<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

From 1912 to the middle 1950s, Cliffhanger Serials were a staple short subject shown during Saturday matinee at the movie theater. These were inexpensively made, black and white films consisting usually of twelve to fifteen chapters, each of which ended with one or more of the heroes caught in a situation that seemed to offer no hope of survival. The cliffhanger resolution, often slightly reshot to facilitate an escape, would open the next chapter. During the decades of talking pictures, serials were primarily produced by Mascot Pictures and Universal Pictures (both of which had also made silent serials), Columbia Pictures beginning in 1936 as part of their B-unit repertoire, and Republic Pictures, opening for business in 1936 with the making of westerns and serials as its primary stock-in-trade and generally considered to have turned out the highest quality of talking serials.

The most famous SF serials were assuredly the "Flash Gordon" trilogy consisting of Flash Gordon (1936), the only serial included in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry; Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938); and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), all starring Buster Crabbe, produced in the late 1930s by Universal Pictures and based on the comic strip by Alex Raymond. As in the comic strip, Flash was accompanied by Dr. Zarkov and Dale Arden and battles the evil Ming the Merciless, who returns in each sequel after having been seemingly destroyed in the preceding serial. Crabbe would also star in Buck Rogers in (1939).

Many other serials were primarily crime or spy thrillers, but many of them contained fantastic elements. In The Crimson Ghost (1946), for example, the villainous title character has developed collars which enable him to control the minds of his victims. Clayton Moore, who later became the Lone Ranger, portrays one of the henchmen. In The Clutching Hand (1936), a scientist develops a transmutation machine which changes base elements into gold, but before he can safeguard the secret, he and his formula disappear. Scientific detective "Craig Kennedy", based on the character created by Arthur B. Reeve, eventually rescues him.

Another scientific discovery, a range finder that makes bombers virtually impregnable, is the prize in Captain Midnight (1942). Captain Marvel (1941), with Tom Tyler in the title role, pits the World's Mightiest Man against the Scorpion in a competition to seize six mystical stones which, when combined, can create gold. Another comic book character came to the screen in Captain America (1944), which featured Lionel Atwill in a supporting role. The archvillain this time is the Scarab, who steals a device that can destroy buildings by generating a vibrating sound wave. And the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu created by Sax Rohmer made another attempt to rule the world in Drums of Fu Manchu (1940).

There's an oversized robot, invisibility, and mechanical spiders in The Phantom Creeps (1939), which featured Bela Lugosi, who starred as the magician-hero in another serial The Return of Chandu. Gene Autry found a lost civilization under the American Southwest in The Phantom Empire (1935). Another serial stalwart, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, discovers another lost civilization in Undersea Kingdom (1936) and there's a disintegrating gas in SOS Coast Guard (1937), another Bela Lugosi serial. A mysterious megalomaniac develops a method of stimulating volcanic eruptions in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe on Clipper Island (1936).

In King of the Rocketmen (1949), Republic Pictures introduced a personal, jet-propelled flying suit, first worn by Jeff King in his crusade against the criminal Dr. Vulcan. In 1952, the same studio created the character of Commando Cody for the serial Radar Men from the Moon (1952), and reused the flying suit costume as a Cody invention, and it thereafter became identified with the character. A sequel, Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953) and another serial with the hero named Larry Martin, Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), further featured the flying suit, and are generally subsumed under the rubric 'rocketman series' and inspired the feature film Rocket Man.

Movie serials were not artistic masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, but they were never boring, were often surprisingly well acted, and they have a simple but unique style that has preserved interest in them. The high percentage that involved scientific speculation as a central plot element suggests they appealed to the same audience that bought pulp era SF. Their rapid demise in the 1950s came about as a result of the appearance of half-hour action television programs aimed at the same youthful audience, early in the decade, and the sales by the serial production companies of their pre-1950s titles into television syndication at the same time, where they were shown on daily after-school matinees, thus making them somewhat redundant as theatrical product; and the general decline of the Saturday matinee in favor of watching the free, and easily available, abundance of back to back movies and cartoons that engorged weekend afternoon television in the absence of significant network weekend daytime programming during TV's first decade and a half.