Cheap or Not Cheap?
Over on the Yahoo Cliffhanger message board they are discussing the Katzman Superman serials. After the usual complaints about the cheap animation used to make Superman fly, someone brought up an interesting point. Animation isn’t really that cheap to do. He has a point. As much as we fans like to whine about the cheapness of Jungle Sam’s serials, putting animation on a live action film isn’t that cheap or quick a process. Now true, Katzman probably used animators that were on the Columbia payroll to ease his budget constraints, and the drawings were not that painstakingly detailed. He probably could have imitated the Republic method for about the same cost if not less, but I’ve often wondered if the studio had a copyright on the technique and might have raised a legal issue if he had. So his use of animation was an inventive way to handle a difficult special effect that was essential to the project, and could even be seen as an artistic choice to draw a stylistic connection with the character’s comic book origins……..nah! This is after all the same man who thought it was a good idea to debut Roy Orbison in a comedy western where his guitar doubled as a rifle. Artistic yearnings were not in the man’s nature. Animation was more than likely just the most economical way he could find to keep the serial on budget.
It’s possible that Columbia did not have a special effects department that could execute all the flying sequences needed, but did have an animation department which needed to be kept busy. Columbia also utilized animation for the space sequences in the Captain Video serial. Columbia was notoriously cheap, so I think an animation department was probably a necessary expense while a special effects department may not have been.