The Mechanical Monsters Inventor
The unnamed mad inventor of the Fleischer Superman short The Mechanical Monsters (1941) sends an army of giant flying robots to rob the city — and wears a thin, villainous pencil mustache while he does it.
- Actor
- Animated
- Film
- The Mechanical Monsters
- Year
- 1941
- Medium
- Animated
- Style
- Pencil
- Fan Votes
- 0 legendary · 0 meh
Why The Mechanical Monsters Inventor's Mustache Matters
The Mechanical Monsters (1941) is the second of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons and the one animation fans still point to as the most gorgeous. A cold-eyed inventor in a dark suit sits at a wall of numbered switches and dispatches giant, winged robots to loot banks and a jewelry exhibition; when Lois Lane stows away inside one of them, he strings her up over a vat of molten metal before Superman arrives.
The inventor never gets a name, but he gets a look: slicked black hair, a long nose, a permanent sneer and a narrow pencil mustache drawn as a single confident stroke. It is pure 1940s pulp-villain shorthand — the mustache tells you he is up to no good before the robots ever leave the hangar.
The Fleischer Superman shorts fell into the public domain when their copyrights were not renewed, which is why frames from this one sit on Wikimedia Commons for anyone to admire. The robot design has been cited as an influence on later animation, including the robots in Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, and the mustache has been quietly influencing cartoon villains ever since.
- *The Mechanical Monsters* was released by Paramount on November 28, 1941, the second of 17 Superman theatrical shorts produced by Fleischer and Famous Studios between 1941 and 1943.
- The inventor's control panel lets him pilot more than 20 robots — each numbered — from a single wall of switches.
- The Fleischer Superman shorts were among the most expensive cartoons of their day and are now in the US public domain.
- Hayao Miyazaki has cited the Fleischer Superman robots as an influence on the robot soldiers in *Castle in the Sky* (1986).
How to Grow the Pencil
Thin, sharp, and dangerous. The mustache of leading men, jazz cats, and people who own tuxedos.
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