Buck endures and evolves. After a few years, the Mongols are replaced as enemies by the traitor Killer Kane. Buck and Wilma are given a rocket ship and head for space—the first time this frontier had been portrayed in the comics. The strip took on new scope with Martian pirates, Saturnian royals, and interstellar monsters. In 1932, Buck Rogers became a CBS radio series, broadcast four times a week. This time, the Mongol plot was erased altogether, and Buck is simply resuscitated from five centuries of sleep by the Space Corps.
Other comic syndicates couldn’t help but notice Buck Rogers’s lucrative cross-media success. At King Features, owned by the world’s leading newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, artists were told the company was looking for a Buck Rogers rival. A young artist named Alex Raymond answered the call. His contribution to the space fantasy genre would lead directly, in time, to Star Wars. Like Lucas in later years, Raymond had to rework his idea several times, but when he got it right, its popularity exploded overnight. Once again, a derivative retread of the space fantasy idea would go further and faster than the original.
Buck Rogers was about to meet his match in Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon was so vital to Star Wars, and such a sensation among Lucas’s generation, that it’s surprising to find there is little scholarship about the character. The comic strip and the movie serials it spawned formed a vital bridge between literary and visual space fantasy, but if Flash is known at all to most modern Star Wars fans, it is in his campy 1980 movie incarnation. Flash is unfashionable, for many good reasons, yet he deserves greater recognition. He was, after all, the first man to conquer the universe.
Flash debuted on January 7, 1934, five years to the day after Buck Rogers, and determined to go his rival one better in every area. Buck was a black-and-white daily; Flash was a color Sunday strip. Buck Rogers built slowly; Raymond raised the stakes right from his first panel. Astronomers find a strange planet rushing toward Earth (just like the one in the popular 1933 novel When Worlds Collide—this was a genre that liked to recycle plots). We meet Flash on a transcontinental plane hit by meteors from the strange planet; he saves another passenger, Dale Arden, from certain doom by bailing out with her in his arms. They land near Dr. Hans Zarkov’s observatory. At gunpoint, Zarkov forces them aboard a rocket ship he intends to crash-land on the approaching planet. There our trio is captured by Ming the Merciless, Emperor of the Universe, who apparently never intended to crash into Earth at all (or at least Raymond seems to forget about that part of the plot; his early strips have a fuzzy, dreamlike logic to them in the style of Little Nemo). Thus begin decades of adventure on the planet Mongo, with only the briefest of pit stops back on Earth during World War II.
Eight decades have now passed since his debut, and Flash has not aged well. Casual forms of racism and sexism filled the strip from the start. The second panel of the first strip shows African jungles where “tom-toms roll” and “howling blacks await their doom.” Flash is introduced as a “Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player”—1930s code, observed Roy Kinnard, coauthor of The Flash Gordon Serials, for the fact that Flash is “a WASP in good standing.” Ming the Merciless is a barely disguised Mongol warlord with a Fu Manchu mustache and yellow skin. (Ming made the strip attractive to Hearst, purveyor of stories about the “Yellow Peril.”) Dale Arden, meanwhile, is no Dejah Thoris—and certainly no Wilma Deering. We never learn Dale’s occupation. Her sole motivation is to stay by Flash’s side. “Men must adventure,” writes Raymond in an early strip, paraphrasing a nineteenth-century poem, “and women must weep.”
Despite its retrograde aspects, Flash Gordon set the gold standard for visual space fantasy. If you can make it past the early years of the strip, during which Flash spends a lot of time in his underwear wrestling various creatures Ming has set upon him, Raymond’s increasingly confident representation of Mongo and its inhabitants is your reward. He starts drawing his characters in close-up, their overwrought faces reminiscent of Norman Rockwell paintings. He becomes devoted to drafting a world, its technology and scenery: rocket ships like submarines and cityscapes that anticipate the 1939 World’s Fair, jumbled up with Arthurian towers and castles. On Mongo, as on Barsoom, science and chivalry, past and future, fairy tale and science fiction blend seamlessly.
