premiers Friday night. Anyone planning to watch? Will it be any good? I have never seen any version of FG, or read any comics, but I am vaguely familiar with it.
You can watch the old original series on sites with old free videos.
I expect what your talking about is a newer release. I would give it a watch. It could be good, depending on how they do it. You still may like to try the old serials.
http://www.thevoiceofreason.com/~thevoic1/publicdomain/Serial/FlashGordonConquersUniverse/index.html
I loved the 1980 film version. Comic book costumes, over the top acting(by some well known names!), humor.
I saw it for the first time Dec. 6, 1980. I can date that because earlier in the day I had been supposed to drive to another town to take the Foreign Service examination. Something happened to my alarm clock and I woke up too late. I was upset all day, moping around the house, feeling sorry for myself. So I went to the movie, to distract myself. I came out feeling pretty good. The movie was fun, that’s the best I can express it.
A week or so later I had to babysit my cousin’s six year old, while they were visiting. Everyone else was somewhere, and I had to take him to see Disney’s The Aristocats. I wasn’t looking forward to that, but when I got there the movie was sold out. However, it was at the same multiplex that FG was showing. So I asked the boy “Would you rather come back later, and have to wait, to see this movie? Or, right now, you could see a movie with rayguns and aliens and spaceships.?” I figured the innuendos would go right over the kid’s head, and they did. Afterwards he went around poking everyone in the back, imitating a scene in the death of Ming the Merciless.
And of course Queen’s music was a plus. I’ve been hearing it in the backgrounds in the ads for the new series. I hope that’s at least going to be the theme.
I presume you are aware that a new collector’s edition the movie was just released on DVD, Baker?
I’m looking forward to the new series. Despite my current opinion of the Sci-Fi channel and their programming practices.
Yes I am! I have the VHS, but this DVD is definitely going on my Christmas list.
And I will give the series a shot.
I never really cared for Flash Gordon.
When I was a kid, they used to run brief bits of Flash Gordon on the Saturday and Sunday morning kids shows. I’m not sure if they ran the really old serials, or the middlin’-old TV shows. I’ve since seen the serials, and they’re remarkable for their cheesiness. The porno spoof Flesh Gordon was a hoot, but itwas pretty cheesy, too.
The thing is, the inspiration for all this, the Flash Gordon comic strip, really got its boost from the superb artwork of Raymond. It was NOT cheesy – but the limited film budgets of the film efforts couldn’t hope to live up to the comic’s standards.
That 1980 version was arguably the first time a movie really did have the budget to pull it off, getting the currently hot effects house (R/Greenberg Associates), and was able to hire impressive actors (Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton, Max von Sydow as Ming, fer cryin’ out loud). Despite some nifty visuals and some cute inside jokes (“Come, Fellini”), it didn’t work for me at all. It made how vapid the story was extremely obvious.
Flash Gordon, like Brick Bradford (Who? you say? Fame is truly fleeting) started out as an imitation of Buck Rogers, but with better artwork and, possibly, better writing. Which, in turn was derived from a couple of Philip Francis Nowlan pulp magazine stories about Anthony Rogers. I really do think that the comic got a boost from changing that name to “Buck”, and giving us a less aristocratic hero. “Flash” Gordon and “Brick” Bradford illustrate their lineage in their nicknames.
Does anyone here remember the animated Flash Gordon? It had pretty good animation, but the creators countered the cost be recycling it heavily.
The animated Flash Gordon is out on DVD, and they are currently sitting in my house awaiting viewing, thanks to Netflix.
I’m in, but I’ll be damned if I’m buying the new DVD. I’ve already paid for it on VHS and the plain old DVD; they got all the money out of me for that flick they’re going to.
Whee! Buster Keaton! Charlie Chaplin! W. C. Fields!
I strongly suspect the series will suck. SciFi Channel might prove me wrong – Battlestar Galactica and Eureka are powerful demonstrations that they’ve learned how to make an SF TV series – but the promos worry me. Frex, the muted “matrix” style lighting and color. ALL WRONG for the genre. And the guy who plays Flash said that Dale wouldn’t be a 50s-style damsel in distress, in fact, his character might need rescuing all the time, not hers. In the first place, it’s not all about the damsel in distresshood, dude, that stuff is old hat. In the second place, I’m not sure I want to watch a Flash Gordon who need rescuing a lot unless we’re dealing with a comedy, since such characters tend to be idiots and hence annoying (just like the old 50s damsels in distress were).
