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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.