The First Superhero Movies

The latest video I've made for the Ringling College of Art Library is about the superhero serials of the 1940.

A Dog Sidekick and a Killer Gorilla for a Pet. It HAS to be Awesome.

As of the day I'm writing this (about six weeks before it is scheduled to post), I have just watched the first chapter of the 1942 Republic serial The Perils of Nyoka. Normally, I'd wait until I've watched the entire serial--at the legally and morally prescribed one chapter per day--before writing about it. But the first chapter alone is so Awesomely Awesome with an Awesome filling & covered in Awesome Sauce, that I simply can't wait.

Perils is sort of a sequel to 1941's Jungle Girl, which starred Frances Gifford as Nyoka Meredith in a story that claimed to be based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, but pretty much just took the title and went its own way.

For the sequel, the name Nyoka was reused, but this character has a different last name (Gordon) and is played by a different actress (Kay Aldridge). This Nyoka has been living in the desert since her scientist father was supposedly killed during an expedition. She's convinced he's still alive and is searching endlessly for her. Along the way, she's gained the loyalty of a band of friendly Arabs and is accompanied by Fang, the world's coolest dog.

Well, there's another expedition coming into the desert, looking for the lost treasure of Hippocrates. The good guys want the treasure because it includes golden scrolls that record a cure for cancer. The bad guys--led by the beautiful but evil Vultura--want the treasure because... well, because the golden scrolls are made of gold. Vultura, by the way, is a great villainess. Played by Lorna Gray, she exudes both intelligence and evil. She also keeps a killer gorilla as a pet, which I now believe should be a standard practice for all villains.

As is typical of most serials, the opening chapter runs about a half-hour. The script does an excellent job of

succinctly explaining the plot, then tossing us into the action. The good guys have a papyrus that will lead them to the treasure, but only Nyoka can translate it since her dad was an expert on this particular dead language. Vultura has Nyoka kidnapped, but Fang helps the girl escape.

Therre's a murder, an ambush, and a pitched gun battle, which all results in Vultura getting the papyrus--though she no longer has Nyoka handy to translate it. The finale involves Nyoka and Dr. Larry Grayson (played by future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore) infiltrating Vultura's base to get the papyrus back. This leads to an energetic and magnificently choreographed sword fight and a cliffhanger that involves a collapsing ceiling.

I wonder what year in medical school is it that they teach you to sword fight three thugs at the same time? Or is that covered in Pre-Med?

It was an Awesome half-hour from start to finish, with the sword fight being one of the most entertaining battles I've ever watched. Though I've only watched Chapter One so far (and I've never watched this particular serial before), I'm going out on a limb to say this is one of the best serials ever.

The following clip shows two scenes from the first chapter.

ROCK MEN, PURPLE DEATH & SUICIDE BOMBER ROBOTS

Read/Watch 'em In Order #17


Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is an undeniably awkward title. There’s a line of dialogue at the end of the last chapter that attempts to justify it, but it really doesn’t make sense. Flash isn’t conquering the universe. He’s merely saving the Earth from destruction and Mongo from despotism.

Heck, he does that every other Thursday. Maybe that would have been a good title—An Average Thursday for Flash Gordon.

Well, maybe not. But the producers really needed to have given their title a little more thought.

But, despite the title, it’s a good serial—a nice ending for the Flash Gordon trilogy.

It seems Mongo’s been a busy place since we last visited. At the end of the first serial, Ming was presumably dead and Princess Aura & Prince Barin were ruling the planet. In the second serial, Barin comes to Mars to aid Flash in his adventures there and stays behind at the end to rule over the Martian Forest People. (There’s no mention of what Aura—presumably back on Mongo—thought of that decision.) Ming has supposedly been destroyed for sure this time—zapped while inside a disintegrator chamber.

Now, without explanation, Ming is alive and back in charge on Mongo. Prince Barin rules the forest kingdom of Arboria (as he did in the original comics) and is at war with Ming. Ming, meanwhile, is dropping “purple death” dust on Earth. Mongo has been a busy place since the last serial and its kind of fun the theorize on how this exact situation came about.

