Third Avenue Playhouse (TAP) brings back the good old days of big screen movie matinees with a Saturday afternoon Superman cartoon festival, featuring 10 of the original 1940′s Max and Dave Fleischer films in all their Technicolor glory.

Every “kid” (of any age) who attends the TAP screening in a Superhero costume of any variety gets a free scoop of Superman Ice Cream at Door County Candy.

”Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, up in the sky, look! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!”

The Superman Classic Cartoon Festival at TAP takes place on Saturday, March 16 at 1 pm, following the Annual Sturgeon Bay St. Patrick’s Day Parade …and the admission is only $2 for kids of all ages!

These cartoons by Fleischer Studios are seen as some of the finest, and certainly the most lavishly budgeted, animated cartoons produced during The Golden Age of American animation. When Paramount Pictures hoped to cash in on the phenomenal popularity of the new Superman comics with an animated cartoon series, the already overburdened Fleischer brothers hoped to discourage them. They informed Paramount that the cost of producing the series would be about $100,000 per cartoon – an amazingly high figure, about four times the budget of a comparable 6-minute Fleischer Popeye the Sailor cartoon during the 1940s. To their surprise, Paramount negotiated it down to a budget of $50,000 – half the requested sum, but still twice the cost of the average Fleischer short – so they committed to the project.

The stories introduce a bit of the playful banter between Lois and Clark that would become a benchmark of the characters in later years. It is interesting to note how often World War II plays a part in these stories. In several instances, Superman encounters the Nazis or some form of Axis threat. Some of the stories touch on social attitudes prevalent at the time, providing a fascinating glimpse at what patriotism meant in the 1940′s.

The Fleischer cartoons were also responsible for Superman gaining the power to fly. When the brothers started work on the series, the Detective Comics superhero could only leap from place to place (hence “Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” in the opening). But the Fleischers thought it was “silly looking” after seeing it animated and convinced Detective Comics Inc. to permit him to fly instead.

This is a classic, groundbreaking series and a must see for any animation or Superman fan. One might even say this original series “…fights a never ending battle for truth and justice!“