My favorite Saturday morning cartoon wasn’t Superfriends, which will shock more than a few long time readers. It’s still one of my favorites, and what got me into DC Comics, but the true winner was season one of Flash Gordon, a 1979 NBC Saturday morning ender that I was happy to watch on the little black and white TV in my room. Then season two came along, the network decided to kill the serialized format of season one and force a cute sidekick character that offered nothing to the plot and some episodes even took away from the season. I will defend many of the “mascot” characters but not all of them.
Sorry, Gremlin. On another show I might have liked you, but you don’t fit here.
I told you I didn’t forget what you did!
It wasn’t until years later, through the internet, that I learned I missed out on the TV movie that led to the show, often called either The Adventures Of Flash Gordon or The New Adventures Of Flash Gordon despite neither being what Filmation put on the title card, hadn’t aired until NBC saw a way to cash in on the live-action 1980s adaptation of Alex Raymond comic strip that it saw air. That’s because NBC took one look at the movie and said “forget that, go make a series!”, and then screwed it up when it came to the second season. Typical.
Lou Scheimer had learned to draw by copying Flash Gordon comics. They were also inspired by the classic series of serials (more than one serial) starring Buster Crabbe as the man who fell to Mongo and eventually rescued the world from Ming The Merciless…and then the comics didn’t end because Mongo is a very dangerous place. I wonder if it inspired their take on Eternia?
Anyway, back to the movie. Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure Of All was originally created for NBC’s Sunday night family movie. The show, being on Saturday morning, had to remove the Nazi reference and put a few more bits of fabric on Aura’s outfit but it made me come back every week to see the next episode and why I enjoy serials today. Vic Perrin voiced Ming in the movie, but Alan Oppenheimer replaced him in the series, which was a completely new story from the movie.
The movie would get released online as a VCR recording of the one airing…but since it was the early days of the internet tying up phone lines that was only possible in pieces, through torrents and taking a lot of time to get all the parts together, which the downloader would have to assemble themselves. Today we have YouTube and streaming capable bandwidth.
There are two videos below. One is taken from what appears to be a Japanese home video release, or I’m getting my Asian alphabet wrong. It’s the cleanest normal copy I could find. If that bothers you, the cleanest copy overall was an AI upscaled version, but the AI did a few things I found distracting in the scene where Nazi blimps were bombing Warsaw. Scheimer and his family escaped Germany just before the war. In his book on creating Filmation, he told the story about how his dad allegedly knocked Adolf on his keister when he was still a soldier spouting his nonsense at a local gathering spot, and Lou’s dad’s fist let him know what he thought of the man. Yeah, I’d run, too. So choose your most standable version, ask when a proper remaster has never been done, and enjoy!
Unmastered version with Japanese subtitles
AI upscaled alternative
And because I can, the TV Series opening
BW Media Spotlight 