Television: Kip's Private War (Rocky Jones, Space Ranger)

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger has a bit of irony to it.  Not in the writing—in the fact that it wasn't terribly successful, but it's probably better known now than its contemporaries in the early-'50s TV science fiction boom.  And what makes it doubly ironic is that its survival and lack of success are tied together.


Captain Video, Space Patrol, and most other science fiction shows of the era were enacted live, and preserved, if at all, as kinescopes: a film taken of the live video image.  As a result, surviving episodes are of fairly poor visual quality.  They're often zoomed in a bit, so as not to catch the edges of the somewhat rounded video tube, so they don't even have the benefit of all 480 video scan lines, much less the full resolution of the film.  The contrast is frequently blown out, thanks in part to the low dynamic range of '50s video, and partly to the limitations of the kinescope process, in which a film camera was pointed at a tiny, bright video monitor.  The brightness of the monitor (necessary to make a filmable image) and the primitive tube video cameras both contributed to ghosting of the image.  Finally, the kinescope had motion smearing, since the film ran at the normal 24 frames per second, and video ran at 60 fields per second—with each two fields interlaced into one frame.

All of which is to say that the shows looked as good as any other '50s television when they were originally broadcast, but reruns were of substantially poorer quality.  They didn't look as good as videotaped shows (once that was an option) or filmed shows, and so they didn't tend to have that robust of an afterlife in syndication.  (I have the feeling the same thing is going to happen to the shows of the mid-'80s through the early 2000's, which had post-production on standard-definition video... and, worse, analog standard definition video for most of the period.  Something shot and posted on film, you can re-scan and broadcast in high definition, and it'll look better than it ever did.  But standard-definition videotape, you're pretty much stuck with.  Which, no doubt, is part of the reason CBS is currently shelling out the dough to rebuild Star Trek: The Next Generation in high definition with new special effects: they can give it new syndication life that fuzzy 1-inch analog video tapes won't have.)

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger was uncommon for the time, in that it was produced entirely on film.  Which helped to make it more expensive than the other shows, even though the production quality, really, wasn't that much higher than Space Patrol's.  And that in turn contributed to the producers discontinuing it after less than one year.

But, having done that, they still had 39 filmed episodes which would look just as good on repeat airings.  What's more, 36 of the episodes were in twelve three-part serials, allowing them to have an alternative afterlife as 90-minute compilation TV movies.  Then, in the 1990's, two of the TV movies appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  And so the show that wasn't nearly as popular as its contemporaries when originally aired lasted much longer and was ultimately seen by more people.  Both MST3K episodes are now available on DVD, and the unadorned episodes and films are available from multiple commercial sources (due in part to their falling into the public domain).  Meanwhile, you can only find Space Patrol on DVD-R's from individual sellers.

This episode, by the way, was one of the exceptions to the three-parter rule.  The series was produced in two blocks, one of 26 episodes and one of 13, leaving extra episodes that were produced as standalone stories.  "Kip's Private War" aired a little over halfway into the show's run, on July 27, 1954.



The "cold light" mentioned in this episode was a previously-introduced method of invisibility.

Watching You Tube: Surplus WEAT

(originally posted, with an additional video that's no longer online, December 23, 2008)

For Google's, and possibly your, benefit: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2 focuses on the writers of Star Trek. All fiction, old and new, is from contributors from the original series to Voyager. Plus, there's a major article on the making of the Hugo and Nebula-nominated "World Enough and Time" episode of the fan-run Star Trek New Voyages Internet series.

Dragon*Con program directors visit the set of New Voyages during the making of WEAT. Funny thing is, although my station as Digital Media Wrangler was right out in the open, between sickbay and the bridge, I don't remember this visit at all. But then, I was probably tunnel-visioned on grinding out the DVDs of dailies, as usual.

An upstate New York ABC affiliate talks to a couple of fans who recently (i.e., circa "Blood and Fire") became involved with New Voyages:



And finally, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett (Servo and Crow during the Sci-Fi Channel years of Mystery Science Theater 3000) riff on WEAT for RiffTrax Presents. Although the percentage of jokes that boil down to, "This sucks. That sucks. Look over there, that sucks, too" is a lot higher than in the old MST3K days, I enjoyed it a lot. However, I can see how the actors might not feel the same way. With a couple of them, I think the joking approached the cruel.

My favorite line: "I has a lot of LOLcats on there."

Classic Serials: Undersea Kingdom, Chapter Two

Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed the first two episodes of this serial.  Well, parts of them.

I mentioned way back in my edited version of Chapter One that they cut a substantial chunk.  It amounted to nearly ten minutes.  And with Chapter Two, they simply cut from about 8:19 in the video below, directly to the "Next Episode" caption.  I guess they already knew they weren't coming back for Chapter Three.

MST3K never tackled a whole serial.  The closest they came was when, during their first season, they riffed eight whole episodes, out of twelve, of Radar Men from the Moon before becoming mightily sick of it.  (They also did a couple minutes of Chapter Nine to bring another episode to length, at which point the Mads suffer a "film break," from which they apparently never recovered.)  And it's not tough to see why it wore on them.  A serial tends to be like a very long movie with highly repetitive action.  (And Radar Men from the Moon is almost surreally so.)  Eventually, you run out of different riffs for the same old, same old, and you start repeating yourself as well.  (How many times did Servo describe Commando Cody's process of twisting his flight control knobs as "Nipple, nipple, tweak, tweak"?)  Imagine if they'd gone on.  Chapter Ten was a "recap" chapter, consisting mostly of footage from the previous nine episodes.  Yikes!

