Superman

Superman (1941)

14 mistakes in The Mad Scientist

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Continuity mistake: When The Mad Scientist's weapon strikes the Daily Planet, you can see the lights inside the building shut off as it cuts the power to the structure. Yet it cuts to inside the building as workers begin panicking as the building shakes and you can see hanging lights swinging everywhere, still on. (00:07:05)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Continuity mistake: Perry White has The Mad Scientist’s letter straight on his desk, but then it turns it to a diagonal angle when he reads it to Lois and Clark. Lois says that she wants to crack the case on her own and the shot pans back to Perry as he thinks about it for a moment, and this shot shows the letter still diagonal on the desk. Then Lois shouts out "Thanks Chief" and dashes off before he can respond and the image cuts to a different angle. Now suddenly the letter is straight on his desk like it was before he turned it. (00:03:10)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Revealing mistake: As Lois says she wants a chance to crack the case on her own, Clark turns his head to look at her. As he does, the shadow effects on his collar flash suddenly several times, his collar going in and out of the light rapidly on the right side. (00:03:00)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Continuity mistake: When you see Perry White’s hand go to his radio to call Clark and Lois into his office, the face of the radio is seen. Then it fades to a different view of him talking to Clark and Lois, and his radio is still seen, only now the space between the top of the radio and the speaker has gotten smaller, the sides smaller, as well as the space between the speaker and the switches he was pushing. (00:02:30)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Continuity mistake: Perry White tells Clark and Lois that The Mad Scientist will strike tonight and then puts his hands on the letter from the scientist. It cuts to a close up of the letter as he begins to turn it. Between the shots, his right hand fingers go from touching the word "Heed" on the letter to being an inch or so below the word, and the fingers on his left hand are suddenly much closer to the paper. (00:02:40)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Revealing mistake: After the narrator says that Clark Kent works for a newspaper, the image cuts to the Daily Planet tower and you see cars driving around below it. One street is curved and you can see that the cars at the top are going to the right and turning as if they came from the street going down on the left of the building. Yet you see on the street to the left of the building that there are only cars going down that street one direction, away from the top of the screen. On the other side of the building the same street has cars going towards the top of the screen. Like the cars are just spawning on the street behind the building. (00:02:15)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Factual error: As the beginning shows Krypton explode, there is a huge cloud of dust at the remains of the planet that then fades to nothing. Only space dust would not act like that from an entire planet exploding. It acted like dust settling on the ground and just fading away, rather than dissipating into space. (00:01:25)

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Plot hole: The Mad Scientist's lair is on the top of a tall pointy mountain with no real flat areas. But Lois is somehow able to land her 1930's-1940's era propeller plane on the top of this mountain with no runways or flats for her to come to a stop on from flying. Which is physically impossible. (00:04:45)

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More quotes from Superman

Trivia: The Fleischer brothers were at first reluctant to take on making this series. This is because that it would require a much more realistic design and style of animation than they usually do. Trying to discourage Paramount from giving it to them, they said they would need about $100,000 per episode, approximately four times the budget of most Disney films at the time. To their shock, Paramount agreed to give them half that, which has made the classic Superman series, accounting for inflation and adjustable dollars, the highest budget animated series in history.

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The Mad Scientist - S1-E1

Question: So I have seen several places where people have been claiming that The Mad Scientist in this first episode was based on Nikola Tesla, and have seen many people complaining about him being portrayed as a bad guy in this. However, IMDb trivia states that "Boris Karloff' engineer Poelzig in Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934) was the inspiration for The Mad Scientist..." I've tried looking into it a little bit, but I can't seem to determine which is the correct person that The Mad Scientist was based on... Maybe both?

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