It’s not a bird or a plane or anything like that, it’s faster and powerful than some other things. The usual start. Then we get a pretty standard plot as well: a mad scientist uses fancy technology to threaten a city, Lois does some investigation and gets in trouble, Clark becomes Superman and saves the day.
I like this one, but there’s not a lot to it. There’s only really two things I feel really merit discussion at the moment:
1) It’s Manhattan. The city that the man is threatening is definitively stated to be Manhattan, but we’re still dealing with our Daily Planet cast and the building there. It seems that Metropolis is NYC in this one. Definitely the kind of thing that people who like the trivia will enjoy.
2) The villain of the piece is a never-identified Native American man trying to reclaim the land stolen from his people. I can’t claim to be the ideal judge of this sort of thing, but I find this to be an impressive depiction of a Native American man for a cartoon from 1942. To start, when he states that his people are the rightful owners of Manhattan, Clark doesn’t deny it outright. That alone feels amazing to me.
But it also impresses me that the man isn’t depicted wearing stereotypical “Indian” garb. He’s just a man in a suit. And his whole scheme is a sci-fi thing with a cool underwater base and electric machines to cause explosions. I genuinely think that in comics even three decades after this cartoon, if they wanted to have a Native character trying to get land back he’d be wearing a loincloth and feathered headress and have a bow and arrow or tomahawk and summon forth the spirits of nature or something. This guy is all “Maybe modern science will make you think differently” and I like it.
Otherwise, it’s mostly a very generic Superman cartoon, with the usual great animation.
Today I have to grapple with something I should have done before now: the line between entomologist and beekeeper. I might as well do it in the form of a review of Professor Benedict O. Fields, who appeared in the Outer Limits episode called “ZZZZZ“.
Fields has bees that he keeps. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time and they don’t have a traditional hive that we get to see, but they’re in his lab. And he isn’t harvesting their honey or anything, what Fields takes gathers is information. I’ve said before that science and beekeeping go together well, so keeping the bees to study them works fine for my purposes. Fields is an award-winning scientist with a reputation for perfectionism who has written books about medieval stories of bees and developed a machine that allows translation of bee language into English and vice versa. The man is devoted to bees. He doesn’t seem especially warm to them, and he never gives a speech about how great they are or anything, but comparing to his relationship with his wife I think it may just be because he’s an Early 1960s American Man than anything.
One other thing he did was to “accelerate” his bees to make his bees more intelligent. I don’t know if this was selective breeding or genetic tampering or exposing them to beetronic rays or whatever sci-fi method they could make up, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that through this uplifting of the species, he caused his own doom. The Queen of his smart bees fell in love with him and the hive were intelligent enough that they had her take human form to seduce him. They were smart enough to have their queen take human form! The acceleration that Fields did to these bees is frankly miraculous.
Ben falls for the queen’s lies and allows her to become his lab assistant. He’s not interested in her in a romantic sense (completely monogamous this guy), but he’s an idiot if he didn’t understand that she was trying and he should have done something more about it. I get that he lost a child and wanted to fill that hole, but she’s not so clever as she seems to think she is. But then again, I guess what’s obvious to the audience isn’t always obvious to the characters. I guess I can give Fields the benefit of the doubt that he’s not a complete idiot. Anyway, after the Queen kills his wife as part of her plan, he finally rejects her forcefully enough to put an end to it.
So, yes. I’m going to say that Fields “keeps bees” enough to count as a Fictional Beekeeper. He cares enough about them to devote his life to them and invent sci-fi stuff for them. He’d rank higher if he cared enough to KEEP more, but he still keeps.
Three Honeycomb out of Five. Though, honestly, after the events of the episode I have to assume he probably gave it up.