So Flash, Zarkov, and Dale return to Mongo to deal with this. They team up with Barin and are soon in the super-cold kingdom of Frigia, mining for a rare substance that can counteract the Purple Death.  This leads to an encounter with remote control robots rigged to explode when they approach Flash’s party.

Soon after, they must deal with another of Ming’s superweapons—projectiles powered by “zultrilnillium.” Of course, as any schoolboy knows, zultrilnillium projectiles have the power to set all Arboria aflame. I think that’s covered in second grade science class.

By the time this is resolved, both Dale and Princess Aura are prisoners of Ming, so Flash and his allies must now launch a dangerous rescue attempt.

It’s all great fun. Like the previous serials, this one makes great use of sets left over from Universal’s horror films and other A-movies. The fight scenes are energetic and the special effects are solid. I especially enjoyed the several instances in which Ming’s rocket ships engaged in dog-fights with Barin’s ships.

There were a couple of cast changes. Barin and Aura are played by different actors this time around. And Dale Arden is now played by Carol Hughes, who does a wonderful job of giving Dale some memorable spitfire moments when she vents her spleen at the villains.

Dale’s also been promoted from resident damsel-in-distress. Though she still fulfils this role, she’s also now described as Zarkov’s assistant and a skilled chemist and pilot. Good for her—she’s earned her spitfire moments.

And Zarkov has really moved up the “brilliant scientist” scale to obtain Reed Richards-level genius. He’s not just inventing stuff right and left this time around, but shows other skills as well. For instance, there’re a few chapters in which the heroes and the villains both have a run-in with the “Rock Men” who live in Mongo’s supposedly life-less Land of the Dead. They have their own strange language (bizarrely, this is represented in the serial by running the sound track backwards when they speak)—but that’s no problem. Zarkov recognizes it as a lost language of an early Earth culture, theorizes that many planets were somehow colonized by humans with a common language eons ago, and then begins to speak fluently in the supposedly lost tongue.

 I really need to mention Ann Gwynne, who plays Sonya, a girl in Aura’s retinue who is really working for Ming. She begins to play a major part in the serial about half-way through, when she arranges for Aura to be captured by Ming’s men. She’s a great villain, managing to exude a real sense of malevolence while still looking absolutely adorable the entire time.

Ming, by the way, has traded in his ornate garb for a more military looking uniform. He’s now called “Dictator” as often as “Emperor.” This is a reflection of the times—even in a fantasy, the war raging in Europe couldn’t be completely ignored. Charles Middleton continues to play Ming with menacing hubris.

The first serial is still the best. It edges past the others in imaginative imagery and, most importantly, had the best supporting cast. We continue to miss Prince Thun of the Lion Men and Prince Vulton of the Hawk Men through both the sequels. In Conquers the Universe, Flash has a couple of Barin’s men as sidekicks and these guys are perfectly likable. But two mere humans simply don’t match up against a Lion Man and a Hawk Man.

This last serial, though, does have one heck of a cliffhanger at the end of one chapter. Dale’s about to be tossed into a flaming pit by the Rock Men; Flash is risking his life trying to rescue a Rock Man prince trapped on a ledge (thus proving they are friendly); and Zarkov is about to become a snack for a giant lizard. It’s three cliffhangers for the price of one.

By the way, this is the serial that uses the same screen crawl at the beginnng of each chapter (reminding us of the events of the previous chapter) that George Lucas later used at the begining of the Star Wars films.

That ends our Watch ‘em in Order coverage of the Flash Gordon serials. We still have a few Pellicidar novels to go, but we need start up another film series. Someone suggested the Marx Brothers movies and I’m all for writing about them, but I don’t think they fit into the In Order format—they each exist as an individual entity with the boys technically playing different characters each time out.

