King Of The Rocket Men

Jet Pack To Where 
You Once Belonged

King Of The Rocket Men
USA 1949 Directed by Fred C. Brannon
Republic Pictures 
Imprint Films Blu Ray Zone B

It was the very early 1980s when I personally made the acquaintance of Jeff King (of the Rocket Men). Since the mid-1970s, school kids had been fed with the same four fantastic Universal serials running in the mornings of alternate school holidays... and we loved it. The big four were Flash Gordon (reviewed here), Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here), Buck Rogers (reviewed here) and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). But the BBC must have realised at some point that they needed to buy some fresh serials so they introduced the first of, I think I’m right in saying only three others they ever broadcast and... that was King Of The Rocket Men, starting off week nights in the old 5.40pm slot used by those other serials on their debuts (not to mention another load of great B-movie features over the years, such as the Charlie Chan, The Saint and The Falcon movies). 

Now, King Of The Rocket Men was made by the old ‘shoot ‘em up Western’ studio Republic Pictures and, yeah, even as kids I could see that they had nowhere near the same kind of budgets as their Universal counterparts. But that didn’t matter, the Republic serials had Howard and Theodore Lydecker handling their special effects, most of which were pretty good and they had a great team of stuntmen on their very energetic fight scenes, which were numerous. I’ve said it a number of times and I’ll re-iterate it here, if the bad guys and the good guys walked into a room in a Republic picture, anything that wasn’t nailed down would be used as a projectile at some point in the next two minutes.

Suffice it to say, I loved King Of The Rocket Men. As I said, the title character was Jeff King (played by the great Tristram Coffin), inventor and member of the Science Associates, who would don a rocket suit to fight off the machinations of the evil Dr. Vulcan, who would put the world in peril for a fast buck. And, while he did this, King would also have to try and find out which one of the Science Associates members actually was Dr. Vulcan (a common plot in these serials, where the villain is revealed in the penultimate or even the last episode). 

And of course, in order for the title of the serial to make sense, there’s an episode when King’s ‘secretly not dead after all’ colleague, who invented the suit and also a weapon called The Decimator (which causes much trouble during the course of the 12 chapters, due to the writers presumably not knowing the actual meaning of the term decimate) dons the rocket suit himself in order to throw suspicion off of King and rescue him from the bad guys’ clutches. Yep, it’s the old “How can Clark Kent and Superman be in the same place at the same time?” ploy but, heck, it worked for me and, if my fifth or sixth revisit to the serial now, courtesy of a beautful new Blu Ray boxed set of serials from Imprint Films in Australia, is somewhat jaded, I still found myself able to recapture some of the magic and excitement of watching this thing when I was 12 or 13 years old. 

I loved the music... and still do (can we have a CD please?) and the serial scurries along at a relatively fast pace, very much using the old ‘change the footage from last weeks cliffhanger to show how the hero is able to escape’ modus operandi that a lot of the companies used. The flying effects by the Lydecker Brothers are exactly the same as those employed to make the title character fly, at the drop of a Shazam!, in Republic’s The Adventures Of Captain Marvel serial (reviewed here), consisting of a hidden trampoline take off to flight, followed by a rigged, ‘stiff as a board on hidden wires’ dummy for the long shots. It’s silly but great stuff and it’s arguable whether it’s any better or lesser than Columbia’s trick in their two Superman serials... of just having the character turn into a cartoon version of himself after take off. 

Honestly, it may be nostalgia talking but I really loved following along with Tristram Coffin and various, assorted colleagues such as Mae Clark, a curiously age appropriate female lead (and Lois Lane-like reporter) who would have been perfect as the female love interest, if such a thing was ever brought up within the confines of the fast moving plot (it wasn’t). Imprint’s new transfer looks the best I’ve ever seen it on a home video format and, unlike other transfers I’ve seen, doesn’t feature the materialising words (A re-release) on the opening credits of each episode... so this must have been from a different master source than the ones they used to show on BBC2 back in the day. 

