Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
An expedition finds a giant prehistoric creature frozen in the ice in Siberia, and brings it, still frozen, to the Museum of Natural Science in Metropolis, where it is displayed as a Tyrannosaurus in a refrigerated wing. Perry White sends Lois Lane to cover the story, and she turns down Clark Kent's offer to come along, saying he might faint at the sight of it. While Lois tours the refrigeration plant, a carelessly placed oil can falls into the machinery. The workers shut down the plant to fix it, the temperature rises, the ice melts and the giant wakes up. It smashes its way out of the museum, leaving Lois in the rubble, shrugs off police bullets, crushes cars and heads into the city. Clark changes into Superman, pulls Lois and the other visitors from the wreckage, and goes after the monster. When it breaks a dam, Superman plugs the gap with a boulder before the flood can reach the town below. Superman lassoes the giant's legs and brings it crashing down. Lois, who has ignored his advice to stay safe, moves in for a photograph and is nearly eaten; Superman flies into the creature's mouth to pull her out, then pins its head down with a lamp post. Lois's story reports the giant safely shackled in the Metropolis Zoo. When she asks Clark where he was, he says he must have fainted, and winks at the audience.
Why It Matters
- The dinosaur's rampage through Metropolis, crushing cars, toppling a dam and towering over the city, is staged with real scale and weight, and it is a monster-movie scenario that predates Godzilla by twelve years.
- It is the fourth of the seventeen Fleischer and Famous Studios Superman cartoons, the series that defined the look of superhero animation and showed a cartoon studio working in a dramatic, cinematic register far from its comedy roots.
Notes and Trivia
- Shots of Superman leaping from rooftop to rooftop were test footage made early in the series and rejected as silly-looking; the journalist Will Murray suggests they were reused here to save money.
- See also: Superman (The Mad Scientist) (1941).