Sunday, October 31, 2010

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE





THE PHANTOM EMPIRE

Hello there, all you happy people! How do I know that you’re happy people? Why, because it’s a brand new month, and that means its time for another Odd Review! How could you possibly NOT be happy? …Don’t answer that. And, of course, I am your buddy, Oddcube, here to say “Hello, and welcome to the column!”

So…Hello! And welcome to the column!

In case you don’t know it, my job is to find all sorts of things that you may not be aware are out there…and whether or not they’re worth your time! I get to talk about a wide variety of things, including music, movies, mini-series, and other things that don’t even begin with “M”. Then, to give you a rough idea of how good it is, I roll my D&D percentage dice to randomly determine a rating between one and a hundred. But more on that near the end of the article!

This time around, I’m gonna tell you about a classic movie serial! Now, if you’re of the older generation you probably know exactly what I mean by that, but I’d better explain to the younger ones. Now listen kiddies, if you go talk to Grandma and Grandpa they can tell you that back when movies were new you went to the theater and saw TWO full-length feature films, a newsreel, a travelogue, a cartoon, and a weekly serial—all for about a nickel!

Well, we’re talking about those serials today! Why? Because they were neat! They were cool! They greatly influenced generations of movie-makers! Plus…I don’t have anything else prepared.

The serials evolved directly from the pulp magazines of the time, and comic strips. Several famous heroes appeared in serials, including: Ace Drummond, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and Zorro! The serial “Undersea Kingdom” is where Ray Corrigan obtained the nickname “Crash”, and the serial “The Phantom Empire” was the very first film to star world-renowned singing cowboy, Gene Autry!

And that’s the one we’re gonna talk about today! I’ve got a really good reason for it, too! It’s the one I’ve most recently seen! If that’s not a good enough reason…I don’t know what you can do about it!

So anyway, there was this movie company, called Mascot (which would later be absorbed into Republic, perhaps the most famous producer of film serials!). Nat Levine was the man in charge, and he instructed one of his writers, Wallace McDonald, to come up with a really boffo storyline for their next film project. Well, according to indisputable internet sources, McDonald read up on the Carlsbad Caverns while waiting in the dentist’s office. When the dentist gassed him, he had this groovy dream about an underground kingdom fighting against the surface people who discovered them! Luckily, he remembered this when he woke up, and viola! They had a plot!

In the serial, Gene Autry plays himself, or at least a character with the same name. He is the owner of Radio Ranch, where he and his musicians broadcast their radio show every day at two o’clock. Somehow, this has become a part of the lease agreement or something, cuz if Gene EVER fails to sing on the two o’clock radio show they will lose the ranch!

Gene has a partner who helps run the ranch, a man named Tom Baxter. Tom has two children, Frankie (played by Frankie Darro, who wore the Robby the Robot suit in “Forbidden Planet”) and Betsy (played by experienced rodeo performer, Betsy King Ross). Frankie and Betsy run a sort of a fan club called the Junior Thunder Riders, which is named after a mysterious company of horsemen who ride across the plains sounding like thunder (get it?) and mysteriously appear and disappear in Thunder Canyon. Frankie and Betsy also have a “secret lab” in the barn, where Frankie tries to invent things.

They allow tourists to come to radio ranch, for the whole “live studio audience” bit, I guess. However, in this batch of tourists is Professor Beetson and his (quote) “vicious band of research scientists” (unquote). Studies suggest that somewhere beneath Radio Ranch is a vast store of the very rare mineral, Radium! So Beetson and his vicious band of research scientists (I LOVE that line!) have come to do some scouting and run some tests to confirm this.

Guess what? It turns out the study was right! There’s just oodles of radium in the area! So Beetson and his vicious band of research scientists (you only get lines like that in old-school stuff like movie serials and pulp mags!) decide they have to drive everyone away from Radio Ranch so they can dig it all up without having to share it with anyone! Why? Well I told ya it was extremely rare, so they can sell it and get filthy stinkin’ rich!

How can they get rid of all the people in Radio Ranch? By getting rid of the reason they’re all there: the show. All they have to do is make Gene Autry miss his two o’clock broadcast—then the terms of their lease will be broken and they’ll get kicked out and the ranch will be deserted! Unfortunately, they turn out to be an INCOMPETENT vicious band of research scientists, and their efforts to detain Gene result in heaping amounts of EPIC FAIL!

So Professor Beetson, compelled by his greed, decides to drastically up the stakes. He kills Tom Baxter, and then frames Gene Autry for it! The only ones who believe that Gene is innocent are Frankie and Betsy, who hide him in the secret lab in the barn so the Sherriff can’t find him. Of course, he doesn’t stay there long before he is discovered, and goes on the run—straight to Thunder Canyon!

