THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935)

 

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

Of this Mascot serial lyzmadness wrote:

It’s rather difficult to know how to react to The Phantom Empire’s tacit contention that the financial security of Radio Ranch is more important than the destruction of an ancient civilisation and its technological marvels.

This put me in mind of something I wrote in reaction to UNDERSEA KINGDOM, a 1936 Republic serial I thought derivative of EMPIRE:

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.

If anything, the creators of Mascot's subterranean fantasy-world seem even less interested in the way that world works than were the creators of the Undersea Kingdom. Said "empire" goes by the name of Murania, a name cobbled together from "Mu," a 19th-century name for a sunken, Atlantis-like continent, and "Urania," a Greek word connoting "the heavens" as well as the name of the Muse of Astronomy. Murania is your basic scientifically-advanced pocket civilization that has managed to stay utterly isolated from every other culture on Planet Earth. And, like most such civilizations, it exists to provide a contrast to the younger, more vital world of humanity, represented in all its glory by-- Gene Autry?

I should note that I've no experience with Autry's work outside of this serial. Further, since I don't have a taste for "singing cowboys" in general or their type of music, Autry comes off as pretty charmless in EMPIRE, even allowing for the fact that it was only his second film performance. All the audience knows about his character-- who bears the same name as the actor-- is that he runs a dude ranch, given the name "Radio Ranch" because it's from that site that Autry and his fellow singers make radio broadcasts of their music every day. The radio-show gimmick is tied to that venerable western trope, "Losing the Old Homestead," for to satisfy his contract with his sponsor, Autry must make a broadcast every scheduled day at a pre-appointed time, or he loses his ranch. (We never meet the insidiously clever bankers that worked out this deal.) Making said broadcasts becomes increasingly hard for Autry, for not only do some surface-dwelling villains frame the singing cowboy for murder, he has to deal with the fact that Murania believes that surface people-- including the aforesaid villains-- are threatening the realm's isolation. So all through the serial, Autry is mostly on the run from assorted enemies.

Fortunately for Autry, he isn't aided only by dopey comedy relief sidekicks (though a couple of them are around). Radio Ranch also plays host to a whole bunch of young kids, possibly school children on holiday, though at least two of them act as shills to promote the business. These two somewhat older kids are a brother and sister, Frankie (Frankie Darro, almost twenty at the time) and Betsy (acclaimed trick-rider Betsy King Ross), and the two of them-- both more charismatic than Autry-- learn about the menace of Murania before Autry does. In fact, there's a weird parallel between the horse-riding servants of Murania, who are dubbed "the Thunder Riders" by no one in particular, and the horse-riding gang of kids who decide to co-opt that name for themselves. They too do a lot of running around as they try to help Autry out of his troubles, though being kids, they can't do very much.

The serial has gained a certain cachet thanks to juxtaposing the theoretically "realistic" world of singing cowboys with that of a super-science kingdom, and thus one can reasonably expect that the serial's best scenes occur when the principals-- Autry and the two youngsters-- end up in Murania. None of the trio are particularly wowed by the wonders of Murania or the charms of its queen Tika (Dorothy Christie). In Chapter 5, Autry says of Murania that "the dampness and dead air of your world is more suited to rats and moles." In Chapter 9, Tika plays host to the two kids and asks them how they find Murania, and Betsy finds it "stuffy." William Wordsworth wrote that "the world is too much with us," but in the case of the three principals of EMPIRE, "the ranch is too much with them," for they can think of nothing else but saving Autry's ranch from financial ruin. Tika wants the ranch gone because she has some vague fear that Autry will uncover Murania's existence, but just to make her world more of a threat, a usurper makes an attempt to overthrow Tika so that he can (possibly) make an assault upon the modern surface-world.

This opposition between ancient and modern worlds is more interesting than any of the catchpenny fights and special effects of EMPIRE. Indeed, the fated doom of Murania is anticipated-- possibly by mere coincidence?-- in a cowboy song, "Uncle Noah's Ark," that humorously described the inundation of a previous era in favor of a more modern existence.

A long long time ago
As all you folks should know
Uncle Noah built himself an Ark
(Now that's a boat folks)
For forty days and nights
The rain was quite a fright
The animals nearly tore the Ark apart

The song doesn't say anything about the world that the flood is destroying, but the conclusion of PHANTOM EMPIRE provides all the destruction one could possibly desire.