Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald, Dan Gordon, Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
The night watchman of the Metropolis Munitions Works is found dead in a swamp. Lois Lane goes undercover as a factory worker and meets the new watchman, a mild old man; Clark, meanwhile, is talking to a bus driver called Louis under the impression that he is Lois. Lois overhears the supervisor, Mr. Jones, telling two workers that the night-light switch has been wired to a case of dynamite and the plant will go up when it is thrown. She is caught, tied up and put inside a torpedo shell that is loaded for a test firing. The old watchman is Clark Kent in disguise; he becomes Superman, chases the torpedo, pulls Lois out of it in flight, flies back to the works and tears out the wiring before the switch is thrown, then rounds up the saboteurs.
Why It Matters
- The munitions-plant setting, with its assembly lines of shells and the torpedo test range, is drawn with the series' documentary care, and Lois's undercover work gives her the best role she had in the later films; the gag of Clark lecturing a bus driver is one of the few jokes in the whole series.
- Destruction Inc. is a representative Famous Studios Superman, competent and a little duller than the Fleischer films, with the saboteur plot that the series used repeatedly in 1942-43 as war propaganda. Released on Christmas Day 1942, it is in the public domain with the rest.
Notes and Trivia
- Isadore Sparber, the director, co-wrote several of the Fleischer Superman films before Paramount promoted him.
- The title and the munitions plot anticipate the sabotage-at-the-factory films Hollywood made in bulk in 1943.
- See also: Japoteurs (1942), Jungle Drums (1943), Billion Dollar Limited (1942).