So we need to go in a different direction. Even though I wrote briefly about one of the old RKO Dick Tracy movies briefly a few years ago, I’m leaning towards covering those four movies in detail. Then again, doing select Charlie Chan movies that each highlight one of his children might be fun (at least four of his sons and one of his daughters get time in the spotlight during the course of the series). Or I could do select episodes of my favorite TV series Combat, concentrating on several excellent episodes directed by Vic Morrow. I haven’t decided yet. And I am, of course, open to suggestion.

Wait-a-minute!! Did Dale just STAB FLASH GORDON IN THE BACK???

Read/Watch ‘em in order #15

Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938) picks up right where the previous serial left off—with Flash, Dale and Zarkov heading back to Earth after defeating Ming on the planet Mongo.

Dale is still played by Jean Rogers, but she’s now a brunette rather than a blonde. This was, of course, done to make her look more like Dale does in the comic strip. But it makes it look as if—in universe—Dale took time to re-color her hair during the trip home.

Gee whiz. Women!!

Anyway, there’s no peace for the heroic. A mysterious beam from outer space is wrecking havoc with Earth’s atmosphere. The trio (along with a stowaway reporter named “Happy” Hapgood) take off in a rocket trip and back track the beam to Mars.

The situation is thus: Mars is ruled by the pleasant-to-look-at but evil Queen Azura, who carries a white sapphire with her that gives her magical powers. (Azura, by the way, is a character taken from Alex Raymond's original strip, though I believe she was  based on Mongo in the strip.)

Ming the Merciless—supposed dead on Mongo—is now serving as Azura’s chief henchman. He is planning, of course, on double-crossing the queen and taking over as soon as he can manage it. To this end, at least one of Azura’s soldiers is really loyal to Ming and he’s also managed to make a secret alliance with the savage Forest People of Mars.

Azura has a sort of self-made problem. She transforms people who displease or betray her into Clay People, then send them off to live in remote caves. But now there’s enough Clay People to be a threat to her. So Ming builds a “nitron lamp” that is shooting out a beam to suck all the “nitron” out of Earth’s atmosphere, using that element to build powerful bombs with which to attack the Clay People. This will have the side effect of destroying all life on Earth, but Ming is perfectly happy with that since he blames the loss of his throne on Mongo on an earthman.

Got all that? It’s actually a pretty nifty set-up for some good adventure storytelling. In fact, it gets even a little more convoluted. The Clay People at first think Flash and his friends are also enemies, there’s a black sapphire hidden in a Forest People temple that can cancel out Azura’s magic and Prince Barin (Flash’s chief ally from Mongo) shows up about a third of the way into the serial.

The screenplay manages to juggle all these elements quite effectively. In fact, the various shifting loyalties and hidden intrigues help provide quite a bit of suspense on top of the race to save Earth.

It’s nice to see Barin again, though fans of the first serial can’t help but miss Prince Thun the Lion Man and King Vultan the Hawk Man—the other members of Flash’s original motley crew of heroes on Mongo.

Production values are good—the light bridge that connects the airfield in Azura’s city with her palace (and it’s exactly what it says it is: a bridge made of light) is a fun effect, as are the bat-wing capes that most Martian soldiers wear. These capes can work as parachutes or otherwise allow their wearers to glide short distances. One effect—the Clay People emerging from the walls of their cave—is a simple dissolve shot that still manages to look appropriately creepy.

I don’t believe I’ve watched this specific serial before. At first, I was worried about the character of Happy Hapgood. Clearly, he was meant to be a comic relief character. As much as I love the serials of this era, the one thing they never did well was comic relief. The “funny” guys are never funny and are usually completely useless in terms of helping fight the bad guys.

But Happy, though he does have some comic relief responsibilities, actually proves to be a worthy ally. In fact, he gets to save Flash’s life on one occasion.

