Saturday Matinee: The Phantom Creeps, Chapter Three (Parts 2 & 3)

Last week, I was astonishingly cruel to Dorothy Arnold. I want to redress the balance this week... by being astonishingly cruel to her co-star, Robert Kent. Born Douglas Blackley, Jr., he was a prizefighter before making a lateral career move and pummeling people into unconsciousness with his acting instead.

Amazingly enough, according to IMDb, The Phantom Creeps' Bob West was his 27th screen role, and 44 followed. Very few of the films he was in are familiar to me, so I don't know if this serial marks the apex of his acting career. However, he does seem to have a lot of items on his resumé like these:

One Hour Late (1934) (uncredited) .... Soda Jerk
Love in Bloom (1935) (uncredited) .... Man who buys song

Love Before Breakfast (1936) (uncredited) .... First College Boy
The 13th Man (1937) (uncredited) .... Jack Winslow (Stella's boyfriend)
A Chump at Oxford (1940) (uncredited) .... Bit Role
Niagara Falls (1941) (uncredited) .... Hotel Guest
The Forest Rangers (1942) (uncredited) .... Lookout
Northern Pursuit (1943) (uncredited) .... Soldier
The Skipper Surprised His Wife (1950) (uncredited) .... Radio technician

That's not to say that he usually went uncredited. Why, he also played "A Switchman" in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and in an episode of The Adventures of Superman, he essayed the role of "Safe Mover Who Speaks."

All right, all right. IMDb claims in its Mini Biography of Kent that "[h]is career consisted mostly of playing leads in 'B' pictures." Which just goes to show that wood does, indeed, float to the top on occasion.

This week's chapter features two brief bits from Feature MPEG, one to cover a film break (Part 3, 1:50), and one to cover a bit of analog video instability (Part 3, 3:17). In both cases, I replaced the entire shot*, because cutting away in mid-shot was just too distracting. A film break and patch with no frames lost (Part 3, 1:40) wasn't bad enough to replace with the much lower-quality Feature MPEG. I did fix the sound pop with Feature MPEG's soundtrack, however.

The end music cut off in Serial MPEG and AVI, so I faded it to the complete music from Chapter Two. Incidentally, the recurring opening credits of all three chapters have come from Chapter Two so far, because Chapters One and Three had a film break.

*- In the first case, the "shot" I replaced was the transition piece. You may have noticed in old films that there's frequently an obvious jump or change in image quality just before and after a wipe or dissolve. That's because they were created on an optical printer. Besides that the result was a generation removed, being a copy of the original footage, optical printers of the time usually created a noticeably inferior picture. The film editor would therefore only cut in the actual transition... which is sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul, because it makes the transition piece stand out like a sore thumb. If producers had the time/money to use top-quality equipment and, if necessary, have it done over and over until the framing and contrast were right, the join could be almost invisible. But of course, The Phantom Creeps was a serial, which had neither.

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 Two (Parts 1 & 2)

Chapters Two and Three are each over twenty minutes, and took more time than I can really spare, so I'm spreading those two chapters over three weeks. Next week, we finish Chapter Two and start Chapter Three. In two weeks, we finish Chapter Three.

***

This week's chapter of The Phantom Creeps marks the first-ever appearance of the distinctive Universal scrolling recap. Serials usually had a text recap at the beginning of each chapter after the first, but they were static caption cards. Universal decided to make recaps more visually interesting by having the text scroll upward and inward. (We previously saw it here in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, made the next year.) George Lucas, of course, borrowed and refined this 38 years later in Star Wars, further tilting the text so that the vanishing point was on screen, and the text seemed to scroll away to infinity.



Part 1 Note:

3:42 Ah, our old friend, the cheat cliffhanger. You may remember that at the end of Chapter One, the plane exploded in flames. This week, it gets a redo.



I briefly considered using the AVI file as the source, but looking at AVI and Serial MPEG side by side, I again figured that the crisper image of the latter more than made up for some combing of the interlaced image during motion.

I spent hours trying to get the best of both worlds, using all the different settings of Adobe AfterEffects' "Remove 3:2 Pulldown" function. But for some reason, when it removed the pulldown, it left a series of twenty or thirty long, horizontal lines in the image, which seemed even more distracting. So I just used it as it was. (All this experimentation is part of the reason it took so long to put this chapter together.)

And all of Chapter Two is from this source. There were no film breaks in the Serial MPEG material that also appears in Feature MPEG.

