Sci-Fi Serial Movies

The Power God

1925 Goodwill Pictures Inc.

silent, 15 chapters

This is just an action/adventure/morality play, with a sci-fi invention as an excuse. Still, it’s worth mentioning as a period piece.

Setting: “a great American Metropolis”

“Atomic Energy Engine” “— draws limitless power from the air, using the very atoms of space as tiny, inexhaustible dynamos of energy!”

The only special effects are:

• Electrical laboratory with flashy sparky things.
• The engine itself, we see in operation only a couple of times They use it to start up a boat, and to power a steam train (!) Turned on, it emits sparks, like those of a Tesla coil.

Premise: the conventional power industries set out to stop the professor from providing limitless power. They get in touch with an underworld boss, who decides that he will be the “power god” instead of them.

This is not really a kid’s show. Elopement is a topic chapter 1. The action is not yet so silly as the serial films of the 1930s became.

Each player is introduced, curiously, as they first come on screen: an intertitle names and describes the character, together with the actor’s name.

Black actors play roles with some personality, but they are superstitious and comically afraid of ghosts.

There are many escapes from car, boat, and train crashes, and a bomb explosion. There is no escaping the car-vs-train scene. Fisticuffs break out, sometimes several times, in each episode. (Jim typically fends off multiple assailants, often without so much as losing his hat.)

Some notable scenes:

• A theatrical summary of the nature of bad guys.
• An escape from certain death by means of kitten.
• A jab at the psychiatric profession.
• Remarkable androgyny in ep. 9.
• A jab at small-town justice.
• An exciting high-speed train chase, with the steam train powered by the power machine (which somehow makes the train go super fast)!

Spoiler: in the final episode, the feds get involved. The intertitles read:

“The government would never permit it to be marketed at this time! —
— It would cause a commercial upheaval!”
“… There is only thing to do — destroy it!”

— a standard plot twist in engineering sci-fi. See The Man in the White Suit

Spoiler: The “man of mystery”, played by a first nations guy, involved in numerous escapes, and who represents the only mystery in the thing, who we eventually learn is a Hindu, is revealed in the final scenes to be “Sabo”, who was doing it because Thorpe had saved his life.

The Vanishing Shadow

1934 Universal

talkie, 13 chapters

This serial manifests its science-fiction aspect in the gimmicks. The dialog calls many things a “ray”, even when nothing ray-like is in evidence, as if they weren’t quite clear on the concept.

• Robot, a.k.a “iron man”, “mechanical man”: is on the jointy side, and appears in the credits cards. In the first chapter, Dorn is tinkering with it, making it work.

  It doesn’t show up again until ch. 10. Weighs a ton, remote-controlled by a very large bracelet, very noisy in operation. “Can do almost anything.” (Noisily.)

• “invisible ray” — makes one invisible. Depicted by a chest plate with controls.

  Fairly intriguing effect: it leaves a shadow… which is only sometimes visible. There is much discussion about how to remove the shadow effect, and the fact that sometimes the shadow can be perceived.

• “destroying ray”, a.k.a. “death ray”: “kills only living cells”.

  The beam looks just like a bright light, and sounds like an electric sheep shearer. As a weapon — it’s unclear why this would be superior to a handgun.

• “electrical key” for opening gates: shoots lightning flashes.

• “electric torch”: A separate ray gun used sometimes to cut holes in metal.

• Yet another ray gun “temporarily paralyzes the wearer” of the vanishing ray.

  It sounds like a wooden whistle when fired.

The electronic engineer’s lab is full of zappy flashy gadgets. It contains a large bank vault with a “chemical ray” that burns up the oxygen in order to kill any intruder. (This belongs to the good engineer!) It also makes something like an electrical discharge that knocks people out indiscriminately. (Just why an electrical lab would have a bank vault half the size of the shop… goes without explanation.)

The social aspect is that of an evil businessman, who wants to take control of people and their stocks — in the usual U.S. American way, as opposed to the master-of-the-universe way typical of other serials of the time.

Besides this, it’s just a good guys vs. bad guys, with plenty of fisticuffs and guns and car chase scenes.

The hero of very pencil-thin mustache and cocked fedora.

The girl, again a reporter, is feisty from the beginning. She’s the bad guy’s estranged daughter.

At least the hero doesn’t hog the vanishing ray — Gloria gets to use it too! She even picks up a ray gun and saves the hero from the safe by cutting through the lock!

(Ah… the writer of the story was a woman!)

It seems, tough guys said “phooey”, back then.

Can we get through one of these serials without the car-cutting-in-front-of-the-train cliffhanger? Not this one.

There are relatively sophisticated camera effects — zoom in, blends…

In the later episodes, they took even less care for dialog and editing. Actors stumble over their lines, as though it were a first try.

The chapter catch-ups are in the form of text panels that look a lot like intertitles of silent films.

Foreshadowing:

The Lost City

1935 dist. by Super Serial Productions, Inc.

talkie, 12 episodes

(Richmond played role Lamont Cranston in The Shadow.)

(For Boyd, though, with this serial, the jig was up.)

Characters: Handsome, energetic, heroic young electrical engineer, Bruce, and his funny side-kick Jerry. Mad scientist and would-be conqueror of the world, Zolok, and his hunchback servant, Gorzo. Harried old scientist, Maynus, and his nubile daughter (and oft-distressed damsel), Natcha.

Butterfield provides thematic interest by mostly being a bad guy who has a change of heart, more than once. Then there is an Arab slave trader Ben Ali, and a luscious Arab queen, Rana, for extra-bad guys.

Premise: All manner of disasters are happening all over the world. The hero determines with his instruments all the problems are coming from central Africa, and proposes adamantly to form a search party and go there.

The sci-fi story is that Zolok is releasing electromagnetic energy into the atmosphere. Moreover, he’s turning the locals into giant zombies. Zolok is the last of his race, the Lemurians (who were “master scientists”), who, he explains, were the losers of the city.

