THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

STEEL (1997)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though I hadn't seen STEEL since the nineties, and barely remembered it, I wanted to like it. I mean, I was fairly sure that it was at best mediocre. But I didn't get the sense that it was mediocre because it was slammed together by a bunch of Hollywood hacks coasting on a superhero project, like the Schumacher BATMANs, the second nineties TURTLES movie, and almost every MCU movie after AVENGERS ENDGAME.

Like most of the viewing public, I had no burning need to see an adaptation of DC's STEEL comics franchise. The character, introduced during the "Death of Superman" sequence, was good-hearted super-scientist John Henry Irons. Seeing a need for a new superhero in Metropolis, he formulated a suit of armor, a weaponized super-hammer, and a persona loosely based on the "John Henry" folklore character, calling himself "Steel." I never followed the DC title, and it was never overly popular, so that for the most part Steel's history is comprised of guest-star spots in other heroes' titles.

Yet I must admit that STEEL is at least true to its source material, and its opening signals the sort of flatly virtuous liberalism I've come to expect from the TV-work of writer-director Kenneth Johnson. I still esteem Johnson for the hours of enjoyment I derived from his FUGITIVE-themed reworking of THE INCREDIBLE HULK (even though said program was NOT true to its source). But with STEEL, I felt Johnson straining to find some way to make this minor superhero more significant than he was then, or could ever be.

Since STEEL the film has nothing to do with the Superman mythos, Johnson built up a minor motif from the comics-hero's origin. In the comic Irons faked his death to keep a weapon he engineered out of the wrong hands. In the movie script, Irons (Shaquille O'Neal) is an officer in the U.S. forces, seeking to perfect an energy weapon that will incapacitate victims without killing them. He works with a fellow engineer, Susan Sparks (Annabelle GIsh), and the two are prepared to demonstrate their device for the high command. But scheming officer Burke (Judd Nelson) alters the weapon's setting in some weird delusion that his alteration will reflect well on him. Instead the weapon blows up and puts Sparks in a wheelchair. Burke is discharged from the army but simply turns his talent for destruction to the private sector.

For some reason Irons also leaves the army, but his past follows him, as robbers use variations on his invention to pull holdups. Of course Burke is responsible, empowering minor thugs as an audition of his wares for dictators and terrorists. Irons decides to fight back as Steel, and he enlists both the wheelchair-bound Sparks and civilian scientist Uncle Joe (Richard Roundtree) to work as his backup. After Steel has various engagements with various thugs, he also falls afoul of the cops and other contrivances by Burke.

Surprisingly, even though O'Neal is clearly out of his depth in the acting department, he's not the movie's biggest shortcoming. Arguably, Judd Nelson, a proven actor, makes a lousy villain-role even worse with his mugging. The biggest problem, though, is the lack of decent FX. Even in the late nineties, the budget of $17 million was not enough to mount the sort of eye-popping visuals audiences had come to expect since the 1989 BATMAN. I speculate that Johnson, having honed his craft on TV budgets, had the notion that he could just skate his way into the big time on a wing and a prayer. (To be fair, he had directed the second SHORT CIRCUIT theatrical film on a budget similar to that of STEEL.) All of the action scenes look incredibly clunky, and the dialogue is not much better. Once in a while, a scene almost comes alive, as when Irons invades the space of a self-pitying Sparks and more or less forces her to join his merry band, which is of course exactly what she really needs. But there are no surprises in the pedestrian script, which seems to be begging audiences, "Love Me," rather than doing anything to earn that love.

Could another writer have done something better with the Steel character by building on the folklore of John Henry, "the steel-drivin' man," rather than focusing on dull crap about weapons-brokers? Hard to say. Yet because there's something of a dopey good-heartedness about STEEL, it still wouldn't make my list of even the 100 worst superhero movies. (Worst five hundred-- yeah, probably.)

PHANTOM 2040, SEASON ONE (1994-5)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Hardly any of the TV serials I've comprehensively examined for high mythicity have received a total score of "good," meaning that there's a strong symbolic discourse running through most or all episodes. Peter Chung's AEON FLUX managed it, but that show consisted of only ten full episodes and some shorts. Chung provided character designs for PHANTOM 2040, but the writers were probably responsible for keeping up the quality of 2040's 35 episodes over the course of two seasons.

