PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
I'm not sure why this serial-adaptation of the 1949 TV-show-- the only such adaptation of a TV-property, BTW-- gave the titular hero such a lofty cognomen. Video, who has no other name or any sort of origin, doesn't spend any time in the stratosphere; he visits a couple of alien worlds, both of which look just like Earth, and spends most of his time on a contemporary looking version of Earth. I think the TV show, most of whose episodes are lost, took place in the far future, when space travel had become common, and the show's full title was "Captain Video and the Video Rangers," suggesting (though usually not showing) that the officer had several subordinates. Here, only three subordinates are seen, and only one, a sidekick known only as "The Ranger," is consistently at Video's side. Whatever the intent of the adapters, the effect is less like a cosmic police force and more like a small coterie of dudes who have a monopoly on spacecraft, not unlike Doctor Zharkov in FLASH GORDON.
Like a handful of earlier "alien invasion" serials, the hero (Judd Holdren, who would play a "Rocketman" the next year) divides his time between an alien threat and an Earthman who collaborates with the extraterrestrials. Collaborator Doctor Tobor (George Eldredge) gets the most screen time in the serial, and it takes the doughty hero most of the serial to figure out Tobor's complicity with the aliens of Planet Atoma, led by the tyrant Vultura (Gene Roth). Vultura occasionally sends agents to Earth to work with his lackey Tobor, but in most of the Earth-scenes Tobot is served by run-of-the-mill gangsters. In some episodes Tobor plots to undermine his alien master with the hope of conquering both worlds, but though this was probably Eldredge's standout role, Tobor still lacks the aura of a strong villain. Vultura as played by Roth may not be Ming the Merciless, but at least he has some of that same aura.
The most ambitious scenes occur in the first half-dozen episodes. When Video and his young ally learn that Atoma's lord is messing with Earth, they travel to that planet, and involve themselves for a time with Vultura's attempt to subjugate another planet, Tharos. (In the script's one Orwellian moment, Vultura calls his invasion a "liberation" of Tharos.) However, once the Tharos-arc is finished the heroes spend the remaining episodes chasing down the bad guys on Earth and foiling their various plans.
Like its sequel-in-props-only THE LOST PLANET, CAPTAIN VIDEO presents lots of gadgets in lieu of exciting battles and cliffhangers (though there is one nice moment where a robot servant of Vultura drops Video into a mass of flames). I noted that in PLANET the poor actors were tasked with reeling off tons of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, and that only Michael Fox as the main villain came off well in that department. Here, most of the jargon-burden is borne by Holdren, and he does well enough. However, the gadget-talk doesn't have the same surrealistic effect here as in PLANET, since in VIDEO, the characters aren't confined to near-identical cramped sets for fifteen episodes. Holdren does get one unintentionally funny line early in the serial, though. In order to instruct his sidekick to immobilize an enemy with a ray-weapon (which causes the guy to shake all over and collapse), Video commands the youth to "use the cosmic vibrator!" This may be even funnier given that, according to most of the reviews I've seen, VIDEO is the only American sound serial that has no female characters at all.
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