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.
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).
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| Art by Lee Bermejo |
Connect the dots between the hugely expensive "Dark Knight' movies and the brief, crude Detective Comics story that introduced Batman to a Depression-weary, war-haunted America in 1939, and you’ll see the process by which a society seizes upon, feeds upon and continually regenerates its own animating myths. It's a process my friend Jim Jenkins has dubbed "augustification."
ReplyDeleteJose Luis Medina:
ReplyDeleteI love those Republic action serials like The Masked Marvel, Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher and Rocketman!!! Back in the 50s & 60s certain channels showed them once in a while.
Paul Zuckerman:
ReplyDeleteI came across the 1940s serials in the mid 60s when our local station, WPIX-11 (then owned by the New York News) featured a continuing serial every weekday. Wow! When you are 11 or 12, they were so exciting and I had to run home every day not to miss an episode. That's how I first saw Commondo Cody and Larry Martin, rocketmen. And had a mad crush for Linda Stirling, who did not do enough in the enjoyable Manhunt on Mystery Island (sounds like a Julie Schwartz-type of title!) with Captain Mephisto! At some point I saw the first Flash Gordon as well. That was also about the time that I picked up Screen Thrills Illustrated 4, which featured Batman on the cover-from the first serial. I quickly sent in my money to get the first three issues of STI, which featured Superman. I learned a lot about serials from that series, which I bought for a while, but somehow missed the last few issues. (I spent about 20 years from the 1980 to the early 00s hunting comic conventions and back issue book stores for the complete run, and, finally with the help of ebay, I completed my collection, which I keep handy.)
As a kid, there was only one episode per day, which is a bit quicker than the one episode per Saturday morning, but nonetheless, it kept me coming back. In the 1980s, I picked up a bootleg copy of the first Batman serial. The quality of the bootleg was below poor, and hard to see what was going on or what they were saying. Still, it was enjoyable. A few months ago I watched the serial again, but this time on an authorized DVD, so the quality was much better.
We see in the serial for the first time the famous "bats" cave. And Alfred makes his first appearance as a thin man with a mustache--necessitating a change in his look from the comic. He was played for laughs and that was the way he usually was for the first 20 years or so of the strip.
I was actually impressed by the leads. They were pretty good (even if Robin seemed a bit older than he should be, but that's been the case in every live-action Robin>) Some of the death traps got a bit repetitious--I gave up counting how many times Batman saved himself from a big fall. And, as you say, too often there was either no explanation or there was an intervening source.
Still! It is fun to watch. And I only watch one episode at a time. Sometimes, I see a few over consecutive days but sometimes I may go a week or two between episodes, and it definitely is the best way to watch them.
When my kids were young, I bought a slew of laser discs and we would watch them--rationed to one at a time usually. Sometimes they would convince me to put on a second episode to see how the hero got out of his fix!
And, it was usually a he. Sometimes the girl lead was in trouble, though and had to be saved. On rare occasions, the female lead was actually the lead--and there we had Linda Stirling again as Tiger Woman or Zorro's descendant. Ah! Still lovely and I still had a crush on her! 🙂
Steven Spielberg understood the lure of the serials and in his Indiana Jones movies, he captured the spirit and the essence of them--and came up with quite a few inescapable doom traps that the hero always got out of in the nick of time!
Cheryl Spoehr:
ReplyDeleteDon't watch " The Shadow," if you don't like bad. Chapter endings. EVERY cliffhanger ends with The Shadow untouched by collapsing buildings and plane crashes. He just stands up, laughs, and goes ahead ALWAYS! It isn't a bad serial other than that, although director Horne always puts "camp" moments into his serials...
I replied:
I hate that kind of cliffhanger cheat.
Johnny Williams:
ReplyDeleteI got to see the bulk of them finally as a young adult and they still maintained their magic. Here’s how it came about. In some of the monster magazines that were popular at the time were small easy to overlook ads featuring actual film footage of those serials. They were available in 8mm, Super 8 film reels and sometimes 16mm as well. Some were silent and copy quality varied.