I love the Fleischer Superman cartoons. The animation is smooth and fluid with vivid colors. The distinct art-deco style, vintage science fiction imagery, and use of noirish shadows gave them a look unlike any other cartoons. The music and voice work is superb. They're fun, accessible, enduring animation classics. While this is a cartoon from Fleischer Studios' successor, Famous Studios, it still tries to maintain the Fleischer style.
Fourteenth in the series starts off with the murder of Egyptologist Dr. Jordan. His assistant finds the body and handles the syringe next to it, getting her fingerprints all over it. She's arrested and tried for Jordan's murder. A colleague of Jordan's calls up Clark Kent and says he has proof of the girl's innocence. Unbeknownst to Clark, Lois overhears and tags along behind him to the museum. There, Clark is given a history lesson on King Tush and shown how Dr. Jordan was really killed. Then, oddly, some ancient guards are revived and Superman has to step in.
I love Egyptology stuff and the part where the professor was explaining to Clark about King Tush was interesting. However, the fight between Superman and the "mummy" guards was way too brief. As a matter of fact, Superman is barely in this. And while I'm griping, they weren't even mummies like the title suggests. Also the resolution to the plot about how Dr. Jordan was killed was poorly executed and directly contradicted what we were shown on screen earlier in the cartoon. Critics of these cartoons often pick apart the stories as being too simplistic. I rarely care about that because the plots aren't as important as the style and action in these cartoons. However, here we have a case of excessively lazy writing. The girl found a syringe next to Jordan's body. Her fingerprints being on it were the whole reason she was arrested. Yet they reveal in the end Jordan was killed by accidentally triggering a poison needle on King Tush's tomb. So what was the syringe? Did Dr. Jordan just happen to have a syringe with him that had the same poison as the needle from Tush's tomb? Preposterous!
Overall, this is a disappointing effort. Not unwatchable but not good. The Egyptian elements were enjoyable enough but inconsistency and unnecessarily dumb storytelling makes this sadly the worst of the Superman cartoons of the '40s. One last thing: other reviewers have incorrectly said that this takes place in Egypt, or at least partly there, and that's not true. The scenes in question take place in the Metropolis Museum's Egyptian exhibit.
Fourteenth in the series starts off with the murder of Egyptologist Dr. Jordan. His assistant finds the body and handles the syringe next to it, getting her fingerprints all over it. She's arrested and tried for Jordan's murder. A colleague of Jordan's calls up Clark Kent and says he has proof of the girl's innocence. Unbeknownst to Clark, Lois overhears and tags along behind him to the museum. There, Clark is given a history lesson on King Tush and shown how Dr. Jordan was really killed. Then, oddly, some ancient guards are revived and Superman has to step in.
I love Egyptology stuff and the part where the professor was explaining to Clark about King Tush was interesting. However, the fight between Superman and the "mummy" guards was way too brief. As a matter of fact, Superman is barely in this. And while I'm griping, they weren't even mummies like the title suggests. Also the resolution to the plot about how Dr. Jordan was killed was poorly executed and directly contradicted what we were shown on screen earlier in the cartoon. Critics of these cartoons often pick apart the stories as being too simplistic. I rarely care about that because the plots aren't as important as the style and action in these cartoons. However, here we have a case of excessively lazy writing. The girl found a syringe next to Jordan's body. Her fingerprints being on it were the whole reason she was arrested. Yet they reveal in the end Jordan was killed by accidentally triggering a poison needle on King Tush's tomb. So what was the syringe? Did Dr. Jordan just happen to have a syringe with him that had the same poison as the needle from Tush's tomb? Preposterous!
Overall, this is a disappointing effort. Not unwatchable but not good. The Egyptian elements were enjoyable enough but inconsistency and unnecessarily dumb storytelling makes this sadly the worst of the Superman cartoons of the '40s. One last thing: other reviewers have incorrectly said that this takes place in Egypt, or at least partly there, and that's not true. The scenes in question take place in the Metropolis Museum's Egyptian exhibit.