Boobs and farts (1/4/01)
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Buck Rogers. [Ford Beebe et al., 1939.]
When a dirigible attempting to circumnavigate the globe is forced down in an arctic blizzard, intrepid pilot Buck Rogers/Buster Crabbe and his teenage sidekick Buddy, thinking it may take a while to be rescued, pop the cork on a bottle of experimental suspended-animation gas. This works a trifle better than expected, as they figure out when they are awakened by explorers five hundred years later in the world of the twenty-fifth century and are hauled off to the Hidden City, the refuge of a heroic band of scientists who represent the last line of resistance to universal domination by blackclad gangsters led by the evil Killer Kane, whose political platform seems to involve turning everybody into brainwiped zombie slave laborers. Fortunately, somebody gets the bright idea of enlisting the aid of the inhabitants of the planet Saturn; complications ensue. — Great stuff, obviously, but some aspects strike the contemporary viewer as odd: though in the future they have antigravity belts, disintegrator rays, retroscopic television that shows past events, and rays that make them invisible, their radios still work on vacuum tubes, for some reason in the future as in the distant past everybody is living in caves, and Buck’s faithful sidekick Wilma Deering [Constance Moore] is, to judge by all appearances, the last woman left alive on either of two planets.
____________Visual jazz (1/2/01)