Gadgets:
“television machine” (and what one does with it, is the verb ‘television’). It’s rather the reverse of a broadcast medium, in that it is used to spy on anybody anywhere.
“brain-destroyer” machine
“enlarging machine”, which turns small Polynesian guys into giant oiled black guys who just grunt.
“freezing gun”
“paralyzing gun” is a ray gun
“destroying ray” (cliffhanger anticipates the James Bond film “Goldfinger”, where an invisible ray is cutting through a table, to which our hero is tied)
Sciency props include: Tesla coil, van de Graaf generator, Jacob’s ladder.

Big black guys with long unkempt hair play the giants. They walk very weirdly but athletically (this is actually fairly creepy). (But some of the “blacks” look to me like Polynesians…)

A black actor, Sam Baker, actually gets (last) billing. (That’s better than no billing, which was more typical at the time for black actors.) He plays one of the amazing black giants. He doesn’t so much grunt, snarl, like a leopard in heat.

The black tribesmen regularly show themselves to be fraidy-cats and lousy fighters.

However, other black actors have short talking scenes, too, and take part in actions. One actress, whose character ‘Scala’ appears in some scenes in which she takes independent action (as opposed to being bossed or terrified) and explains those actions — has no credits anywhere I could find.

Ch. 1–4 are about the lost city, which the heroes escape. Zolok is still observing the action by television in ch. 5, and doesn’t reappear until ch. 11. In ch. 5 and 6, Arab traders with slaving on their minds take the heroes. In ch. 7 the heros get stuck in a giant spider web, and are beset by a tribe of white dwarves with afros — whom the scientist converted from blackness. (A black guy begs to become white in one scene — nobody questions this desire.)

In ch 8, Queen Rama (the daughter of an Arab slave trader, who speaks with a lovely French accent and sports skimpy skirts) bosses a village of Africans, conspires to capture the scientist to make giants for herself so she can rule all of Africa! But she of course gets the hots for Gordon, (the kind of hots from which no good comes,) and eventually the good guys escape, and the queen… well, the last we see her alive, she drinks something, then throws it in the face of her servant, Scala. Next we see her, she is dramatically dead. Evidently, Scala poisoned her.

The technology most discussed by the script is the making of these giants. Everybody wants it, to get rich or powerful or whatever.

Natcha fights a tiger by herself. (What a tiger was doing in central Africa will remain a mystery.)

I wonder if the Arabs speak any Arabic, or just make Arab-sounding babble. (They and the blacks are all Americans, after all… but it isn’t impossible.)

Lots of guys in this serial wear skimpy clothing. Well — the setting is Africa. But check out queen Rama!

The interior of the secret lair gives the usual un-lair-like impression — more like the inside of a ship. (Had these people ever seen a lair?)

Each episode had an opening crawl, and between scenes, there was a wipe transition.

This serial is often accused of being racist. Well, there is surely an underlying racism to it. Blacks are mostly subservient, being effortlessly commanded by whites. In one scene, a black guy begs to be turned white.

In this serial, blacks often speak, and a few times, they take independent action. Also, blacks interact with whites, touching and wrestling them — in other times, such things were impossible to show. In most films of the time, no blacks appear at all, but when they are, have no lines at all, or play strictly subservient parts. Here, one black actor got credit — his name came last, but one could argue, that is better than not being credited at all.

I would say that the racism of this serial represents the common ideas of the time, but that, here and there, it humanizes blacks in a way that was not common at the time. (Of course, although all the black actors were Americans, they are playing Africans. The serial therefore does not suggest that black Americans could behave independently — a distinction that might have been important to white supremacists of the time.)

In the last chapter, Zolok escapes his certain confinement, and for no apparent reason, careens around slurring his lines, although nothing in the script would indicate he should be intoxicated. (The story is that Wm. (Stage) Boyd had substance abuse problems, that, shortly after this filming, got him in legal trouble. He died the same year.)

Flash Gordon

1936 Universal

talkie, 13 chapters + two sequels

This is one of the earliest space-themed serials, and surely the most popular. Anybody keen on cinema should watch at least the first chapter of this serial — it shows up endlessly in later films. Nobody should watch all of them without a medical check-up before and after.

It was adapted from a 1934 comic strip by Alex Raymond, itself was derivative of, and in competition with, the 1929 comic strip Buck Rogers. The adaptation of the latter strip as a serial film came after Flash Gordon, though.

It ran as three separate serials: in 1936, then in 1938, as Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (15 chapters), then in 1940, as Flash Gordon — Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe (12 chapters). The principal actors are the same in each (except Jean Rogers, who moved on in life).

The quality did not improve from one run to the next. Some reviewers say that the 1940s one is somehow more sophisticated — I watched the whole thing, and I don’t see that. I see it as even more ridiculously cheap. (Berin’s men dress in Robin Hood outfits.)

The original chapters proclaim

In the 1950s, these were all re-worked for TV and broadcast, under altered titles. The picture and audio quality was thereby reduced, and scenes were cut.

The TV chapters say instead

Both say:

premise

A rogue planet is going to crash into Earth. We find out later its name is “Mongo.” Fortunately, scientist Zarkov has a space ship, and the Earth has Flash Gordon!

aliens

all are just people; of course, they all speak American English (with a variety of accents!) Besides Ming’s crowd, there are the Shark-men, who live in an underwater city, and are just Olympic swimmers with skull caps and waxed chests (except their king, who is lushly endowed), the Lion-men, who let their hair and beards grow, and the Hawk-men who can fly with their angel-like wings, and sport little wings on their helmets in case viewers missed the point made by the wings on their backs.

characters

Ming the Merciless of Mongo is the primary driver of the plot, as well as the driver of planet Mongo. He can steer the planet wherever he likes. (Not much comes of this outside of the first chapter.) He has an embarrassingly severe inferiority complex.

Arden sure is pretty, but she serves no function except as a love interest, to be saved, and occasionally, to emote (sometimes oddly out of synch with the action). Once or twice she says “look out!”