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.

Saturday Matinee: "The Phantom Creeps" Trailer

Well, this week, I was going to begin the 12-chapter 1939 Bela Lugosi serial, The Phantom Creeps... but it's taking longer than I expected. As you know, I'm anal-retentive about this kind of thing, and I'm putting it together from three sources.

So, next week, it begins. I promise. In the meantime, Saturday Matinee is going to poach on YouTube Tuesday's preserve. Take your pick between two videos of the the original trailer for The Phantom Creeps.

This one is fuzzy and has some spurious color, but the sound is good.

This one is much crisper visually, but the sound is pretty much blown out.  I suppose if I had to choose one, it would probably be the first, because the sound on the second one is fairly unpleasant. But I'm also kind of a resolution snob, so I'm ducking the choice and leaving it up to you.

So, until next Saturday, remember: although the notion of annoying little phantoms is fairly amusing, "Creeps" in the serial's title is a verb.

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.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Eleven

Say, you think that's a stuntman as Flash starting at about 2:11 of Part 1, or did Buster Crabbe's hair suddenly get a lot darker, and very thin on top?

And at at the end of "Poison gas! Cover your mouths!" (2:49 of Part 1), Dr. Zarkov suddenly gets very, very Celtic. According to IMDb, actor Frank Shannon comes by it naturally. There was a line last week (can't remember what it was) that made me suspect, but this one just cracks me up something fierce.

(And now my cats, who I think already wonder about me, are going to have to put up for a while with me going around the house, yelling, "Poison gas! Cover y' mowwwoooothz!")

3:47, Part 1: As they used to say on Mystery Science Theater 3000, here's one for the laaaaadies.

So many scene transitions are dissolves or wipes that for the Part 1 break, I just went for a mid-scene line that was good and punchy and cliffhanger-y.

Charles Middleton (Ming) seemed to have a bit of a problem with name pronunciation. He renders "Ronal" alternately with the stress on the first syllable (correct) and on the second, and "Sonja" sometimes with a "j" sound.

4:54 of Part 3: Oh, no! Ming tortured him to death in the Comfy Chair!







This week, only 27 frames come from AVI, and twenty of them are the dissolve into and out of the seven used to repair a film break (about 1:38 of Part 2).

And, again, it's fortunate the sound is good on my DVCam copy, because there are some substantial chunks missing from the AVI:

1) A segment cut out between 4:16 and 5:53 of Part 1. Yes, they went from before the attack, directly to the announcement of defeat.

2) A 20-frame film break during that long, long wide shot of Ming's throne room (7:12 of Part 1).

3) An incredible 3:34 edit going from 6:14 of Part 2 to 3:13 of Part Three. The end of this chapter is funny enough as it is, but without the explanation for why it's happening, it must be hilarious. (Vagueness courtesy of SpoilerBusters™.)

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Ten

Our first three-parter in a while. Actually, Chapter Ten runs about 19:30, but there wasn't a convenient place to cut it into two pieces of ten minutes or less.

I could have mentioned this last time, but I laugh every time I see the four of them all turn their heads at once (3:09 of Part 1). Somehow, I don't think that was the response the filmmakers were going for.

As I've said, I'm not that musical, but even I can recognize the bizarre musical cut at 3:21 of Part 2. Did the music editor have a sudden heart attack?

It won't win any acting prizes, but I'm still unreasonably amused by the way Anne Gwynne (Sonja) delivers the line, "Prince Barin, bah!" (4:03 of Part 2).

When I'm really rich (and there's just a fortune to be made in science fiction publishing these days, a fortune), I'm going to fix up the basement to look just like the radio room (first appearing at 0:30 in Part 3). There wouldn't be much to do there, you say? Well, only two walls are visible in the serial. What you can't see is that they've got a kick-ass 120-inch HDTV in there, plus an Xbox 360 complete with The Beatles: Rock Band. You should hear Barin's men wailing on "Hey, Bulldog."

Speaking of wailing on things, it's a shame there wasn't a 1940 Olympics, because they could have taken a page from this chapter's conclusion, and instituted mixed doubles fistfighting. I wonder how many little girls on the school playground beat the snot out of each other, playing Dale and Sonja, while the others were busy playing house? To most of them (the ones who weren't just doing it because they were budding little violent psychopaths), I'd just like to say, 69 years late, "You go, girl!"