GENERATION UNTO GENERATION, Parts 1-2-- In 2040, the venerable costumed jungle-hero of the Lee Falk comic strip gets a futuristic update, possibly with some guidance from the future-city patterns created by the example of METROPOLIS. Eighteen-year-old Kit Walker (Scott Valentine), who has no idea of his heritage, was raised by his aunt in the city of "Metropia," a city divorced from the world of nature. Kit wants to become an ecological engineer in the few parts of the world where natural ecosystems are preserved since the world-devastating "resource wars." But because Kit reaches his majority, his father's old teacher, Guran of Bangalla, comes to Metropia to teach Kit to become the new Phantom. The main source of evil in the "big-city jungle" is Rebecca Madison (Margot Kidder), whose primary plot is to create a closed community, Cyberville, where the wealthy will be served while the rest of the world goes to hell. Kit doesn't want to be a crusader against evil, but he gets a big push toward savior-dom when he discovers that a mutated plant, "ghostwood," may be capable ofto renovating Earth's wrecked ecosystem. Kit consents to become a high-tech "Ghost Who Walks," complete with an invisibility screen. The first two-parter also introduces Rebecca's decadent son Max Jr, who at a young age was traumatized by the death of his father Max Sr, supposedly killed by the father of Kit. Max Jr affects to talk to others through the medium of his grungy cat, named for the French decadent poet Baudelaire. Also present are (1) Rebecca's cyborg enforcer Graft, (2) righteous Metropian police officer Sagan and her cyborg-partner, a mutt named DVL (a knowing spoof of Original Phantom's wolf-pet "Devil"), and (3) Metropian shock-jock Doctor Jak (Mark Hamill) and his "biot" (android) aide Pavlova. In the first two-parter, Phantom destroys Rebecca's plan to brainwash citizens with a video game.

THE SUM OF THE PARTS-- Max Jr concocts a new type of biot to frame the New Phantom as a criminal. This is one of the weaker plots, but the android itself takes on a new and unpredictable identity befitting the name Mad Max bestows on the android: Heisenberg. Another Phantom-foe appears: Sean One, who rules over a series of orbital colonies and who, like Rebecca, has plans to encourage humans to desert Earth to become citizens under his control.

FIRE AND I.C.E.-- Phantom and his team seek to break into Rebecca's security system in order to find out her plans for Cyberville. In the process the hero makes another ally: teenaged hacker Sparks. He also encounters a mysterious figure, Mister Cairo, who seems to be an intelligent hologram.

REFLECTIONS OF GLORY-- Rebecca has another brainwashing plan, and this one is directed solely at the city-council members whose approval she needs to build Cyberville. This time the Madisons plan to use a beautiful singer, Vaingloria (Debbie Harry), who's been outfitted with implants to hypnotize others. (Some slight inspiration from the Evil Maria in METROPOLIS is possible.) In the same episode, Sagan meets Kit a second time when she apprehends Sparks for a minor criminal act, and more or less strongarms Kit into accompanying her on a date. However, when Kit changes into the Phantom to investigate, the vigilante has his first direct run-in with the by-the-book lady cop.

SHADOWS FROM THE PAST-- An African warrior-woman, Nia, bears a grudge against the previous Phantom, and so ends up having a big battle with the new hero. Rebecca makes an alliance with Nia to kill the Phantom, and in so doing shows the woman how she Rebecca has preserved the persona of her dead husband online. Nia poisons Guran, who goes berserk until Phantom is able to find a cure.

THE BIOT IN RED-- Phantom continues trying to figure out what happened in the events that led to the death of Max Madison Sr and the disappearance of Kit's father. Heisenberg, who has escaped the control of Max Jr, befriends a jazz-playing musician. Max Jr stashes an information cylinder in the musician's case and Doctor Jak sends Pavlova to engage a detective to find the case. Pavlova engages Professor Archer, Kit's college teacher, who's playing at being a detective in imitation of his ancestor (implicitly Miles Archer of THE MALTESE FALCON). Heisenberg conceives a thing for Pavlova and the two of them play out the farewell scene from "Casablanca."