Well it turns out that Thunder Canyon hold the secret entrance that leads to the Scientific City of Murania (the mysterious underground “Phantom Empire” of the series title). Murania is a technologically advanced culture with robots, sky-chariots, atomic cannons and other good stuff! It’s implied that the people of Murania are the descendents of the lost kingdom of Mu. In case you don’t know, Mu is a mysterious island kingdom that supposedly sunk into the ocean, and it cannot be proved whether or not it actually existed. Sorta like Atlantis, except Mu was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Gene manages to escape from the Sherriff and the vicious band of research scientists (it actually says that phrase in the opening of one of the chapters!) by getting captured by the Thunder Riders, who take him into Murania! Ha, take that, surface antagonists!

But—oh snap!—things just got worse instead of better! See, the xenophobic ruler of Murania, Queen Tika (played by Dorothy Christie) has been watching us ignorant and barbaric surface people on her fancy-shmancy television, and wants absolutely nothing to do with us! She has no qualms about killing surface people to keep Murania secret and safe, so she decides to kill Gene Autry!

However, that’s still not complicated enough to stretch out for twelve whole chapters, so to complicate matters the Queen’s trusted advisor, Lord Argo the High Chancellor, is plotting to start a civil war, overthrow the Queen and put himself in charge! The swine! Why do all these rulers of lost kingdoms trust their trusted advisors? Don’t they know the trusted advisor ALWAYS turns out to be the bad-guy?!

Anyway, the traitorous Lord Argo has been slowly building up an army of rebels by saving people from the execution chamber. And he decides to save Gene Autry! But Gene, being the bland but dutiful hero-type, utterly refuses to join up and escapes instead!

So, because this is a 1935 movie serial, there’s a lot of “one damn thing after another” as Gene commutes between the surface world and the secret underground kingdom. He keeps having to sing on the radio show, but has to do it from remote locations so the Sherriff can’t catch him before he can clear himself of murder, and one or another of his sidekicks keeps getting kidnapped by the Muranians so he has a convenient excuse to go back there and help overthrow evil High Chancellor Argo.

I don’t really want to ruin the ending, in case anyone out there wants to check it out first hand. But I will say that I was surprised how…useful a role the comedic sidekicks ended up playing. Cuz in addition to the kids, Frankie and Betsy, Gene had two other sidekicks, Oscar and Pete (played by Smiley Burnette and William Moore). They spend most of the series being silly for the sake of being silly. But eventually, these two guys ended up orchestrating some vital plot points! I was impressed! And pleasantly surprised!

In 1940, the serial was edited down to the more reasonable feature film length of 70 minutes, and issued under two different names: “Radio Ranch” and “Men With Steel Faces”. And that’s not all! “The Phantom Empire” was also the inspiration behind one of the three serials featured weekly on the 1979 TV show “Cliffhangers”, a show which sounds really cool, but sadly didn’t last a full season.

It seems to me that these old-school serials are sort of an acquired taste nowadays. Just like any other film genre, there are some that are pretty good and others that are not. Fortunately, you don’t have to buy one to check it out. Netflix has a few serials for rent, including this one (that’s how I saw it). They have a few others that you can stream to your computer. There are also some other sites where you can stream or download old movies and serials that are now public domain. But you can watch it for free online at archivemovieclassics.com and other places that I can’t tell you about because when I found them I was dumb and forgot to bookmark them. But a web-search should get you more results!

Oh yeah, almost forgot. In order to maintain the disguise of a mild-mannered review column, I’ve got to issue a rating. As I’m the indecisive type when it comes to things like this, I’ve got a pair of handy-dandy D&D percentage dice to do it for me! The concept here is really easy. Percentage dice are two ten-sided dice. One represents the digit of the ones place, while the other represents the digit of the tens place. Together, they randomly determine a number anywhere from 01 (oh dear Lord, make it STOP!) and double-0 which actually means 100 (the unreachable standard to which all projects ought to aspire). So I’ll give my dice a simple toss like so…




…and end up with a fairly respectable 70! I guess that ain’t too bad. I can live with that. Like I said, these old-fashioned serials aren’t for everyone, even if they did inspire things like “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones. However, this was one of the better ones I’ve seen, so if you’re interested in old-fashioned serials, I can recommend this one!

But hey, that’s only one idiot’s opinion, and you don’t have to take it! You could check it out for yourself and form your own opinion! That’s what I did! And since I can’t really think of anything else to say, I guess I’ll just say so long until next time! Speaking of next time, you should come back and find out what I’m gonna talk about next time, that way we’ll both know! Be there and be square!

-----Your Buddy Oddcube


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