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Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
Weather: Dark all day, but still above freezing. A beautiful snowfall began at twilight.
Media Watch: We saw the DVD version of Bride and Prejudice with Ashwarya Rai the other night. One of the movie companies involved with the production is Pathe -- that name has been around for almost 100 years. The director Gurinder Chadha really dropped the ball right at the beginning with her characterization of the leading man. He possessed more negatives than the viewer could reasonably forgive later in the movie when she tried to turn him into a worthy match for Ms. Rai's character. The English lyrics mixed with Bollywood-style songs were kind of lame too. We are still hoping for a popular breakthrough for this genre. B&P was far from being a bad movie, but it wasn't strong enough to break any barriers.
Those Flash Gordon serials make great time-fillers during laid-back Holiday afternoons. I noticed many influences from Edgar Rice Burroughs -- especially from the Mars stories, which made sense in the 1930's, when Tarzan was a huge hit in the movies too.
Flash was an intentional competitor of Buck Rogers -- a Space Opera from the pages of Amazing Stories featuring a 20th Century aviator (resembling popular hero Charles Lindbergh) who awakens from suspended animation 500 years in the future. Buck rockets about a space-faring society resembling Zane Grey's Wild West and Raphael Sabatini's Spanish Main.
Flash is more of a heroic explorer. He just falls into his original mission to save the Earth (or rather accidentally parachutes onto Dr. Zarkov's estate) with Dale Arden clinging to his shoulders. After they blast off to Planet Mongo, the Earth people cope with one emergency after another, much like Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters do as they discover new worlds, lands, and peoples. There are old labyrinthine palaces, wastelands inhabited by monsters, primitive tribesmen, kings, emperors, princesses, mad scientists, and secret caves and tunnels connecting all of them. Powerful, mysterious rays do fantastic things!
J. Allen St. John's cover for the hardback book 1922 (Left)
Argosy cover by P.J. Monahan 1922 (Right)
St. John's eclectic mixture of the extraterrestrial and ancient in Burroughs' version of Mars inspired Flash Gordon comics and movies.
Burroughs was a leader in popular fiction, and he was followed by many disciples. Harold Foster (Tarzan) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) were two of the best, drawing vivid newspaper comics from his inspiration. The movies made from these characters were only shadows of his creations, but they resonated with the public over many generations.
In 1940 Flash Gordon was about to be brought down to Earth, by command of King Features Syndicate. Raymond was turning more and more work over to his assistant Austin Briggs. Flash's last movie serial looked backward rather than forward -- those tailored Robin Hood/Prisoner of Zenda costumes told of subdued aesthetics compared to the barbaric armor plate of earlier series. Those same Tesla Coils and Van der Graff Generators in the labs told of a stasis of imagination, reinforced by the ten year old Rocket Ships.
Actual reality was pretty scary that year -- World War II darkened China and Europe, and modern technology was killing people by the thousands. Emotionally wounded Charles Lindbergh was making Isolationist speeches. 'The Future' was not the same pleasant fantasy it had been a decade earlier. Juvenile chapter serials wouldn't disappear for a decade more, but they had passed their creative peak.
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