THE GOOD MARK-- Intrigue out the wazoo. Not only is the Phantom trying to learn more about his father's disappearance, Graft and Max Jr conspire to get hold of Rebecca's secret files. Sagan gets framed by her commander, so Phantom helps her bring him down. The script works in a little-used bit of Phantom lore: "the Good Mark," a symbol of righteousness.

DARK ORBIT PTS 1-2-- Sean One desires to have his orbital colonies declared independent of Earth's government, so he gathers supplies for a space laser from an obese Earth-smuggler, the Aussie-accented Gorda. Phantom is forced to league himself with Graft and Max Jr to foil Sean One's plans. Though Graft remains allied to Rebecca by the end of the episode, he and the Phantom part as respectful adversaries, and even Guran hopes that someday the old soldier will recover the better angels of his nature.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE-- Max Jr has a dream of his childhood, being shown love by his father. But Max's adult psyche intrudes, reciting a (somewhat altered) poem from Baudelaire about angels knowing grief. Simultaneously, Guran reveals that at a very young age Kit received some instruction from his missing father, thus creating a parallel between the adversaries. Rebecca then launches a new scheme: downloading the mental engrams of her husband into a new biot body. However, the biot awakes believing that it's the original Max Sr and goes on a rampage, taking Sparks prisoner. Later he releases Sparks but abducts Max Jr, forcing Phantom to try to stop the android. When the biot drags Max Jr to Sector Zero, the site of Max Sr's death-- an area which should be replete with poison due to the catastrophe there-- all are surprised to see that the mutated ghostwood plant has neutralized the poison elements. The android realizes that it's no more than a machine and destroys itself, though not without claiming that the previous Phantom killed Max Sr.

LASERS IN THE JUNGLE-- The episode opens with Vaingloria musing on the impermanence of human life. That day at one of the singer's concerts, a mad bomber tries to assault Vaingloria, but the Phantom saves her. The hero also plans to lure Graft into the Section Zero jungle to annihilate Rebecca's biot army, on which her Cyberville scheme depends. Max Jr sends Vaingloria along with Graft and the biot army as his "observer," but it's more likely that Max Jr just likes messing with people. There's the hint of a possible romance between the singer and the soldier, though both are too damaged to make a connection. Phantom manages to use Vaingloria's specialty, illusions, to wipe out the biot army. There's an amusing side-plot in which Rebecca loses her hair due to chemical exposure, but by episode's end has regained it all thanks to clone-transplants. In the scene dealing with her recovery, her full head of hair is juxtaposed with the image of the snaky-locked head topping a statue of Medusa.

THREE INTO ONE-- Sagan is forced to work with the Phantom when a trio of citizens-- one of whom is a policewoman known to Sagan-- become a unitary being with enormous telekinetic powers. Cairo appears again, appearing to make a deal with Graft. Both Graft and the Phantom learn of "the Triad Project," which was supposedly abandoned during the era of Kit's predecessor. At the end, though Sagan doesn't learn Kit's secret, she's a bit more sanguine about the vigilante's activities.

THE GAUNTLET-- Sparks, who essentially raised himself on the streets after being apparently abandoned by his parents, gets the chance to find out what really happened. Mister Cairo takes an interest in the teen's welfare, not even charging anyone for eliciting vital memories from Sparks' subconscious. The boy learns that biots from Maximum Inc kidnapped both mother and father, and Phantom resolves to ferret out the truth, though he orders Sparks to stay out of the matter. Naturally the youth deals himself in anyway, but he, Phantom and Guran can only learn the truth by subduing a security system named Gauntlet, whose minds were used to provide a template for the system.

LIFE LESSONS-- Phantom shoots a biot and is grief stricken to find that he wounded (but fortunately did not kill) a human being masquerading as one of Maximum's androids. Phantom learns from the soulful biot Heisenberg that some biots have asserted their status as free, cognitive beings, which Kit finds hard to countenance. The main threat, however, is a defective reactor under the control of Maximum Inc, one that Rebecca's totally willing to let detonate since it will only harm the lower classes.

