The Saturday Serials - Universal's Flash Gordon!

When Flash Gordon was adapted to the big screen by Universal studios it was appropriately enough in the serial or chapter play format. Serials were commonly the domain of pulp or comic heroes and in 1936 the Flash Gordon comic strip had become very successful and had maintained that success for a few years, a good sign that interest would be strong for a film rendition. When they started looking for someone to play Flash they found the rough and tumble but handsome mug of Buster Crabbe looking at them. An inspired choice, Crabbe became one of the mainstay stars of the serial in the 30's and 40's and beyond when serials became television. He was joined by Jean Rogers, probably a bigger star at the time and Frank Shannon as the intrepid trio of terrestrials who fly to the speeding planet of Mongo to save the Earth.

They find on Mongo the deadly Fu Manchu, or the variation on the "Yellow Peril" villain designed by Don Moore and Alex Raymond called Ming the Merciless. Joining forces with Thun the Lion Man and Prince Barin the trio battle Ming and his forces again and again until ultimately prevail and return home (spoiler alert?). I've always liked the idea that Thun was played by a Tarzan actor and that he joined forces with Crabbe, a one-time ape man himself. The serial worked hard, sometimes to its detriment, to cleave to the images that Raymond had burned into the memories and imaginations of the youth of America. Universal borrowed sets sets from Frankenstein, clips from Just Imagine, and costumes from who knows where, but still they pulled it off, and with sufficient success to warrant a sequal..

Now the first Flash Gordon serial was a huge success and so a rare sequel was scheduled. But by the time it rolled around one Orson Welles had made a big star out of the planet Mars so it was decided that Flash and his allies would go there instead of Mongo in the directly titled Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. (Not all that surprisingly it looks a whole lot like Mongo.) This new adventure has more polish than the first one, more surface production value and while the first one cleaved to the Alex Raymond original to its detriment at times (do we really need to see Frank Shannon's knees?) this one felt comfortable enough to add a character.

That character was named "Happy Hapgood" a news hawk (played by Donald Kerr) who ends up accidentally along for the ride into space. Happy is added to the mix to give jokes, to be the comedy relief. He's totally unneeded and unwanted and he messes with the classic Flash Gordon formula something awful. One of the strongest aspects of  this installment is the presence of the Clay People who are cursed and as a consequence are able weirdly blend into the walls of their territory. Watching them blend in and out of the walls is seriously creepy and one of the scariest memories of my childhood. They are wraiths in nearly every sense of the word, ghosts blended with goblins to form a really unsettling creature.

Then some years later they did it again with Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (a most unwieldy but memorable title. As in the comic strip Flash, Dale, and Zarkov go back to Mongo and get involved with saving the planet from Ming yet one more time. Again the movie looks like the comic strip, but by this time the comic strip was lush and handsome indeed. This is a good looking serial and one of my favorites, because it was this serial I owned first as it has always been in the public domain for some reason. 

There is much daring-do and the serial looks great. Buster Crabbe never looked more handsome or dashing on the screen. But some of the blood and thunder was missing, and that's true of the comic strip as well. There's a sense at times of going through the motions, both on screen and on the Sunday funny supplement. More on that tomorrow. 

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