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.

Television: Jack Benny and Ernie Kovacs--Prisoners of the Future!

Okay, remember when I promised you "science fiction-related items from sources you might not expect"?  Well, here you go.  Were you expecting science fiction from The Jack Benny Program?

There are certain stories that open so many eyes so forcefully to a new kind of science fiction storytelling that they give their names to the subgenre.  After Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Worlds of If" appeared in Wonder Stories in 1935, tales of alternative timelines were known as "Worlds of If stories."  Similarly, although extrapolating into the future a condition from the present was hardly a new idea when Robert A. Heinlein wrote his first novel in 1940, he did it memorably enough, with a title apposite enough, that such stories quickly became known as "If This Goes On stories."

Well, here's an "If This Goes On story" from The Jack Benny Program.  Extrapolating ideas to absurdity is, of course, one of the great tools of comedy, especially satire, so it's no surprise that satire and science fiction should come together as often as they do.  Or, more specifically, that Jack Benny's writers should look at the movement toward more humane treatment of prisoners, and think, "Where will this all end?  Why, if this goes on..."

So join Jack Benny and his guest star Ernie Kovacs in a satirical future of the past in an extract from the January 25, 1959 episode, as Benny the Louse and Killer Kovacs enjoy life behind bars in the prison of 1970.



Notes:

0:21 "Oh, but yeah..."  This is coming right off a beatnik sketch, so Kovacs is still hip to the lingo.

1:21 You have to wonder what that long pause after "Ladies and gentlemen..." (and before, for that matter) was about.  Maybe behind the scenes, it was taking a little longer than they expected to get everything into position.

1:28 "Claremont Prison, typical of many institutions throughout the country, is located in Nob Hill in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge."  Obviously, they mean that it's typical for them to be in scenic places, but I enjoy the logical paradox that prisons can be located throughout the country, and yet all in the same city.

1:39 Prisons in the real 1970 weren't as cushy as this one, but they had done away with the black and white stripes.

2:50 "...or Blockhouse 90."  A joke on CBS' series of plays for television, Playhouse 90 (1957-60).  Although it wasn't a science fiction series, among the writers for the show were Leslie Stevens (creator of The Outer Limits) and Rod Serling.

4:45 "Clean the clubs or I'll call the governor."  Somehow, I don't think that would have done much good in the real 1970.  Ronald Reagan probably wasn't too concerned about convicts' sports equipment.

5:58 What they really needed, evidently, was a switch to wake up the lighting director.

7:24 Note Benny's choice of brand.  Lucky Strike was the program's sponsor.

9:17 Charlie Chaplin's Tramp character was reluctant to leave the comforts of prison in his 1931 film City Lights.  And that was a contemporaneous prison.

10:40 "I think the comic books beat us to it."  This was five years after Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent led to widespread concern that comic books promoted crime and other antisocial behavior.

Television: Flash Gordon and Struggle to the End

With this questionably-grammatical title, we bring a close to this three-part Flash Gordon epic.  And looking at the title card makes me wonder, who is this Marie Powers whose name is proudly emblazoned upon two of the episodes (and probably would be on three if the original opening of "The Brain Machine" survived) as Guest Star?  According to Wikipedia, she was "an American contralto who was best known for her performance as Madame Flora in Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, a role that she played on stage, screen and television....  Later Broadway work for Powers included the 1957 revival of the musical Carousel and the original 1960 production of Becket, where she played the Queen Mother. She died in New York City in 1973."  According to IMDb, she appeared in one movie and five television episodes, and these three were her last screen work.

While we're on the subject of actors...  It strikes me I've been somewhat negative in these posts, so I'd like to talk about my favorite part of the Flash Gordon series, which is the three regulars: Steve Holland (Flash Gordon), Irene Champlin (Dale Arden), and Joseph Nash (Dr. Zarkov).  None of them has much in the way of screen credits (in fact, this series is the only one for Nash), but they all put in solid, believable performances.