THE MAGICIAN-- Phantom encounters a professional magician named Steele, a friend of his vanished father. However, because of that contact, Graft and Rebecca may get a pipeline to a horde of secrets Steele maintained from the earlier association-- including a lot of the tech the modern Phantom uses. However, Steele uses his tricks to flummox Graft long enough to destroy the secrets and protect Kit. Though Steele doesn't look anything like the classic Mandrake, whom comics-artist Lee Falk created slightly before he invented The Phantom, it's obvious that this is a Mandrake homage, even if one doesn't know that the Steele character is being voiced by the same actor who did Mandrake in the 1986-7 DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH cartoon.

SWIFTER, HIGHER, FASTER-- Kit's Phantom crusade has led him to neglect the fellow collegians he used to hang with, but when he seeks to re-connect, he learns that one sportswoman, Jenna, has been enhanced thanks to Maximum Inc's promotion of risky nanobot tech. Jenna goes berserk. One of the other females who witnessed the debut of the New Phantom strongly suspects his identity, but nothing more comes of this plot-thread.

DOWN THE LINE-- Phantom and his allies receive a transmission from what appears to be the Phantom of a future era. The supposed descendant claims that for the safety of humankind, Kit must break the Phantom's rule against killing and exterminate Rebecca Madison.

CONTROL GROUP-- Thanks to Rebecca experimenting with memory transfers, Phantom and Sparks get to witness downloads of the memories of Rebecca's enforcer Graft. Both heroes are surprised to learn that the ruthless henchman was once a hero in his own right, defending the helpless people Rebecca wiped out during the conflicts of the resource wars. But because Graft lost almost his entire organic body in the wars-- he speaks the famous Ronald Reagan line from a similarly maimed character in the forties movie KINGS ROW-- he allows himself to succumb to being a madwoman's tool. Yet by the end, it's evident that the heroic Graft is far from being as dead as he thinks he is.

A BOY AND HIS CAT-- Despite Max Jr's facility for plotting evil plots, he enters a VR program and refuses to emerge, so that his body becomes comatose. Rebecca rages at the loss of her son to his own psychosis and brings in a programmer to extricate Max. Said programmer's name is "Cordwainer Bird," a well-known alias of writer Harlan Ellison, and the script not only has Bird comment on his "dangerous visions," the episode title references a famous Ellison story, "A Boy and His Dog." In VR Max encounters a female computer construct who takes the name Athena because she claims that she sprang from Max's head, a la the story of Athena's birth from the skull of Zeus. However, just like Rebecca, Athena is a jealous mistress who doesn't want Max to ever leave, and at one point she morphs into a Medusa-form, referencing the conflation of Rebecca and the snake-haired gorgon in the episode LASERS IN THE JUNGLE. Phantom tries to pull Max out of his delusive state but in the end must leave the confused Maximum Inc heir to his own devices.

In closing my remarks on Season One, I'll reiterate a point I made in my analysis of the book METROPOLIS. The word "Metropolis" means "mother-city," and the arc of the book connotes the madonna-figure of Maria reasserting her primacy over a city controlled by a father alienated from his son. In 2040, Rebecca wields almost total control of the similarly named Metropia, as well as her husband-- reduced to a "ghost in the machine"-- and all of her children, real and symbolic-- and as such, she's closer to the lascivious goddesses of pagan myth, the antitypes to the madonna archetype. Season Two will prove to be no less rich in mythopoeic correlations.

KUNG FU PANDA 2 (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Once the first PANDA hit big, the filmmakers stuck close to what worked for both the second and third films: raucous cartoon chopsocky violence with a side-dish of Eastern wisdom.

In the first film, the story arc of Po the Panda (Jack Black) concerned his efforts to become a kung-fu fighter, though fate-- and the will of the turtle-oracle Oogwai-- threw Po into the deep end of the pool, by promoting him as the destined "Dragon Warrior." In choosing this destiny, Po forswears dedicating himself to the noodle-shop run by his adoptive father Ping (a goose who never informs Po as to his non-goose heritage). But Ping is not the source of conflict: the "heavy father" figure is supplied by Shifu, who puts Po through many rigors before finally conceding that Po deserves his status. Shifu is also, like Ping, an adoptive father, but his "son" became a menace, whom Po must defeat. In essence the first film completes Shifu's arc and he's only of modest importance in the second and third films.

