Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars

 

 

Feet Of Clay

Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars
Directed by Ford Beebe
and Robert F. Hill
USA 1938 Image DVD Region 1

Okay, so... the second Flash Gordon serial is possibly the least popular (nowadays) of the three theatrically released 'franchise' serials... although it’s still pretty great, to be honest. This second serial is called Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars and I’d always believed the myth about the producers setting their sights on a return to Mongo for this and then changing their minds and going to Mars... was because Orson Welle’s popular and traumatic radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds meant Mars was on everyone’s lips again. However, it turns out that this legendary broadcast was actually about 8 months after this serial was put out so... turns out the change came due to budgetary constraints although, to be fair, I really don’t understand how the re-use of sets on Mars was any cheaper than reusing the same sets for Mongo (where that would have been more logical in a story sense, too).

It’s also much less racy in terms of the costuming here, with the bare chests of the men and bare legs of the women a thing of the past, although, that being said, there are at least three ‘bottleneck’ episodes where lengthy flashbacks from the first serial are replayed. I don’t know why you need them, to be honest, since the plot points they purport to explain do nothing of the kind and these could easily be cut with the serial running for one episode less. As it is, it’s the longest of the three serials, clocking in at a hefty 15 chapters long.  

The main cast in this one are pretty much the same with Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe playing Flash, Frank Shannon as Zarkov (doing a much better and more interesting acting job in the role here than his previous turn... much more relaxed), Richard Alexander as his second and final go around as Prince Barin (who turns up half way through the serial as a kind of added ‘deux ex machina’ character) and Charles Middleton as Ming The Merciless. It does, of course, still have Jean Rogers playing Dale Arden, which is a big plus. Out of the two times she appeared in the role, this was a better written version of the character, at least for the first half of the serial before she spends most of the second half relegated to screaming and cowering once more.

There are also four important new characters in this one. We have Wheeler Oakman as Tarnack, Ming’s right hand man who is basically like a more scheming and, ultimately less loyal, version of Officer Torch from the first serial (Torch is absent from this story but returns in the third serial). Next we have serial stalwart C. Montague Shaw as the King of the Clay People. The clay people are at war with the monarchy of the planet because they were turned into... well... people of clay, doomed to live in the clay caverns and await an ally who can destroy the source of the power which robbed them of their humanity... err... martianity... and revert back to their true selves.

Another major player is reporter Happy Hapgood, played by Donald Kerr. He basically stows away on Flash and the gang’s rocket ship in the hopes of breaking a story and ends up on a round trip to Mars. He’s basically there for comic relief but he also seems to serve the dual function of getting into difficulties and falling over at the wrong minute to get them all in trouble, even more than Dale Arden (which was her principle function in the first serial, of course). I’ve always quite liked the bumbling character but he really does seem like a fifth wheel and I guess the studio thought so too because he’s only in the middle serial.

Lastly but, probably the most important, we have the chapter play’s other main villain who is, for most of the story, the dominant ally of Ming. She is Queen Azura, played by Beatrice Roberts. In the strips she was The Witch Queen Of Mongo but, well, given the location change for this adventure, she’s now Azura, the Martian Queen of Black Magic. And, yes, when they say magic they mean it. Due to the properties of a gem she wears (which can only be nullified by the presence of the Black Sapphire of Kalu), she has full on magical properties. Despite all the scientific shenanigans which the rest of the technological marvels are explained away with in the three Flash Gordon serials, this is full on embracing the co-existence of a magical force for good or evil so... yeah... it may seem like an uneasy alliance of elements but the characters don’t once question the logic of it so, neither does the audience, for the most part (the recent Wonder Woman 1984, reviewed here, has not been as successful for some audience members in pulling off the same trick, for some reason).

Now, there are a heck of a lot less things for Flash and company to explore in this one. In terms of different races, the first serial brought us Barin (and by mention only in his case, the forest people of Arboria), the Hawkmen, the Sharkmen and the Lion Men. This serial is way longer but only has the Clay Men (who live in the rocks of their cave and materialise from the walls when they want to be seen) and a forest based race (who I suspect were probably the Arborians in the first scripts, before the location change meant that they couldn’t really be). Don’t worry, we’ll meet the Arborians properly in the third serial and.. oh wait, I’ll save their dress sense for the next review.

