Buck Rogers has been credited with bringing into popular media the concept of space exploration,[5] following in the footsteps of literary pioneers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

I got a job surveying the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh, in which the atmosphere had a peculiar pungent tang and the crumbling rock glowed strangely.

[6] After rescuing future freedom fighter Wilma Deering from attackers armed with anti-gravity belts and rocket guns, he proves his identity by showing her his American Legion button.

She then explains how the Red Mongols emerged from the Gobi desert to conquer Asia and Europe and then attacked America starting with that "big idol holding a torch" (the Statue of Liberty).

"; the villainous traitor Killer Kane and his perfidious partner in crime Ardala Valmar; and Black Barney Wade, who began as a space pirate but later became Buck's friend and ally.

Hostile species Buck met included the Tiger Men of Mars, the nasty little Asterites of the asteroid belt, and giant robots called Mekkanos.

[16] In 2009, Dynamite Entertainment began a monthly comic book version of Buck Rogers[17][18] by writer Scott Beatty[19] and artist Carlos Rafael.

The characters featured include Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, Dr. Huer, Killer Kane, Ardala, King Grallo of the Martian Tiger Men, and robots.

Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) and his young friend Buddy Wade get caught in a blizzard and are forced to crash their airship in the Arctic wastes.

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

The series apparently went on summer hiatus from around July 7 until the end of August, probably reappearing on the air again around Labor Day with Robert Pastene still in the lead role.

[6] The series starred Gil Gerard as Captain William "Buck" Rogers, a United States Air Force and NASA pilot who commands Ranger III, a Space Shuttle-like ship that is launched in 1987.

Co-starring in the series were Erin Gray as crack Starfighter pilot Colonel Wilma Deering, and Tim O'Connor as Dr. Elias Huer, head of Earth Defense Directorate, and a former starpilot himself.

[31] In 2015, the producer Don Murphy announced that he was developing a Buck Rogers film based on the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D.; however this conflicted with the Dille Family Trust, which claimed to hold the rights of the franchise.

On October 14, 2020, it was announced that Don Murphy, Susan Montford, Flint Dille and Legendary Entertainment will produce a Buck Rogers film which is intended to launch a transmedia franchise.

In the role-playing game, the player characters were allied to Buck Rogers and NEO (the New Earth Organisation) in their fight against RAM (a Russian-American corporation based on Mars).

From 1990 to 1991, ten "comics modules" set in the Buck Rogers XXVC universe were published, entitled Rude Awakening #1-3, Black Barney #1-3. and Martian Wars #1-4.

Sega released the arcade video game Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (Japanese: バック・ロジャース：プラネット・オブ・ズーム, Hepburn: Bakku Rojāsu: Puranetto obu Zūmu) in 1982.

In 1990, Strategic Simulations, Inc. released a Buck Rogers XXVC video game, Countdown to Doomsday, for the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Sega Mega Drive, and Amiga.

The XZ-38 Disintegrator Pistol, the first actual "ray gun" toy and such an iconic symbol of the franchise that it made a cameo appearance in the first episode of the 1939 movie serial, as if to show that what the audience was seeing was indeed the Real Thing, debuted in 1935.

It was a 10-inch pop gun topped with flint-and-striker sparkler using a mechanism, not unlike that used in cigarette lighters, cast in a distinctive metallic copper color.

By then, pop guns were considered old-fashioned, and even the Buck Rogers franchise was losing its luster, having been overtaken by real-world events and the prospect of actual crewed space flight.

This toy, and its successor, the Norton-Honer Super Sonic Ray Gun, was featured prominently in the actual Buck Rogers newspaper strips of the time, many of which concluded with a secret message in a Morse Code variant called the Rocket Rangers International Code, the key to which was available only by sending as self-addressed stamped envelope to the newspaper syndicate or the "cheat sheet" included in the package with the toy.

In 1934, a Rocket Police Patrol Ship windup red and green tin toy spaceship was produced by Louis Marx & Company with Buck seated in the cockpit holding a ray gun rifle.

These were a set of six British Premium figures for Cream of Wheat and included Buck, Dr. Huer, Wilma, Kane, Ardala and an unidentified Mekkano Man Robot.

This 1:6 scale figure of Buck wears the 1930s period uniform including visor leather like plastic helmet and vest, a glass bubble space helmet, a red light up plastic flame jet pack, a mini gold colored metal XZ-38 Disintegrator Ray Pistol and a wooden slotted lid box with the limited edition number up to 1000.

For example, this view was sufficiently ingrained in popular culture that in 1993, following a successful low-altitude test flight of a prototype rocket, a writer opined: "The DC-X launched vertically, hovered in mid-air ...

[43] The animated television series Futurama, created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen in 1999, was strongly influenced by themes and characters from the "Buck Rogers" comic strip, as well as many other science fiction books and films.

[citation needed] Track nine of Hyphy Bay Area rapper Mac Dre's album Heart of a Gangsta, Mind of a Hustla, Tongue of a Pimp (2000) is titled "Black Buck Rogers".

In a later scene in which the seven astronauts confront the NASA rocket scientists who have been running the program to demand changes to allow them to fly their spacecraft as actual pilots rather than as mere passive passengers in vehicles totally controlled from the ground—threatening to reveal to the press how they were being marginalized despite their public status as heroes, which would in turn damage Congressional support for the program—Cooper, Grissom and Slayton repeat the "no bucks—no Buck Rogers!"