The Phantom Creeps

The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 serial about a mad scientist who attempts to rule the world by creating various elaborate inventions. In a dramatic fashion, foreign agents and GMen try to seize the inventions for themselves.

Dr. Zorka, a rogue scientist, is the creator of various weapons of warfare, including a devisualizer belt which renders him invisible an eightfoot tall slave robot Ed Wolff, robot spiders that can destroy life or paralyse it and he also has a deadly meteorite fragment from which he extracts an element which can induce suspended animation in an entire army. Foreign spies, operating under the guise of a foreign language school, are trying to buy or mostly steal the meteorite element, while his former partner, Dr. Fred Mallory, miffed that Zorka will not turn his inventions over to the U.S. Government, blows the whistle on him to Captain Bob West of the Military Intelligence Department. Tired of answering the door and saying no to the spies and the government, Zorka moves his lab. When his beloved wife is killed, Zorka, puttering around for his own amusement up to this point, is crushed and swears eternal vengeance against anyone trying to use his creations to make himself world dictator. And would have if not for his assistant Monk, an escaped convict virtually enslaved by Zorka, who is cowardly, treacherous and totally incompetent, and whose accidental or deliberate interference with Zorkas efforts repeatedly frustrates his masters own plans...The serial contains some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, such as an invisibility belt and a remotecontrol robot. Stock footage was used from The Invisible Ray look closely and youll see Boris Karloff, including scenes of Dr Zorka finding the meteorite in Africa. As with several Universal serials, some of the stock music came from the Frankenstein films. The Phantom Creeps car chase was itself used as stock footage in later serials. Newsreel shots of the Hindenburg disaster were used as part of Dr Zorkas final spree of destruction after his robot, which is supposed to destroy the human race, is stopped due to the sabotage by Monk after being unleashed. ........

Source: Wikipedia