Lois Lane’s Lava Lament.

Throughout this whole run of write-ups about the shorts, I’ve been noting that (assuming you accept my argument that T-Rexes having been relatively recently discovered, so they count) the shorts have all been about pitching Superman against some newfangled sci-fi threat. This one doesn’t do that. This time, it’s Superman versus Nature when a small island town is threatened by an ancient volcano becoming active again. All the newspapers are following the story, but only the Daily Planet actually sends some reporters to the scene, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Lois and Clark that are sent (and Lois halves the group by stealing Clark’s press pass so he can’t get in). Everything goes badly and Superman has to save the town (and Lois) from lethal lava.

Now, there may be no scientific threat, but that’s not to say there’s no science at all. There’s a team of scientists who are studying the volcano and devising a plan to save the town which doesn’t go perfectly, but is the way Superman ultimately saves the day. That means science is not the tool of the villain here, it is a tool for good. I like to see that. Also, there IS NO villain here. As I make my complaints about the superhero genre, I’m often told that we Need To have supervillains and stories that end with fights because stories thrive on conflict. It’s always nice to see an example that proves my side.

Other than that, we get some good Lois here. I don’t like that she stole Clark’s press pass so he wouldn’t be able to play reporter with her, but I do like that she flees the erupting volcano by climbing hand-over-hand down the cable car cable. I’ve always said this woman is no mere “damsel in distress” no matter how often she is absolutely in distress.

A minor note from the opening too. Notice that they do the speeding bullet and locomotive, but then instead of leaping tall bullets, we’re told that Superman is “able to soar higher than any plane” and the plane we see is a bomber. A sign of the War creeping in for not the last time. Bombers are, of course, another example of Superman being contrasted against a modern invention. They just love to do it.

What if there were Earthquakes, but they were Electric?

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.

Superman meets another fancy sci-fi concept.

We get a standard opening and then we’re into it. A scientist is using his magic observatory to pluck comets from the sky and pull them closer to Earth for study (it is, of course, ridiculous that the Magnetic Telescope would be able to pull comets from so far away to Earth in a matter of seconds, but what’re ya gonna do?). It goes wrong and the first comet crashes into the city, so the scientist is told to knock it off. Knock it off, he does not. To this scientist, the benefits of his experiments are more important than any potential risks, including any human lives lost. He’s a rogue scientist with a comet addiction and they can’t stop him. In fact, the cops don’t much help the situation, smashing up the machinery so the scientist loses control and now the comet is heading straight for the city.

Lois calls in the story and Clark goes to help (taking the opportunity to change in a cab this time) and before we know it, Superman is trying to bash that comet away. But Superman fails. Twice. A lot of destructing rains down on Metropolis in this one and if we pretend they were going for any kind of realism, people would have died here. It’s only when Clark gives up on the brute force that he wins, by getting the Magnetic Telescope working again that he and Lois are able to send that hunk of evil outer space back where it belongs. Lois accidentally kisses Clark, thinking he’s Superman and we’re out.

Lasers, robots, T-Rexes, and fancy cars, and now this magnetic telescope. The threats Superman face in these cartoons are right on the cutting edge of sci-fi technologies. A common complaint I’ve seen about Golden Age Superman comics is that they focus too much on gangsters and not enough on more fantastical stuff. Well these shorts have been consistently science fiction and I like it. We have some exceptions I recall coming up, but at this point the groundwork is laid that Superman is a sci-fi guy.

The image of Superman flying up into the sky to stop a threat coming down and failing is one that will recur throughout time. Most notably in Panic In The Sky, an episode of the 50s show that has been essentially remade multiple times in later shows and which, PDR thinks, deserves a Wikipedia page of its own instead of just a redirect to the list of episodes of Adventures of Superman. But whatever. We’re just lucky that Superman here was able to get back up and deal with the comet instead of getting amnesia or anything.