While we're talking proto-feminism, note at about 2:50 in Part 3 that it's Dale who goes into the cell to check that the guard is dead, while Barin hangs back, and not the other way around.

This week, not only does almost all of the video come from my DVCam copy, so does the audio. It's been over a year since I transferred it, so I don't remember for sure, but I think Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Twelve were on a different tape from the rest. At any rate, I know that, unlike most of the rest, there were no timecode hiccups in those three chapters, because I was able to capture each in one piece.

And it's a lucky thing the DVCam audio is good for this chapter, because the whole scene from 4:44 to 5:47 of Part One isn't in the AVI version.

The only piece from the AVI version comes at 5:54 of Part 2. As you can see, it bridges two shots. In the past, I've replaced the whole shots, but in this case, each shot was pretty long, so I decided on something more ambitious. I sized and positioned the AVI version to best match the DVCam, and dissolved from DVCam to AVI and back, using the least possible amount of AVI in the process.

By the way, next week might mark an uptick in visual quality, since I've only just noticed that YouTube has increased maximum file size to 2GB, up from the 1GB I've been using since this site began. Now I can use the highest settings when converting to MPEG-4.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Nine

Old-time Doctor Who fans, back me up on this one: the Rock Men and Omega (left), separated at birth or what?

Back when I was doing Undersea Kingdom, after a while I'd think ahead every week about Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. I decided each week's blog post title would have a scrap of lyric from Queen's Flash Gordon theme (e.g., "Saturday Matinee: Flash! Ah-ahhh!") Naturally, as soon as the time came, I forgot all about it, and I've only just remembered now, as I'm writing the notes for Chapter Nine.

I know I've made a similar statement before, but it's kind of amazing to me that a serial that can produce a cool visual effect like the monitor tuning in (about 8:12 in Part 2) has to resort to film scratches for most of the energy rays.

Again, the audio from the DVCam version was full of annoying digital-error squeaks and chirps, so as much of the audio as possible comes from the AVI version. Unfortunately, for three short periods, the AVI audio is plagued with ticks... the kind that are short, sharp noises, not the kind that carry Lyme disease. And thanks to a film break in the source material for the AVI, a short bit beginning about 2:21 in Part 1 comes squeakily from the DVCam.

Speaking of digital errors, most of the episodes on my DVCam tape had to be captured in several pieces because some error would stop the capture. If I remember correctly, one episode of Undersea Kingdom had about twenty. Well, this week's episode, I was able to capture in one piece. But it doesn't help the audio.

Apart from one shot through the window of Flash's ship, all the video specific to this chapter comes from DVCam.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Eight

I know... six months is a hell of a time to wait to see a cliffhanger resolved. Won't happen again. However, Part Nine will probably be two weeks, despite what it says at the end of Part 2. What can I say? I have family in town next week and stuff.

***

When Hollywood Cared About Grammar: Note the (all-too-obvious) sound edit at about 1:00 of Part 2 to remove the redundant and ungrammatical last word of "Where did these people originate from?"

I wonder how many young boys felt odd stirrings around 2:40 of Part 2.

Odd Music Editing Department: Does the sequence beginning about 3:05 of Part 2 really warrant the triumphal music? Seems like a real bad development for our side, actually.

Speaking of that sequence, I like the uncharacteristically understated way Charles Middleton delivers the line "You traitor." Makes him seem so disappointed.

I wonder how many gay young boys (or straight girls) felt odd stirrings around 3:53 of Part 2. I somehow suspect gym socks were involved.

This week, the audio in the DVCam version was extra-chirpy, so I used the audio from the AVI version throughout (apart from the stock opening and the text crawl).

That's not as simple as it sounds, because the AVI version is sped up. So I needed a lot of trial and error to find out just how much. At a speed of 95.9%, it would seem fine for a while, then suddenly go out of sync.

When I superimposed the picture of the AVI version on the DVCam, I found out why:

1) A film break at about 2:40 of Part 1. (I dropped the AVI video in for two shots to cover it.)

2) Some frames of black removed during the segue where I ended Part 1. (I dropped in the two remaining frames of pure black several times to cover it.)

3) Another film break at about 1:38 of Part 2. (I dropped in one shot from the AVI.)

4) Yet another film break at about 5:31 of Part 2, apparently patched imperfectly in the DVCam copy with an inferior print. (I had to replace that shot and the two previous ones from AVI, since they're linked by wipes instead of cuts.)

