I’ve just bought the box set of the reimagined (I hate that phrase) Flash Gordon, laregly because it was on Amazon for only just over £6.
I have not had chance to watch any of the episodes yet, but wanted to gauge opinion.
Is it any good? I fondly remember the old Buster Crabbe episodes being shown when I was a child (in the 1970s, not the 1940s). I also enjoyed the movie, but that was mainly due to Ornella Mutty and the phrase “use the bore worms Klytus”.
I want to enjoy this and hope that it is not done too badly, if it is luckily I’ve not spent much money.
I couldn’t stand to keep watching after 15 minutes of the first episode. It sent me scrambling for the old Buster Crabbe serials to try to erase this abomination from my brain.
Depends. Were you a fan of MST3K? Do you make fun of crappy movies for fun? Then you’ve purchased yourself a gold mine. The first episode alone is rich with nuggets of humor. My friends and I still repeat some of them. Brian Blessed should have killed the show in its sleep.
It started off pretty awful, but as it went on it got somewhat less awful. I don’t think I saw all of the episodes and may check it out again through Netflix.
The first episodes were truly awful. About midway through, though, the cast and production seemed to develop a self-mocking casualness to everything, and we ended up really enjoying the tail end of the season–like everyone just decided “We can either suck seriously, or have fun sucking, so let’s make this fun.”
There is a certain cheesy fun to it, but it is pretty dreadful. It also is a tease show - lots of scantily clad parts, nothing actually occurring.
I had a hobby of watching each episode, then mentally rewriting it to a porno scene. “Who does Flash end up banging this time?”
I had Flash hook up with Baylin (the Bounty Hunter) in a bid to make Dale jealous, which worked, but then Baylin was in to the threesome. Meanwhile, Flash got caught up with Princess Aura a couple times (there were things he couldn’t avoid), and eventually they all worked it out. It was much more enjoyable my way.
Well, I only had time to watch the first episode last night.
It seemed that they took a potentially good idea (the rifts) and then totally screwed it up.
Ming (if indeed it was Ming at the start) didn’t look or act remotely like Ming should.
Zarkov was just made into a steriotypical science geek with no social skills, rather than the strong character he was in the original series and film. By the way, in order to make up for this, I’ve ordered the complete Buster Crabbe series. I’m looking forward to seeing spaceships with sparklers in the exhaust pipe again.
The whole programme seems to have been done in the style of the Power Rangers or some similar dirge. The music was dire and very corny.
Flash and Dale had potential and could work as the characters, but the plot seemed weak.
Even the CGI was poor quality, the scene on Mongo at the end just looked like it was in a grassy park filmed through a pinkish filter with a couple of planet photoshopped into the sky. You could almost see the outlines, it was terrible.
I will watch the rest over time, just to justify my (minimal) expenditure, but unless it gets good this will soon be in the charity donation box.
In the interest of having you waste as little of your time as possible, I suggest you watch the hawkmen episode next. That will definitely ensure no more of your time is wasted.
… and please, do not donate this crap to charity. People who need charity have suffered enough already.
Don’t worry, what I meant was I will give this to a charity shop so that they can sell it to someone else, the proceeds will go to the charity.
No innocents will suffer. It is possible that the next person to buy this will either a. enjoy it or b. do the same thing thus meaning that Flash will eventually save the Earth by generating many times its value in resales.
That change must’ve happened right after I gave up. Maybe someone should narrow it down to a certain ep where the shift takes place so the OP doesn’t waste time watching the horrible ones I remember.
Looking at the episode list on Wikipedia, I’d say around Episode 10 or so the tone became more enjoyable. Enough so that Mrs G and I both at least wanted to give a second season a try had they renewed it.
But then, it may have just grown on me in the same way that sauerkraut did. “Disgusting…wretched…awful…vomitous…not bad…didn’t suck…can I have some more…man, I’d die for a reuben right now…”
I recall making the comment, at the time, that “Ming the Merciless”, was actually “Ming the Mildly Dyspeptic”. Bear in mind that I had no prior knowledge of the characters - I just thought someone truly merciless would smack the shit out of his snotty daughter.
Having said that, I would love to watch the series again on DVD. Just for the hell of it.