The good news re: No #2 is that while the writers might have chosen to make Po's second "big bad" another kung-fu bully-boy, they crafted a much more ingenious villain this time, one linked to the circumstances that orphaned Po. Having the villain of an anthropomorphic kung-fu flick be a peacock, a delicate-looking bird, might seem counter-intuitive. But the writers shift the conflict to one of weaponry rather than hand-to-hand conflict. Villainous Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) seeks power by weaponizing his clan's discovery of gunpowder into destructive cannons, with which he plans to conquer all of Cartoon-China. But a prophecy about his being defeated by "black and white" leads him to massacre a tribe of black-and-white pandas, leading to the circumstance wherein Baby Po is adopted by Ping the Goose. As it happens, Po and his fellow martial-arts cops encounter Shen's threat at precisely the same time Po experiences existential doubts about his being the only black-and-white panda that anyone's seen in his neck of the woods.

Despite all these doubts, Po's teacher has informed him that the solution is "inner peace"-- and this is what eventually gives the warrior-panda the moxie he needs to defeat the seemingly-unbeatable cannons. The film frames the idea of spiritual transcendence as something as simple as a fortune-cookie maxim, but the movie delivers what the viewer wants: a hissable villain, who relies not on brute force but upon skills with knives (hidden within Shen's wings) and an inventive conclusion in which martial arts trumps, at least in cartoons, martial arms.

A coda establishes that Po's father is still alive after all, setting up the events of the third film.

BIGFOOT VS. THE ILLUMINATI (2020)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Given that this film shares the same date as TRUMP VS THE ILLUMINATI, the creator probably never meant to follow up his lame "satire" directly. Thus BIGFOOT VS THE ILLUMINATI stands as a soft reboot of the other film, with no references to the Trump-Clone or his climactic confrontation with Lucifer. All of the other regular characters are in place: Van Helsing (now said to be the clone of a Jack Van Helsing, who as far as I know never appeared anywhere), his suit-clad paramour Kali, the Allies, the Illuminati (whose foot soldiers are now called "Archons"), and the occultist Aleister Crowley, who's been incarnated in the body of a Bad Grey alien. Bigfoot appeared briefly in TRUMP but did almost nothing, so that may have been the director monetizing the animation-work he did in advance of this flick. BVTI may also be the first appearance of "Xterminator," who gets his own feature in 2023, and his appearance in the same film as Bigfoot makes the movie a very minor monster mashup.

This time, Van Helsing goes looking for Bigfoot to help out against the Illuminati, going on the memory that the real VH was acquainted with the hairy monster as a buddy. Their meeting is complicated by the fact that VH is a clone, but Bigfoot eventually gets over his reluctance and joins the space-war effort. Fourteen's sloppy script more or less implies that Bigfoot is a thousands-years-old survivor of the devastated Earth, but how he came to live in the galactic empire is never related. Bigfoot talks tough and uses lots of foul language, but he does very little and most of the combative action here is just spaceships, fighting with the most minor CGI-FX.

Once again, it's a lot of plotless jibber-jabber with a few esoteric references to Crowley's occultism thrown in for no good reason. Oh, and there's also no explanation as to whether Kali's ship-physician "Doctor Jekyll" has anything to do with the original Victorian experimenter. As I work my way through this sludge, I think an explanation is unlikely to appear, so if anyone's a crossover-icon here. Jekyll's probably not one.

SPY KIDS (2001)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I'm going to try reviewing all four films in this franchise, but they're going to be short reviews because this series is SO not aimed at me. In fact, I can't say that it would have been my kind of thing had I been born a Millennial. I'm sure I liked a fair amount of ephemeral junk in my pre-adolescent years, and on the whole I like movies about superspies better than movies about real, mundane spies. And I can just barely tolerate flicks starring high-schoolers as covert operatives. But somehow I think that even when I myself was a middle-schooler, middle-school spies would have been a bridge too far.

The biggest flaw of the first SPY KIDS is that, even though writer-director Robert Rodriguez was going for what he described as a blend of James Bond and Willy Wonka, the first half of the first KIDS takes too much time trying to lend verisimilitude to the goofy concept. Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez are retired superspies who seem to have a flawless life, except for the fact that their middle-schoolers don't know anything of their heroic pasts. But I found that during the setup I thought adult actors Banderas and Gugino had far better chemistry than the two destined "spy kids," Carmen (Alexa Vega, 13) and Juni (Daryl Sabara, 9). The kid-performers weren't terrible, but they also weren't overly charismatic.