So does Dale—who gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome when she steals a strato-sled (think sci-fi jet fighter) and uses it to bomb some Forest People who are about to overwhelm Flash and Zarkov. If there’s any one complaint that could be made about the first serial, it’s that Dale doesn’t get to do anything other than wait to be rescued. But this time around, she has opportunity to pull her own weight.

Of course, in a later chapter, she’s exposed to the “Incense of Forgetfulness” by the Forest People and—in what may be the single best cliffhanger moment in serial history—stabs Flash in the back. But that doesn’t detract from her previous Action Girl moment at all. Heck, that pesky “Incense of Forgetfulness” would throw anybody off.

There is one more thing that deserves mention. Azura’s powers (which include teleportation as well as transforming people into clay people) are unabashedly described as magic. I was half-expected an explanation from Zarkov at some point telling everyone that it’s really some form of super-science. But no—it’s magic.

And, though Flash Gordon’s universe is technically one of science fiction and not fantasy—this fits into the story’s ambiance just fine. The solar system according to Flash is a pretty gosh-darn bizarre place and there’s actually room for a little bit of magic.

In the end, Ming travels so far into Crazy Town that even his own minions start to doubt him. The Earth is saved and Flash’s posse heads back home to a ticker-tape parade.

Overall, the original Flash Gordon serial is the better of the two, if only because of a slightly more entertaining set of supporting characters and some cool visuals (such as the Hawk Men’s floating city) that this one never quite equals. But Trip to Mars is still one of the best serials of the decade—a worthy addition to Flash Gordon’s interplanetary career.

Rocket Ships, Monsters and a Boisterous Hawk Man

Read/Watch 'em in Order #12

The invaluable book The Flash Gordon Serials, 1936-1940: A Heavily Illustrated Guide unabashedly declares the original 1936 entry to be the best-ever serial. And, by golly, the authors might very well be correct.

One of the things I like most about it is how closely it sticks—both in story and in visuals—to Alex Raymond’s brilliant full page Sunday comic strip. The serial begins with Earth threatened by the approach of the rogue planet Mongo. Flash Gordon and professional Damsel-in-Distress Dale Arden meet when they are forced to bail out of a plane damaged in a meteor storm. This brings them into contact with Doctor Zarkov, who takes them along in his newly invented rocket ship to Mongo.

From there, it’s just one darn thing after another. Mongo is ruled by Ming the Merciless, whose minions soon capture Flash and his companions. But Ming’s beautiful daughter Princess Aura quickly falls for Flash, giving the good guys a chance to escape.

Aura is a great character. She’s in love with Flash, but is (at least at first) just as ruthless as her dad. If winning Flash means disposing of Dale Arden or committing other acts of violence (including at one point a rather casual attempt to commit genocide against Mongo’s city of Shark Men), then by golly she’ll do it.

But at the same time, Aura shows some positive traits and, by the end of the serial, has morphed into one of the good guys. The Flash Gordon Serials correctly points out that this sort of character development was rare in the serials and it’s one of Flash Gordon’s strongest points.

Flash, by the way, is in love with Dale and remains loyal to her (except for a brief time after Aura feeds him an amnesia drug). It’s lucky for Flash that he looks beyond outer beauty to decide who to fall in love with—because though Dale Arden is certainly easy on the eyes, Princess Aura enters full-scale Hubba Hubba territory.

Another strong point is the setting. Mongo is a world inhabited by hideous monsters. The relatively safe cities are divided among Ming’s human citizens, the Lion Men, the Hawk Men and the Shark Men. There’s also Monkey Men hanging around somewhere—Flash has to battle three of them in Ming’s arena early in the serial.

Ming is technically ruler of Mongo, but the Lion Men at least are in open rebellion against him and Prince Vultan of the Hawk Men isn’t that happy with Ming either. It’s a situation that’s used throughout the serial to carry along the plot and add to the suspense.

Vultan, by the way, is yet another great character. Played with boisterous fun by James Lipson, the portly Hawkman starts out as another villain. But, like Princess Aura, he also gets some real character development. Impressed by Flash’s courage, he also eventually becomes his ally. Heck, in pretty much any version of Flash Gordon every produced, Vultan always comes across as the guy you’d most want to have fun with.

