Billion Dollar Limited (1942)
Masked robbers sabotage a train carrying a billion dollars in gold to the U.S. Mint, and Clark Kent must become Superman to catch the runaway cars, dodge gunfire and tear gas, and deliver the shipment safely.
The third of the seventeen Fleischer and Famous Studios Superman shorts, Billion Dollar Limited typifies the series’ lavish Art Deco design and rotoscoped motion, a level of craft rare for theatrical cartoons of the era and expensive enough that Paramount eventually forced the studio to scale it back.
Background
Billion Dollar Limited was the third of the seventeen Superman theatrical cartoons produced first by Fleischer Studios and later by its successor, Famous Studios, a series widely regarded for its lavish Art Deco visual style and heavy use of rotoscoping to give Superman’s movements an unusually fluid, realistic quality for a cartoon of the period. The plot follows masked robbers sabotaging a train carrying a billion dollars in gold to the U.S. Mint, forcing Clark Kent to transform into Superman and stop the runaway cars under gunfire.
What to watch for
Watch for the production’s elaborate Art Deco train and city designs, consistent with the visual ambition of the series as a whole; the shorts were expensive enough to produce that Paramount Pictures, which distributed them, eventually pressured the studio to scale back the budget on later entries in the run. It remains a good showcase for why the Superman cartoons of this period are still cited as a high point of theatrical animation craftsmanship.
