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.
Since it’s Sci Fi Week, I thought we’d have a special Fleischer Friday and look at two cartoons that involve robots. These aren’t just any robots, though, these are transformers. Yes, fifty years before anyone had heard of Optimus Prime, Bimbo the Dog built his own Autobot.
It’s a nebulous sort of Bimbo who appears in this early cartoon, and his canine girlfriend isn’t even referred to as Betty. Still, it’s a fun little story, in which Bimbo uses his mechanical know-how to make up for his lack of pugilistic skill, using his car-turned-robot to win a prize fight against One-Round Mike, who bears a resemblance to Disney’s early villain, Pete. In terms of today’s science fiction, what Bimbo builds seems less like a robot than an Iron Man-esque power suit. That is, it doesn’t fight for him so much as he gets inside it and fights through it. It’s true that the “robot” has its own face and occasionally displays a personality, but so does every inanimate object in an early Fleischer cartoon. The important thing is that Bimbo and his robot win the fight, so he and proto-Betty can get married. Fortunately there’s no continuity in cartoons this old, so this marriage never comes up again (or perhaps it was annulled when Betty turned out to be human).
Meanwhile (nine years later) in Metropolis, Superman runs into some rather troublesome Decepticons.
Of course, the thing about these robots that causes Superman the most trouble is that Lois Lane decides to climb inside one of them. Always making the wise decisions, that Lois. This leads to a pretty standard battle with this installment’s mad scientist, who looks a bit like Tony Stark. I try my hardest not to apply logic to these old cartoons, but the question I can’t escape from is this: once you’ve invented flying robots, why would you use them to steal jewels? If it’s 1941 and you have the patent on flying, super-strong, semi-autonomous robots, I think you stand to make a greater fortune than even “50,000,000 Dollars of the World’s Rarest Gems” will get you on the black market. I guess that’s what makes this scientist “mad.” Probably what it comes down to is that, if you’re a mad scientist who builds some super-robots, you’re going to want them to fight Superman. That’s pretty much the best test they could possibly be put through. So, knowing that Superman is super-busy and won’t just come over and fight your robots because you ask nicely, the easiest thing to do is to have them steal some stuff in Metropolis. This guarantees that they’ll be put through the Superman test, free of charge. Unfortunately it’s a test that every robot so far has failed. Back to the drawing board, Dr. Mustachio.
Lets go in a different direction this week (don’t worry, there’s still plenty of mind-bending black and white jazz odysseys to come), and look at the beginning of Fleischer Studios’ second most successful adaptation from the funny pages.
Considering it’s nearly seven decades old, this cartoon really illustrates how little the key elements of Superman have changed since the character’s inception: mad scientist out to destroy Metropolis, newsroom scenes, Lois getting tied up, bending the cannon barrel in on itself, the villain behind bars fading to a Daily Planet cover, ending on a wink.
The nameless villain is less a character than he is the archetype of “mad scientist” thrown up on screen. I love how when we first see him, he’s apparently sitting in a chair doing nothing while he waits on the clock to strike. His only friend is a creepy little bird, whose comical movements are the strongest visual thread linking this cartoon to the earlier Fleischer works from past Fridays.
The laser-type weapon is referred to as the electrothenasia ray, which doesn’t really mean anything but sounds fantastic. Apparently its properties include destroying bridges and rendering skyscrapers unsettlingly flaccid. Fortunately, unlike a laser, the electrothenasia ray is vulnerable to fisticuffs, which is pretty lucky for Superman (and less so for the villain).
This particular version of the cartoon (presumably pulled off some video release) contains an edit designed to keep Clark Kent from sounding sexist to modern ears. After Lois runs off to investigate the mad scientist, Clark turns to Perry White and says, “Don’t you think that’s a dangerous mission f-“ and is interrupted by a cut. As pretty much anyone could guess, his original line ended with, “…for a girl.” As a scholar of classic animation, I usually prefer to see the unedited originals, warts and all. On the other hand, these cartoons still appeal to kids today, and I’d just as soon they don’t hear Superman endorsing such silly ideas.
