The seventh episode in the series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films based upon the DC Comics character Superman, The Man of Steel. Electric Earthquake was produced by Fleischer Studios and released to theaters by Paramount Pictures on May 15, 1942. The story covers Superman's adventures in stopping a madman from destroying Manhattan with electronically induced earthquakes. This is the first of the films to make it clear that the action is taking place in New York City.

Superman ranked number 33 in a list of the fifty greatest cartoons of all time sourced from a 1994 poll of 1000 animation professionals, and was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject. Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer were reluctant to take this assignment because it would require much more realistic designs and animation than they usually used. They tried to discourage the studio by stating they would need a budget of around $100,000 per short, four times the budget of an average Walt Disney cartoon, which then had the highest budgets in animation. To their shock, Paramount executives agreed to at least half the amount, which made the Superman series - in adjusted dollars - the biggest-budgeted animation series in film history.

This series marks the 1st appearance on film of the famous introduction, "Faster than a speeding bullet, etc...", and of the "Look, up in the sky, etc..." line. This film series is where Superman "learned" to fly. Prior to this, he was only able to "leap tall buildings in a single bound."

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