So, yes, less people for Flash and the gang to meet and, for the longer running time, this means there is a hell of a lot of jumping from location to location and doing the usual mini quests in an effort to pad out the time. Okay, so this is standard for a serial anyway but there’s just less variety here. I should probably mention I’ve never read the strips this one is possibly based on far enough to know if this is a good adaptation of some of those or if they just did their own thing here. There are, however, some nice technical inventions, in addition to Kenneth Strickfaden’s electrical marvels, which were used again for the laboratory scenes here...

So the hand held rays guns are a neat design and are held kind of cack-handed, with the wrist having to be held up more or less at a right angle to aim them at a target. It’s a distinctive way of doing things but, it seems to me, a little less practical in terms of the strain of the user having to keep his arm bent up to fire them. There are also the Martian cloaks or ‘bat wings’ which act similarly to parachutes in that, when you stretch your arms out, you can jump out of a stratosled (the new spaceship design for this serial) and glide along the currents of air to land safely on the ground. Another lovely innovation is the light bridge, which is a beam of light extended from the roof of one building to another which allows you to walk across it in safety. Finally there are the little bullet cars which rocket through a kind of secret, underground runway linking the Clay Kingdom and Queen Azura’s palace... which are used only half the time and make no sense of the times the heroes and villains choose to travel to each other via stratosled. Especially since they seem infinitely quicker. These same transports are also, of course, a main feature of the planet Saturn, as fans of the 1939 serial Buck Rogers will remember, where some of these sets and props were re-used.

Okay so, the serial is fine and, although not as good as the first, is certainly superior to many of the serials put out by the other studios. Strangely, the story starts off exactly where the last one finishes, with Flash, Dale and Zarkov returning to Earth at the end of the previous adventure (which I reviewed here). I say strangely because, although they are wearing more or less the same costumes in their rocket ship... after all, where would one be able to get a costume change on the way back to Earth... Dale Arden has gone from blonde to brunette (as the original comic strip character). So, well yeah, don’t know where she got a hairdresser during her return journey, for sure.

The chapter play does all the usual things with lots of action, wobbly sets and daring stunt work (performed by stunt people who, mostly, look nothing like the stars they are doubling). There are some surprisingly good, effective special effects (where things disintegrate by being, I suspect, iron filings moulded into shape and then de-magnetised so they fall apart... this beats most things I’ve seen done to this day) along with the usual ‘of their time’ effects. I still love the ray gun blasts with their loud bangs and ‘not quite synching up’ rays of superimposed light. Although, in one scene towards the end of the serial, Flash dodges a ray gun attack by one of Ming’s guards but the sound and visual effect are noticeably absent... as though there just wasn’t enough time or money to put that last little effect on. So it looks pretty silly, to be honest.

Actually, the last episode has a pretty dark conclusion, with Ming going somewhat power mad and Tarnack turning on him, forcing him into a disintegration chamber and, well, disintegrating him. It’s got a certain finality to it in terms of his character and, I suspect the studio weren’t planning on making a third serial because, well, they bring Ming back with no real explanation as to how he could possibly have survived in the next one. More on that in my review of the third one but at least his miracle reappearance in this one after seeing him consumed by fire in the last is explained here by highlighting his robes are somehow fireproof. This death scene is followed by a hasty conclusion where Flash and the others return to Earth and are celebrated with stock footage and their faces hastily superimposed over the shots of the crowds (in a kind of eerie pre-cursor to the character ‘sign offs’ in last year’s Avengers Endgame... reviewed by me here).

