bkoganbing Someone at Universal Studios got the bright idea to edit out all the cliffhanger chapter endings and re-release an old Buck Rogers serial as a feature film in 1953. The advances in science have rendered it laughable in those Cold War years, now the film is high camp.The original serial had the notion that a 20th century dirigible pilot and junior sidekick Buster Crabbe and Jackie Moran crash near the North Pole and their bodies are cryogenically frozen and thawed out by those who found them 500 years later which is about the same time that the Starship Enterprise was doing its thing. But this is not a Star Trek world that they've come back to. Although in the original Star Trek series in one of the comic episodes a humanoid people did take on the gangster culture from 20th century earth.In this film because we did not deal with the Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos back in the day as we should have, they're on top now and the boss of all bosses is a guy named Killer Kane played by Anthony Warde. Fortunately Crabbe and Moran fall into the hands of the Resistance who have holed up in a Hidden City. There are some other humans on Saturn and most of the film is devoted to making an alliance with them.Science Fiction as a film form does have a half life. Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov can write about the wonders of the future, but you can read it and use your imagination and a hundred, a thousand years from now it will adjust depending on how far humans advance. But once it's on film it stays. The Buck Rogers films are pretty laughable and campy for today, but I wonder what Gene Roddenberry's vision will look like a hundred years from now, just how much will he have gotten right?Tacked on is a prologue and epilogue of narration where a Cold War era message is hammered home. That too is a relic of the times.

John W Chance This is one of four feature version attempts made from the serial 'Buck Rogers' (1939). This one, released in 1953, in addition to condensing the story down to a trim 69 minutes, has an added prologue and epilogue filmed that year. The prologue narrator suggests that as the submarine, airplane and atomic bomb were written about years before they actually became a reality, so too will the existence of flying saucers be proved in the near future. What a non sequiter! He makes reference to the science-fiction writer (it was Cleve Cartmill) who was investigated by the FBI which thought that he had used classified information to write about the A-bomb years before it was created.Supposedly, this is the prologue to the story of Killer Kane and his quest to rule the Earth. Cut to the condensed archival footage of the 'Buck Rogers' serial, with Buster Crabbe, Jackie Moran, Constance Moore, Anthony Warde and C. Montague Shaw. Not much derives from the original story or comic strip-- Buck (Buster Crabbe) and Buddy (Jackie Moran) go into suspended animation and wake up 500 years in the future, where they meet Lt. Wilma Deering (Constance Moore). That's it. Very quickly they take sides with Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw) and 'The Hidden City' in its war against the tyrant Killer Kane (Anthony Warde). For some reason, in order to win the war they need to form an alliance with the government of Saturn, so our trio of heroes wind up going there three times. The alliance is made; they storm Kane's city, and he is turned into a mindless robot. The continuity is pretty good in condensing the story, but as a result, in several scenes we see things going on in the background that are never explained since so much from too many chapters has been skipped.Travel to the far future was a common trope in science fiction from H. G. Wells on, and the emphasis was usually on the contrast or differences between our time and that of the future. Here, in Buck's new 25th Century, we get anti gravity belts (from the original story), terrestrial spaceships that double as interstellar ones, a high speed tunnel car, a mind control device, and a funny triangular space gun. The best part for me was the great art deco sets of Killer Kane's city.Killer Kane just doesn't make it as an evil tyrant, since about all he does is stand around berating his council members for their incompetence, except when he tries to put the Robot Battalion coffee pot on Buck Rogers (deleted from the feature versions). I had this same reaction when I watched the entire serial. Anthony Warde didn't have a menacing enough tone of voice, but had more of a high pitched yell. He was better in other serials where he was not the lead villain. The 1953 epilogue narrator warns us of the rise of any future Killer Kane (an obvious reference to Joseph Stalin of Russia), and facing the camera says, "God bless America!"We get a lot of music from Max Steiner's great score for 'The Bride of Frankenstein' (1935), Buster Crabbe's winning personality and cheerful take charge attitude, and the great deco and recycled 'Flash Gordon' sets. It's too bad that neither this nor the original serial is very good. Unfortunately this squeezed down version moves so quickly and does so little that I can only give it a 3.

classicsoncall The 1939 "Buck Rogers" serial clocks in at just about four hours, and though "Planet Outlaws" is just a bit over an hour itself, the repetitious nature of it's programming makes it feel almost as long as the original. I wasn't counting, but how many trips did Buck (Buster Crabbe) and sidekick Buddy (Jackie Moran) actually make between Earth and Saturn? The film's limited budget really shows through in virtually every scene, and is never more apparent than in the shots of the space ships themselves. Keeping in mind that "King Kong" was made six years earlier in 1933 should give one a good idea of what kind of shoestring this must have been made on. In the story, Buck and Buddy go into suspended animation for a period of five hundred years after their dirigible goes down in an Arctic region in 1938. Amazingly, a record of their original mission still exists, which helps with their credibility once they're discovered.The villain of the piece is one Killer Kane, attempting to rule the world, the universe and anything else beyond that. As Kane, Anthony Warde doesn't have that larger than life charismatic evil of say, a Darth Vader, or even a Ming the Merciless. What he does have though is the technology to render an entire 'Robot Battalion' of captured enemies to do his bidding. Interestingly, whenever a good guy removes a helmet from one of the slaves, the mind control connection dissolves, even when the helmet is immediately put back on! Well, I guess it doesn't have to make sense. Buck Rogers was the product of a simpler time, when forays into outer space science fiction was a wide open experiment, along with the relatively new medium of talking pictures. Viewed in that context, the film has a unique perspective to offer if one can refrain from being too critical. Have some fun with this one, space ranger.

hms66 The old movies, and especially the old serials, had a naive charm of their own. Starting with the characters, there was no ambiguity here. Bad guys did bad deeds and only bad deeds. Good guys did good deeds and only good deeds. This characterization is very apparent in this movie. Killer Kane is all evil and Buck Rogers is the next thing to a saint.The futuristic sets and apparatus are a hoot. They would be laughed out of todays science fiction films. Compare with Stars Wars, big difference. The space ships eject sparks more appropriate to fireworks than a rocket engine. Saturn is a rocky planet, not a gas giant. The uniforms are ridiculous. Why bother with pressure suits and space helmets. Computers, what are they? The hero, of course, is indestructible, and so on.All of this elements, and a few more, make old movies the charmers that they are.