I can only hope it was a meatheaded actor extemporizing and not reciting the official line on what the series will be.
USA Today has trashed the show:
I’ll still give it one, maybe two episodes.
Well, crap. That sucks. I’ve been walking around all week singing, “FLASH! Ah-ahhh! Savior of the universe!”
It’s been driving my dog, Flash, nuts.
I’ll take a look at it, and if it’s bad, I’ll just have to watch the 80s movie again.
There were two and a half animated Flash series.
Filmation did one in the seventies. They reused music and sound effects from all their other series at the time. It was cheezy, but in a good way.
The nineties had another cartoon. Flash was a slacker dude on a flying surfboard and Ming was reptilian instead of Oriental. I could only bring myself to watch one episode.
Flash, along with his son, appeared in Defenders Of The Earth. Along with Mandrake, and the Phantom and their kids, Flash fought evil- generally in the form of Ming. I remember this show fondly as well. Ming’s chief advisor was the robot Okton. He had robot armies and spaceships and rayguns. He had an evil process to coat men with a ‘veneer of frost’ wiping their memories and turning them in to MIB agents. By ancient jungle law, once per day the Phantom could call on the power of ten tigers.
Well, it’s over and it was as bad as I suspected it would be.
The show is just way too mundane (for the lack of a better word) for Flash Gordon. I wanted over the top craziness not generic Earth bound settings and minimal sets on Mongo. I wanted retro-futuristic styling not reused props and design from SciFi channel movies. No opulent alien pleasure domes, no swashbuckling clashes with alien warlords, no strange monsters (okay, one in the prison but bumpy alien heads doesn’t work for me).
Admittedly you probably couldn’t do the Flash Gordon series I want to see on a SciFi channel budget but they didn’t even attempt it. I could have even lived with a tongue in cheek version but this is so bland, so forgettable that it isn’t worth coming back to.
Well, it didn’t totally suck but it’s not very good.
OK, dimensional rifts instead of rocket ships. Whatever, the path to Mongo isn’t all that important. Althuogh there needed to be some sort of explanation as to why, for instance, when the lady sheriff or whatever she was got left behind, why couldn’t she just open another rift? Aura jumps through, it closes, lady sheriff re-opens it a bit but doesn’t make it through, then she drops her rift-opener in disgust and drives off (in the Earth vehicle that she somehow knows how to drive).
Call me old-fashioned, but if my Ming isn’t vaguely Asian and wearing a pointy-topped cloak, then it just ain’t Ming. Turning him from a despotic emperor into a despotic water salesman? Not so much. The actor offers no sense of menace whatsoever.
The Zardoz, excuse me I mean IMEX, was irritating. First of all, I kept thinking they were saying “IMAX” and I wondered why Ming was after a giant movie projector. As soon as they showed the box of watches I figured out that the dad’s old watch was involved. The battery in that thing must be amazing if it’s been running for 13 years. Or was it a stemwinder? I couldn’t tell. But…if they have Flash’s father and they have the ability to do mind probes, shouldn’t they already know what the IMEX is?
And where the hell was Zarkov? They had a scientist, is there some reason they couldn’t have named him Zarkov?
Oh, it was bad. However. It wasn’t as bad as “Painkiller Jane,” which really doesn’t so much kill pain as cause even more of it. Unfortunately, I see that bad Flash Gordon hasn’t killed off even worse Painkiller Jane, so there’s really no point to this one, either.
I’ll just chalk it up to more proof of my “inverse Midas touch” theory – i.e., anything the Halmi brothers touch turns to crap.
I’m just going to say** Just Some Guy** nailed the post I was going to make. I’ll try one more episode, and if it’s as bad as the opener, I won’t be back.
OMFG that sucked. I am going to wash my eyes out and then drive to Borders and buy the collector’s edition DVD so I won’t have my fond teenage memories ruined.
Hello, Central Casting? Yeah…I just want to make a suggestion. When you’re starting a new series, it’s not generally a good idea to make all 3 main female characters look exactly the same. And to make the 4th and 5th look pretty much the same as that too.
I’m sure they have something other than willowy brunettes in Canada. Don’t they?