The music in this one, as usual, comes from a variety of sources such as The Invisible Man (reviewed here) and other B-pictures. Most of the stuff used in here is from Franz Waxman’s score to The Bride Of Frankenstein (which I reviewed here) and it’s probably the most dominant music used in this particular serial. That being said, I don’t think it’s necessarily tracked in and I’m sure I heard some variants in a much slower tempo at one point so... I’m guessing that there was a minimal musical budget for this one (don’t forget, the Flash Gordon serials were the expensive jewels in Universal’s serial output crown) but I suspect a lot of it was re-recorded to fit some of the scenes better.

And that’s me done for a while with Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars. This would be the last time we would see Jean Rogers and Richard Alexander playing Dale Arden and Prince Barin respectively. Also the last time we’d see Priscilla Lawson playing Princess Aura (who is seen in the flashback replays from the first serial only). These characters would be filled out with different actors for the third time around... which I’ll review on here tomorrow. Hope you can make it. 

 

Buster Crabbe Serial Week at NUTS4R2

Flash Gordon (1936)

Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars (1938)

Red Barry (1938)

Buck Rogers (1939)

Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (1940)

Flash Gordon (1936)

Ming In The Tail

Flash Gordon (1936)
Directed by Frederick Stephani & Ray Taylor
USA 1936 Image DVD Region 1

So... I'm finally revisiting one of my favourite things.

I first saw the original Flash Gordon serial on the BBC in... it must have been the early to mid-1970s. I’m going to say 1973/74 as a guestimate so, that would have made me somewhere between five and six years old. This first one consists of 13 episodes running between around 15-25 mins each (including the usual replay of the last few minutes of the previous episode at the start of the new one, to remind the audience what dire predicament Flash or one of his 'team' had been left in at the end of the last chapter).  

My father spotted it was being shown and, I believe this may have been the first time it was broadcast on television in the United Kingdom, although my dad certainly remembered seeing the serials at the cinema in the early 1940s... so they would have been either very quick re-releases or we got them a few years late over here. He always used to rave about these and also about a certain Western star when I was a kid so, when he spotted that the BBC were showing a special version of this, with the serial spliced together and run as two large parts, including a Hopalong Cassidy feature film showing bang in the middle of this wonderful, visual sandwich, there was no way we were going to miss this one.

And it was fantastic. It was one of my all time favourite things to think about, talk about and act out when I was a kid... taking its place alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, King Kong, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Planet Of The Apes, Doc Savage and, eventually, Star Wars (which really does owe its beginnings to Flash Gordon... I’ll get to that eventually, bear with me... you can read my review of that movie here). I was absolutely hooked and, I guess the screening must have proved pretty popular because, for the next 12 or so years, the BBC would televise the three Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s (and some other classic serials too), one episode a day and usually in the school holidays in the mornings (Christmas was always good) or, occasionally, at 5.40pm on BBC2 in the same time slot they used to show the Charlie Chan, The Saint, The Falcon and the 1960s Fu Manchu films in. And you can bet my whole life revolved around them when they came on. Everything would be planned around me watching the latest installment as far as the way the rest of the day would go. Everything about these things hit big with me. And remember, these were the days before video recording. So I used to have a microphone set up next to the television and everybody had to be quiet so I could sound record the show and then listen to it numerous times after because I loved it so much (I only upgraded from a VHS player to DVD player a year or two after those machines first came out because I discovered that the Flash Gordon serials were out in the US on the format... the very same discs I’m re-watching now... oh, for a Blu Ray restoration).

Now, Flash Gordon was a cartoon strip owned by King Features that was created and written by Alex Raymond. And I say created loosely because, just a few years ago, I found out that it was he who had been working for a while with Edgar Rice Burroughs to try and develop a comic strip based on John Carter of Mars. It almost came to pass when, suddenly, work on the forthcoming strip was cancelled, the Burroughs contract rejected and... not soon after, Flash Gordon burst on the scene with a cast of creatures and locales which, it could be said, bear a certain resemblance to some of the ideas in Burrough’s Barsoomian chronicles. Funnily enough, around about 15 years ago I finally read a collected reprint of the first story of the Flash Gordon newspaper strips and the travelling to and fro from various places on the globe (in this case, the globe is the planet Mongo) and meeting strange creatures while fulfilling mini quests to get to the end of the story... in other words, all of the things that you would associate with a typical 1930s -1950s theatrical serial adventure... were all inherent in that original story. Not only that... and I certainly never realised this at the time... but the first of the three serials is absolutely spot on a fairly straight adaptation of the original adventure (I can’t say the same for the other two because I never read those strips thus far). So, that threw me when I found that out... in as nice a way possible.

