The Last Chapter

There were several important reasons for the death of the serials. Chief among these, of course, was the problem of economics. In the early days serials could be turned out relatively inexpensively, most of them being primarily shot outdoors. However, as the years progressed and production costs rose, the serial format began to look less and less appealing to the cost-conscious producer. And serials, on the whole, never really created that much revenue. The average episode was rented to a theater for only a few dollars as an incentive to take additional features from the producing company. Those few dollars did mount up eventually, but as the years progressed the number of theaters running serials dwindled from thousands to a matter of hundreds.

When serials had reached a new peak of popularity in the early forties, it was thought that there would always be a market for the weekly adventures. Unfortunately, the people who believed this had not reckoned on television. With the growth of that all-seeing eye, youngsters could now watch complete action adventures right at home. Adventure series like “Dick Tracy, Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, The Gene Autry Show, The Roy Rogers Show, The Lone Ranger,” etc., provided the young viewers with all the action material necessary to keep them satisfied.

There was an additional problem that confronted the serial-makers, Serials had always been filled with assorted violence and mayhem. Now the mothers and professional psychologists were beginning to attack the Saturday cliff-hangers on a rather broad front, claiming they were inducing every conceivable form of nervous ailment from extreme trauma to ringworm. The same rather vague reasons proffered by the same rather vague people caused serials to be canceled when they were shown on television in later years. All this, of course, was despite the fact that the serials provided a basic moral truth: “good always triumphs over evil.” There were never any delicate shadings of purpose in the serials. The villains were all bad and deserved the violent fates decreed them, and the heroes were all good and deserved the right to mete out justice. Now, of course, we are told that life is not all good or all bad but spans the complete range between the two. I think I would have hated to believe, many years ago when I sat in my favorite theater watching “The Adventures of Captain Marvel”, that the Scorpion was a victim of a deprived childhood and that he wore his mask as an act of visual hostility towards a society which found no place in its overall scheme for him and his kind. Now that would have really given me a trauma.

Universal Pictures, whose serial-production history went back into the earliest days of silent films, was the first studio to realize the chapter plays had had it. The studio which had turned out such superior action fare as “Flash Gordon, Ace Drummond, Buck Rogers”, and so many favorites of the late thirties now found its market too limited for the costs involved and canceled further production after 1946 It was, perhaps, just as well, for the quality of their productions had slipped to the point where there was so little action and excitement that it was more of a chore than a pleasure to watch them. Universal had always stressed in their serials plot rather than action, and some of their serials were so talky that you simply couldn’t follow what was going on half the time. When “Mysterious Mr. M” brought the Universal serial line to a close, fans viewed the demise with mixed emotions. The plot of Mysterious Mr. M found federal agent Grant Farrell (Dennis Moore) assisting a local plainclothesman (Richard Martin) in solving the disappearance of a famous inventor specializing in undersea devices. After thirteen dull episodes the mystery man turned out to be exactly who viewers thought it was in chapter one.

Feeling was more pronounced when Republic finally threw in the towel with “King of the Carnival” in 1955. Even at the end, though economy was all too evident, there was still enough interest (this final serial did have a mystery man) and excitement to satisfy the viewer who was not spoiled by those earlier action classics. Republic, unlike Universal and Columbia, had stockpiled nearly fifteen years of wonderful special effects built especially for their serials and features by Howard Lydecker and his special-effects department. Unlike the cheap newsreel footage constantly integrated in serials at Universal, these spectacular miniatures seemed as thrilling in 1955 as they bad in 1945 or earlier. Spliced into new footage, admittedly slower and more routine, the chapter endings were still appealing and continued to bring audiences back week after week. In the. great days of the studio as many as seven writers were involved in writing the fast-moving screenplay for a single serial (Captain America), and chapters ran up to sixteen or seventeen minutes each, with first episodes running as long as thirty minutes. The final thirteen serials turned out by the studio were written entirely by one writer, Ronald Davidson, and the running time per episode had been reduced to a standard thirteen minutes with a twenty-minute first chapter. The great days of free-swinging fights in which complete sets were demolished were a thing of the past. Fights were now done in small, cramped sets with the stunt men moving at a pace considerably slower than in years gone by. “King of the Carnival” found high-wire acrobats Harry Lauter and Fran Bennett on the trail of a counterfeiting ring operating in the circus in which they were employed. The mystery man was either seen roaming around in a clown costume or heard giving instructions to his henchmen via a two-way radio. Again, there was only one likely suspect for the mystery man. In an exciting finale, the villain is unmasked and plunges to his death after a thrilling chase, thus ending his reign of terror and bringing to a close the serial output of Republic Pictures Corporation.

Columbia decided to ring down their final curtain with the customary cheapness expected from them; they chose a Western, “Blazing the Overland Trail”, and a very routine one at that. The pedestrian plot found evil Rance Devlin (Don C. Harvey) planning to create a private army to take over the territory. Opposing him were Lee Roberts and Dennis Moore (Moore had the dubious distinction of appearing in the final serials of both Universal and Columbia). The film was so full of stock from earlier serials and features that it was hard to accept it as a new attraction. Spencer Gordon Bennett, who had directed more sound serials than any other director, including the thrill-packed “Secret Service in Darkest Africa, The Masked Marvel, Haunted Harbor”, and others, for Republic, and over twenty assorted titles for Columbia, seemed a fitting choice to bring the life of the serial, now in its terminal stage, to a peaceful and routine end. Released in 1956, Blazing the Overland Trail climaxed an uninterrupted flow of silent and sound serials which totaled more than five hundred titles spanning a period of forty-odd years.

Except for occasional screening on television, or a very rare re-issue to theaters, the younger generation is unable to see and enjoy these wonderful products of a vanished era. It is really a pity, for every child should be allowed to enjoy his own precious Days of Thrills and Adventure while those fleeting days of youthful escapism are still available to him.

• Alan G. Barbour: Saturday Afternoon at the Movies, 1986