Flash Gordon (serial)

• Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon • Charles B. Middleton as Ming the Merciless • Jean Rogers as Dale Arden • Priscilla Lawson as Princess Aura • Frank Shannon as Dr. Alexis Zarkov • Richard Alexander as Prince Barin • Jack Lipson as King Vultan • Theodore Lorch as Second High Priest • James Pierce as Prince Thun • Duke York as King Kala • Earl Askam as Officer Torch • Lon Poff as First High Priest (uncredited) • Richard Tucker as Professor Gordon • George Cleveland as Professor Hensley • Muriel Goodspeed as Zona Cast notes: • Eddie Parker served as a stand-in and stunt double for Buster Crabbe. • Richard Alexander helped to design his own costume, which included a leather chest plate painted gold. • Early film fan historians claimed that actor Lon Poff, playing the first of Ming's two high priests, died shortly after production began and was replaced by Theodore Lorch. In fact, however, only Poff's character died, or rather was killed by Ming in an act of fury and replaced by Lorch's High Priest, but the scene was cut from the final print. Poff did not die until 1952. ==Production==

• According to Harmon and Glut, Flash Gordon had a budget of over a million dollars. • Exterior shots, such as the Earth crew's first steps on Mongo, were filmed at Bronson Canyon. ==Release and reception==

Universal hoped to regain an adult audience for serials with the release of Flash Gordon and by presenting it in many of the top or "A-level" theaters in large cities across the United States. The serial film was also edited into a 72-minute feature version in 1936, which was only exhibited abroad, until being released in the US in 1949 as Rocket Ship by Sherman S. Krellberg's Filmcraft Pictures. A different feature version of the serial, at 90 minutes, was sold directly to television in 1966 under the title Spaceship to the Unknown. Flash Gordon was Universal's second-highest-grossing film of 1936, after Three Smart Girls, a musical starring Deanna Durbin. The Hays Office, however, objected to the revealing costumes worn by Dale, Aura and the other female characters. In response to those objections, Universal designed more modest outfits for the female performers in the film's two sequels. In his review of the film in the 2015 reference Radio Times Guide to Films, Alan Jones describes Flash Gordon as "non-stop thrill-a-minute stuff as Flash battles one adversary after another", and he states that it is "the best of the Crabbe trilogy of Flash Gordon films". ==Chapter list==

• "The Planet of Peril" • "The Tunnel of Terror" • "Captured by Shark Men" • "Battling the Sea Beast" • "The Destroying Ray" • "Flaming Torture" • "Shattering Doom" • "Tournament of Death" • "Fighting the Fire Dragon" • "The Unseen Peril" • "In the Claws of the Tigron" • "Trapped in the Turret" • "Rocketing to Earth" ==Sequels==

Two sequels to Flash Gordon, also in serial form and starring Buster Crabbe, followed the popular 1936 production: ''Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (15 chapters) in 1938 and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe'' (12 chapters) in 1940. Between the releases of those two later productions, Crabbe starred in an entirely separate but similarly structured Universal science-fiction serial portraying Buck Rogers, another popular character also featured in magazines, comic strips, and on radio in the late 1920s and 1930s. ==See also==