Saturday, November 15, 2008


Okay. First go here and listen to this five-minute report on WFCR radio

While I certainly embrace the idea of employing musicians and enabling audiences to connect with an artist's work through a live performance, I really do object to taking a film with an established score and junking it.

It's clear they selected the Superman shorts because they are in the public domain and because their reputation can still draw an audience, but I think it is pretentious to assume that you can create something better than what the original creators of a film did.

Writing new scores for silent pictures is a great idea as many films never had a score written for them and I hope this group would consider doing something like that in the future.

Am I being too zealous a keeper of the Fleischer flame here? Perhaps some might think, but frankly I don't care.

2 comments:

Mark Martin said...

It is unsavory. Maybe the creatives behind it actually love The Supe cartoons and want to pay homage, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there (I have not listened to the FCR clip). But it's like they are taking "found objects" and making "art" out of it - when the source is already a completed work of art. And it's like making a Broadway musical out of Monty Python material, or making shitty movies out of Dr Seuss books. The "homage" almost always stinks. On the other hand, I suppose some comic book purist somewhere is offended that the original comics were ever turned into those horrid animated cartoons.

Mark Martin said...

I should have put "those horrid animated cartoons" in quotes of course. Because I love them! But the mythical comic book purist may not...