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Come on, you fool! Do you want to get trampled?!?In my view, Lois Lane is the real star of most of these 1940s Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons. She definitely wears the pants in her little menage with Kent and Superman.
First, she's always chiseling in on Kent's assignment, or stealing it outright, and ends up being the main reporter. (Not sure how Kent even keeps his job at the Daily Planet, considering his apparent lack of enterprise as compared with Lois.)
Second, she's the genuinely fearless member of the cast even if she does end up being humiliated on the dastardly villain's "sawmill" every time (in this episode, put into bondage over a cauldron of scalding, molten steel that the bad guy evidently keeps on the front burner, just in case). Superman needs no courage since he knows that he is inherently invincible.
Third, Lois must be stronger than hell judging by how she keeps her lunch hooks embedded in the robot's steel trapdoor at 3,000 feet while Superman helplessly bumbles off into a web of high-voltage power lines despite his supernatural physical endowment.
For purposes of brevity, I'll leave aside the discussion of intelligence since even a 6-year-old can discern that Superman is a dimwit. Lois is always doing dumb things in these animations, but Kent/Superman is just a dope, plain and simple.
Finally, I'd bet that Lois is a lot of fun behind closed doors. One can imagine her hollered warning to Kent (top of this post) to, in another context, double as an invitation to a night of fun in her own little BDSM dungeon.
Enjoy the animation and the industrial deco settings. I love how the robots slouch when they're deactivated instead of just locking down at attention---much more work to do things the Fleischer way, but the result was superior.
The Mechanical Monsters (1941, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Steve Muffatti and George Germanetti, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
Nice clarinet work.
ReplyDeleteYes, quite glamorous in places.
ReplyDeletea few observations about this. a headline proclaims "$50,000,000 million dollars" were taken. How much is that, exactly?
ReplyDeleteSecondly, it looks like Clark Kent's mother was a drunk-- from the reduced size of his head he appears to be suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.
And lastly, do you think the idea of robots robbing banks gave banks the idea to use robo-signers to rob customers? The process appeared similar, including pouring the stolen money into vaults.
$50,000,000 would be fifty trillion, mayhap. You do the arithmetic. And a Kryptonian with fetal alcohol syndrome might be stronger and dumber than hell, so you could be right.
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