"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.