King Of The Rocket Men was also influential. Not only was the flying footage re-used in three other serials using the same costume - Radar Men From The Moon, Zombies Of The Stratosphere and Commando Cody: Sky Marshall Of The Universe (reviewed by me here) - all of which are included in the Imprint boxed edition, which also includes Flying Disc Man From Mars, The Invisible Monster and The Mysterious Dr. Satan... but it was also the inspiration for Dave Steven’s loving, comic book homage The Rocketeer, which was itself turned into a very badly adapted but no less entertaining movie of the same name. 

And that’s me done on King Of The Rocket Men, I think. If you are coming to this as an adult and this is your first watch... I would urge you to suspend disbelief and water down any cynicism while watching. All of you who are a child at heart, though, surely can’t fail to have a good time with this one. 

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials

Image Chapter

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials
by William C. Cline 
McFarland Classics 
ISBN: 978-0786404711

I was really looking forward to reading this book when I initially bought it. I’d already read one pretty good book on serials, The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury (reviewed here), and, although I enjoyed it greatly, I felt it was lacking in some areas for a number of reasons, not least of which because the serials which are available to us now on home video systems were not readily available to the writers of that book in 1973. It was still a great read, however, and I was looking forward to reading what I thought would be a, relatively, modern take on the genre, looking at the components and key themes of these chapter plays in a more critical and enlightening manner.

However, what I didn’t realise is that this is actually a reprint of a book which was originally published in 1984, so although the writer would have possibly had a little more access to his subject matter, the book doesn’t really break down the form of the serial in a way which might have been more useful. To be fair, it does analyse aspects of the chapter plays to a certain degree, but I did find this one a hard and, in some ways, monotonous read for large sections of the book.

Now I fully comprehend that the author did, in fact, see pretty much all the serials he talks about and was in a unique position to do so for some of his time as a cinema programmer. This is not in question. However, I did find it hard to read that, according to the writer, serials were primarily aimed at the juvenile end of the market and that the reason they are neglected by many is because they are not sophisticated enoutgh to hold an adult audience. While I can tentatively object to the first accusation on the grounds that I’m pretty sure expensive serials like the Flash Gordon series were as much for adults as they were the children, I can certainly raise the issue that an adult appreciation of all art forms, whatever their primary market, is not without reward or interest and certainly I am able to enjoy the format, formulaic as it is, from a modern context as much as I can from pitching my viewing to a historical perspective... albeit with a different level of appreciation juxtaposed with the initial thrill of the action.

Nevertheless, the author may have got off to a bad start with me but at least he is passionate enough about the serials that he’s written at length about them. Like the earlier book I read on serials, In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials eschews any real glances at the early silent film serials, instead choosing to pitch its tent firmly within the era of the talkies... although the way the subject is organised, it could have easily been used to cover both forms, I suspect.

My main problem with the book is, although it is split into dedicated chapters on specific tropes of the serials such as heroes, sidekicks, leading ladies, villains etc, it mostly reads like a series of lists strung together to pass for sentences. Extremelely detailed lists, granted, but also not very interesting in that they seem to be saying such stuff as “actor x played this kind of character in serial A, serial B and Serical C, totalling y number of serials for this company and z number of serials for that company”... before just moving onto the next person in another paragraph and repeating this kind of exercise throughout. It doesn’t breakdown the serial formula to specific story arc styles so much, or refer to the psychological reasoning that brought certain kinds of serials to our screens and, much as some of this book was quite informative, it’s really not the critical study of the form I have been searching for so far (although, if anybody knows of one, please either tweet me or pop it in the comments section at the bottom of the page).

To be fair to it, some of the sections are quite valuable taking this kind of approach, such as the one on score composers, but when I did find something as interesting as this, I found it not going into enough detail on the subject... possibly for a lack of research resources in this kind of area (the composers were rarely credited and most of the serials recycled music from here, there and everywhere, including cannibalising their own past successes... although the part about why the Spy Smasher music was like it was is something I found very interesting).

And there, I think, lies the nub of why I just didn’t get as much joy from this tome as I thought I would. For the casual reader who is interested in these things, there’s probably way more irrelevant detail than required but, for the reader who wants to explore these in more depth and gain more of an understanding of just what made these chapter plays tick in the way they did, there’s maybe not enough focus in those areas... it has to be said.

