# Flash Gordon (serial)

Flash Gordon is a 1936 superhero serial film. Presented in 13 chapters, it is the first screen adventure for Flash Gordon, the comic-strip character created by Alex Raymond in 1934. It presents the story of Gordon's visit to the planet Mongo and his encounters with the evil Emperor Ming the Merciless. Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, Charles Middleton, Priscilla Lawson and Frank Shannon portray the film's central characters. In 1996, Flash Gordon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

## Cast

* Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon
* Charles B. Middleton as Ming the Merciless
* Jean Rogers as Dale Arden
* Priscilla Lawson as Princess Aura
* Frank Shannon as Dr. Alexis Zarkov
* Richard Alexander as Prince Barin
* Jack Lipson as King Vultan
* Theodore Lorch as Second High Priest
* James Pierce as Prince Thun
* Duke York as King Kala
* Earl Askam as Officer Torch
* Lon Poff as First High Priest (uncredited)
* Richard Tucker as Professor Gordon
* George Cleveland as Professor Hensley
* Muriel Goodspeed as Zona
Cast notes:
* Eddie Parker served as a stand-in and stunt double for Buster Crabbe.
* Crash Corrigan, who would later star in other serials, wore a modified gorilla suit to portray the "orangopoid" seen in chapters 8 and 9.
* Glenn Strange in uncredited roles wore the "Gocko" lobster-clawed dragon costume and also appears as one of Ming's soldiers.
* Richard Alexander helped to design his own costume, which included a leather chest plate painted gold.
* Early film fan historians claimed that actor Lon Poff, playing the first of Ming's two high priests, died shortly after production began and was replaced by Theodore Lorch. In fact, however, only Poff's character died, or rather was killed by Ming in an act of fury and replaced by Lorch's High Priest, but the scene was cut from the final print. Poff did not die until 1952.

## Production

* According to Harmon and Glut, Flash Gordon had a budget of over a million dollars. Stedman, however, writes that it was "reportedly" US$350,000 (equivalent to $7.9 million in 2024).
* Many props and other elements in the film were recycled from earlier Universal productions. The watchtower sets used in Frankenstein (1931) appear again as several interiors within Ming's palace. One of the large Egyptian statues seen in The Mummy (1932) is the idol of the Great God Tao. The laboratory set and a shot of the Moon rushing past Zarkov's returning rocket ship from space are from The Invisible Ray (1936). Zarkov's rocket ship and scenes of dancers swarming over a gigantic idol were reused from Just Imagine (1930). Ming's attack on Earth is footage from old silent newsreels, and an entire dance segment is from The Midnight Sun (1927), while some of the laboratory equipment came from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The music was also recycled from several other films, notably Bride of Frankenstein, Bombay Mail, The Black Cat (both 1934), Werewolf of London (1935), and The Invisible Man (1933).
* Crabbe had his hair dyed blond to appear more like the comic-strip Flash Gordon. He was reportedly very self-conscious about this and kept his hat on in public at all times, even with women present. He did not like men whistling at him. Jean Rogers also had her hair dyed blonde prior to production, "apparently to capitalize on the popularity of Jean Harlow". Brunette was actually the natural hair color for both actors.
* According to the reference The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury (1973) by Jim Harmon and Donald Glut, Ming's makeup and costuming were designed to resemble Fu Manchu, a fictional "supervillain" popularized in earlier Hollywood films and in a series of novels first published in England in 1913.
* Exterior shots, such as the Earth crew's first steps on Mongo, were filmed at Bronson Canyon.

## Release and reception

Universal hoped to regain an adult audience for serials with the release of Flash Gordon and by presenting it in many of the top or "A-level" theaters in large cities across the United States. Multiple newspapers in 1936, including some not even carrying the Flash Gordon comic strip, featured half- and three-quarter-page stories about the film as well as copies of Raymond's drawings and publicity stills that highlighted characters and chapter settings.
The film was the first outright science-fiction serial, although earlier serials had contained science-fiction elements such as gadgets. Six of the fourteen serials released within five years of Flash Gordon were science fiction.
For syndication to TV in the 1950s, the serial was renamed Space Soldiers, so as not to be confused with the newly made, also syndicated TV series, Flash Gordon.
The serial film was also edited into a 72-minute feature version in 1936, which was only exhibited abroad, until being released in the US as 1949 as Rocket Ship by Sherman S. Krellberg's Filmcraft Pictures.
A different feature version of the serial, at 90 minutes, was sold directly to television in 1966 under the title Spaceship to the Unknown.
Flash Gordon was Universal's second-highest-grossing film of 1936, after Three Smart Girls, a musical starring Deanna Durbin. The Hays Office, however, objected to the revealing costumes worn by Dale, Aura and the other female characters. In response to those objections, Universal designed more modest outfits for the female performers in the film's two sequels.
In his review of the film in the 2015 reference Radio Times Guide to Films, Alan Jones describes Flash Gordon as "non-stop thrill-a-minute stuff as Flash battles one adversary after another", and he states that it is "the best of the Crabbe trilogy of Flash Gordon films".

## Sequels

Two sequels to Flash Gordon, also in serial form and starring Buster Crabbe, followed the popular 1936 production: Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (15 chapters) in 1938 and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (12 chapters) in 1940. Between the releases of those two later productions, Crabbe starred in an entirely separate but similarly structured Universal science-fiction serial portraying Buck Rogers, another popular character also featured in magazines, comic strips, and on radio in the late 1920s and 1930s.