I'm having a super Christmas this year, or maybe I should say, 'Super' Christmas.

Every year at our holiday party, my science-fiction club holds its annual gift exchange. It's always a freewheeling affair of which a Ferengi would be proud, with gift stealing part of the rules.

So you never know if you'll get a sci-fi gem or that Battlefield Earth action figure some poor soul got a couple years back.

This year, through circuitous selection and gift-stealing, my fiancee wound up with a set of DVDs containing lost Superman episodes released in the early 1940s by Paramount Studios. Ive never been a huge Superman fan, but these have turned out to be a surprisingly nice catch.

With titles like The Mad Scientist, The Mechanical Monsters and The Magnetic Telescope, these animated shorts would not appear to be particularly great. However, they were made with budgets of between $30,000 and $50,000 -- huge by standards of the day -- and their cartoonish quality has an appealing charm. (Its particularly fun to watch Lois Lane strike a blow for womens lib in each and every episode -- decades before feminism took off.)

These stories, although quick and simplistic, are refreshing because they celebrate the spirit of the original Superman ethic and never have pretensions to be anything else.

Clearly, these stories were written both to offer the audiences of the time some escape from the horrors of World War II as well as keep their spirits up during those dark days.

Despite the fact these episodes were very much a product of their time, I very much agree with a number of fans on the Internet who believe they should offer some serious inspiration to director Bryan Singer and the other folks plotting the long-awaited next Man of Steel movie.

I do not want this film to be set in the 30s or 40s like I have heard a few people say, but the the feeling I get when I watch those cartoons is what I would like to happen, said one online fan.

The production team, headed by Max and Dave Fleischer, infused the stories with a wink-and-nod noir sensibility, but it never tried for a wholesale reimagining of the Superman mythos, or sought to be high concept. Voice actors Bud Colyer and Joan Alexander never sought stardom in their roles as Superman and Lois Lane. Rather, workmanlike, they simply set about telling the most entertaining stories they could.

That's something Singer & Co. would do well to remember.

With that, heres hoping all of you, too, have your own super holidays.

A former entertainment journalist, Scott Nance is a member of the USS Chesapeake, an independent science-fiction and Star Trek club in the Washington, DC, area. He is a columnist for Airlock Alpha, and can be reached at scottnance@airlockalpha.com.