In fact, Flash’s motley crew of followers is a pretty cool group. There’s Vultan, Prince Barin (the rightful ruler of Mongo) and Prince Thun of the Lion Men. Thun, by the way, is played by James Pierce, whose career (like Buster Crabbe, who plays Flash) included a stint as Tarzan. Pierce (Edgar Rice Burroughs’ son-in-law) played the ape man in both a silent films (1927’s Tarzan and the Golden Lion) and in a radio serial that began in 1934.

So we get a Tarzan/Tarzan team-up in this serial. To add to the serial’s geek cred, future Frankenstein Monster Glenn Strange does double-duty in a monster costume and as one of Ming’s soldiers.

Two other points are worth making. First, the stunt work in the numerous fight scenes is excellent. Second, the visuals and special effects are wonderful. Their relative primitiveness by today’s standards doesn’t detract at all, but instead gives them a charm and other-worldliness that fits in with the story perfectly. The sets and props were those previously used in Bride of Frankenstein and the Karloff/Lugosi horror film The Invisible Ray—their reuse here is still another factor in getting everything on Mongo to simply look cool. The minature work done specifically for the serial is also very good--most notably the image of the Hawk Men city suspended in the air by anti-gravity beams.

Anyway, after adventures and escapes too numerous to recount (just watch the darn thing—but DON’T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE ABOUT WATCHING A SERIAL!!), Flash, Dale and Zarkov return to Earth. But it won’t be long before yet another interplanetary threat brings them back into action. In 1938, our three heroes will be taking a trip to mmars to save the Earth from yet another interplanetary threat.

You Gotta Respect the Cliffhanger

A lot of the old timey stuff I like is done in a cliffhanger format: multi-chapter serials in which each chapter ends at a tense or dramatic moment. Radio shows like The Adventures of Superman, I Love a Mystery and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar are good examples of this.


And, of course, there are the movie serials—a concept that goes back to the silent film days and ran into the 1950s before dying out. The movie serials ran anywhere from twelve to fifteen chapters. To see the whole thing, you had to go to the theater each Saturday, watching the next chapter as part of the Saturday matinee. A lot of the best serials--Superman, The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Zorro’s Fighting Legion, etc.—are available on DVD.


Now there is a proper way and an improper way to watch movie serials (or listen to radio serials, for that matter). You can’t watch more than one chapter per day. You can’t sit and watch the whole thing in one sitting. That partially spoils the experience and it simply isn’t done. Enjoying the pleasant suspense of a cliffhanger is half the fun. A little patience—a little self-control—and the entire experience becomes that much more enjoyable.



I had a birthday recently and got a copy of the 1940 serial The Green Hornet as a gift. It’s one of the better ones. The production values are good. There’s some really nifty looking car crashes and plane wrecks. The story is strong—each chapter, the Hornet is breaking up yet another racket run by a syndicate of mobsters (with the identity of the top mobster being kept secret). The Hornet’s car—the Black Beauty—is cool-looking, as is his custom-made gas gun. The Hornet is played by actor/stunt man Gordon Jones, but when he puts on his mask, his voice becomes that of Al Hodge—the actor who played the Hornet on radio. The fight scenes are energetic and nicely choreographed.


Keye Luke, best known as Charlie Chan’s number one son and later as Master Po in the Kung Fu tv series, is the Hornet’s Philippino valet Kato, the character responsible for souping up the Black Beauty and inventing the gas gun. He’s one of my favorite character actors from the 1930s & 1940s—always giving a personable performance.


So far, I’ve watched the first four episodes. The Hornet’s gotten the goods on a construction company using shoddy and unsafe materials and busted up a murder/insurance racket. He’s caught three of the bad guys, but they’ve either refused to squeel on the rest or been killed to insure their silence.


