Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Mount Monokoa, dormant for three hundred years, has begun to tremble above an island city. Perry White sends Lois and Clark together, telling them to cooperate for once; Lois promptly hides Clark's press pass in her purse so that she can have the story to herself, and while he goes to police headquarters for a replacement she rides the cable car up the mountain, where an engineer explains the plan to dynamite a notch in the rim and divert any lava into the sea. The volcano erupts. A boulder cuts the wire to the dynamite, lava pours toward the city, and Lois is left hanging from a cable whose anchor is giving way. Superman catches a boulder the size of a house and throws it into the ocean, plucks Lois off the cable, hurls the cable car into a hillside to start a landslide that dams the lava, then finds the cut wire and joins it with his hands; the rim blows and the lava slides into the sea. On the boat home Clark notices his press pass sticking out of Lois's open purse.
Why It Matters
- The eruption is the series' finest natural disaster, with the lava painted in glowing reds against the night and the cable-car rescue staged for maximum vertigo; the Fleischers' setback process gives the mountain and the city below real depth.
- Volcano is the last entry in which Lois's scheming against Clark drives the plot, a reminder that these were newspaper comedies as much as adventures, and the press-pass gag is the closest the series comes to a running joke. The copyright was never renewed, as with all seventeen Superman cartoons.
Notes and Trivia
- Mount Monokoa is fictional; the island setting is unnamed.
- Willard Bowsky, the lead animator, was killed in action in France in 1944.
- See also: Superman: The Magnetic Telescope (1942), Superman: Electric Earthquake (1942), Superman: Terror on the Midway (1942).
