He is preparing to fire his futuristic weapon (perhaps a particle beam or death ray), until his pet vulture spots Lois' aircraft and alerts him.

Upon her arrival, Lois is kidnapped, bound, and gagged, as the scientist boasts to her about the success of his plan, and then demonstrates the weapon's power by aiming it at a bridge and destroying it.

The Mad Scientist (Jack Mercer) then has the beam weapon weaken the foundations of the Daily Planet skyscraper, causing it to tip over.

Fortunately, Superman arrives in time and prevents the structure from crashing into neighboring buildings or falling to the ground, successfully restoring the skyscraper to its upright orientation.

In 1941, Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to DC Comics' Superman property, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Co-owner Dave Fleischer did not want to take on the task of producing such a demanding series, so he went up to Paramount and gave them a ridiculously high budget quota of $100,000 per cartoon – six times the cost of the Fleischers' black-and-white Popeye the Sailor cartoons, hoping to get Paramount to change its mind about the shorts.

[4] Paramount promoted Superman with a campaign highly unusual for an animated short, which was usually treated as a throwaway bonus on a movie theater's bill.

The scene where Superman disrupts the generator and causes the villain's lair to explode was used to some extent in the episode "Heart of Steel", where Batman attempts to thwart a plan by HARDAC to murder and replace humans with androids.