At the end of the fourth chapter, the Hornet is in an out-of-control car as it slams into a gas station. How will he survive? I’ll find out tomorrow, when I watch Chapter Five.


But not before then. I know the proper way to watch a serial, by golly.


When I was in Sudan on a short-term mission trip last May, I discovered that several of the full-time missionaries were hooked on the TV show Prison Break, which uses the serial format. They had the DVDs and would watch a whole bunch of episodes at one time.


I tried to explain the extraordinary wrongness of this—that they had to ration out the episodes and enjoy the suspense. But I couldn’t get them to listen. I even tried to convince them that there’s a verse in Leviticus that bans watching more than one episode a day, but they didn’t buy that.


Well, I know the proper way to watch a serial, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. One chapter a day. It’s the only way. Watch more than a chapter a day and you simply don’t go to Heaven when you die.

Superman, the Spider Lady and 15 chapters of pure fun.

Superman's first appearance was, of course, on the cover and in the pages of Action Comics #1 in 1938, but such was his popularity that he was soon spilling out into other media. His enormously entertaining radio show (with Bud Collyer playing Clark Kent/Superman) went on the air in 1940. In 1941, the Fleicher studio Superman cartoons--which still rank among some of the most entertaining animated shorts ever made--began rolling out into the theaters.

A prose novel written by George Lowther (who also penned radio scripts for Superman and the Shadow) was published in 1942. A newspaper comic strip was also going strong during ththe '40s.

Superman's first live action foray into the theaters came in 1948. Superman was a 15-chapter serial produced by Columbia picture. Kirk Alyn is an effective Superman and very believable as the meek Clark Kent. Noel Neill has yet to be toppled from her throne as the prettiest Lois Lane ever. Former "Our Gang" member Tommy Bond is Jimmy Olsen.

The first chapter is an excellent retelling of Superman's origin, starting on Krypton with Jor-el vainly trying to convince his fellow Kryptonians that their planet is about to blow up. Jor-el saves his infant son by sending him to Earth via rocket, where the boy is adopted by the Kents. The first chapter ends with a grown Clark Kent on his way to Metropolis when some criminals attempt to sabotage a speeding train. Will Superman be able to save the day? Wait till next week to find out.

As the story unfolds in the successive chapters, Clark and his fellow reporters fight the machinations of the Spider Lady, a criminal mastermind trying to get her hands on both some Kryptonite and a destructive new ray gun.

A few months ago, I was baby-sitting four kids (between 6 to 11 years old) every Friday night for some weeks. For most of each evening, we'd play games or I'd let them play with stuff from my toy collection. But every time they were over, we'd pause for 15 minutes to watch another chapter of Superman.

At first, I had no idea if they'd enjoy this particular old black-and-white artifact, but they had no trouble at all getting into it. Though they mentioned a few times they wished it was in color (kids nowadays--whataya gonna do with 'em?), they were otherwise were enthralled from start to finish.

I was very strict about watching only one chapter per week--thus giving them the pleasant experience of a cliffhanger. We started keeping track of the number of times Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen were knocked out by crooks--thus holding a contest of sorts between them.

The best part of the viewing experience was when Superman would take flight--this was done by having the live-action Kirk Alyn transform into an animated Superman. If anything would make a modern child sniff disdainfully at this serial, I thought, it would be that primitive special effect.

But instead, their reaction was "Hey, he turns into a cartoon! Cool!" They loved it and easily accepted it as the way things work in that particular corner of the Superman universe.

Unfortunately, my baby-sitting duties came to an end before we could move on to the 1950 sequel Atom Man vs. Superman. In fact, in order to finish the first serial, I had to cheat a little and let them watch two chapters a night the last few weeks I had them over.

Both kids and adults nowadays are often spoiled by modern special effects and reluctant to give the beauty of black-and-white photography a proper chance.

But it can be done. If you can get a kid to sit down in front of an old movie serial or Ray Harryhausen film or any old-time entertainment, then the power and charm of good storytelling will get 'em every time.