Flash Gordon

[Buster's Uncle]

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 7 - The Land of the Dead (1940)

[Buster's Uncle]

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 8 - The Fiery Abyss (1940)

[Buster's Uncle]

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 9 - The Pool of Peril (1940)

[Buster's Uncle]

And aren't the chapter titles beautifully cheesy?

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 10 - The Death Mist (1940)

[Buster's Uncle]

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 11 - Stark Treachery (1940)

[Buster's Uncle]

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Episode 12 - Doom of the Dictator (1940)

[Unorthodox]

I absolutely adore the prop work on this show.

[Unorthodox]

Just totally awesome: 

http://davelowe.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-useless-weekend-prop-project.html

[Buster's Uncle]

I absolutely adore the prop work on this show.

Do you?  What they did with the model effects is what impressed me.

That's sarcasm.

...

Here's Les Preludes in its entirety - listen at 3:00 for the Bear Went Over the Mountain part.

Franz Liszt - Les préludes, symphonic poem No.3, S.97

Liszt was clearly a very handsome man.  That's sarcasm.

[Buster's Uncle]

Just totally awesome: 

http://davelowe.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-useless-weekend-prop-project.html

It is indeed totally awesome.

[Unorthodox]

Do you?  What they did with the model effects is what impressed me.

That's sarcasm.

...

Yes, pick a control panel in Flash Gordon, all the knobs and sticks and guages, all shiny and chromed.  Totally kickass prop work that is infinitely more interesting than the blinking light banks of most scifi.  Original Trek being the beginning of this move to blinking light banks. 

[Buster's Uncle]

It certainly had a look - but one feels confident they followed Alex Raymond and the strip closely in this, as they did in most all other things.  These serials are fairly faithful adaptions.

What chaps me about the model work is all the places that using a slightly high-speed camera to play things back a little slow to give some slight sense of scale would have helped.  I'm not asking for CGI in 1936, or a multi-million-dollar budget, but the model work was plain sloppy.

[Unorthodox]

Never said the effects were good. 

Just Flash Gordon was steampunk before steampunk was cool. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Nah, the first steampunk was The Wild, Wild West in the 60s.

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's a particularly good example, but most any episode with Dr. Lovelace -and a lot of the others- will do.

The Night Of The Puppeteer (5) (The video's owner prevents external embedding)