It looks like it took shorter each time for them to get tired of a serial.  During Season Two, they riffed on three episodes of The Phantom Creeps.  Then what amounts to about 7/6 episodes of Undersea Kingdom, in Season Four, and then never again.  Which is a bit of a shame.  I can't help but think it would have been fun to see them take on Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.  Maybe they could have done the feature version.  And, like the other serials, it was in the public domain, so there was nothing stopping them.

As it is, whenever I hear the opening theme to Undersea Kingdom, I can't not think of their short burst of lyrics for it: "It's the Undersea Kingdom/For you and for me/And it's fiiiiine!"  And the name "Unga Khan" reminds me of their riff, singing his name to the tune of Chaka Khan's "I Feel for You."

Saturday Matinee: The Phantom Creeps, Chapter Two (Part 3) and Three (Part 1)

Dorothy Arnold (Jean Drew) had three short stints as an actress, in 1937-9, 1954, and 1957-8. This, frankly, doesn't surprise me that much, considering her performance in The Phantom Creeps, which whipsaws unpredictably between overstated and zombie-like. Perhaps Joe DiMaggio wore her out some days.

She met DiMaggio in 1937, and married him late in the year The Phantom Creeps was released (1939). They divorced in 1944. She went on to own a supper club in Palm Springs, California, with her third husband. (DiMaggio went on to have a second storied major-league baseball career with the New York Yankees, and to marry Marilyn Monroe.)

Chapter Two, Part 3 Notes:

2:12 I'm betting that pause is an actorly brain-freeze. But it doesn't seem unrealistic.

7:11 Huh. And here I didn't even know that revolvers had stun settings. "Shoot in the gut to stun" is certainly a new one for the police procedure books.

8:32 And here's the birth of another MST3K running joke. In the episode featuring this chapter, Joel and the 'Bots had fun with how West's whispery tone made him sound like Ronald Reagan. Later, when they referred to this line, they forgot how it actually went. But the Reagan thing, they remembered. Crow would say, in a Reagan voice, "Welcome to Death Valley Days. The driver's either missing, or he's dead." Fans from that time who hadn't seen the original appearance thought the line was actually from Death Valley Days, or some Reagan film.

Saturday Matinee: The Phantom Creeps, Chapter One

(UPDATE: I don't know why the videos seem to be at such a low framerate. They're fine in my original files. I'll try to upload them again and see what happens.)

Welcome to the first installment of the twelve-chapter Universal serial, The Phantom Creeps, starring the one, the only Bela Lugosi.

Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut, in their sadly out-of-print book The Great Movie Serials, have (in part) this to say about the serial:

In 1939, Lugosi made his final serial appearance, and appropriately, it seemed a combination, and a culmination, of all his other villain roles. In Universal's The Phantom Creeps, it is, of course, Bela Lugosi who has the title role of the evil Phantom, and top billing.

Even if you couldn't read the title card, it would be abundantly obvious that Lugosi is the top dog in this production. Whereas, for instance, Undersea Kingdom opens with almost ludicrous amounts of activity for hero "Crash" Corrigan before the plot even begins*, the putative protagonist of The Phantom Creeps first shows up nearly fourteen minutes in.

*-Although not in our edited version, which gets the story quickly underway.

Some notes:

2:59: It's just as well I never saw this serial when I was young. I think that robot's face would have scared the snot out of me. And I was born about a generation and a half after the target audience for this thing.

7:30 Acting!

8:30: "And persuade him from his mad course." That's dissuade.

2:28: Bela's accent goes out of control! "The sorest of all my power!"

2:09: And Mystery Science Theater 3000 gains a running joke. MST3K riffed the first three chapters of this serial. Blatant plot conveniences in later movies would provoke a comment, in Lugosi accent, of "How fortunate! That simplifies everything!"

5:31: West is doing an awfully good job standing up in a plane that we just saw was practically upside down.

As I mentioned last week, I have three sources for The Phantom Creeps. It turns out, though, that one may not be very helpful. However, I'm not certain yet which.

You see, one is an MPEG-2 file of the serial version (henceforward Serial MPEG), one is an MPEG-2 file of the 78-minute feature edit (Feature MPEG), and the third is a series of AVI files of the serial version (AVI).

It turns out that Serial MPEG and AVI are the same transfer (same film flaws, tape flaws, image geometry), so there's unlikely to be anything in the one that isn't in the other. (For instance, both have the same film break at 0:33 of Part 2, and that scene isn't in Feature MPEG.)

The question is which to use as the master. Each one has a disadvantage. Serial MPEG is interlaced, so there's some "combing" of the image, especially during movement. AVI has a noticeably softer image. (In fact, this may be robbing Peter to pay Paul. AVI, like Serial MPEG, is 30fpi. AVI just has the fields blended together instead of interlaced. Hence, perhaps, the fuzziness.) As you can probably tell, I used the interlaced Serial MPEG for Chapter One.

(I tried everything I know to de-interlace Serial MPEG, but nothing would do the job cleanly. Maybe I'll just use AVI next week.)

There are four very brief bits of Feature MPEG video, and slightly offset bits of its very scratchy audio, to cover film breaks in Serial MPEG/AVI. All of them are in Part 1.