Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Twelve

And so, after about ten months, on and off (mostly off), we come to the thrilling conclusion of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and to the immensely lame rationalization for that title!

And now, some comments:

Yes, mere moments after Flash nearly gets hisself blowed up real good, Barin is about to charge across the same stretch until Princess Aura tells him it's electrified. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is our Barin.

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but Charles "Ming" Middleton has a habit of pronouncing "attack" as "attact." He does it twice in this week's chapter.

Say, I just noticed that some of the masks of the Ming guards have rivets at the corners, and some don't. I wonder if it marks some kind of difference in status. Not that I feel like going back through the whole thing to work it out empirically.

Also, it occurs to me now to wonder what the guards without cockades do with the little tube on the top of their helmets. Perhaps some keep a boutonniere fresh with a little water in there.

Again, we cover a couple of film breaks in the DVCam version with very brief fades in and out of the lower-resolution AVI copy.

Unfortunately, there's a much longer switch to AVI at the end, since the DVCam version becomes very unstable there, jittering and rolling. Fortunately, the audio on the DVCam is fine, so that comes from there.

The actual "The End" segment comes from the MPEG-2 of the feature version which, apart from the standard opening, we haven't seen since Chapter Six.  I don't know if the other episodes had this ending, or some "Next Week" text teaser, so I haven't used it until now.

And now, as the Irish/British comedian Dave Allen used to say, good night, thank you, and may your god go with you.