the other car escapes and soon you see her at police headquarters explaining that she needs help getting to Washington because she has a list of enemy spies in America. On the way, not surprisingly, they are attacked and this spunky lady escapes yet again. However, she is in serious danger so Clark somehow instinctively knows when and where to appear to save the day. Just how DID he know that?! The lack of dialog make this one strange as did one weird piece of dialog. When the lady leaves her car early in the cartoon, she explains to no one nearby that she needs to get to the police with the list. Just who is she talking to?! Overall, this one just seemed odd and a bit rushed compared to the average Superman short of the era.

This cartoon has a great deal to recommend it. The female character, though she appears only in this cartoon, never to be seen again, is courageous and quick thinking. The pacing, albeit unrealistic, is terrifically well handled. The animators, in the days before computer animation, do a credible job with the representation of such things as geared mechanical devices. Superman has not yet evolved into the overly powerful demigod of later years, and is plausibly challenged -- especially in an early scene where he has, in the guise of Kent, leapt on the back of a speeding automobile, and cannot risk doing anything too "super".

Generally speaking, the Fleischers in this series succeed in taking what amounted to a dumbed-down combination of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Alexander Gillespie Raymond, and producing something genuinely exciting from it.

It should be noted, however, that this and many of the other cartoons in the Fleisher series (and in the Famous cartoons that continued it) are sometimes quite violent, and parents should preview these cartoons before allowing younger children to watch them.

Secret Agent (1943)

** (out of 4)

Seventeenth and final short in Paramount's series once again deals with WW2 issues as Clark Kent helps a female secret agent and allows himself to get kidnapped so that he can learn Nazi secrets. For the last Superman short they really decided to pretty much take him out of everything considering he has only one line of dialogue and doesn't show up until the final minute or two of the film. In reality this is a pretty straight WW2 action film as for the majority of the time we have the saboteurs constantly after the female secret agent and of course coming up just short. Once again we get some rather nice animation but all of that is lost with the rather weak story that never really pays off.