Black and White 40s-50' Serials

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fleabus101

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I remember watching the gangsters working w the
spaceman , usually working out of caves, from my 60s
youth. I loved watching the spaceships unloading the trucks and driving the billowing canvas covered double
axle trucks. Trying to take over the world w the
bad guys..
The G-Men trying to catch them..
Tune in Again next week, to see what happens.
Can anyone tell me what to look for on Amazon , to buy
a few of the these old 40's series. I ve not seen any on TV
thesedays .
Thanks Very Much !!
 
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Growing up in the 50's led me to believe that WWII was fought in black and white, as was winning the west. :D
 
I just went and did a search on "serial movie". Along with several offers for the movie Serial, Serial Mom, and various movies about serial killers many of those serials popped up. Batman, green hornet, The phantom, Commander Cody, there were a couple of westerns, etc. I don't know if any of those are what you were looking for, but they are there.
 
There is a channel or two on YouTube that carries all those old serials (Captain Midnight, etc.), some this child of the '50s never heard of.
 
Well JR, I don't remember any with the Mob working with the space men. I'm sure the gangsters were armed with Thompsons and the little green men had ray guns. Maybe some day they will bring back Prohibition and the mob and the aliens will be making big bucks, again.
 
A lot of the older 1940/1950's movie "shorts" were of highly flammable film, and they weren't digitized they are probably gone forever. I'm thinking the longer running ones, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Cisco Kidd, Batman & Robin, etc will probably be out there somewhere.


Search by name, I found a whole lot of Tom Mix and Roy Rogers with one inq on Google.
 
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Late 50's for me. Our neighborhood did not have TV till 1956 and then it was only on for 8-10 hours. Anyway, some were Rocky Jones and his Space Rangers, Jet Jackson, Superman, The Man and the Challenge, Science Fiction Theater, The millionaire, Billy the Kid and The Texas Rangers with that great theme song "This is the story of 26 men who saddled up and then...".
 
Jet Jackson was the syndicated version of Captain Midnight.
2 of the best books on the serials are "Cliffhanger" by Alan G. Barbour and "The Great Movie Serials-Their Sound and Fury" by Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut.
The villians had no trouble recruiting human underlings and native-born traitors to do their bidding. Cf. Dr. Daka in "Batman" (Columbia, 1943) and Sakima in "The Masked Marvel" (Republic, 1943") In "Radar Men from the Moon" Clayton Moore plays a villian.
 
Thanks for the trip back to the early '50s! I was there, waiting with the test pattern for TV to come on after school. My Captain Midnight mug went when Mom sold the cottage. Paid dearly for a replacement much later.
Captain Video and the Video Rangers. Tom Corbett too. Great fun!
 
Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe!

Radar Men From The Moon.
Where gangsters (one being Clayton Moore) were helping the Moonmen conquer planet Earth. Standard firearms for the good guys and bad guys was the old S&W Model 10. The Moonmen had a single shot ray gun/disintegrator that was complicated to load like a muzzle loader.

If you want to laugh hysterically, look on YT for the episode but redone by college students called "Turn It Down!". You will never be able to look at Mister Rogers the same again
 
Back in my old home town, a local movie theater always had a kid's program every Saturday morning, usually an episode of a serial, a cartoon or two, and a double feature western with Lash Larue, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, etc. Lots of Western stars and Western movies back then. I imagine I probably saw about every serial there was. And there were many of them. Pretty clever. A 10-part serial meant you had to return every week to see what happened at the end of the previous episode. I am sure most of the theater profit was from selling popcorn and candy. No drinks allowed. I think the ticket was a quarter. The theater was packed every Saturday, TV had yet to really catch on then. I always thought the real purpose of those Saturday programs was to allow the parents to have some mommy and daddy time while the kids were at the movies.

Speaking of Flash Gordon, does anyone else remember seeing the 1974 soft core comedy movie titled "Flesh Gordon". I did, sort of funny. Flesh Gordon (1974) - IMDb
 
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Zombies of the Stratosphere....

fleabus101 said:
I remember watching the gangsters working w the
spaceman , usually working out of caves, from my 60s
youth. I loved watching the spaceships unloading the trucks and driving the billowing canvas covered double
axle trucks. Trying to take over the world w the
bad guys..
The G-Men trying to catch them..
Tune in Again next week, to see what happens.
Can anyone tell me what to look for on Amazon , to buy
a few of the these old 40's series. I ve not seen any on TV
thesedays .
Thanks Very Much !!
Click to expand...

In the 'Rocket Man' serials, "Zombies of the Stratosphere" featured a young Leonard Nimoy as a Martian. Those things were a hoot. A guy's hiding in the back of the truck and there's a tiny window to the cab, so he sticks his gun through it and tell the guys to stop. Of course they just knock the gun aside. In another they are getting shot at, so they hide behind a piece of rope hanging off the truck.

Flash Gordon was my earliest memory of a TV 'Super Hero'. I watched it religiously when I was a tiny kid. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (and his dog King) was my next hero, then 'Paladin'. Then the guys on 'Ripcord'. Of course 'The Rifleman' and Johnny Yuma were in there, but they weren't seemingly as 'super' as some.

This isn't a 'serial' but even as a tiny kid I loved watching 'Ernie Kovacs'. I still appreciate the off-beat and surreallism to this day.

Something I really miss about those days were the 'anthology' shows with either limited or no repeating characters.
 
swsig said:
I liked Flash Gordon and his never-ending battle against Ming the Merciless, mwahahaha!
Click to expand...

As a youngster we watch that show in the movie house and one
short film had people going through tunnels in the top of this BIG mountain, that scared the **** out of me, because it was filled with Gorilla's;
One was BIG and white and a man "Killer" !!

My favorite show was "Flash Gordon" against the evil Ming.
The space ships with white smoke coming out of them, were slick at first but then you noticed that they looked a little funny, when flying. I think they were hung on strings but I was too young to notice.
 
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