July 1943: At This Theatre Next Week!

Live action super heroes were pretty thin on the ground when I was a boy.

We had little beyond Superman and Zorro on TV and Tarzan at the movies until 1966, when Batman wowed the tube and Superman flew to Broadway.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that the generation just ahead of mine had been much luckier, thrilling to dozens of superheroes from the comic books, the newspaper comic strips, the pulp magazines, radio drama and original screenplays as they dashed manically across the movie screen in 15-minute chapter plays every Saturday during the 1930s and 1940s.

Each hero’s adventure added up to three or four hours on screen! What bliss! (And it turns out they play much better if you don’t binge-watch them).

When I finally did get to watch them as an adult, I could still see beyond the repetitive action of the endless, breathless chases and the strained production values to the cinema sorcery that set someone else’s childhood soaring.

By the way, I’m a sucker for a good inescapable doom trap (from which the hero will, of course, inevitably escape). And so was my father.

Even 20 years later, he could describe in vivid detail how Batman had gotten out of the evil Dr. Daka’s room with the spiked closing walls in Chapter 14 of his 1943 movie serial (the Caped Crusader blocked them in the proverbial nick of time with a crowbar tossed down to him by Robin).

Dad also loved James Bond’s escape from Auric Goldfinger’s laser table, one of the best examples of that venerable melodramatic convention.

Like a classic detective story, the inescapable doom trap should always play fair, I think. The hero should escape by virtue of his own wits, resourcefulness and established abilities, prompting us to admire him all the more. He should never be saved by a random deus ex machina (something that happened too often in the hurriedly written and filmed movie serials).

Art by Lee Bermejo