Steve Holland makes a good successor to Buster Crabbe in the role of Flash, with a somewhat different approach to the role.  I always like the slightly worried look that Crabbe carries through the serials, as though even he is wondering how long his luck is going to hold out.  And that was appropriate for a man from Earth, constantly thrown against the vast resources of a planetary dictator.  Holland is a more confident Flash, in keeping with the series Flash's position as pretty much literally a galactic FBI officer.  Crabbe's Flash fought the law; Holland's Flash was the law.

Champlin, similarly, helped sell a role somewhat rethought from the comics and serials.  The Dale Arden of the series is an intelligent, capable professional.  Note the first episode of this story, where there is absolutely no question but that she's qualified to repair the atmosphere converter.  And, watching her, I can believe it.

Of course, it also helps the regulars to stand out when most of the guest characters in this series, shot in France and Germany, have to be local actors.  And many of them spoke little English, if any.  According to sometime director Wallace Worsley, Jr., "The use of German actors who could not speak English required us to use a lot of close-ups.  I would stand behind the camera, correctly positioned for the actor's look, and read his or her line; the actor would then repeat the line, mimicking my pronunciation and emphasis."

It's a pity they couldn't add the Netherlands to this French-German-American co-production.  They could have claimed Steve Holland counted against requirements for Dutch content.



Next week: Jack Benny and Ernie Kovacs go to prison, while I get to run around free after making jokes like that Steve Holland one.  There's no justice in the world.

Television: Flash Gordon: The Brain Machine

There's nothing so banal but that some people can't find meaning in it.  Especially when they're professional academics.  Take one Wheeler Winston Dixon, who may sound like a southern publishing house, but who Wikipedia assures us is actually "a writer of film history, theory and criticism... as well as a professor who has taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick; The New School in New York; and the University of Amsterdam, Holland."  This is his view on Flash Gordon, and particularly today's episode:

[F]ar from decrying the series for its production values, Dixon finds that "the copious [use of] stock footage and the numerous exterior sequences shot in the ruins of the bombed-out metropolis [of Berlin] give Flash Gordon a distinctly ravaged look". He writes that its international origins give the series "an interesting new cultural dimension, even a perceptible air of a split cultural identity". Dixon quotes German cultural historian Mark Baker, who writes of a particular scene from the episode "The Brain Machine" as emblematic of this cultural split. The scene uses stock footage of a June 17, 1953 demonstration by East Berlin workers against the East German government. Soviet tanks opened fire on both demonstrators and bystanders, thus confirming East Germany's status as a Soviet puppet state in the minds of West Germans. American viewers, Baker speculates, were probably unaware of the iconic power in West Germany of the images of fleeing East Berlinners, which were used to illustrate a panic on Neptune.... The "ravaged look" of the series, Dixon writes, "underscores the real-world stage on which the action of the space operas played".

Me, I think it was stock footage that was used because it was close at hand, although in highly questionable taste.  But that's why I'm not teaching at a university.  It does give the show an unusual look, though.  It's not a clean future of people in spotless tunics.

I was thinking last week that it's one thing to watch actors playing miserable, desperate people, and quite another to watch what you know are actual miserable, desperate people being used to represent fictional miserable, desperate people in an entertainment program.  It says something, but I'm not sure what.  Perhaps that we go to fiction to have the reassurance of distance between what's going on on screen, however terrible, and real life.  But when, suddenly, the terrible things are from real life, the whole thing sort of collapses, and it's profoundly unsettling.

Hmm.  I may get into academe yet.

Incidentally, postwar Berlin actually plays itself in a later episode utilizing that money-saving plotline of time travel to our present day.



I managed to get this episode uploaded in one piece.

It looks like the opening credits were lost at some point, and reconstructed in more recent times.  The words "The Brain Machine" flying on screen is clearly a video effect.

1:50 "...and while Flash and Dale prepared the auxiliary converter."  I'm amused by the shot used to represent this: Dale working on the machine, while Flash, standing off to the side, tosses his sweaty t-shirt onto it.  Thanks for the help, Flash.

