Live action super heroes were 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 ahead of me 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! (Turns out they play better if you don’t binge-watch them).
I longed to see them as a boy, but they were never shown. When I 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.
The best superhero movie serials? I think they were:
• Republic’s 1942 Spy Smasher starring the able, handsome Kane Richmond as the Fawcett Comic hero. The production values were high (I suspect they used some other film’s classy leftover sets), the action was fine and the wartime plot was even poignant at points.
• Republic’s 1941 Adventures of Captain Marvel starring Tom Tyler, which helped propel the good captain into stratospheric comic book sales during the 1940s. The flying effects and fight stunts are still admirable, clearly labors of love. Watch, for example, as Captain Marvel kicks two thugs in the chin with a back flip.
• Columbia’s 1942 The Secret Code, starring Paul Kelly (an actor whose career was not confined to the serial ghetto) as the Black Commando. For once, a superhero identity has an almost credible rationale — Kelly plays an American agent who has infiltrated a Nazi spy ring, and who periodically thwarts their plans as the Black Commando without blowing his cover. It’s an original character, but, as my friend David Goode has observed, this could easily have been a serial featuring MLJ Comics’ popular hero the Black Hood.
• Republic’s late entry, the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men. More of those sharp flying effects are featured in serial about an original character who directly inspired Commando Cody and the Rocketeer. The serial ends, rather startlingly and spectacularly, with the destruction of Manhattan by super-scientific tidal wave.
I thought superheroes were supposed to prevent that kind of thing? Oh, well. Rocket Man did succeed in entertaining us.
“I remember seeing this as a kid and being surprised at how good it was,” Richard Meyer wrote. “I didn’t remember his name was King, though there was King, of the Khyber Rifles and Sky King. I didn’t see any of the Cody movies though Zombies got some marketing for Leonard Nimoy having a bit part.”
“Kids no doubt loved the notion of strapping on a backpack and flying around,” Michael Fraley wrote. “The first flying hero to capture the public imagination was Buck Rogers, who in the early ’30s discovered he could do more than jump like a kangaroo with his anti-gravity pack — he could push himself along through the air with the force of his ray gun. After letting that stroke of genius slip into the background for a month or so, writer Phil Nowlan revealed Buck and Wilma’s new rocket belts. Before long, Bulletman and Rocketman would pull this magical item into the present, setting the stage for rocket people of all kinds.”
And culminating in the gorgeous sunlit soaring of DC’s Adam Strange.
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