DC has been celebrating Superman Day throughout the entire day with big reveals related to the new Superman movie and the ongoing DC comics, and there’s been a lot to love. While much of the attention is on the new, this is also the perfect opportunity to watch and appreciate the fantastic team-up between Zack Snyder and Bruce Timm for Superman’s 75th Anniversary, which showcased Superman through the years in comics, television, and film. In just over two minutes, Snyder and Timm showcase a host of iconic moments and events from Superman’s career, and you can watch it in the video above.
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The animated short starts off with a classic Superman that shifts from the comics to the George Reeves version, and soon after we get throwdowns with Brainiac and Bizarro before Krypto makes an appearance. Super Friends, Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeves, and Doomsday all make appearances soon after, with the four new Supermen and Superman’s Electric Blue phase not far behind.
Superman: The Animated Series is next, and we continue to move through Superman’s various eras, including Kingdom Come, the New 52, and Snyder’s Man of Steel, who brings the short to a close. It’s been a phenomenal 75 years, and this short encapsulates it brilliantly. You can watch the full video above.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Timm revealed how the project came about and how they condensed so much Superman history into just 2 minutes. At one point, though, the goal was actually 1 minute, but that turned out to be impossible. “The idea was to start with Siegel and Shuster and end with Henry Cavill, stopping at all the high points and iconic moments in between,” Timm said.
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“It was Zack Snyder’s idea,” Timm said. “We had approached him about maybe doing a short for the DC Nation program on Cartoon Network. He said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and then he had this idea to do basically the entire history of Superman in, like, a minute. We said, ‘Okay … whoooo.’ We started working and quickly realized there was no way to do it, even in a minute.”
It was difficult narrowing down which film and TV versions made the cut with such a small timeframe, and there is one person who Timm would have loved to get into the short. “I would have loved to have Kirk Alyn in there, the first live-action Superman from the serials, but he didn’t quite make the cut,” Timm said. “And there have been several different Superboy shows, but we were like, ‘Okay, those are Superboy, not Superman, so they don’t make it.’”
It was also challenging to figure out which comic versions made the cut. “It got really tricky dealing with the comic book versions, because it’s hard enough for somebody who’s not a hardcore geek to know the difference between a Curt Swan Superman and a Wayne Boring Superman. That took a lot of trial and error and a lot of retakes with the animation,” Timm said.
What do you think of the animation, and who would you include in a 2025 version of the animated short? Let us know in the comments, and you can talk all things comics and DC with me on Bluesky @knightofoa!
