The Caterpillar Tractor Company presents “Report on the Giant,” a 1950s color film examining the D9 “the giant of the earth movers.” (The D9 is a large track-type tractor usually sold as a bulldozer and equipped with a detachable large blade and a rear ripper attachment.) The D9 is shown in various settings, such as hauling timber through forests, moving raw material in an industrial setting, and separating heavy rock. “Wherever it is working, the D9 is making the most severe assignments look commonplace,” says the narrator. There are scenes of the equipment at work at the west Texas town of Guadalupe Peak (mark 01:23) and an interview with an owner of the equipment who talks about its performance and various jobs starting at mark 01:52. “It’s power and its ruggedness” are cited as just two of its positive attributes at mark 04:22. This is followed by additional scenes of D9 being used as a bulldozer, pushing material into a hopper at mark 05:10, stripping the overburden (the soil and subsoil above the bedrock), and using it in a coal-stripping setting. The film rolls on with more scenes of the earth-moving equipment and additional interviews with satisfied owners touting its superiority, particularly in coal country and road-widening projects in California. Although the machinery is tested by heavy boulders at mark 12:14, the D9 still gets the job done. “The D9 does the job on a scale that equipment users would not have dreamed but 10 years before,” says the narrator at mark 14:40. As the film nears an end, we see scenes of the D9 on an interstate job site in the Midwest and working among the Redwoods in California, and the narrator reminds us that “it is the one crawler tractor that has earned the right to be known as ‘giant of the earth movers!’”

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