I realize this probably doesn't interest anyone, but I enjoy writing about it anyway.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Seven

Annoyingly, as of this writing, YouTube seems to have turned off the ability to watch the high-quality version of videos from an embedded player.

Still, it's over the top and on the downhill slide for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe with Chapter Seven of twelve.

I'm continuing to take the video from my DVCam version. The audio is mostly from there as well, but since this week, there's a lot of digital-error chirping and squeaking, there's also a fair amount of audio from the AVI files from the Web. Fortunately, the AVI file for Chapter Seven sounds a lot better than any of the previous ones.

And when I went to replace a bit of the opening narration, I got a surprise. Even though they're both the retitled Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe version, the AVI file had no narration, just the music under the opening crawl. I'd suspected that the original 1940 version didn't have narration, and this seems to suggest I was right. At any rate, I used the AVI audio, and I'm going to use that audio on all the subsequent opening crawls.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Six

I can't believe we're halfway through Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe already. Why, it only seems like forty, fifty times we've seen that wide angle of Ming's throne room.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I don't know if it's a matte shot or a glass painting, but whichever it is, it's entirely convincing, and they had good reason to be proud of it. And if you've been watching these Saturday Matinee installments all along (or you caught up at some point), you no doubt find convincing effects shots, numerous and detailed sets, and intricate costumes an enormous relief after Undersea Kingdom. How many sets were there in total in that serial? Twelve?

This week, except for the regular opening credits, it's time to say goodbye to Source 1 (the MPEG-2 of the feature version). To be honest, though, I only used it for the occasional line last week. Its audio is better than that of Source 3 (the DVCam tapes of the Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe version), but it wouldn't sync up with the Source 3 video. One or the other of them must have been missing frames here or there (probably film breaks), but I was coming down to the deadline, so rather than figure it out, I just used Source 3 as source for both video and audio, dropping in Source 1's audio to cover a couple of digital-flaw squeaks.

Now, if I need to cover those errors, I need to do it with the vastly inferior Source 2 (the AVI files of Space Soldiers). And this week, I really could have used a good-quality alternative to Source 3, because it had quite a few snaps and squeaks. For the most part, I left them as they were, using Source 2 for one syllable at one point, and a longer but dialogue-less section later on when the snaps got out of hand.

Usually, the feature version of a serial is the whole main plot, condensed to about 80 minutes. That of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is decidedly different. It simply contains everything, strung together... until it reaches the end of Part 1, above. Then it just has a bit of new narration, and stops dead.

And why not, really? Flash, Dale, and Zarkov are back together, and the Earth is safe from the Purple Death. Why not call it a day, and go home to the ticker tape parade?

Well, okay, in the serial, there is something else they have to attend to. Near the end of Part 1, Zarkov says to Barin, "Prince... I have learned from Karm that Ming is preparing another terrible weapon to destroy the world. We must return to your palace at once and prepare to combat it." You'll notice it isn't in the feature clip, above, for obvious reasons. I think it's the only line the feature editors cut from the serial.

And just to be super anal retentive, I used Source 3 for all the video in that clip (and matching the feature editing) except the "The End" caption, replacing the softer Source 1. Source 1 was the one and only audio source.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Five

Starting this week, we bring you... huge-ass viewer windows! According to YouTube, we could now go as far as full SD size (640x505, including the bar at the bottom), but the main area of this blog is only 600 pixels wide. Maybe I'll change it to 640. That would make the whole blog more than 800 pixels wide, which would push stuff off the side for people using 800x600 monitors. (Are there still people using 800x600 monitors?)

As I mentioned last time, another recent YouTube improvement is that you can now watch a high-quality version without having to schlep over to their site to do it. Just start the video, mouse over the icon on the right (the up-pointing arrow), and click "HQ" on the pop-up menu. (Their next improvement ought to be allowing you to choose HQ before starting the video.) 

According to Harmon and Glut's The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury, this serial was based on the "Big Little Book" Flash Gordon and the Ice World of Mongo (itself based on a sequence from the comic strip). I guess the producers felt that title wasn't "big" enough, so they went pretty much to the farthest possible reaches of "big" with Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

"But," I hear you say, "so far, Flash has only been on Mongo and Earth. Are you telling me that by the end of Chapter Twelve, Flash will have subjugated the whole furshlugginer universe?"