The plots again followed a trusty formula, designed to produce a cliffhanger every week. Flash, Dale, and Zarkov are forever crashing their ships. Flash and Dale constantly declare their love without ever consummating it. They rush to rescue each other from peril. Flash sustains more concussions than an NFL player (which, as polo began to sound too snobbish, is what he would retroactively become). He tells Dale to stay behind because it’s too risky; Dale tells him her place is by his side. Queens and princesses fall for Flash everywhere he goes. Dale is always walking in on compromising scenes and “naturally misunderstanding” them. Traitors are in the midst of each court; Flash is forever being suckered by their treachery, overcoming it, and forgiving their crimes, only to have the traitor escape again. It’s space fantasy as soap opera.*
Flash is even more of a heroic cardboard cutout than John Carter or Buck Rogers. We never see him give into temptation or fail to forgive. (Only once, when Queen Fria of the frozen north of Mongo convinces him that Dale despises him, does Flash offer a willing extracurricular kiss.) One might call him Superman-like; the superhero arrived on the scene two years later, and Superman’s early artists were clearly influenced by Raymond. But at least Superman spends half his life in his bumbling reporter guise, Clark Kent. The only time we see Flash’s vulnerability is when he is unconscious. Still, that same relentless heroism that tends to make Flash boring to a modern adult audience still endears him to children—and it certainly endeared him to the adults of the late 1930s, a time when both relentless heroism and escapism became urgently necessary.
Flash Gordon quickly eclipsed Buck Rogers in the speed at which he crossed over into other media. A Flash Gordon radio series debuted a year after the strip, running for thirty-six episodes and staying faithful to Raymond’s story throughout. A pulp magazine—Flash Gordon Strange Adventure—arrived the following year. Universal Pictures hastily acquired the movie serial rights for $10,000, and production began in 1936 on the first Flash Gordon serial: thirteen twenty-minute episodes with a budget of $350,000. (That would be $6 million in today’s dollars). This was a record for a serial and more than the budget for a major feature film at the time. It wrapped in two months, shooting an incredible eighty-five scenes a day.
The star of the Flash Gordon film serial, Larry “Buster” Crabbe, a former Olympic swimmer, was himself a huge fan of the comic strip before taking the role. “When I went home in the evening I’d pick up the paper and find out what old Flash had gotten himself into with Ming,” Crabbe recalled years later. Hearing about a casting call for the serial at Universal, where he had friends at the casting office, he went along out of curiosity: Who could possibly portray this hero? Crabbe himself, it turned out, once the casting office talked him into dying his hair blond. No expense was spared on the costumes, made to match the colors of the Raymond strip—even though the serial was shot in black and white. (Just digest that for a second. It was a different age.)
When Flash Gordon debuted, the film serial—like the comic strip—was an immediate sensation. First-run movie houses, which normally didn’t screen serials at all, showed Flash as their main evening feature. The serial boasted state-of-the-art effects: two-foot miniature wooden rocket ships with copper fins, matte paintings, and split-screen shots that allowed Flash to fight a giant lizard. The city of the Hawkmen floated in billowing clouds of white smoke. The serial also offered some of the more revealing costumes yet seen on screen, particularly the Dejah Thoris–like outfit of Ming’s lustful daughter and Flash’s eventual ally, Princess Aura. The Hays Office, which enforced a set of moral standards agreed on by the studios in the hopes of heading off government censorship of the motion picture business, made its displeasure known. In future se
rials, Aura and Dale would look positively demure, while Flash would stop stripping to his shorts.
A second serial, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, followed in 1938, based on another Raymond storyline. Film historians have often assumed the setting was changed from Mongo to Mars to cash in on Orson Welles’s sensational radio broadcast of War of the Worlds that year. But the timing doesn’t add up: the serial was released in March, while Welles’s fear-inducing play was a Halloween performance. Mars continued to excite the popular imagination no matter the month. Besides, Buck Rogers had been there, and anything Buck could do, Flash could do better.
