The Mechanical Monsters Torrent

vannirett

Superman battles a criminal mastermind and his robot army.
As the headline on the Daily Planet tells the public: "Mechanical Monster loots bank!" In fact, a scientist has an army of these flying robots able to steal anything in sight. Police are set up everywhere to guard an exhibition of rare jewels, but it's no use. When a robot crashes into the building, it steals all the precious stones in sight, while the policemen's bullets harm it no more than flies. Clark and Lois are at the exhibit. While Clark phones in the story from a booth, Lois stows away in the robot's compartment. Clark sees that Lois has gone missing and decides to change into Superman there in the phone booth. Superman follows the monster, while his X-ray vision allows him to spot Lois inside. His attempt to get Lois out fails. The robot knocks him onto some power lines, losing the jewelry and (nearly) Lois in the process. The robot returns to the scientist's hideout with Lois, but no jewelry. She refuses to tell the scientist where it is. He retaliates by tying her up and setting her on a platform over a pot of boiling metal. The platform slowly descends, as Superman breaks in. But he'll have to fight the scientist's entire army of robots to save the day.
The Fleischer Brothers Studio made 17 Superman cartoons in the early 1940s. All 17 are very, very similar and suffer from very low quality animation and plots compared to contemporary cartoons. While THE MECHANICAL MONSTERS is far from the worst of the lot (that honor goes to THE MUMMY STRIKES), it's also not particularly noteworthy and is typical of the low quality of the series. While I am no fan of the Fleischers' other series such as Popeye and Betty Boop because of their incredibly similar plots, they are far superior to the Superman cartoons when it comes to animation quality. You can't fault Popeye or Boop for their quality of their animation. While in color, the Superman films lack the detailed backgrounds, characters and line drawings of the other cartoons and they just look cheap. As for the plots, cheapness is also the case. Part of the problem is that you can't tell much of a story in only about eight minutes--no room is left for character development or depth to the villains. Another part is that the Fleischers didn't do much to create interesting plots or situations. In other words, the villain just appears and Superman beats the snot out of him...end of story. Here, we once again we have a generic villain. He unleashes some robots that are smaller versions of the type of robots you might have seen if you'd watched SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. But the robots are easily defeated and the whole thing is over before you can become too bored. Now if you read through the rest of the reviews, you'll see an awful lot of 9s and 10s for this and other Superman films. Frankly, I think these incredibly high ratings come from comic book fans and not people who can objectively rate the films. Fans tend to vote their favorite things 10s mindlessly and ignore a film's shortcomings. After all, any non-zombified fan has to admit that the cartoons have rather poor animation when compared to the Looney Toons and MGM cartoons of the era. Plus there just isn't enough depth to merit such outrageous scores. It's okay to enjoy the films, but can anyone seriously consider them among the very, very best cartoons ever made?! By the way, I saw this film on the DVD entitled "Cartoon Crazys: And The Envelope Please". This is a rather poor compilation of supposedly award winning and nominated films. Poor because several of the films are very lame and are NOT award nominated, the prints are rather bad and parts of some of the cartoons are missing!
The Mechanical Monsters, the second Superman cartoon from the Fleischer studio, shows us quite clearly that a pattern is being followed. We see a bank which has been broken into, and what appears to be the shadow of an aircraft flying from the scene. We follow the shadow until it arrives at the secret hideout of an unnamed crook, at which point we discover that it is a robot with a aeroplane propeller at its neck. The robot - number 5 - opens a hopper in its back and deposits the proceeds of the robbery in a receptacle, at which point it joins more than 20 (going by the numbers painted on them) other robots, awaiting the next crime. The Daily Planet headlines the robbery on its front page, and also features an article about the House of Jewels exhibition. Lois and Clark attend the exhibition but, when robot 5 smashes into the building, having been unharmed by a hail of police gunfire, Lois drags Clark to "safety." Clark ducks into a phone box, where he actually makes a phone call to report the crime, but Lois sneaks back to the robbery and manages to climb into the robot's hopper. When Clark realises she is gone, he realises that "This is a job for Superman" and changes in the phone box. Flying after the robot, he uses his X-ray vision to spot Lois in her hiding place. He flies down and tries to pry the hopper open, but it isn't easy. The robot flips over, the hopper opens and the jewels fall out (although Lois manages to hang on), and Superman tumbles down and becomes entangled in power lines below. When the robot arrives at the secret base, the crook demands to know from Lois what happened to the jewels and, being unhappy with the response, he ties her to a hoist in order to lower into a vat of molten metal in the smelting works in his basement(!) (OK, so it's a cave). Superman, having extricated himself from the power cables, beats in the reinforced door but the crook powers up all the robots and sets them onto him. They are no match for him, however, and he catches Lois as she is about to fall into the molten metal, spreads his cape wide to deflect molten metal which is being poured onto them, and flies off with Lois and the crook. The flight to prison, Daily Planet front page, and knowing wink to the audience are an exact replay of the ending of the first cartoon. Some points to note: The Robots themselves are clearly the inspiration for the flying robots at the start of Sky Captain. My word, don't those policeman expend some ordnance on the utter futility of trying to damage the robot! The establishing shots at the World of Jewels are far too long. This short sees the first use of X-ray vision in a film. Superman falling and getting caught up in the power lines is, to be frank, a bit weedy of him. Superman's bounding into the crook's lair after breaking through the door is badly conceived - it appears quite effeminate. On the other hand, the rescue from molten metal is pretty good and, again, the effects animation is excellent. Overall, another very enjoyable one reeler, although it suffers from similarities with its predecessor.

See: this FAQ entry Watch Mechanical Monsters (1941) on: archive.org here a5c7b9f00b

The Mechanical Monsters Torrent

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