Flash… ah-ah...
Nostalgia wasn’t really a thing with our parents’ generation, at least not if my own parents were anything to go by. Our dad’s tastes in music certainly harked back to the era when jazz and big band swing had, all too briefly, been the ‘popular music’ of their day, and he had a small collection of records reflecting this interest: but he hadn’t kept any books, toys or ephemera from his childhood – more’s the pity, as my brother and I would have got a kick out of seeing them.
One thing I do remember him reminiscing about was Saturday morning pictures at the cinema: the line-up of cartoons and serials that were regularly screened to entertain a pre-television generation of children. In the mid 60s, when Batman came to television, our dad remembered seeing the old cinema serial version in the 1940s. But the serial he remembered best of all was Flash Gordon. I entertained no expectation of seeing it myself, as it was far too old, and the BBC didn’t go in for that kind of thing – vintage Laurel and Hardy, certainly, but never any of the old cinema serials. Then came Christmas 1976...
By this time, we’d come to expect a few choice repeats from the television networks during the school holidays: for the past two years, BBC1 had shown episodes of Star Trek at Christmas; but this year, the corporation offered up the entire, unabridged Flash Gordon serial, which was celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The serial had been shown in a 2-part abridgement earlier in the year, which may have prompted this full-length festive broadcast, its first complete screening on any UK television network.
Buster Crabbe had first donned the mantle of Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero back in 1936, and returned again in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). Between this and the final entry in the series, Crabbe briefly switched comic book roles to portray Buck Rogers. The serials were all produced by Universal Pictures, and anyone with an ear for soundtracks might have recognised music cues from some of their horror pictures, most notably Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Werewolf of London (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933).
The original comic strip had been running for a shade over two years when Universal’s serialisation first hit the big screen, so this was bang up-to-the-minute stuff. Accounts differ as to the budget for the serial, with claims that it was in excess of a million dollars, but this seems unlikely given the amount of material reycled from earlier movies, both in the form of sets and previously shot footage. Nevertheless, the production design stuck closely to Alex Raymond’s original, and the characters would have been instantly recognisable to readers of the comic strip. Universal had an instant hit on their hands – the film was their second-highest grossing title of 1936, so sequels were inevitable.
Science fiction wasn’t new to cinema – Georges Méliès had wowed audiences as far back as 1902 with his fantasy A Trip to the Moon, but Flash Gordon was the first sci-fi serial for the screen, and its success heralded a wave of futuristic adventures. Not that Flash Gordon is heavy on the space hardware: in fact, it looks rather more like a medieval adventure with a few Roman centurions thrown into the mix. There were lots of fights – around one per episode, with Flash taking on all comers – Ming's soldiers, an 'Octosac' and a thing called an Orangopoid which looks suspiciously like Ethel the chimp from the 1930 Laurel and Hardy short...
Watching from a distance of forty years, one couldn’t help but smile at some of the special effects on show. The whole business of practical effects in movies and television had improved out of all recognition in the intervening years, but I still enjoyed seeing Dr. Zarkov’s rocket ship propelled through the strangely misty void of interplanetary space by means of a couple of sparklers. The sound effects were idiosyncratic too – rocket ships crackled and popped like a backfiring old banger when taking off, and in flight sounded more like an electrical generator than the smooth whooshing sounds we’d grown accustomed to in the Gerry Anderson productions.
The acting was, of course, corny and melodramatic, with the latter quality best exemplified by Charles Middleton’s unforgettable performance as Emperor Ming. He was a regular movie baddie, and had already menaced Laurel and Hardy in a couple of their films. Buster Crabbe was perfectly cast as Flash, and the trio of Earth explorers was completed by Jean Rogers as Dale Arden and Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov.
The serial kicked off forty-eight years ago today on 20 December 1976, with two episodes together, followed by another double-up on Tuesday 21st. The serial ran all the way through Christmas, pausing only for Christmas Day itself, with the concluding part shown on New Year’s Eve. Happily, our dad was off work for Christmas week and was able to sit in with us for some of the episodes, reliving a part of his childhood he’d never expected to see again.
We didn’t have to wait a year for the next serial, because in June 1977, the BBC rolled out the 15-part Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars on Saturday mornings. I was a convert by now, and made sure to be tuned in. Christmas 1977 brought the final serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, generally regarded as the weakest of the three, before Christmas 1978 brought the 1939 Buck Rogers serial; and with that, the brief run of Saturday morning cinema classics came to an end. They were all repeated over the coming years before disappearing sometime in the early 90s. These days, your best bet is to go to YouTube, where the original serial can be found in its entirety:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrdrha6AX3w
In two years, that old Flash Gordon serial will be ninety. I doubt it will ever see action again on the BBC, yet even as I speak, retro TV channel Rewind are mid way through a screening of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.
I’ll leave you with this sobering thought: back in 1976, the original Flash Gordon serial was, as I mentioned earlier, forty years old. Today, the 1980 colour remake directed by Dino De Laurentis is even older than that – forty four, to be precise. But I doubt it looks as old to modern eyes as the original Flash Gordon did to us back in 1976.
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