Ballad Of Rocketman

There is a long monologue in Misery about a chapter play or serial. It is about Rocketman and how Annie Wilkes didn't like it when the studio cheated the viewers out of a proper ending. Well I decided to investigate and see if this was a real serial or not.

Turns out it might be! I have found King of the Rocketmen and Radar Men from the Moon. King was the original and done in 1949. Radar Men was done mostly with stock footage from King of the Rocketmen. I believe footage was also used again in Zombies of the Stratosphere but I have no first hand knowledge of that.

I do enjoy serials and have three Flash Gordon serials and one Buck Rogers serial on my DVD shelves. They are fun, lighthearted romps that inspired many modern filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Yes I know I am very critical of Lucas and his treatment of the Star Wars franchise. How it started off good, got better, went to good, and then tailed off.

The Indiana Jones series though is just about as direct a inspiration of the age of serials as you can possibly get though. With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull coming out this Summer you can revisit the days when serials were king.

I'd also recommend shopping Ebay or Amazon and finding one or two if you have an interest in them. They can be a little dry with lots of fist fights however that was the movie martial arts of its day. Yes we have seen bigger explosions, better car crashes, and the cliffhangers aren't as cliffhangery as they used to be.

But the point of them is that it is fun. If you can watch some of the dreck, such as a new Will Farrell movie that Hollywood puts out today then you can handle this fairly easily!