However, you have to respect the author of this work because he certainly knows his stuff and, for the time in which this was written, this was probably an essential addition for any cinephile’s shelf. By no means a hard recommend from me but, since there’s not exactly a glut of books on this unique form of cinematic entertainment, it’s possibly one you might want to welcome into your hands at some point, if you have no others on the subject. An honourable attempt with, I hasten to add, a very valuable and lengthy reference appendix detailing every sound serial shot and released in any given year from 1930 to 1956... so if you need an essential checklist of sound era serials, this book has it.

The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury

Killer Serials

The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury
by Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut
Woburn Press
ISBN: 071300097X

When I find a bargain of a second hand book I’m not usually accustomed to paying a tenner for it. But I could tell from the image of Jean Rogers as Dale Arden peering at me from the spine on the shelf, about a year ago, that this one was something special and “of its time”. And that time, according to this first edition (of probably only one pressing I’m guessing, from its rarity), published in Great Britain by Woburn Books... was 1973. And therein lies both the deep joy and slight weakness, in contemporary terms, of this particular volume.

Next to the £10 marked up price, written in pencil on the first interior page, there is also an ink penned inscription written, presumably, by the previous owner of this adventuresome tome. Christmas 1973, is what it reads and I wonder if, perhaps, this book was sold on as a result of the death of the last reader. Whoever he or she was, I’d have to say to any ghostly, lingering spirit of that person, their Christmas present came to find itself in good hands again. Re-bought by someone who will value and cherish it for what it is. Even its imperfections.

When I was a young un, my mum and dad would take me to the local library in what was then known as Lower Edmonton but is now, more politically correctly called, Edmonton Green. My dad would sometimes take me up to the reference library and sit with me so we could flick through books with pictures in and he could describe to me, with their aid, all of the science fiction and fantasy films of bygone decades that I’d never seen and probably never would, unless one of the television channels decided to show one some time. Don’t forget, this is in the time before home video was even a wink in the consumer’s eye and movies were rarely shown more than once every three years or so (if the channel happened to have the rights to show it at the time). We had a small black and white television set with, in those days, three channels (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) and that was as good as it got.

Many an hour was spent looking at the pictures in these books of B-movie monsters and robots of whom my dad would tell me stories from his personal experiences of watching them cavort and cut a path of celluloid destruction on the silver screen. Now I have most of these things on DVD I suspect but then, the unobtainable nature and the secret knowledge gained from the wisdom of books with the black and white photographic stills of these things was a very special thing and it was the way me and my father bonded (this is the same library from which my father borrowed a long playing record of the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds... but that’s another story). I’m pretty sure that one of the books we used to look through was this one I’m reviewing here. It only has two small runs of black and white photos in it near the centre but that would have been enough for my father to show me images from the Flash Gordon, Batman and Superman serials etc. This was the stuff of legends but it was a reference library so these books weren’t really things we could take home with us and read. And once my mum had done with obliterating the Agatha Christie shelves in the downstairs library, it was usually time to go home.

1973 was a good year for me. Or it might have been 1974 actually. Can’t quite recall the year but I was five or six years old... and the BBC did something wonderful (asides from showing the original King Kong late one night which was... oh wait... that really is another story). Anyway, the BBC had a special afternoon on, probably BBC2 actually, of something they were showing to see if it would be popular. They were showing the original 1936 serial of Flash Gordon squashed together with the episode tops and tails taken out and split into two big parts, sandwiching a Hoppalong Cassidy movie in the middle. This turned out to be my equivalent of heaven and my father and I watched every drop. I was instantly a Flash Gordon fan.

The serials must have proved popular for the BBC I guess, or at least were cheaply obtained, because for the next ten years or so after that, they started showing the actual serial episode versions of this and other good serials at regular time slots. At first they would be shown during the Christmas holidays, then they would move to every weeknight at a 5.40pm time slot (followed by either a Charlie Chan, Saint or Falcon movie) and also during the summer and Easter holidays in the mornings, right after the French TV serial The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe and before Why Don’t You? I watched them all and, when they were on in the evenings (pre video recorders, remember?) my dad would watch them with me. We would watch Flash Gordon, carry on with him on Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, watch him victorious in Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, and then watch as Buster Crabbe would change his hair colour for Buck Rogers. Then we would thrill to King Of The Rocket Men, Hawk Of The Wilderness and Daredevils Of The Red Circle. Those were the days.