Ming’s daughter, Aura, on the other hand, is conniving, but she’s hopelessly fallen for the blonde beauty Flash.

The Shark-men’s king Kala is a fat, hairy wrestler bully, who is immediately outwitted and overcome physically by Flash. He is generally a jerk.

King Vultan of the Hawk-men is a big fat slob, but he has an agreeable personality. He tries to woo Arden with roasted meat.

Flash himself is simply the male model, smiled upon by the gods and women, undefeated in (fair) battle, done as a blonde wavy-haired all-American boy.

Scientist Zarkov is there to introduce sciency things and emphasize dangers. The indignity of tights were a wrong that Zarkov did not deserve.

places

Various locations on Earth, (famously) in an airliner, in the rocket-ship, various locations on Mongo, various locations on Mars. The sets include: castle interiors, woods, lots of caverns, and outdoor canyons, underwater in a submarine and an underwater city, and in a city that floats in the sky. All scenes require much imagination of the viewer.

props

God Tao is a giant 4-armed mechanical creature, all beset with scantily clad maidens. He didn’t rate many scenes, though.

There are a lot of miniatures, including a couple of different spaceships, a submarine, and a few cities. They all look decidedly miniature. Some imagination required.

A lot of the props were liberated from other productions — there are Egyptian-looking things, and the castle looks medieval. A lot of guys wear armor that looks suspiciously Roman.

vehicles

The models used in this serial, both the full-sized one and the miniature, are the same as in the 1930 film, Just Imagine.

The rocket ship is notable for having flaming motors around its middle. Its curious shape is like contemporary mortar shells. The rocket has as exhaust sparkling fireworks whose smoke wafts up lazily. It has exhaust pipes on the sides like a 1930s racing car.

In flight, all the ships make a sound like a 60 Hz electric arc.

The ship’s interior consists of a steering wheel and dashboard, a periscope for looking out, and little else. There are some supports that resemble the interior of a dirigible’s gondola.

The normal landing mode of the rocket ship looks very much like that of the toy biplanes in contemporary movies… but far slower, slower than any real aircraft… even a biplane. It occurs to me that their motion is somewhere between that of a dirigible and a heavier-than-air aircraft. When they take off, they make a sputtering sound, like firecrackers… The touch-down looks exactly like a small model being dropped onto sand.

Opposition “gyro ships” are wobbling, spinning, smoking tops on strings.

The Shark-men drive a submarine that looks like a toy airplane with fish-fins and two big propellers in front.

gadgets & weapons

• Ray guns shoot a shower of sparks and lightning.
• Zarkov invents an invisibility ray on the side, which results in some standard invisible-man scenes.
• View-screens appear in many scenes. Of course, real TV technology had been in development for some time, so these may be regarded as engineering sci-fi.
• Rays powered by radium levitate the Hawk-men’s city. The radium looks just like, and shovels just like, coal. (Well — radium and nuclear energy were still pretty new, and their nature hadn’t really entered public conscience.)
• Finally, there’s a time bomb on the spaceship, timed by a sand clock. The scene resolves quickly — thrown in as if… they had a threat left over and a few extra feet of film.

creatures

• Giant iguanas with horns are shown whenever a rocket ship lands. These don’t have much else to do with the action.
• A dragon thing with lobster claws attacks Flash. It’s a guy in a suit, together with a claw prop to hold Flash.
• Underwater, they are beset by an aquarium full of octopuses and sharks. (Note: animals were harmed in the filming of this production.)
• A bear, painted with black and brown stripes, has the clever appellation “Urso”. He doesn’t do anything but make Arden squeal.
• The “sacred fire dragon” in the “tunnel of terror” is no different from the earlier dragon, except it has fire.
• Flash fights an “orangopoid”, a guy in an ape suit with a horn glued on, making chimp-like noises. The dialog informs us that no man can ever overcome the orangopoid, barely in time for us to witness its defeat.
• Aura sicks a “sacred tiger” on Arden. It’s just a regular tiger — a small one, but Flash kills it with his bare hands, without a scratch. (Like Hercules or Samson, get it?)

The depiction of outer space with clouds in air is funny to me. But they clearly didn’t make any distinction: they talk about journeying in the stratosphere. It was just technobabble to them. But I would have had news for them — a big fraction of their juvenile audience knew what those words meant. Not that it affected their sales — the audience was starved for this stuff.

The different groups have varying allegiances with Ming… which suggests that his moniker “master of the universe” is just marketing. He has let previous nobility, including Prince Barin, survive and plot against him. The whole time, both opposition groups and his own daughter plot against him.

Ming may be all-powerful, but besides having defectors on all sides, he has difficulty keeping his starched collar under control. (I always found it curious, that in one scene, his collar bends front of his face, in another, it bends back, and in some scenes, one side bends back and the other forward. Is it intended? It looks weird to me. Or maybe they just didn’t notice…)

He uses the sobriquet “merciless”, although, as despots go, I don’t see how he is especially so. Maybe he just likes the alliteration. He spends most of his time bragging, threatening, condemning people to almost certain escape. Often, he just changes his mind and makes an offer to his would-be victim. One thing is consistent about him: he is quite untrustworthy, despite Flash and others relentlessly trusting him.

Both emperor Ming and his daughter show good taste in romantic partners, but lousy wooing abilities.

For sheer frequency of daring escapes, Flash Gordon is hard to beat. For that matter, for sheer frequency of proclamations of conquest of the universe, it’s hard to beat.

quotes

The nearest this serial comes to cleverness is this exchange:

Undersea Kingdom
with Ray (Crash) Corrigan

1936 Republic

talkie, 12 chapters

The basic premise is a pretty standard subterranean fiction. The heros reach the lower world by means of a submarine. This premise doesn’t intrude into the action-adventure very much.

vehicles

“super-submarine”, propelled by rocket motors 10,000 feet down

“sky-giant”, a flying machine that looks like two connected zeppelins, with a gondola hanging beneath from two diagonal struts. (elements of Star Trek’s Enterprise?) Often manned by mechanical men. Also called “vol-plane”? (There is a verb, “volplane” for gliding to Earth)

“juggernaut” a fancy war-tank, that sound exactly like contemporary air-raid sirens. Often manned by mechanical men.

