THE MUMMY STRIKES

(1943)


Notes: Paramount. Animated.
Story: Jay Morton
Directed: I. Sparber
Animation: Myron Waldman, Graham Place
Based on Superman Comics by Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster


Summary: Harmonic minor noodlings in a museum lead to the corpse of Dr. Jordan, an expert in hieroglyphics, and a syringe. His assistant, Jane Hogan, is tried and convicted of murder. Dr. Wilson of the Egyptian Museum calls Clark Kent with new evidence. Feigning a doctor's appointment, Clark leaves, but Lois Lane smells a story and follows.

Wilson reads the tablet Jordan had discovered, containing a secret curse: "He who disturbs the eternal sleep of King Tush will perish." Among the museum's catacombs of the XVIIIth and XXth dynasties, Wilson tells Clark Kent the history of a sickly 12-year-old Egyptian king whose father's guards had sworn to protect. When the young king died, the guards had drunk poison in order to accompany and protect him in the afterlife. Jordan, after rebuilding the discovered catacombs within the museum and working in "frenzied secrecy," thought he had found an "ancient and mystic formula" and had duplicated a "fluid of life." He innoculated the guard mummies, but when approaching the sarcophagus of King Tush, a poison needle, booby-trapped within the sarcophagus, was actually the cause Jordan's death.

Light from the Tush amulet reflects onto the amulets of the giant guard mummies, who come to life and break their wraps. When they are about to throw Lois and Wilson into flames, Superman sends them hurling into stone columns.

Jane Hogan is set free. Kent asks Lois Lane who told her he was at the museum. She holds up bandaged arms: "My mummy done told me."


Commentary: The piece is cursory: lengthy but superficial premise, and a quick violent resolution. The persistent indecision about whether the key Egyptological horror is the idea of the wrapped mummy or a reanimation of the dead (since the guards' wraps fall off) registers here. The one raise of the brow is occasioned by the choice of the name King Tush!


Mummy Films
Mummies
Monsters Frontpage