UNDERSEA KINGDOM (1936)

 

Oddly, though UNDERSEA KINGDOM-- Republic's attempt to duplicate Universal's success with FLASH GORDON-- is a much more expensive effort than JUNGLE QUEEN, I found that it lacked even the latter's minor charms, much less GORDON's mythic dimensions.

 I appreciate that KINGDOM comes up with a lot more gosh-wow tinkertoys than most space-opera serials.  Its chapters are replete with robots, ray-guns, a battering-ram tank (which at one point has the hero spread-eagled on front of it, easily the serial's best moment), and a giant tower that rises from the sea to menace the modern world.  This sequence reminded me of Robert E. Howard's 1935 novel HOUR OF THE DRAGON, which also concerned a recrudescent archaic world that strove to replace the modern continuum.

However, FLASH GORDON-- both in the comic strip and the original serial-- showed some interest in the exotic worlds Flash visited as the hero attempted to sway the various races of Mongo against the tyrant Ming.  UNDERSEA KINGDOM is a little more on the programmatic side.

Hero Crash Corrigan and his allies voyage to the Undersea Kingdom of Atlantis for roughly the same reasons that Flash and his friends seek out Mongo; investigating the genesis of mysterious phenomena in their world.  In GORDON, Ming is responsible for causing chaos on Earth, while in KINGDOM, a tyrant with the risible name "Unga Khan" has been creating earthquakes on the surface world as a prelude to his attempt at conquest.  In both serial-stories, the scientist-member of the hero's team is seized by the tyrant, who seeks to use his talents to promote his agenda.

But KINGDOM has no interest in the world of Atlantis as GORDON showed interest in the exotica of Mongo.  Atlantis could pretty much be any old Ruritanian kingdom, and the script may be poking fun at its own good/bad simplicity in naming the good faction "the White Robes" while the allies of Unga Khan are "the Black Robes."  To be sure, in one episode a  Black Robe is converted to the side of the angels when Corrigan spares his life.  But it doesn't do the fellow-- oddly given the name of an "evil" pagan deity, "Moloch"-- much good, because by the serial's end all the bloody Atlanteans, good and bad, bite the bullet.

Perhaps this, more than anything, accounts for my negative feelings toward the serial.  Flash Gordon's Mongo is a great though utterly inconsistent dream-world, where any sort of weirdness is possible.  The producers of UNDERSEA KINGDOM seem strangely in a hurry to dispose of their dream-world, as if its presence threatened the hegemony of their real world, not just the serial's version of reality.

Corrigan is a competent serial-hero, who almost never resorts to a ray-gun if he can use his fists or wrestling-moves to win a battle.  But he lacks the charisma that Buster Crabbe displayed in his first serial outing, and his companions are similarly routine.  Despite having two comics to supply the funny stuff-- with the hilarious names "Salty" and "Briny Deep"-- their routines probably could have been excised without anyone noticing the lack.