Fleischer Friday: The Arctic Giant
You might be having a bad day today. Maybe work has been rough lately, or maybe you don’t have a job at the moment and you’re trying to find one. Maybe you’re worried about healthcare, or war, or social justice. Whatever you’re afraid of, there’s one thing you don’t have to fear: dinosaurs. Despite all the problems we face in 2010, dinosaur attacks are not one of them. Why is that, you ask? Because we have Superman, and Superman’s got the dinosaur problem covered.
Lois is in full-on His Girl Friday mood in this one, cute little hat and all. The fact that Perry White sends her to the museum when he hears the dinosaur might be alive strikes me as a little shady. There’s frequently this sense in Superman stories that everyone knows what kind of narrative this is, and what steps have to be taken for the story to move along. Along the same lines, but even shadier, is the engineer who “accidentally” drops an oil can into the refrigeration machinery. My personal theory is that this is the first animated appearance of Lex Luthor, who disguised himself as a refrigeration engineer to purposely unleash the dinosaur on Metropolis. My favorite thing about this whole sequence is the thermometer which just says “Freezing/Melting/Danger” in lieu of actual numbers.
Also, that shot of the dinosaur’s eyes opening? I love that. Possibly the single best moment in a Fleischer Superman cartoon. Certainly the creepiest.
This creature perfectly embodies the way dinosaurs were always portrayed in the first half of the 20th Century. He’s not recognizable as any particular species. He’s huge, flabby, lumbering, and seems deliberately destructive. He also has a particular interest in eating people, as demonstrated when he gobbles up Lois, who then has to be fished out of his mouth! Talk about cutting it a little close, Superman.
As wet and gross as Lois probably feels after that, she’s still presumably better off than the people whose houses are directly in front of the dam. That just seems terribly ill-advised, even if dinosaur attacks weren’t a foreseeable risk.
On the obligatory Daily Planet front page at the dénouement, you can see that the monster has been put on display in the zoo. Do you suppose that’s regarded as a permanent solution? As frequently as supervillains attack Metropolis, is it really wise to keep a giant dinosaur around, just waiting to be let loose as a distraction while you go out and rob some banks? In this pre-Endangered Species Act era, you’d think they’d just kill it. But maybe Superman persuaded them not to- after all, he and the dinosaur are both the last of their kind.
