Programme notes
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) Sci-Fi, Adventure | 12 Chapters | TV Serial Marathon
Summary
A Universal serial from 1940, released in twelve weekly chapters, with Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon and Charles Middleton as Ming the Merciless. It was the third and last of Universal's Flash Gordon serials, following Flash Gordon (1936) and Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), and it adapts Alex Raymond's newspaper strip into rocket ships, ray guns and a hostile planet ruled by a tyrant.\n\nThe form matters as much as the story. A serial was not a film but a habit: each chapter ran roughly twenty minutes before the main feature and ended with the hero in apparently fatal danger, resolved at the start of the following week's instalment. Sets and costumes were reused aggressively, effects were achieved with wires and sparklers, and the pace is relentless because the format could not afford dead time. Watched as one marathon, as it is here, the repetitions and the cliffhanger rhythm become very visible — which is its own kind of pleasure.\n\nCrabbe, an Olympic swimming gold medallist before he was an actor, had already played both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and he remains the face most associated with the character despite decades of later adaptations.
Why it matters
The Saturday-morning serial is one of the lost formats of cinema, and Flash Gordon is the clearest surviving example of what it did: cheap, fast, episodic adventure aimed squarely at children, funded by the certainty they would come back next week. Television eventually absorbed that audience and that rhythm, and the serial died out in the 1950s.\n\nIts influence on later science fiction is direct and openly acknowledged. George Lucas has said he tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon and, failing that, made Star Wars instead — which is why the opening crawl, the wipe transitions, the chapter numbering and the flat moral universe of heroes and emperors all feel borrowed. A great deal of what modern audiences read as 'classic science fiction style' traces back through Star Wars to serials like this one.\n\nIt also documents the visual vocabulary of pulp science fiction at the moment it was being fixed: rockets that trail smoke, control panels of unlabelled switches, capes and jodhpurs on alien courts. Those images came from the newspaper strips into the serials and out into everything after.
Controversy
Like most American adventure fiction of its era, the serial's villain is an oriental despot played by a white actor in heavy makeup, and Ming the Merciless carries the racial caricature that was standard in the pulps. It is not incidental set dressing but the character's whole design, and it is worth naming rather than passing over: the Yellow Peril imagery that shaped Ming was a mainstream convention of the period, and modern adaptations have consistently had to reckon with it.