This book remembers all of these too but, it has to be said, not as vividly. That’s because, as the authors say in the book, a lot of these serials just couldn’t be seen to be reviewed. What could be gleaned mostly came from childhood memories, American television showings, interviews with some of the major players and readings of the original scripts. So that’s one thing... because I live in a time where I have a lot of these serials (commercially available or from other sources) I actually am able to see the things being reviewed, in some cases, when the writers (at the time) might not have had a chance to see some of them at all.

And like I said, the book is of its time.

Because these things weren’t easy to see, a lot of the book, more than a book dealing with the same subject matter would do today, it taken up with almost blow by blow accounts of what happened in a particular serial. Which is interesting and still, in some cases, quite valuable in a way but, even so, the talk about various tropes or quirks of these startling chapter plays is buried under the descriptions of the episodes themselves. Which in 1973 must have been fantastic (I wish I’d had this book as a kid) but nowadays can drag a bit when the serial being described is something you only watched a few years back.

Still, that’s not to detract from just how good a book it is and, more importantly, just how enthusiastic the two writers are (George Lucas must have thought so too because I seem to remember that Donald F. Glut was the guy who wrote the commercially released novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980... which is pretty much as close to a modern cinema serial you’re going to get). You will want to watch all these serials again, once you read about them, which is a shame because some of them really are still lost to time, never to be seen again. Okay, so maybe I live more in hope now that I live in an era which has managed to restore to us a complete print of Metropolis (reviewed here) but I suspect a lot less effort would be made these days to locate an old Lone Ranger serial as opposed to a masterwork of early German Expressionism. But still... I can live in hope.

The thing is, though, I could disagree quite violently with the authors opinions on some serials... but I don’t know if they’ve actually seen them or not. They make a point about just how bad the two Batman serials were but actually, I’d like to go on record saying that, although I agree with their appraisal of Batman and Robin from 1949, I actually really enjoyed the original Batman serial from 1943. That was a class act (in serial terms) and I don’t care who knows about it. There’s also the fact, and the authors warn you about this up front, to be fair, that the book deals almost exclusively with the talkies and the silent era serials are mostly left unexplored in any great detail.

That being said, its also a book that holds great treasures and is certainly a thing of value and wonder. For instance, among the many footnotes in the book, I came across this little gem...

“Comic relief characters were very much a part of serials of the talkie era. Syd Saylor’s particular trademark was the manipulation of his bow tie due to a large and manoeuvrable Adam’s apple.”

Now come on... that’s something you don’t read in books that often these days, is it? I showed that passage to my dad and he said... “You know... I think I remember him and that act.” It doesn’t get any better than this.

There’s also a little insight into stuff like the way actors in serials were cast due to their resemblance to the various companies’ main stunt men and if one or two of them had a checkered history, it’s touched upon here, if you can sort out the wheat from the chaff. It’s always interesting to know which A-listers died in the war or which matinee idol went to prison for 40 years after murdering someone. All good knowledge to be in possession of... hidden in among the jokes and asides about topical issues like the comments levelled at the then Governor Ronald Reagan. If only they’d known!

At a basic level, though, this is what you need to know if you decide you want to make an investment in purchasing what is now a harder to obtain and considerably more expensive item than what I payed out for it last year, according to Amazon. If you are after a book that covers the stylistic traits of these serials and looks at how they came into being and evolved during their “relatively” short cinematic lifetime, then this book may be less than what you are looking for. Some of this stuff is covered, for sure, but not in any academic detail, it has to be said. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something which, for it’s day, was probably the most knowledgable god-send of a book and is something written with a real enthusiasm and love of the genre, then you could do a lot worse than read this joyous celebration of a slice of cinematic history that a lot of the younger kiddies seem to have forgotten about (or not had the opportunity to see) these days. If you’re a true fan of these old action adventure romps with cliffhanger endings and, quite often, cheated or ludicrous solutions to those cliffhangers at the opening of the next episode, then this book is surely written for you.