The pointy tower where Khan lives becomes a vehicle. Khan has it equipped with rocket motors, to launch it into the “upper world”. (Here we again forget that we entered the world of Atlantis through a cave.)

We find that rocket motors can’t be started without “priming powder”.

weapons

“atom guns”, hand weapons that shoot lightning bolts, causing small explosions.

“magnetic ray”, “invisible ray gun”, “disintegrator”, I was unable to distinguish, as there isn’t much to see. They are something that defends to Kahn’s tower.

“projector” shoots a torpedo-like missile that whistles like a WWII bomb.

robots

In addition to his normal black-clad soldiers, Khan has “mechanical men”. They are among the clunkier robot suits you’ve seen, with a body like a steam boiler with flexible tubes.

Although they are impervious to bullets, mechanical men can be knocked out by flinging contemporary furniture at them.

gadgets

An “earthquake-predicting machine” instead indicates a “human agency coming from the bottom of the ocean”.

A flat viewscreen affords spying on people at a distance. (Zooming in on a viewscreen brings about an amusing scene transition.)

A machine for transforming people’s minds, to make them obedient.

This serial does much less with science fiction than most of its competition. The chase scenes transpire on horseback; most of the fights are by hand or with swords. It stitches its sci-fi theme to action-adventure even more clumsily than other serials. With the addition of the secondary boy-hero Billy, the target audience is even more explicitly juvenile than in the others. However, it used better camera work than was typical of its contemporaries. Some veteran actors lend something to the otherwise silly script.

They go into a hole in an underwater mountain, to find a whole world, with dry land, and sky and sun; with horizons that seem to go on forever, looking like nothing other than Southern California. At least the professor makes the discerning observation: “It’s beyond me.”

Soldiers ride up forthwith on horses.

Although the dialog mentions repeatedly the premise that they are underwater, it has nothing whatever to do with the scenery or action after the original arrival.

There is a matte painting of the city of Atlantis from a distance, And a matte background painting behind a building (that looks like it’s from a Western) to indicate it is in Atlantis.

Crash is an “athletic star and naval officer”, and all-around hero. Starts up with Army-Navy football in the mud, and then directly to wrestling and daring rescue involving exercise rings. He gets lots of bare-chested and short-shorts scenes. He gets to put on the most outrageous hat, and fight hand-to-hand sword battles clad in nothing but short-shorts, booties and a cape!

What boy wouldn’t idolize him?

Diana is a “go-getting newspaper girl”. She serves no purpose but to be saved.

Billy Norton — 10-year-old admirer of Crash. He gets a ray gun, holds off the bad guys, and barks orders at full-grown Diana. Another time, he commands an enemy soldier, at gunpoint.

Unga Khan is the tyrant (dressed and coiffured to look distinctly like Genghis Khan) who wants to conquer the “upper world”. You might wonder why a guy from Atlantis should look like and be dressed like and have a name like Genghis Khan, but you won’t find an explanation here.

Briny Deep and Salty get intermittent, forced, comic scenes, which rely on southern accents and crossed eyes.

In the end, Crash and Diana get married — as we knew had to be.

Now, the idea of the evil guy equipping his evil tower with rocket motors, in order to fly from an underwater cave to the “upper world”, in itself is pretty hard to swallow. After all the talk about it, and some fairly elaborate special effects, we really don’t see how the tower/rocket gets from point A to point B. Moreover… evidently, the cave and Atlantis, and everybody in it, would be killed by this. Yet, once it happens, we don’t hear anything further about that.

quotes

Crash (to himself):

(That is immediately after we have seen Diana and the others in the temple being bombed, and things falling on them.)

The Phantom Creeps

1939 Commonwealth Pictures Corp., Universal Pictures

talkie, 12 chapters

robot

• “iron man” is very strange — with a huge Mardi Gras head with grotesque, African features. Otherwise, it’s just a robot.

gadgets

• An invisibility device: “de-visualizer”;
• A new element he found on a meteorite in Africa is the source of his power… somehow. It’s never clear how it works — stuff randomly blows up.

weapons

• A mechanical spider that seeks out a magnetic disk… and blows up (in a little poof) when it gets there. A very inefficient weapon, and a very pathetic prop.
• A gas or mist, which is deadly to living things when later activated by a “z-ray” pistol — again, very inefficient. It turns out, the pistol can also be used to open locks (due to something about a combination of science and genius).

vehicles

• A parade of cars, trains, planes, ships and boats. Each gets jumped out of or into — some, on many occasions.

The “phantom” here is Lugosi, when he’s invisible. I guess the “creeps” of the title is the mechanical spider.

In many chapters, Lugosi is invisible much of the time — which meant, he didn’t need to be on-set for the filming, at great savings to the studio.

This is Lugosi at the height of his powers. He’s the strangest character, the one that takes the camera.

He plans to be “Master of the Universe”. (Yeah, that’s what they all say!) He spends most of his dialog alternately bragging and threatening maniacally. His relationship with his henchman is ridiculously dysfunctional.

Other characters include a “captain” who belongs to “intelligence”, who does lots of heroic and athletic stuff, a pretty newspaper reporter, described as “hard-boiled”. A team of “international spies” works out of an “International School of Languages”. There are G-men chasing everybody around.

After a very protracted airplane crash scene — which ends in the plane going nose first into the ground… the passengers just walk away. (Had they not heard that plane crashes are dangerous?)

More than once, a character hears an airplane going over, and identifies it by sound…

This plays like it was written for radio. For instance, we see a car, we hear a car, and the actor says “a car!”

Overall — it’s non-stop action, OK, if mostly pretty conventional. The special effects are silly, but not the worst. The mad scientist is over-the-top to the point of overflowing — a lot.

