Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers (1939)

BUCK ROGERS BATTLES INVASION FROM FOREIGN PLANETS!...Space ships exploded by giant ray machines! Mountains crumbled by disintegrating machines!

Buck Rogers and Buddy Wade are in the middle of a trans-polar dirigible flight when they are caught in a blizzard and crash. Buddy then releases a special gas to keep them in suspended animation until a rescue party can arrive. However, an avalanche covers the craft and the two are in suspended animation for 500 years. When they are found, they awake to find out that the world has been taken over by the outlaw army of Killer Kane. Along with Lieutenant Wilma Deering, Buck and Buddy join in the fight to overthrow Kane and with the help of Prince Tallen of Saturn and his forces, they eventually do and Earth is free of Kane's grip.

Date of release
1939-04-10
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (15)
Runtime
3h 57m
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure
Director
Saul A. Goodkind, Ford Beebe

Casting

Interesting facts

Buck Rogers is a 1939 American science fiction film serial, produced by Universal Pictures. It stars Buster Crabbe as the eponymous hero, Constance Moore, Jackie Moran and Anthony Warde. Episodes were directed by Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind. The serial was written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins based on the Buck Rogers character created by Philip Francis Nowlan, who had appeared in magazines and comic strips since 1928.

Production

The 12-part serial launched in 1939. Buster Crabbe had played Flash Gordon in the serials of the same name and Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. Constance Moore played Lieutenant Wilma Deering, the sole female character, and Jackie Moran as "Buddy" Wade, an original character who was modeled on the Sunday strip character Buddy Deering.

Noted actor and "crown prince of stuntmen" David Sharpe, who appeared in over 4,500 films over the course of a seven-decade career, appeared in several roles.

The serial had a small budget and saved money on special effects by re-using material from other stories: background shots from the futuristic 1930 musical Just Imagine, as the city of the future, the garishly stenciled walls from the Azura palace set in Trip to Mars, and even the studded leather belt that Crabbe wore in Trip, turned up as part of Buck's uniform.

In 1953, the serial was edited into a feature film entitled Planet Outlaws, by Sherman Krellberg for release via Goodwill Pictures Inc. It was edited again to feature length and titled Destination Saturn for syndication to television, in 1965.

Both the original Planet Outlaws and Destination Saturn adaptations have been available in video format since the early 1980s, and as early as 1970 were also available for purchase in 16-mm film format from Thunderbird Pictures.

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

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