Flash Gordon

Flash Gordon was first published on January 7, 1934.

Intended as a competitor to the comic strip Buck Rogers, which had been published since January of 1929, the sci-fi themed adventure strip follows the adventures of Harvard graduate and world-famous polo player, Flash Gordon. Flash and girlfriend, Dale Arden, are kidnapped from Earth by a half-crazed Dr. Hans Zarkov during a meteor-storm, and transported via rocket-ship to the planet Mongo. There they run afoul of Ming the Merciless, Mongo's tyrant king, and escape to the planet's various forest, jungle, arctic, undersea, and mid-air kingdoms. Each has its own fantastic architecture and nature, and its own exotic ruler - Prince Barin of Arboria, the shark-man King Kala, the hawkman Prince Vulta, and Queens Fria of Frigia and Desira of Tropica,

As the strip continued over the years, becoming a daily in 1940, Flash, Dale, and Zarkov overthrow Ming and continue their adventures in other star systems.

Alex Raymond drew the original Sunday strip, evolving it by 1936 from a twelve-panel layout to six - thus doubling the panel size - and removing all word balloons, instead placing the dialogue in blocks at the bottom of the panels. The added space enhanced Raymond's sumptuous illustrations, which art critic R.C. Harvey describes as having "a technical virtuosity matched on the comics pages only by Harold Foster in his Prince Valiant strip. Comics greats Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, and Will Eisner all cite Raymond as a substantial influence.

The strip continues to run in reprints to this day. Contributing artists over the years include Gray Morrow and Al Williamson. More than a half dozen publishers have printed high-quality contemporary collections in hardcover and softcover, including Dark Horse Comics and Kitchen Sink Press.

The character and his exploits have been adapted in all manner of media, including magazines, comic books, novels, radio serials, a 1936 - '40 film serial, three live-action TV series between 1954 and 2008, four animated TV series and movies between 1979 and 1996, and of course the softcore sci-fi classic, 1974's Flesh Gordon, and its not-so classic 1990 sequel, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. In 2010, director Breck Eisner (The Crazies - 2010/The Witch Hunter - planned October 23, 2015 release) announced development of a 3D big-screen reboot of the character, describing the movie as “very much looking back to the original Alex Raymond strips; it’s imagining that Alex Raymond were to draw the strips today instead of in the ’30s and ’40s.” As of 2012, Eisner was still promoting the project, in an April 21st Screen Rant interview that year saying, “We have a couple months to go until the draft goes into Sony.”

The Star Wars franchise fan website Star Wars Origins notes George Lucas' original intent for his blockbuster sci-fi/fantasy franchise was to remake the 1930s and '40s Flash Gordon serials, saying the director moved on to other ideas when he found the rights unavailable. Notable influences in Lucas' finished films remain, however - including their opening credit crawls, soft wipes between scenes, cloud cities, and central plotline of rebels fighting imperial forces for the fate of the known universe. Other pop culture Flash Gordon manifestations include the U.S. Postal Service's inclusion of the strip in their 1995 Comic Book Classics series - a collection of twenty stamps honoring the centennial of the newspaper comic strip.

On a personal tangent: I had the questionable honor of doing several months' post-effects work on Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. While the finished film was near-excruciatingly bad, the effects gig was great fun; our Detroit-area crew had a blast conceiving, actualizing, and shooting a broad variety of intentionally cheesy, old-school practical special effects – creatures, miniature fly-by-wire spaceships, alien landscapes, explosions, outer space shots, planet surfaces, and the like. We had a broad scope of work and were given considerable creative freedom.

I remember the day when a shipment of miniatures from the original film arrived at the shop. I opened a box and found the gold “dick ship” from “Flesh Gordon” carefully packed inside. I spent the next several days restoring it – fixing scratches and other minor damage, replacing nail-head miniature “rivets”, and giving the ship an overall polish. I had in my hands and entrusted to my talents an (admittedly minor) icon of science-fiction. It was a thrill.

Over the course of the “Flesh 2” gig, fellow filmmaker and effects tech Tom Chaney bought the 16mm camera Flesh co-director Howard Ziehm used to shoot his original pop-culture classic, and Tom used it to shoot his own horror feature debut, Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo (1995). Tom still directs horror films today and is now in production on his latest, The Wind Walker. Although he's long-since graduated to shooting with state-of-the-art 4K digital RED cameras (available through his own rental outfit, Fitzgerald Camera), I'll bet Tom still has Howard's camera sitting on a shelf somewhere. He may even rent it to you for the right price.

Back to Flash: Our hero's film premiere was in Universal's 1936 thirteen-part movie serial, Flash Gordon. This was followed in 1938 by their fifteen-part, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, and in 1940 by their twelve-part, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Buster Crabbe stars as the titular character in all episodes (just as he does in Universal's' own competing 1939 Buck Rogers serial). In 1996, the Library of Congress selected Flash Gordon for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Clip - from the 1939 serial, "Flash Gordon"