Buck Rogers

1939 Universal; FILMCRAFT, Inc.

talkie, 12 chapters

[Philson Ahn is the younger brother of Philip Ahn, who played “Master Kan” from Kung Fu]

Adapted from a comic strip of the same name by Phil Nowlan and Dick Calkins. In the 1950s, a TV series of the same name played briefly. There was also a similarly-named series in ’79–’81, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.

premise

Our hero and his side-kick are transported 500 years into the future, where they carry out deeds of derring-do.

The social fiction premise is that “super-racketeers” (led by Killer Kane) have taken over the Earth, due to the 20th century failure to “stamp out lawlessness”. Of course there is a revolutionary group in opposition — they have their own spaceships, live in a “hidden city” in a mountain, and take commands from scientists.

date/places

Initially, the present day (in the 1930s) The action starts in an observatory, where scientists and military guys contact a dirigible being piloted by Buck. Most of the chapters take place in the year 2440 (it’s a Rip-van-Winkle), a couple of places on Earth, and otherwise on Saturn.

Somehow accidentally they end up at Saturn, where the outer atmosphere “10 times denser than that of the Earth.” Now this is a puzzle: the atmospheric pressure buckles the portholes of the spaceship… so they bail out… yet they survive…

Saturn looks exactly like S. California.

aliens

Saturnians

Besides Philson Ahn playing in many scenes as Prince Tallen with lots of lines, there are scenes of Saturnian soldiers played by people of Asian descent. Caucasians play the majority, including a leading counsel. Everybody speaks with various American accents.

To the council, Buck and friends initially appear as “revolutionaries”, and thus, enemies.

Another “primitive race”, the Zuggs, mask their faces grotesquely with goggles. They perform menial tasks and obey commands worshipfully. Eventually, they rise up against the leading counsel, but only because they have mistaken a robot-ized man for a god, who is, in turn, under the control of others.

vehicles

Their present-day dirigible crashes and becomes buried in an avalanche, with Buck & Buddy in suspended animation.

Several similar spaceship designs: Some can easily go to Saturn, like a trip to the next town. Buck asks how far it is to a city, the answer is “about 1000 miles, we’ll be there in about an hour”.

The spaceship effects are exactly those of the Flash Gordon serials, except the ship design… more like a sled, on the bottom it looks like a clothes iron, on top like a passenger train car, with large empty spaces in between. Underground rail car “bullet car”, transparent and football shaped, also flies thorough clouds! Underground!

gadgets

• “Nirvana” gas that induces suspended animation is responsible for delivering the heroes into the future.

• Kane puts “obedience helmets” on his enemies, to turn them into robots.
• A “force gun” shines a beam of waving light, but goes “bang”. Once they use it to push an underground “bullet cars”. It has a “demi-charge”, that only stuns.
• With “degravity” belts (“an outgrowth of the old parachute”) they can bail out of crashing spaceships, or sneak into enemy headquarters.
• Transporters! By radioactivity: disassembles body and then re-assembles it.
• They talk to Earth with a radio… no problem of a delay. The Saturnians are unfamiliar with radio, although they have spaceships.
• When the crew turn the radio on, the microphone raises into the air, with no visible supports (swaying as though it’s on a wire, though).
• Televisors make a pretty bent-mirror effect. They can be used to spy on people, and look at ships in space.
• A “pathescope” can “play back a scene” of another time and a place.
• An invisibility ray comes in handy in a couple of chapters to make a ship invisible.

This serial has a lot in common with Flash Gordon. The main heroes, in particular, are interchangeable. In this serial, the bad guys are on Earth, while in Flash Gordon, they are from another planet.

As noted, at least Asian-Americans are in the cast, and one woman has a position of some responsibility.

In 1950–51, a TV adaptation of Buck Rogers was broadcast. Only one chapter has survived.

In 1979–80, another TV adaptation of Buck Rogers was broadcast, called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. A full-length film pilot was distributed first.

quotes

Mysterious Doctor Satan

1940 Republic Pictures

talkie, 15 chapters

The masked hero, “The Copperhead”, wears a copper chain-mail hood, to protect his true identity. (Just why, I did not follow — the usual, I suppose.) He is at least super-athletic.

There isn’t much sci-fi in this, what there is might be called engineering sci-fi.

gadgets

• “viewscreen”.
• “tungite”, a mineral needed by the remote-control system
• “control disk”, on Satan’s thugs forces them to do his bidding.

robot

The remote control of the robot consists, conveniently, of a single button. The suit is a hand-me-down from Undersea Kingdom. We don’t see the robot until ch 5.

It starts out with a remote-control system for military boats and aircraft. The first few episodes are about Dr. Satan’s attempts to sabotage and steal this system, which he means to use in a robot.

Dr. Satan’s plan is to build an army of robots, for limitless wealth and power. His thugs all wear a “control disk” on their chests, by which Satan threatens them with electrocution if they can’t or don’t do his bidding.

Women sometimes engage in action, at least as radio operators, etc. Ms. Brent very athletically takes on a mob of armed bad guys!

The robot’s strategy is to lure people to keep shooting it uselessly with hand guns until it can lumber over to them and crush them. The Copperhead discovers that it is susceptible to “hydrocic acid” (a name I have been unable to locate).

We also get the usual shrinking room trap.

The actors are mostly competent, and a few, especially Ciannelli, Shaw and Trowbridge, were seasoned and well-known. This serial also features better camera work, unusual in the genre. Fight scenes are relatively elaborate, in comparison with contemporaries.

The script and dialog is generally on par with other serials. It’s stupid.

Jack Armstrong

1947 Columbia, Western Electric recording

talkie, 15 chapters

Adapted from the radio feature Jack Armstrong the all-American Boy! (1933–51)

The usual formula for the principal group: the dashing daring Jack, his funny faithful sidekick Billy, and the resolute girl, Betty.

