Referenced By / Superman Theatrical Cartoons

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • "Christmas with the Joker" makes a subtle one to the first short of this series by recreating the superlaser bombardment of Metropolis, right down to a bridge being blown apart, except in that case it's the Joker using a giant cannon on Gotham.
  • The robots in the episode "Deep Freeze" are basically a cross between the robots from "The Mechanical Monsters" and the robots from Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky.
• My Adventures with Superman: In "Kiss Kiss Fall in Portal", when Mister Mxyzptlk first demonstrates his powers, he briefly turns Clark into several past animated versions of Superman; naturally, the first one is from Fleischers' series.
• Superman: The Animated Series has a few situations where Supes punches an energy beam to reach the emitter. Like when he first met Brainiac.
  • Before they went for a more streamline design to match The New Batman Adventures, they consider mimicking the style of the shorts. Making the series set in a sort of Retro Universe like the first seasons of Batman: The Animated Series.
• Superman: Doomsday makes two — in The Fortress of Solitude, the flying car from "The Bulleteers" and one of the robots from "The Mechanical Monsters" make "blink and you'll miss 'em" cameos (although one must beg the question where he got them, since the bullet car was completely incinerated in its short, and Superman destroyed all of the robots from Mechanical Monsters-or better yet, why he even has them laying around out in the open in his fortress in the first place).
• The appearance of the monster Godzilla somewhat resembles the Arctic Giant.
• The Popeye cartoons, which Famous was making at the time, made some shout-outs to this series, with one of them, "She-Sick Sailors", having Bluto dress up as Superman to try and woo Olive. Incidentally, the theme when Clark changes to Superman is suspiciously similar to the "Spinach power up" jingle in the Popeye cartoons.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow producers openly admitted the giant robots were based on the Mechanical Monsters.
• DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp: Dijon asserts that, once Merlock gets ahold of the lamp, he will become "More powerful than... than... locomotive! Faster than... speedy bull! Able to leap tall pyramid in a single bound!"
• Superman & Lois featured a scene that had Clark donning a suit based on the one seen in the Fleischer cartoons.
• The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show: The Pith Possum segment "Darkness on the Edge of Black" parodies The Mechanical Monsters, and homages more than a few scenes from the original cartoon.
• The Bugs Bunny cartoon Super Rabbit is a parody of these cartoons.
• A tie-in comic book with Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019) includes a visit to the universe of the Fleischer films to show it being erased from existence.
• An episode of Smallville had Clark stand over Lois and shield her from a molten liquid being dumped upon them like in "The Mechanical Monsters".

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