That said, Trip to Mars is probably the weakest of the Flash Gordon serials. It adds comic relief in the hapless form of Happy Hapgood, a photojournalist who tags along for the rocket ship ride. The serial is most notable for the Martian enemies of Ming, the Clay People, who are eerie shapeshifters able to fade into cavern walls.
In 1939 came a Buck Rogers serial that cemented the relative position of the two franchises: it had a smaller budget and used Flash Gordon’s hand-me-downs. Also made by Universal, also starring Crabbe (with his natural hair this time), it reused Flash’s Martian sets and costumes. These days, serial fans consider it pretty much a fourth Flash Gordon. Somewhere in the home for retired space fantasy characters, Buck and Wilma must be livid.
Finally in 1940 came Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. The slowest-moving and most cheaply made of all the Flash Gordon serials, it was also the most mature. Of course, mature is a relative term in a story that opens with Ming’s rocket ships seeding “Purple Death dust” in Earth’s atmosphere. But Ming, now dressed in the regalia of a European royal, was no longer the Fu Manchu stereotype; he was a stand-in for the real-life tyrant conquering Europe while the cameras rolled. Mongo’s dissidents, we discover, have been locked up in concentration camps. Drunk on his own mad ambition, Ming has gone beyond declaring himself Emperor of the Universe; he now claims to be the universe. Thus, from the last line of the serial came its title, as Zarkov radios the outcome of their titanic struggle to Earth: “Flash Gordon conquers the Universe.”
Plans were laid for a fourth Flash Gordon, but World War II intruded. Production stopped on all serials, and the format fell out of vogue when peacetime resumed. Alex Raymond had quit the comic strip to join the Marines; when he returned he focused on other cartoonish heroes, such as Jungle Jim and Rip Kirby. Flash Gordon, continued under the stewardship of artists Austin Briggs and Mac Raboy, was to outlast them all—including his creator. Raymond’s life ended prematurely and tragically, thanks to his love of fast cars. Unhappy in his marriage, with his wife refusing to grant him a divorce so he could marry his mistress, Raymond reportedly managed to get involved in four automobile accidents in one month in 1956. The last one killed him. Raymond was forty-seven.
As he met his end, Raymond had no idea that his most famous creation was reverberating around the head of a twelve-year-old boy in the unassuming town of Modesto, California. The boy also had a passion for fast cars and was just six years away from his own fateful appointment with an automobile accident. The flaming torch of space fantasy was about to be handed down to another generation—and this time, it would set the world alight.
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* Arguably, every movie Lucas ever made or had a strong hand in producing was some kind of fantasy or fantasia. American Graffiti was the latter; the genre he once offered for THX was “documentary fantasy.”
* Brave, but ultimately mistaken. It is not possible to shoot yourself to the moon via cannon. Do not try this at home.
† This Verne-Wells split can be seen in the earliest short, silent science fiction movies, too. This time the divide was the Atlantic rather than the Channel. Georges Melies made A Trip to the Moon in 1902, shooting his explorers in a cannon. Thomas Edison made A Trip to Mars in 1910, in which a scientist covers himself in antigravity dust and floats to the Red Planet.
* The term “space opera” entered the language in 1941, used as a pejorative by snooty science fiction writers. Later, Brian Aldiss would reclaim the term in his seminal 1974 anthology Space Opera—just as George Lucas was constructing a space opera of his own.
2.
THE LAND OF ZOOM
Modesto is known the world over as the birthplace of George Lucas, but until 2013, most of the town’s residents had never seen him. Even in 1997, when the town unveiled a statue dedicated to the wildly popular coming-of-age movie that made Lucas his first fortune, the movie based on his teenage years there, American Graffiti, Lucas declined to attend. It wasn’t a snub; it was just George being George. He had more movies to produce, three kids to raise, and a world to fly around. Plus, for all his fame, Lucas has never been all that comfortable in front of an audience. “He’s a behind the scenes guy; he’s not out front,” George’s little sister Wendy, who still lives in Modesto, told the town in 2012. “People mistake that as being aloof.”
