PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*
In between Kirk Alyn's two Superman serials he made two G-man serials for Republic. In both serials, although the majority of the narratives are naturalistically oriented, there's just enough metaphenomenal content to edge them into the domain of "the uncanny."
Of the two, there's less to say about RADAR, which was the second of these two 1949 Alyn serials, so I'll start with that one. Four years after the end of WWII, U.S. agent Chris Calvert (Alyn) is busy overseeing the construction of an up-to-date radar defense project, leaving the technical side to a rare (for serials) female scientist, Joan Hughes (Jean Dean). The evil "Spy King" Baroda (John Merton) is out to sabotage the project, creating his own "counter-radar" among other stratagems. Baroda doesn't seem to be employed by any country in particular to commit these acts of sabotage, and some of his dialogue with female accomplice Nitra (Eve Whitney) implied to me that he was doing it all "on spec," to impress potential employers.
John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES GUIDE claims that Baroda's arsenal includes a nifty sounding "electro annihilator," but if it's in there I must've blinked and missed it. I only noticed two "outre devices" that went beyond the usual mundane guns-and-fists battles. The first is the aforementioned "counter radar," which is a marginal SF-notion, while the other involves a clever sort of gas-trap. In the serial's best scene, Nitra conceals the gas-gadget in a hollowed-out fake encyclopedia and gives it away to Joan as a promotional item. None of the heroes perish from this or any other stratagem by the villains, and most of the cliffhanger-resolutions are pretty weak tea.
No comments:
Post a Comment