This one is heavy on technobabble. Otherwise the plot is pretty thin.

vehicles

• ”jet car”
• “aeroglobe”, a rocket ship, shown at the lead-in to each chapter. It’s blunt bullet-shaped, with very big fins and a long needle shaped antenna in front.

gadgets

• “visual radiations” “present only on a certain ultra-high frequency band”
• emanation of deadly cosmic rays

The crew of the aeroglobe wear poison gas suits.

Ch. 5, depicts a launch, along with a few curious special effects together with deliciously confused discussions of space flight and gravitation.

The younger guys “boys” are in their 30s, at least.

quotes

Regarding cosmic rays:

The lead-in to each chapter:

Brick Bradford

1947 Columbia Pictures

talkie, 15 chapters

Based upon the newspaper feature “Brick Bradford”. Owned and Copyrighted by King Features Syndicate

Noel Niell went on to play Lois Lane in the 1950s TV Superman.

This one starts out as straight sci-fi, but the sci-fi thins out towards the end. The chapters of this serial divide roughly into three parts: a trip to the Moon, a trip back in time, and a good-guys-vs-bad-guys with invisibility gadget.

The writing is of each part is different from the others. Only the actors who take part in the first part are in the credits. Two different characters go by the name “Stevens”. I think this was a pastiche of three different stories.

The story starts off dallying with social messages, and women who are more than accessories, but the writing changes as it goes on. The women initially play roles somewhat more advanced than in earlier serials: they take some initiatives, and speak intelligently. Some of them wear pant-suits. But in later chapters, the female roles deteriorate badly.

The props are very minimal and cheap throughout. A few of the actors were experienced — it isn’t the worst of the serials, in at least that respect.

gadgets

• “interceptor ray” Great weapon for peace, to destroy atomic missiles. But “it can be made into the most devastating weapon of war the world has ever seen”. At the end of ch 9, a light beam depicts the ray itself. (The machine is really just a Jacob’s ladder.)
• “lunarium” (atomic weight 200), present only on the Moon, is a special ingredient for the interceptor ray.

• “crystal door”, Means to travel into both space and time “entrance to 5th dimension” His “gateway to the Moon, to the far side, which no one has seen before”

  There’s another door like it on the Moon, that was “propelled there by a guided spaceship” (but we never see that spaceship).

• Moon people use a “sleep ray”, and another ray cannon arouses people put to sleep with it.
• “invisible Z-ray machine” “creates the illusion of invisibility, just as the mirror creates the illusion of form”
• “radioactive ray” shoots fireworks and makes guys keel over dramatically.
• “time top” is a time machine. Looks like a cast-iron sno-cone. Spins like a top.

De rigueur prop: secret lab hidden behind a moving bookshelf.

Very limited special effects.

The special effect representing the action of the crystal door is primarily fireworks in reverse, with a little animation and an overlay of a water wave. Those for the “time top” are very similar, with a model of the “top” flying through.

When he gets to the Moon, Brick finds plenty of air. The Moon looks a lot like Southern California.

Now, by the 1940s, kids were taught in high school that the Moon was airless. So who were they fooling?

Then some guys that look very much like Roman soldiers zap him with a sleep ray. Although Moon-people have handheld ray guns, there are whole scenes where everybody decides to fight with short swords — gladii left over from some Roman movie, I guess. The ray guns go bang, anyway.

Brick asks of the lunarians the question we always wanted to ask of so many sci-fi aliens: “How is it that you all speak English so well?”

The Moon chapters deal a little with politics:

She talks like a college girl.

People remark repeatedly on how young Brick Bradford is… but he’s plainly in his early 40s. (This was Richmond’s penultimate acting job.)

In ch. 4, we get the story of the people on the Moon: many years ago a group of Earth scientists perfected a means of reaching the Moon. Started out a Utopian democracy headed by a scientist, ended up with a dictator seizing power. (The good guys, “exiles”, wear modern Western clothing.)

Multi-layered cellophane scenes of the cosmos, showing stars and planets. represent transitions between the Earth and Moon. Then a zoom up on an Earth-globe, with an attempt at depicting clouds above.

Ch 5: A matte painting of a city of small domes, reminiscent of — what? Timbuktu?

Ch. 7:

They go back 200 years, and to S. America. (Looks like S. California.)

This part gets even sillier than the first part, relies a lot more on dumb verbal gags. The female sex is the target of ridicule on multiple occasions.

The “natives” look more Polynesian to me… except Lula, who is a petite Caucasian American.

Maybe the most stupid escape: heroes are in a hole with a large keg of gunpowder, which explodes. Cliffhanger! Next exciting chapter:

King of the Rocket Men

1949 Republic

talkie, 12 chapters

Mae Clarke is a very familiar face, see Frankenstein. This was her last major role in a film, but she played bit parts for years.

The story is action-adventure, with super-hero aspects. Here, the hero is just a regular (well, superior) guy who happens to get this atomic-powered rocket suit that allows him to fly.

The premise is that a shady mad scientist, Dr. Vulcan, (who appears in most chapters only as a shadow behind a screen, with a crazed murderous voice) is raising havoc to acquire weapons.

Millard, who developed the suit, was “unbalanced” by his strange ideas, but apparently died. In reality, he developed the rocket suit, and is helping with the forced whodunnit subplot of finding out who Dr. Vulcan is.

This is engineering sci-fi. It’s engineering that pushes the limits of plausibility, but still.

The effects of the guy flying were the best of its time. Scenes were re-used in later Republic films. The story is, it took multiple stuntmen to pull off the different flying activities.

gadgets

• atomic-powered rocket suit
• “aerial (interceptor) torpedo” (a surface-to-surface missile)
• a special hand gun with loops around the end
• flat viewscreen, again used to spy on people at a distance
• remote control gadget can take control of cars at a distance

• “sonic decimator” — an energy ray weapon

  there is some fair technobabble:
  thromium waves; uses “X-20 tube” (represented by a small fluorescent tube)
  gives off “ultra radionic waves”
  has ”range of 200 miles”

I remember this series from childhood, when it was re-played on TV. The rocket suit kept me watching, but I was pretty bored with the good-guy-bad-guy stuff. I was hoping for more cool sci-fi stuff, which never came.