Finally, for the fortieth anniversary of Graffiti, Wendy persuaded her big brother to be the grand marshal of Modesto’s fifteenth annual classic car parade. On June 7, 2013, crowds braved the 103-degree heat that marks the height of a Modesto summer, lining the parade route three hours ahead of time. Here and there Modesto-ites chattered about the visiting VIP, trying to get his story straight. One might have expected a tall tale or two from his contemporaries, now in their late sixties, but classmates from Downey High had little to offer. “A nerd, but he was very nice,” recalled one. Another remembered Lucas reading comic books between classes. A third, MaryAnn Templeton, barely knew the slight kid who hid behind his camera at high school games. “We all called him a little dork,” she said. “Little did we know.”
Inside the air-conditioned Gallo Center for the Arts stood Lucas himself, in trademark flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Normally, when this most private man goes into public at a press-attended gathering, he wears the face best described by Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, who compared Lucas to a small-town banker: “impeccably polite and implacably distanced, as though fearing you might ask an inappropriate question or request a loan.” But on this day, reunited with his sisters, he seemed almost giddy. The mood lasted for roughly one question from a reporter, and you can see it deteriorate in the follow-ups. What brought him back? His sister, “the small one,” twisting his arm. Did he have a favorite memory of cruising? “It’s like fishing,” he said. “Mostly sitting around talking, having a good time.” Did people here mostly talk to him about Graffiti or his other films? “I don’t really talk to people on the street.”
Finally, the Modesto Bee reporter pressed the question most residents were eager to ask: Did Modesto somehow influence Star Wars?
Lucas offered a smile that was one part pained grimace to two parts practiced politesse. “No, not really. Most of these things come out of your imagination.”
Thus dogged once again by his most famous creation, Lucas stepped out into the street. A great roar went up, and a crowd of teenagers who had previously been dissecting the latest rumor of a Boba Fett spin-off movie pressed up to police barriers to get his autograph. Lucas signed their posters and fan club cards, his features once again arranged in the small-town banker configuration.
Certainly, the Star Wars films weren’t conceived in Lucas’s hometown; that happened a hundred miles to the west, in San Anselmo, where Lucas wrote the scripts for the films in the mansion that his Graffiti fortune had afforded him. Modesto did inspire the movie that allowed Lucas to purchase the home where Star Wars would be born. (The original Star Wars, as we shall see, was the indulgence of a multimillionaire director who would never really need to write a word, or direct a picture, again.)
Modesto gave Lucas his stepping-stone movie and much more besides; it was also the physical location for early Star Wars inspiration. But all that visionary stuff technically took place inside one boy’s head. So if you want to glimpse the earliest glimmerings of the Star Wars universe, you’d be better off reading about World War II, or
grabbing a pile of comic books from the mid-1950s, or (best of all) hopping on a rocket ship to Mongo than cruising around Modesto.
One place Modesto is not: Tatooine. The analogy to Luke Skywalker’s desert-covered, double-sunlit home world has been drawn many times over the years by journalists who clearly don’t live in Northern California. Their comparison seem reasonable enough, given that Luke is a character based on the naive side of Lucas’s personality. But if the Tatooine experience on Earth is what you want, you’d find a much better candidate in the desert town of Mojave, hundreds of miles to the south: literally a spaceport, it also offers a roughneck equivalent of the Mos Eisley cantina, with curious-looking locals and sand that gets everywhere.
No, Modesto is verdant. The climate is positively Mediterranean. The town stands atop of California’s central valley, the fruit, nut, and wine basket of the world. There’s a lot of farming here, but you wouldn’t call it moisture farming—unless you like your moisture infused with fermented grapes. The Gallo winery was founded here in 1933 by a couple of brothers who were so by-the-book that they waited until the moment Prohibition officially ended before digging up old winemaking pamphlets in the town library. By the twenty-first century, Gallo held 25 percent of the US wine market. It is still family-owned. A little education, a lot of hard work, and you can build a global empire: the example was not lost on Lucas, who just happens to grow pinot noir grapes at his own winemaking operation, Skywalker Vineyards.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 4