Olympic Bronze and Gold Medal champion swimmer Clarence Linden Crabbe II played Flash under his screen name, Larry “Buster” Crabbe. He’s the perfect Flash Gordon (still is) and out of all the cast, he seems to be one of the more natural of the actors (he’d already played Tarzan by this point and would go on to do a whole series of both Billy The Kid and Billy Carson films, not to mention a couple of other strip characters which... I’ll get to over the next few days on this blog). Starring opposite him as Dale Arden was Jean Rogers who, for me, was always the perfect Dale Arden, although she does, in this first serial at least, spend most of her time swooning or metaphorically ‘twisting her ankle’ and generally putting herself in danger so she can be rescued. She was actually a natural brunette, which would have been fine because so was the character but, Jean Harlow was big at the time so the producers wanted her to dye her hair blonde, just as they’d got ‘Buster’ Crabbe to do. In the third serial she was replaced completely by another actress (I’ll get to that when I review it).

Frank Shannon plays Dr. Zarkov and, he was always one of my favourites but, I have to say, watching it this time around he seems to be one of the more wooden of the actors in the cast, although I’m pretty sure he got a lot better as the sequels progressed. Prince Barin is played here by the somewhat portly (which was more associated with strength in those days, as opposed to obesity) Richard Alexander, who would reprise the character in the next serial but, like many of the cast members here, would be replaced by a different actor in the third). Only the actors playing Flash Gordon, Dr. Zarkov and Emperor Ming The Merciless would stay in their roles for all three serials.

We also have Jack 'Tiny' Lipson, James Pierce and Duke York playing King Vultan of the Hawk Men, Prince Thun of the Lion Men and King Kala of the Shark Men respectively. Thun’s character was given short shrift in the 1980 movie version (reviewed here) and was stabbed by Ming early in the story but he's given much more to do here. It’s pretty obvious Brian Blessed must have remembered Lipson’s performance as the constantly laughing, boisterous Vultan when he played the role... which doesn’t seem that far removed from Blessed’s personality anyway, the way he played it.

Rounding out the main cast are Charles Middleton (who appeared a few years earlier opposite the Marx Brothers in a sequence in Duck Soup) as the evil Emperor Ming and the feisty Priscilla Lawson as his daughter Princess Aura (who is even more dripping with sex appeal than the vivacious Ornella Muti was in the 1980s movie). I’ve heard that Middleton’s make up was deliberately made to resemble, to a certain extent, the look of popular book, serial and movie super villain Fu Manchu although, to be fair, if that’s the case then the comic book character also was. Priscilla Lawson is seen here in what is probably her most famous role of not very many films. She joined the armed forces in the Second World War and, I believe, lost her leg... dying from complications from an ulcer or some such in the 1950s. When the character reappears in the third serial, she not only suffers a complete personality change but she’s also played by another actress.

And it’s a real humdinger of a serial, matching the strip it’s based on with different humanoid species (as you can tell from some of the character names) and with some special effects that, while they may look quite ropey by today's standards, still look kind of beautiful in a charming 1930s kind of way. The crudity of the practical effects is, however, matched by the sleak elegance of some of the designs. And, as there are lots of different mini adventures making up the serial, the special effects team at Universal even got to reprise their startling ‘invisibility’ effects which they’d perfected for The Invisible Man movies... Flash spends the best part of two episodes as an ‘invisible agent’, attacking Ming and his soldiers when they least suspect, aided by the invisibility ray Dr. Zarkov perfects while tinkering away in the laboratory on Mongo.