The cliffhanger of chapter 7, where the decimator melts the inside of a cave, is a lasting memory for five-year-old me. I was convinced there was no way out, and couldn’t wait for the next episode, but (as a five-year-old) I was disappointed by the lameness of their escape.

Now I finally understand what made him “King” — since there aren’t any other rocket men. Of course, it’s the protagonist’s surname. Still doesn’t explain why “Rocket Men” is plural. I remember wondering why…

Rocket suit chest controls read:

	UP DOWN  ON OFF 
         (0-10)  (0-10)
	SPEED CONTROL
      (0-100)   (0-100)
	SLOW      FAST

King turns UP to 4, ON to just ON, and FAST to about 35. Sometimes, in flight, he turns the knob to DOWN.

Reporter Glenda shows initiative often, but she usually ends up having to be saved.

The dialog is somewhat more adult than in many contemporary serials, and as silly as the premise is, it is not as implausible as many of them. Mostly, the protagonist just gets into fisticuffs with bad guys… much furniture busts over backs. Many guns fire from moving cars. But when he gets into a pinch, there’s the atomic rocket suit!

How many times does a vehicle drive over a cliff in this serial? I’m sure of at least four times. And there were other cases where somebody nearly drives off a cliff. It’s the poor man’s cliffhanger. (Not that it’s special in this way…)

The final episode includes many special effects of great destruction…

Flying Disk Man from Mars

1950 Republic

talkie, 12 chapters

This is a sequel to the serial The Purple Monster Strikes, and re-uses a lot of its footage.

A feature film version was released in 1958 as Missile Monsters.

weapons

“atomic ray”

cliffhangers

Of the chapter-ending cliffhangers, I count:

• car crashing into plane,
• train on exploding bridge,
• crashing airplane,
• fire (? I don’t quite follow how he survived that one),
• dropped out of a semi-disc plane (lands in a hay bale),
• car on exploding bridge,
• descending hydraulic wall (gets pulled out from under),
• colliding planes,
• exploding building,
• closet being shot through with bullets,
• exploding car

It starts with the story of an atomic ray attached to a radar scope, and a connection to Martians. But the rest is just serial good guy vs. bad guy, serial cliffhanger, with little or no connection to the slender sci-fi premise. Some nice model rocket ships form the title scene of each chapter, but they never appear elsewhere.

Shortly into the first chapter, the hero shoots an aircraft down because the doctor tells him “it’s interfering with my plans”… That’s the good guys.

They have shot down a Martian, who is a guy wearing a shiny hood, who speaks with an eastern European accent, and already knows the doctor’s name, because they’ve been listening to Earthling radio.

The Martian wanted to set up a world dictatorship and knows his man is Bryant, who was secretly a Hitler supporter. The rest of the serial has to do with chasing around for stolen uranium.

How cheap is it? The Martian’s outfit is a hand-me-down from The Purple Monster Strikes (we don’t notice because neither serial was in color). The main fancy vehicle is a “semi-disc plane”, a little bomber with no obvious engines, has a Japanese rising Sun emblem on the tail. Why? It’s a left-over from a previous serial.

Radar Men from the Moon
Introducing Commando Cody

1952 Republic

talkie, 12 chapters

This is very poor indeed.

aliens

“Moon-men” wear tight hoods, are evil and incompetent.

vehicles

• Commander Cody has a rocket suit!
• There’s an “experimental” Moon rocket
• Moon tank. Some effort is put into decorating a small army tank with fins and a cool paint job. It belches diesel smoke.

weapons

• “atomic” weapons of Moon-men, taking the forms of hand weapons or cannons. They are exceedingly clumsy to re-load, always allowing Cody to escape.

The atmosphere on the Moon has become too thin to breathe — that’s why they want Earth.

The Moon-men hire Earth bank robbers who prove incapable of completing any mission.

Cody always commands a “180 degree turn” on landing. This turn is executed in a leisurely horizontal fashion, not so the rocket can land on its tail.

A woman is on board the rocket explicitly to cook.

Another film serial, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, followed this serial the same year.

Parables:
The Moon is dying.
To land, make a 180° turn.
If you want a hot meal, don’t forget the women.

The Lost Planet
Conqueror of Space!

1953 Columbia

talkie, 15 chapters

This serial is noted as being the only serial derived from a children’s sci-fi TV program. It shows. It is also noted as the last space sci-fi serial of the 1950s.

It is essentially a sequel to Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere, which in turn was based on a television series, Captain Video and His Video Rangers.

The special effects are only worse than those of serials twenty years before; the notions of space flight are even sillier. The script is just as lame, and the acting… somehow even worse.

This serial is gadgetry-driven, with scenes that pull in almost every sci-fi gadget that had ever appeared. Absolutely nothing is new, though.

The only actors of any ability are Michael Fox and Gene Roth. But Fox has a one-dimensional character, and has a terrible time getting his technobabble out.

aliens

Imprisoned “planet people” wear Arab headdresses. They do nothing but stand around in jail until a later chapter, where they get released and they gently and politely, briefly revolt. We see nothing further of them.

places

Earth, and planet Ergo.

Planet Ergo looks like southern California. In fact, Ergo looks exactly like the location of Grood’s desert hide-out.

vehicles

• Bad guys release a flying saucer, to distract people from the launch of the cosmo-jet. Everybody panics! A striking animation depicts a flying saucer, but doesn’t last long — and we never see it again. The cosmo-jet launches regularly thereafter with no cover required.
• The “cosmo-jet” is a spaceship, bearing some resemblance to the Bell X-2. Even Grood’s people refer to it as “the missile”, although it is a vehicle for people. Not a minute after launch from Earth, the cosmo-jet lands on Ergo, as though travel to another planet were like taking an elevator.

