The Fighting Devil Dogs

The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938)

The Lightning Strikes! A half-crazed devil terrorizes the world with a mysterious thunderbolt that brings devastation to all it touches.

Two marine lieutenants battle a masked would-be world conqueror who uses electricity as a weapon.

Date of release
1938-05-27
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (4)
Runtime
3h 24m
Genres
Action, Science Fiction
Director
John English, William Witney

Casting

Interesting facts

The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938) is a 12-chapter Republic movie serial starring Lee Powell and Herman Brix, the latter better known by his later stage name, Bruce Bennett. It was directed by William Witney and John English. While not often considered a great serial, as it contains much stock footage and two recap chapters, it is famous for its main villain, the Lightning—the first costumed supervillain. There is some speculation that George Lucas used the Lightning as a template for Darth Vader.

Production

The Fighting Devil Dogs was budgeted at $94,656 although the final negative cost was $92,569 (a $2,087, or 2.2%, under spend) making it one of only three pre-war Republic serials to be produced under budget. It was the cheapest Republic serial of 1938 and the second cheapest of all Republic serials.

It was filmed between 10 March and 29 March 1938. The serial's production number was 793.

One of the directors, William Witney, believed this to be one of the worst of the serials he ever made.

The Lightning's Flying wing was taken from the earlier Dick Tracy serial. Aviation was one of the most popular serial genres of the early 1930s, along with Westerns and Jungle serials. Aviation films were even expected to displace Westerns as the most popular genre but science fiction took over instead.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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