Of course, there’s loads of recycling going on too. You’ll recognise sets from various Universal horror movies redressed and, of course, no scientific laboratory would be complete without using Kenneth Strickfaden’s unusual scientific inventions which did Dr. Frankenstein so proud (read my review of Frankenstein here for a quick mention of Strickfaden and be on the look out for my review of a biography on him in the New Year). There’s also the odd bit of ‘found footage’ from older productions to flesh out sequences and, well, a lot of Ming’s soldiers, not to mention Barin, are obviously outfitted by leftovers from a Roman legion picture.

Even the music is mostly recycled and I wish I knew where half of it came from. Although the re-release of this may have included some selections from Franz Waxman’s score to The Bride Of Frankenstein, this first release doesn’t included those (although the two sequels certainly did). There are various classical pieces which I would love to know the names of here plus various other Universal scores jammed together in one big, quite seductive musical mash up (such as excerpts from the scores of Dracula’s Daughter, reviewed here and Werewolf Of London, reviewed here).

That being said, despite all this recycling, the Flash Gordon serials had huge budgets for their time, three times the amount normally alloted a weekly cinematic chapter play. They were the most expensive serials of their time and this really shows when you compare it to others of their ilk. Universal serials always looked better than rivals like Columbia and Republic and, these (and the Buck Rogers serial) looked even better than the other Universal serials of the time. Yes, there are a lot of clunky bits such as bizarrely miscast voice additions dubbed on to add in lines in post production and, some of the monsters look bizarrely comical (although, as a kaiju fan I still love them)... but they are completely charming and, frankly, I could watch these things over and over again.

It’s no secret that George Lucas wanted to make a big budget version of Flash Gordon in the mid 1970s and that he tried very hard to get the rights but was refused. I guess a lot of Star Wars fans owe a lot to that refusal because he wrote his own space opera along similar lines and, although Star Wars is its own thing, it’s equally a pastiche of several things found in the serials and the history of science fiction (not to mention influences from the cinema of Kurosawa and World War II dogfight pictures, along with a load of other stuff). Indeed, I can’t think of Han Solo being tortured on that static electricity machine in The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here) without thinking of Flash being tortured by the electricity in the static room on Vultan’s sky city (indeed, Cloud City is pretty much Lucas’ homage to Vultan’s city). Similarly, when Flash goes up against a man in suit monster in Episode 2/3 (cliffhanger and resolution)... and changing into a young boy in long shot so the ‘giant monster’ can pick him up... I remember what a debt the Rancor in Return Of The Jedi (reviewed here) owes to this serial. More to come on these kinds of influences as I review each serial this week. Of course, the film-makers here, in turn, were also looking back to their cinematic legacy. For instance, the man working the big dial machine in the atom furnaces in Vultan’s palace was obviously inspired by the workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (reviewed here).

The other thing about this is, although some of the acting is a bit wooden and some of the acting is very ‘silent melodrama’, that the on-screen chemistry between everyone is electric and it really carries it. Crabbe himself is pretty natural as the comic strip hero and you can see why he was cast in these kinds of adventures roles... being an Olympic swimmer he really looks the part and you believe he can do all this running, jumping and fighting... some of which he clearly does himself (and you certainly know it when he doesn’t). And talking about that body... you get to see a lot of it and, frankly, a lot of the actors and actresses in this. The costumes in this one show a lot of flesh and the producers were pressurised into cooling it down and providing more coverings for the various actors and actresses in the two sequels.

And... there’s lots more to say about Flash Gordon but, honestly, watch out for my reviews of the next two serials in this sequence over the next couple of days. When this was finally shown on television in America in the 1950s it became very popular and so, an American/German co-production of a Flash Gordon TV series was produced, starring Steve Holland as Flash (who readers of the 1960s/70s Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage stories will recognise as he was the ‘artists model’ for James Bama’s cover paintings). I’ve got a number of the surviving episodes of this show and, honestly, asides from not sticking to the original concept in hardly any way at all, the shows look really cheap and nasty and certainly don’t live up to the brilliance of the original serials, despite being filmed almost 20 years later. Avoid them like the plague (of sound?*) and stick with these wonderful originals. I have to say that, re-watching these again, they totally hold up and I thoroughly love them. So join me tomorrow when I review the first of the sequel serials.