• The “atomic plane” is the most idiotic prop in the whole serial. It is a tiny two-seater propeller airplane that flies between planets. It is one thing to require imagination of the audience, but this is the slap in the face.

  The “atomic plane” is, in fact, an Erco Ercoupe, a common light propeller plane of the 1950s. That’s right: a popular, conventional light propeller plane was deemed an adequate stand-in for a spaceship in this serial. It gets worse.

  When the atomic plane takes off, it sounds like a conventional prop plane. In flight, it sounds like a jet, but looks exactly like a light prop airplane. It flies at “2,500”… is that an altitude or a speed? We will never know. In flight, it sometimes makes sounds like an audio loop of fireworks. My guess: the people who made it had a fixed idea of rockets, as the things that launch fireworks.

  But look: any kid in the 1950s would know the difference between a light propeller aircraft and a jet and a spaceship… and know that an airplane is no good as a spaceship.

  Among a tight crowd of competitors, this prop-job prop pulls ahead as the lamest excuse for a space ship I have seen. Cardboard boxes glued together demand imagination of the viewer, but this is just a familiar thing standing in for something exotic.

gadgets

• A swinging bookcase and automatic sliding doors, which Grood opens with a pen-sized controller.
• “cosmonium” has something to do with cosmic energy. “Robots” are just people, forced to mine Ergo for cosmonium. The “cosmonium ray” makes the cosmo-jet invisible…
• The “hypnotic ray cabinet” turns victims into “robots”; thereafter, they wear a funky headset that keeps them hypnotized.
• The “dehypnotizer” un-does the hypnotism (but sometimes simply calling victims by name suffices).
• A “thermic disintegrator”.
• A “cosmic divisor” makes duplicates of people.
• A “radar electroscope” lets bad guys spy on distant people.
• A “nullifier” makes things invisible to radar electroscope.
• The “atomic reactor” “draws its energy from the Sun’s rays.”
• The “sonic vibrator” for creating avalanches.
• The “telopticon”.

• The newly-discovered element “dornite”, upon reflecting “naturally” radiated cosmic energy, creates an “infrangible ray”, which produces invisibility!

  All parties employ this gadget often. Yet those who aren’t invisible always appear surprised by it, even when they have used it themselves.

• “free radioactive atoms” are Grood’s explanation for strange occurrences.
• “subconscious mind control machine” is a hair dryer, I think.
• There is frequent communication via “thought waves”, using a machine.

In all the chapters, only a very few scenes appear:

• a lab with wooden table and chairs, for both Earth and Ergo;
• some stock fake caverns, for headquarters on Earth and Ergo;
• the usual Vasquez Rock for outdoor scenes on Ergo;
• a small airstrip in S. California.

There is a brief animation of a guy getting shot into the sky, an effect like that used in contemporary Superman.

weapons

• A “cosmic cannon” produces harmless little puffs of smoke.
• “neutron detonators” are a hand weapon. They go bang, and are evidently very difficult to aim.
• An “atomic missile” looks like nothing other than a small crumpled cardboard box rolling clumsily down a road. It explodes in a very small way, doing no harm. It’s as if they had only five minutes to come up with a missile, and had nothing at hand but a cardboard box and string.

As he enters his hide-out on Mt Vulcan, Dr. Grood changes from his furtive public alter-ego “the hermit” to his scientist alter-ego by donning a white jacket and glasses. Nothing further comes of this transformation.

In some scenes, fireworks exploding in the dark depicts the space outside the cosmo-jet.

In ch. 8 the space effects improve slightly, showing the cosmo-jet flying in a background of stars, followed by the little propeller-driven “atomic plane”. But then the atomic plane pulls up alongside the cosmo-jet, and they just open their doors, wearing business suits, and chat. No vacuum intrudes on their conversation. There is also no wind, although shortly before, the cosmo-jet was described as moving “too fast for the human eye”. Basically, they just pull over and say hi.

Call it cluelessness, or just not having the concept. But seriously — had nobody on the staff heard that there is no air in space?

Grood’s henchmen on Ergo wear WWII German naval outfits, and talk like Californian bit-part actors.

In ch. 13, the cosmo-jet heads for the “red planet”! A blast of terrifically confused techno-babble ensues:

… but this is about the closest we come to science (or reality) in the entire serial.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

1981 BBC 2

color, for TV, 5 episodes

Originally a radio play series broadcast on the BBC in 1978, then novelized, then adapted for television.

I happened onto it because I briefly had a roommate from a wealthy family, who had a big TV but didn’t know how to make it work. I rigged up an antenna for it, which brought in some 2½ channels. The roomie was impressed and bemused, but not exactly grateful.

One night when the roomie was away, I nearly killed myself laughing at an episode of this, one of the strangest, cleverest things I’d ever seen on TV.

Unfortunately, another night the roomie came home early from one of his frequent dates, to find me watching this. He deemed it unworthy of his TV, forbade me to watch such things on it, and turned it off. I managed to catch a couple more episodes anyway on his more successful dates.

(I mention this only as an illustration of the division of the world into funny and unintentionally funny.)

I finally saw all the episodes years later, in re-runs. Nearly killed me again.

In 2005, a feature film appeared with the same name, based on a screenplay that Adams had worked on.

places

• England,
• deep space,
• various planets,
• various spacecraft,
• various hyperspacey whatsits,
• the Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
• The Earth Mk. II.

vehicles

• Vogon constructor,
• starship Heart of Gold with “infinite improbability drive“,
• black spaceship,
• B Ark.

aliens

In all off-Earth scenes, everybody but Dent and Trillian are aliens. The Guide describes many aliens; many more appear without descriptions. Some notable species include:

• Vogons,
• Betelgeusians,
• Magratheans,
• white mice,
• dolphins

computers

Each but the last has a personality.

• Marvin the manically depressed robot,
• the insufferably obsequious doors of Heart of Gold,
• the computer of Heart of Gold
• mega-computer Deep Thought,
• The Earth Mk. II.