3:49 "What's that all about?"  Beats me-- the mad witch's voice was too badly mixed to make out.

4:09 You watch a lot of old science fiction, you get used to some really mismatched effects dissolves.  This one was actually very good.

5:21 Wow, 1955 is pretty late for the amazing powers of radium.

11:51 "A matter transmitter machine!"  I always love it in science fiction when someone can look at something almost featureless, and know immediately what it is.

14:10 If this were on MST3K, this is where a "hat party"/"and mine will be the grandest of all!" joke would come in.

Television: Flash Gordon and The Witch of Neptune

While I've featured print, movie serials, and radio science fiction here pretty much from the beginning, there's one medium I haven't yet scoured for the finest entertainment the public domain will allow: television.  Today, I begin making up our omission.

As we go along, I hope to bring you some science fiction you may not have heard of, and science fiction-related items from sources you might not expect.

Well, that said, let's get to some Flash Gordon.


This series, which lasted for one season in 1954-5, was an American/French/West German co-production.  In America, it aired mostly in first-run syndication, but in the east, it was on the ill-fated and, at that time, rapidly fading DuMont Television Network.  According to Wikipedia, DuMont decided in February 1955 to wind down operations, and it dropped most of its entertainment programs as of April 1.  I don't know whether or not this included Flash Gordon, which was then only 24 episodes into its 39-episode season.  I would guess not, since DuMont didn't actually produce the show, and had probably paid for the whole season already.  At any rate, DuMont aired its last non-sports program on September 23, ten weeks after the airdate of the last episode of the series.

Universal, which produced the three Flash Gordon movie serials, had let their rights to the character lapse by 1954.  Ironically, it was two former executives from the company who then partnered with rights-holder King Features Syndicate to produce the series.

By the looks of things, they bought the rights only for the name value, because this series dramatically deviates from the continuity of the comic strip and serials.  There's no Ming here, no Mongo, no Prince Barin, none of that.  It's the year 3203, and Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov are agents of the Galactic Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, fighting evil around the galaxy.

You may feel while watching this that someone has slipped you some cold medicine, or that you forgot to take your meds this morning, because this is some whacked-out shizzle.  There are times I think the scripts for this show took, at best, about twice as long to write as they do to watch.  This series has a lot of "Wait, what?" moments.  In this episode, I think my favorite is the huge, clearly labeled switches, with the exclusive function of doing something no one at GBI should ever want to do.  At least it has a two-key security system.

"So wait a minute," you may ask.  "In that case, why are you starting with this?  It couldn't have to do with the fact that Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is some of the most-watched material on your YouTube channel, could it?"  The answer to that is: well, yes, pretty much.  I'm not proud.  In fact, I'm so not-proud, I'm presenting the series' only multi-part story, a three part-epic.  This week, it's part one, "The Witch of Neptune," broadcast March 4, 1955.  (It's in two pieces because I tried uploading it as a single 4.54GB file, and it froze up 56% of the way through.  Rather than waste more time trying to get it in one piece, I split it in two... and, of course, they uploaded just fine, one after the other, so presumably it would have worked as single file the second time.  Oh, well.)

Besides, I have it from some people that this isn't even the worst series with the name Flash Gordon.  I haven't seen the 2007-8 Sci-Fi Channel series myself, though.  According to Wikipedia, the British magazine SFX called an episode of that show, written by someone I used to know, "possibly the worst episode of anything, ever."  But since, thanks to the Internet, pretty much every episode of everything, ever, is described somewhere as the worst episode of anything, ever, she probably shouldn't lose much sleep over it.

Sorry for the blown-out contrast.  That's the way it was when I got it, and there's really nothing one can do for it at that point.  Also, Part One ends kind of abruptly.  That's where the commercial break was (hence the recap at the start of Part Two), but the last few seconds before the break must have, well, broken off at some point.