The plot is routine. Gregorio and Ingrid come out of retirement to face a threat of a kids' show performer who has invented hordes of killer robots, mostly with the faces of famous children-- as well as both Carmen and Juni, for some reason. The wacky Wonka-esque inventor Floop (a mug-happy Alan Cumming) is really more thoughtless than fiendish, so Rodriguez has to introduce three more villainous types to compensate, played by Robert Patrick, Teri Hatcher and Tony Shahloub. The action is routine too, and the only time the two adult spies get to fight, Rodriquez cuts away from the action--even though he revels in a long sequence of the two kids battling their robot doubles.

Obviously, the film was successful, so it reached its target audience. I can only say that despite the director's passion for children's films, I've yet to see one I thought really good. Said passion does make me wonder what sort of kid-vids he liked as a youngling, though.

THE VALLEY OF VANISHING MEN (1942)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This is one of the more solid Columbia serials, not showing the tendency toward ruthless cost-cutting seen in later years, nor the barren strategy of keeping all the filmed action in one or two restrictive sets. In fact, of all the works of Spenser G. Bennett, credited with directing more serials than any other individual, I'd probably rate VALLEY in the top five.

VALLEY opens at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the amicable meeting of two field commanders on opposite sides, one of whom is hero Bill Tolliver (Bill Elliott). I don't remember if the script mentions what state Bill fought for, but the dissolution of the Confederacy frees him up to seek out his father, who's prospecting in the New Mexico territory. He and his wartime-buddy Missouri (Slim Summerville) ride west, leaving the turmoil of North and South behind (a motif also found in the classic western novel THE VIRGINIAN).

Bill and Missouri soon learn that Bill's father has gone missing, and that the nearest city is dominated by an outlaw gang run by Jonathan Kincaid (the superbly oily Kenneth MacDonald, forgotten these days except for THREE STOOGES shorts). Kincaid's gang has abducted several locals-- the "vanishing men"-- to labor as slaves in a hidden gold mine. Further, Kincaid is funneling the gold to Emperor Maximillian, supporting the French conqueror against the forces of Juarez. Two female agents of Juarez-- young Consuela (Carmen Morales) and her duenna-- seek to figure out who's sending the gold and how, but neither woman does much but provide exposition for the benefit of the main hero and his sidekick.

As with most serials the action comes down to various back-and-forth struggles between the hero and the villain's henchmen, but Bennett and his writers provide enough variety that the serial's 15 chapters don't become tedious. Elliott, a popular B-western actor, handles all the fisticuffs and riding-stunts very well, while his sidekick provides good comic relief, due to his being more of an "ornery cuss" rather than the more standard dopey doofus. In fact, the writers got into the antics of Missouri that for one episode alone, they had him talking to his horse, which answered him back a la "Mister Ed."

The limited sets of Kincaid's mine are given some cool decorations, such as a big Aztec deity-statue posed behind the bib boss's desk. Said desk has an uncanny execution-gimmick built into it: a concealed gun that "fires" any henchman who displeases Kincaid. The standout gimmick, however, was left behind by the vanished Aztecs: a giant mounted prism able to focus the sun's rays and start fires where directed. This device is used for the chapterplay's best cliffhanger: Bill tied to a stake and surrounded by flammable brush, while a weight-device slowly causes the prism to move toward Bill and his death-trap. Naturally, after the outlaws take all this trouble to give the hero a ghastly death, they decide to leave and do something else, making it easy for Bill to escape.

In one of the serial's best touches, the credits-sequence for each episode plays over scenes of the vanished men (including Bill's dad) laboring in the mine, pushing a wheel connected to a rock-crushing press. In the last episode, Bill almost dies under the press. But not only are the hero and the kidnapped men liberated, Kincaid perishes beneath another crushing weight: that of the pagan idol in his office. The end of Kincaid's rule isn't quite on the symbolic level of the Philistine carnage wrought by Samson, but there's a little more religious resonance here than in the majority of serial conclusions.