*sorry, couldn’t resist a little joke to fans of the Alex Raymond branded Flash Gordon novels of the early 1970s there.

 

Buster Crabbe Serial Week at NUTS4R2

Flash Gordon (1936)

Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars (1938)

Red Barry (1938)

Buck Rogers (1939)

Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (1940)

 

Flash Gordon (1980)

Flash In The Can

Flash Gordon (1980)
UK/Italy/Netherlands/USA 1980
Directed by Mike Hodges
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

When I was a kid, from the first omnibus TV screening of the original 1936 Flash Gordon serial by the BBC in 1975... which was shown as two long ‘compiled’ episodes with a Hoppalong Cassidy movie playing between the two, I was absolutely hooked on Flash Gordon and that theatrical serial and its two sequels, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, were... and still are... three of my favourite things within the world of film.

Now I’m not going to talk about the serials much here because... well, I intend to watch them again sometime over the course of the next year and write about them for this blog... but I will say that many decades later, when I read some of Alex Raymond’s original Flash Gordon newspaper strips, I was shocked to find that, as far as the first serial goes at any rate, the 1936 Hollywood version with Buster Crabbe, with all its episodic twists and turns and globe-trotting travels on the planet Mongo, was remarkably close to the original source material.

Now, around about the same time as I first saw that original serial, a young director called George Lucas was trying to buy the rights to make a modern, Flash Gordon movie (the rights were optioned with Fellini at the time, I believe, who gets name checked as a character in the 1980 version). He couldn’t afford the asking price so, in the end, he put all his ideas into making his own space opera which borrowed quite a lot from the feel of the original... that film turned out to be Star Wars and, as you undoubtedly know, the rest was movie history, as far as that story goes.

However, the Flash Gordon film then being made by Dino DeLaurentis was floundering and creative differences forced one of the original directors for this movie to part company... so, yeah, we missed out on the great Nicholas Roeg’s vision for Flash (which, given the direction he was going, I’m not sure wasn’t a blessing in disguise) and eventually Mike Hodges went on to direct the new movie.

Ironically, of course, it was the success of the first Star Wars film itself that paved the way for the atmosphere in which a film like Flash Gordon could be taken seriously by studio executives. The bandwagon machine for post Star Wars clones was an immediate rush for anything science fiction to be given a green light and the next ten years saw a lot of films, some bad and others good, coming out to greet the viewing public. Stuff like Star Crash, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek The Motion Picture, The Black Hole, Battle Beyond The Stars, The Humanoid... things that might not have made it to the cinema in exactly the same way they might have, if at all, without Lucas’ film hugely changing the cinema going map. Even the popular James Bond franchise was retooled and the next intended film for the series was replaced with a ‘name only but not the original story’ version of Moonraker, to keep up with the general public’s voracious demand for science fiction.

I remember seeing Flash Gordon back in 1980 at my local cinema in Enfield and thinking to myself that, although it was obviously nowhere near as good as those original theatrical serials (nothing to do with Flash Gordon since has ever touched those... but I’m sure there’s a great film series to be realised from these stories yet), this film was still a huge amount of fun and, if it wasn’t anywhere near as close to the original story, it did have some anchor points and some of the spirit of the template was certainly there. So I liked it a lot, in other words... and ended up seeing it three times at the cinema, if memory serves.

The wonderful Arrow films has released a nice new Blu Ray restoration of the movie overseas but, alas, due to rights issues, the new UK version has been released by Studio Canal. I was going to go for the big £50 boxed edition but I thought that was a bit of an expensive option and I had most of the stuff in it anyway... so I saved some money by buying the new, slimmed down 2 disc 40th Anniversary Edition and then augmenting it with the third of the discs in the deluxe edition set, the documentary film Life After Flash, as a separate Blu Ray purchase (I got a nice little handwritten note from the director thanking me when that film came through in the post and I am looking forward to watching and reviewing Life After Flash for this blog at some point in the very near future).

