Oh, by the way, there’s been a war going on this whole time. Time for it to be in the Superman shorts.
They use the version of the opening with the “higher than ant plane” bit, appropriate for this short), and then we see a Daily Planet announcing that the world’s biggest bomber plane has been constructed. And so a Japanese man in an office somewhere hits that button that all Japanese businessmen must have that transforms their Statue of Liberty picture into a Rising Sun flag. If the title of the short wasn’t clear enough for you, it should be clear now that we’re in propaganda town. The short is basically saying that no matter how American they seem, any Japanese person could turn out to be a spy. Just great. And yes, the lead Japanese spy is a buck-toothed guy who looks like Daffy Duck should be messing with him.
Anyway, Lois and Clark are checking out that new big plane. And it is a big friggin’ plane, they weren’t lying about that. It definitely fulfills the sci-fi component for this short. Anyway, Lois and Clark are there and when they are supposed to leave, Lois hides and stays on there and obviously that means she’s there when the plane is hijacked. A Superman fight ensues and in the end Superman catches it before it can crash into the city.
Leaving the wartime propaganda element aside, I’d say that the first of the Famous shorts doesn’t seem that much like a visual quality dropoff to me. The takeoff sequence isn’t anything special, I guess, but I like the transition with the burning newspaper.
On a whim I have decided that I want to re-read the Marvel comic Sleepwalker from the ’90s. To make it feel like an accomplishment in some way, I will write about it on my little website here. That’s correct, I will be posting thoughts about a Marvel character other than Rocket Racer. He’s not even a character I’d want to cross over with Rocket Racer. Just a whole different thing.
I remember liking Sleepwalker as a kid. I’ve read the whole run, I’m pretty sure, but I don’t remember much. As I recall, it’s the tale of an entity from mental realms that is bonded with a human and thus winding up in the physical world whenever his host, Rick, went to sleep. It’s a decent supernatural setup that I have since decided would have fit in with the Midnight Sons books I also read in those days, but which I think I could have been greatly improved by having a character like Sleepwalker in there.
From what I recall, I don’t remember caring much about Rick. I do remember liking some of the book’s villains (8-Ball and Bookworm stand out). I feel like the book went off the rails, but probably not as bad as its contemporary Darkhawk. But anyway, I’m just here to make the announcement, not to make predictions. So now the Summer of Sleepwalker begins.
David Vincent is staking out an alien operation, sneaks in and starts randomly pushing buttons. This is his right, and I won’t take that from him.
Anyway, this one picks up three months into Vincent’s current investigation. He’s got a job (under his real name, of course) with an oil company, and there’s a whole thing where he steals some alien stuff and he brings it to a guy who used to work for NASA to study it and there’s hypnotism and subterfuge and all that. But what this episode is really about is that David Vincent has a love interest. Susan Carver, the daughter of the oil company boss. During those three months we didn’t see, she and Vincent fell in love (why would a story want to focus on that part, when it can just introduce her and tell her they are in love at the same time?). The thing is, her father has some shady dealings in his past and the aliens use that information to blackmail Susan into working against Vincent. She comes to regret it, but the story still has her sacrificing her life to save our hero, who shall single-manly go on to have more adventures.
I got to thinking during this one how shows in this era would just roll in a love interest for the hero now and again, and how often they were doomed women. My mind went to David Vincent’s contemporaries Captain Kirk and Batman. I haven’t seen it in decades, but I swear there’s an episode of Batman where the love interest is a criminal woman who, per the narrative must be punished for her crimes, and she dies in a similar radiation thing to the one Susan does here. And, of course, the closest thing Vincent has had to another love interest in the show so far, the Invader with the mutation in The Mutation episode of the Invaders, was not as close to Vincent as Susan is here, but she was similarly doomed. I’m definitely gonna keep track of how many more doomed love interests we get during the run. (I also just remembered that during that episode with the hallucination of a better life working with the aliens, we learned of an old girlfriend he had in the past. She probably got out fine because he wasn’t an adventure show hero when they hooked up.)
Um. In other news, the aliens have some sort of energy weapon guns in this one. I don’t think we’ve seen those before. They’re getting more dangerous.
This time, instead of David Vincent learning about an alien plot in the newspaper, he sees a guy he recognizes as an alien from one of his other adventures (I assume an off-screen adventure, but I didn’t look into if the actor had been on the show before or not). He follows the guy to a place called the Midlands Academy and he learns it is an alien training headquarters! They are teaching newly-arrived Invaders how to fake human emotions. They are using Venture Bros-style learning beds to fill their brains with all sorts of information they’ll need to know about Earth and humanity. And they are training all the Invaders posing as young people (especially the ones who look like teen girls drawn by John Romita) to promote all sort of subversive thoughts like drugs and disrespecting the police (gasp!).
Naturally Vincent is captured, but naturally Vincent escapes. He gets a cool moment where he crawls around on the outside of a moving van. He’s really growing into a top-quality alien-fighting action hero.
But Vincent isn’t the only human caught up in this Midlands Academy business. The aliens are once again trying to recruit a human, and it is once again a war veteran with marriage troubles. Barney Cahill is a pilot with a younger wife who loves money that he has trouble providing. When he stumbles upon the aliens, they decide not to kill him, but instead pay him for his services as a pilot. He will pick up newly-arrived Invaders and fly them to Midlands for training.
Vincent’s attempt to bring cops to the school is a failure (they’ve covered their tracks and appear as a normal school) but he learns about Cahill and is able to track him down and talk to him. Eventually, Vincent is able to convince Cahill to work with him, they are gonna betray the aliens, but Cahill’s wife wants money and she betrays them. But Cahill doesn’t let that stop him. He crashes his plane into the Midlands Academy, dealing what must be quite a blow to the Invaders.
Some things of note: When reporting the school to the authorities, Vincent refers to the Invaders as “foreign agents” which helps them take him seriously. What tips off Cahill about the aliens is seeing one of them wounded, with a big crack in his arm that doesn’t bleed. It makes the human disguises they use seem like plastic shells or something, which is kinda neat.
