Who was the actor who played “Emperor Ming” of the planet Mongo? His costume was really cool! How did they get his collar to stand up like that?
I understand that Buster Crabbe (who played Flash) was an Olympic swimming medalist…did he go on to bigger and better acting jobs?
Anyway, I like the old series…those rocket ships that sound like an old, out-of-tune radio are a scream! What were the designers thinking-the spaceships all had exposed rivet heads, just like a Civil-War eraironclad warship?
Was “Flash Gordon” ever redone in a more modern format?
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0027623
Some answers: Charles Middleton played Ming. I assume his collar stayed up because of starch.
Crabbe had pretty steady work in Hollywood up until his death in 1982. Next to playing Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, his most famous role was the lead in the TV show “Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion.”
Flash Gordon has been redone several times, the last feature film coming in 1980.
Ming the Merciless was played by Charles Middleton.
Buster Crabbe also played Tarzan, Buck Rogers and a variety of cowboys.
The most recent cinema version of Flash Gordon seems to have been this 1980 version, whoch was pretty amusing in spite of a hopelessly wooden Sam Jones in the title role.
If you look at the paintings of rocket ships in the old pulp magazines, they all looked like that – exposed rivets and bright colors. The makers of Flash Gordon wer just following the style of the times.
Actually, they were following more than that. Flash Gordon, like “Brick Bradford” was practically a Xeroc copy of Buck Rogers, the strip which started this cycle, right down to the lovely warrior girlfriend and the vaguely Asaian nemesis. Buck Rogers was based on Francis Nolan’s Armageddon 2219 A.D., in which Rogers’ first name isn’t “Buck”. It’s actually a prettyy good read, with its own imaginary science. It lasted a long time, too, but Flash Gordon was more successful because it had better writing, and Alex Raymond’s wonderful art.
(Of course, it All owes a lot to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars”, which arguably owes a lot to Edwin Arnold’s “Lt. Gulliver Jones”/“Gulliver of Mars”. But if we keep that up, we get an infinite regress.)
The spacecraft in the “Flash Gordon” serials were actually left over from a 1930 feature film, “Just Imagine,” a musical sci-fi comedy set in the faraway future of 1980…
BTW, I saw a short on one TCM one time, and it listed Charles Middleton in the credits. I thought, “Cool! I get to see Ming the Merciless without his makeup.” It was a western, and Middleton played some shady (what a surprise) banker.
You would not have recognized him having seen him only as Ming–but that voice. Oh, there was no disguising that.
My favorite favorite scene of all was when Dale was trapped in a disable rocketship, and Buck was in anoter, travelling side by side, and he threw a lasso across to rope the other rocket, then climbed hand-over-hand across the rope to get to Dale and bring her back across the rope to safety in his rocketship.
Ahhh, the good old days.
Didn’t they do that in Air Force One ?
God, I’m such a geek, but that was Armageddon 2419 A.D.
His given name was Anthony, but I guess Buck sounded more cool.
<< Didn’t they do that in Air Force One ? >>
Yeah, you’re right, they did. So there really ISN’T anything new under the sun.
Of course, those planes were in the atmosphere, not in innersteller space… Makes it a heckuva lot easier if you can breathe whilst climbing that rope…
…actually, from what I understand, “Flash Gordon” started out as a comic strip, done by artist Alex Raymond, in the 1920s. He worked for the Hearst syndicate, which still owns the character.
“Buck Rogers,” on the other hand, started out as a serialized pulp novel, and was bought by a newspaper syndicate in order to have a “science fiction” comic strip to compete with “Flash Gordon.” I could be wrong about this, though.
This led to some weirdness during the making of the serials, in that BOTH serials hired Buster Crabbe to play the hero! He’s basically identical in both, except that in one, his hair is dyed blonde!
The ray guns in the Flash Gordon series were also corny.
They called these “stun guns” and they looked like big candy canes. These were also used in “the Phantom Empire” series.
He can be as wooden as he wants to. All I know is he gave this 9-year-old (at the time) plenty of wood…
I should have explained that my previous posting concerned the television series Flash Gordon (1954) that starred Steve Holland as the title character. The filming locations for this series were West Germany and France.
I’ve seen clips from that film, and I’d love to see the whole thing, even though I hate musicals, but according to this, it’s never been released on video.
Yes, but Glenn Close’s hair scared most people off.
Sam Jones gave you wood when you were nine? Surely that’s either illegal or a biological anomoly?
Biological anomaly. I was well into puberty by the time I was 10.