A bald scientist who thinks he knows better than the authorities and will put the world at risk to get his own way is also a thing that would recur in Superman, but this unnamed guy is a professor and Lex would never bother with that.

It’s another bad car!

It occurs to me that everything I said about the T-Rex in the last one is also true, more obviously even, about cool cars. They’re a modern marvel for Superman to contend with. I’ll admit that I think the cool car in Billion Dollar Limited is cooler than this one, but this one is part plane, so that’s an even more modern marvel.

Anyway, in this cartoon the Bulleteers (cool name) have this high tech supercar that can fly and can just smash its way through anything. From their mountaintop lair (with massive speakers and a rock drawbridge and stuff, who are these guys?) they demand money or they’ll go on a rampage. They don’t get the money, so they go on a rampage. Lois heads off to investigate, and when she gets a chance she tries to bust up the car as well. Anyway, Superman stops them. You get it.

There’s a bit about six minutes and ten seconds in where Clark jumps off a building and the way he gets his footing to do it appeals to me. As I said in the Billion Dollar Limited one, I like when Clark’s flight has more weight to it. Details like this are what I want.

This one ends with Lois getting the scoop on the story, with no interference from Clark. Good for her. No wink at the end here, but they do walk past a “Buy Defense Bonds” poster that I think may be the first acknowledgement of the War that these shorts have had.

In this one, we got a Godzilla going on!

By this point the opening has solidified (for now anyway). We follow that with news that a “huge monster” has been found frozen in ice in Siberia. For the purposes of this cartoon (and ignoring inaccuracies we’ve discovered since), this is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It’s not some mutant or alien beast, just a dinosaur frozen since the Mesozoic. It’s worth remembering that, though dinosaurs are ancient, the discovery that T-Rex had existed was still relatively new as of 1942. There were definitely people working on this cartoon who had been children when T-Rex was considered a new find and would probably still think of them as a big deal new monster, appropriate for the big new deal hero of the age.

Anyway, the frozen dino is brought to Metropolis. Perry finds out the thing might still be alive in the ice and sends Lois to investigate. This is a good cartoon for Lois and it all starts with her NOT being sent to get “the women’s angle” for once. She’s full-in on investigating in the face of peril and she’s got quips. That said, it’s Lois’s presence that distracts the worker and causes the dino to thaw (and it thaws amazingly quickly). Still, it is decidedly not her fault.

Did you know that T-Rex was bulletproof? This cartoon knows it. And there is carnage all over the city as its mere presence walking down the road causes panic and accidents. Obviously this is a job for the main guy the cartoon is about. The dino, just deciding to walk through a dam and a bridge instead of going around for some reason, gives our hero a chance to pull off some impressive rescues. Then he captures it. Overall, decent stuff, though slight in the way these shorts kinda have to be.

Aside from it being a good showing for Lois, there’s two things I kinda feel like thinking about: One: Something this short has in common with the most-recent Superman movie, Clark wants to take the giant monster alive. The depiction of it being kept in the zoo at the end of this looks like torture, but the intent of the story is that this is merciful and now there’s a new place where you can go and see a living dinosaur, thanks to Superman.

The other thing is that Superman doesn’t seem to be up to flying yet in this one. If you’d asked me, I’d say we’ve seen him flying in the previous shorts. Certainly he defies gravity while punching his way up the laser that one time and he’s able to change direction mid-leap while dealing with that train that other time. This here time, it’s very pointedly jumping we see. And I have to say, I like it. We should see Superman jump more often.

I am by no means opposed to Clark flying (it’s the heat vision I have a problem with, remember), but I’ve never been big on the floaty Peter Pan-esque flight where he basically takes off by standing on his tip-toes and then floating away. I like it when he has to plant his feet and jump to get in the air. And if he’s not going around the world or anything, why not let him come down and do it again as he goes? It’s makes him seem more physical. And I consider that a plus.

Oh! And it ends with a wink! Very important.