The film is, mostly, nicely presented and the production values are, for the most part, excellent. I hate the first couple of spaceship designs used in this but the final one, War Rocket Ajax, is a nice, spectacular design worthy of the original strip and the whole film is like a bizarre fusion of 1930s eye candy reimagined for the 1980s. It’s so colourful too... like somebody had hired Mario Bava and Dario Argento to do the lighting and then just let them run riot with the thing.

The cast is wonderful... Sam J. Jones as Flash is a lot more of a presence than I believe people gave him credit for. Melody Anderson’s Dale Arden is, perhaps, a little stronger as a character than she was in the 1930s but that’s no bad thing either. Now I always loved the original 1930s cast and especially Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov. Here, Zarkov is played by Chaim Topol and he’s absolutely amazing in the role, if a little over the top. That being said, most of the cast are a little over the top because the movie does almost demand a larger than life delivery of the lines. I mean, Brian Blessed as Vultan, King of the Hawkmen, is a completely brilliant bit of casting and Timothy Dalton as Prince Baron is... as written, a little more intimidating and complicated than the original... but still great. And Ornella Muti as Princess Aura, daughter of Ming The Merciless, is who every teenage boy was thinking of at the time. And of course, there’s the great Max Von Sydow as Emperor Ming, playing it to the hilt just as Charles Middleton had done in the 1930s. Plus a load of great character actors in the piece too, of course, such as Richard O’Brien and the late, great William Hootkins. Nothing much can go wrong there.

The films is exciting, fairly pacey, very humorous and has some exciting laser battles towards the end of the picture. There’s maybe too many “that characters dead, they’ve had it now, oh no they’re not... “Gordon’s Alive!” moments in the film but this just, generally, reflects the cliffhanger nature of both the original serials and the newspaper strips so... I’ve got no complaints. It’s also a very sexy film and as far as the costumes and certain comments go, it certainly reflects the first of the three 1930s serials in this respect (the costumes... or lack of them... had to be completely toned down for the second and third serials, is my remembrance).

And then there’s the music. Queen’s hit song is fantastic and some of the other action sequences are exciting too. Alas, they didn’t really do their job is my understanding and, though they got a hit record album out of it, a fair amount of extra music had to be hastily written by Howard Blake using their themes, from what I've read over the years and there’s some nice stuff from him here too (I have a ‘promo’ CD of his parts of the score and it’s a real eye... err... ear opener). Still, the main Queen song, Flash, is great and the pulse which starts it and goes through some of the action scenes certainly makes the hairs on your arms stand up at times. The opening credit sequence accompanying this song, utilising fast montages of the original Alex Raymond newspaper strip, is probably one of the best title sequences in cinema history, as far as I’m concerned.

I have two slight problems with this new Blu Ray restoration. Once is that the highly visible strings on the Hawkmen have been digitally removed and I think I noticed  few other little special effects ‘enhancements’ as I watched this new version. Nobody needs this kind of Lucas-like tinkering. We want to see the strings and the wobbly sets please... they’re part of the history of the film. The other thing I wasn’t too sure about was the scene where the Ming punches through the windscreen of the plane near the start. The saturation seems hugely overblown here and you really can’t see that it’s a facsimile of Ming punching through anymore... just a big red blur. I think that was a bit overdone and another unwelcome bit of ‘restoration’. However, the majority of the film is still beautifully lurid in its design (contradictory as that may sound to some) and hugely entertaining.

And there you have it. Flash Gordon (1980) is a fun film which lovers of cinema should definitely take a look at if they like a good night in with a good movie. A feel good film which doesn’t, alas, live up to the 1930s serials but certainly makes a much more successful go of it than any other versions since then (don’t talk to me about the 1950s German/US TV show starring Bantam paperback Doc Savage cover model Steve Holland as Flash... it was a bad attempt at best). This film is easily one I’ll watch again and again and it’s loaded with extras including a half hour look at the unfilmed Nicholas Roeg version and... and this is a real good one... a commentary track by Brian Blessed. I haven’t listened to that yet but I already know that’s going to be worth the price of purchase alone and it will be going on sometime soon.