Well, yes and no. I'm telling you about this now so that your built-up anticipation makes you good and mad at the writers for the über-lame justification of the title that they shoehorn in.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Four

The ray effects in this week's installment go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The sublime is the moiré-ish Destroying Ray near the end. The ridiculous, near the beginning and end, are what are obviously print scratches.

Ming lusts after Dale Arden in a couple of fun scenes that remind of a bit from Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut's The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury:

The most evil mastermind of them all was an actor who was not famous from horror films, crime pictures, or Westerns. In fact, he never really seemed to get a good role outside of serials. Because he was largely ignored for major parts in features, his most famous portrayal will always be that of Ming the Merciless in Universal's three Flash Gordon serials. Ming's real name was Charles Middleton.

Middleton came from a wealthy family and did not really have to act for a living, but he enjoyed it....

Charles Middleton hugely enjoyed the role of Ming, overacting with just enough gusto to make his menace believable within the context of that very special serial world. You could almost read his inner feelings when, beholding the golden beauty of Dale Arden for the first time, he advances with clutching, rigid finigers that must have been both clammy and slimy, and slowly speaks in a commanding voice, "Ah, you are beautiful!" At times, the Emperor of Mongo thought of conquering more than just the Earth.

If you read my entries about editing Undersea Kingdom, you'll know just how anal retentive I am about these videos. In the case of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, I'm not doing any editing, but I am assembling them from three different sources.

Source 1 is an MPEG-2 of the feature version. Source 2 is a set of AVI files of the episodic version with new titles calling it Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe. Source 3 is this same version from DVCam tapes.

Unfortunately, the DVCam version is missing Chapters One through Three. I bought them from a public domain video dealer a couple years ago, but didn't get a chance to view them (and find out it wasn't complete) until this last fall.

As a result, Chapters One through Three came mostly from Source 1, with the chapter intros, cliffhanger recaps, cliffhanger endings, and a few other shots from Source 2.

This week, all the video is from Source 3 (which is the sharpest) except for the opening credits, which are from Source 1. However, Source 1 sounds the best, so as much of the audio as possible comes from there. Since the text recap isn't in Source 1, both video and sound come from Source 3.

However, Source 3 has some annoying digital errors in the sound, so I twice had to patch in a word in the recap from the markedly inferior Source 2. See if you can tell which they are.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Three

Sorry the updates have again become thin upon the ground. Rest assured they've been pushed off my schedule for good reasons, having to do with getting Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2 ready to sell.

I really enjoy the robots which make their debut late in this chapter. Some viewers may find their movements comical, but I thought the filmmakers hit upon an effective method, for the time, of making the robots seem less like suits with people inside. They had the robot actors make jerky, mechanical motions, and then ran the camera slow. Result? Mechanical-looking motion, inhumanly quick. Unfortunately, the method kind of breaks down whenever humans are on screen with the robots, especially fighting them. It looks like a sci-fi Keystone comedy.

I apologize for the ticking/popping in the soundtrack at times. I put this chapter together (like the first two) from two sources. One (thankfully the less used) is an avi file that runs considerably fast. So between converting the soundtrack to aiff, and slowing it down, Final Cut introduces that decidedly unattractive artifact.

Starting next week, DVCam-format video replaces the avi files, so both video and audio quality should go up considerably.

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter Two

And now, Chapter Two (of twelve) of the 1940 Universal serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. The process of putting the files together was unexpectedly time-consuming and tedious, so that's all I have the energy left to say.

The conclusion of Undersea Kingdom is coming sometime later today (Saturday).

Saturday Matinee: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Chapter One

Because I took two weeks off, I'm going to make it up to you by doubling up for two weeks.

Say hello to Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, the third and final installment in Universal's series. This one sees Flash return to Mongo after visiting Mars in the second serial.

That serial was based on the "Big Little Book" Flash Gordon and the Witch Queen of Mongo. But according to Jim Harmon and Donald Glut's The Great Movie Serials, the producers changed the locale when Orson Welles' terror-inducing radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds made the red planet the more valuable pop culture real estate. And so it became Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars.

But two years later, I guess, Mars had jumped the shark, so it was back to Mongo for the third go-around. Ming was back, too, despite having been disintegrated at the end of the last serial. You just can't keep a good villain down. Or apart.

This time, I'm presenting it complete. For one thing, it moves along a lot quicker than Undersea Kingdom. For another, as much as I enjoy editing, it was taking too much time for the number of viewers I was getting. So running-time-wise, I'm actually tripling up this week, as Chapter One runs a bit over twenty minutes.