TV Review: Flash Gordon #TV1-A
Digging through my pile of random DVDs, I have come across this set of three episodes of the 1950s German/American TV series of FLash Gordon starring Steve Holland. As previously mentioned, the three lead characters, Flash, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov, were played by American actors while almost everyone else was Germans, many of whom learned their lines phonetically.
“Deadline at Noon”: A series of dead planets in another galaxy blow up. The radiation patterns left behind show a fissionable material that takes approximately 1200 years to explode, but once it does is a planet buster. This turns out to have been a dry run for the Colossians, who have used time travel to set a bomb on Earth which will explode at noon, Galactic Bureau of Intelligence time.
Our heroes use their own time machine to find the bomb before centuries of building on top of it makes it undetectable. Turns out it is in Berlin in 1953. This allows the production crew to simply use footage of Flash and company driving around West Berlin in a hijacked delivery van, and then a ruin left over from World War Two. We see our heroes marveling at how primitive Earth technology is, and it’s mentioned that Dale Arden’s female ancestors probably wouldn’t have been able to get the scientific education she’s had. No direct mention of the political situation in 1953 is made, and we don’t get to see them interact with the locals beyond the hijacking (no dialogue) and freeze-raying a few cops.
“The Planet of Death”: The abandoned planet Ziptar would be ideal for Dr. Zarkov’s negative gravity experiments to prevent an invasion from Ebon, but Commander Richards of the GBI forbids it due to the unexplained deaths of most of a recent expedition. Flash and Dale bring in the sole survivor, who raves about an idol of the demon god Belphegor which cursed most of the expedition to death. Dr. Zarkov calls bullshit and the heroes force the survivor to head back to Ziptar with them.
Turns out the “curse” was just an ordinary death ray dressed up by spies from Ebon planning to use Ziptar as an invasion base. The cowardly survivor of the first expedition redeems himself by sacrificing his life to stop Emperor Draco.
“The Brain Machine”: We open by learning the atmosphere conversion plant on Neptune was destroyed–by Dr. Zarkov and Commander Richards! They have no memory of doing so, but they were caught red-handed. An attack is made on the replacement plant, but Flash and Dale thwart it. The saboteur drops a strange insignia which changes color.
The actual mastermind behind the explosion was “the Mad Witch of Neptune”, who’d previously been the power behind the throne of the planet until it converted to a democratic system and none of the new leaders were beholden to her. She has an array of superscience gadgets, the most prominent of which is the Brain Machine which can remove and store memories that she can then access to create more superscience like her transmatter device. She’d already used this once on Dr. Zarkov and Commander Richards to frame them for sabotage, but now she’s going to drain every bit of science and defense knowledge out of their brains.
Flash and Dale manage to use the insignia to track the Mad Witch to her lair, but are too late to stop her from teleporting away with the combined memories of Earth’s greatest minds! Cliffhanger!
This is typical low-budget TV science fiction of the time. A minimum of special effects, tiny casts, much use of stock footage. The plots are simple, as is the characterization. The high point of any given episode is when Flash gets to fight a couple of guards for the baddie.
But the odd inflections of many of the guest stars do give a suitably alien feel to their acting.
This is mostly worth looking at as an oddity from the early days of television. You can probably find most of the episodes by searching the internet by legal means, if you can’t track down this particular DVD.
