[1] A separate 30-minute spinoff series called The Secret Files of Captain Video aired Saturday mornings, alternating with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, from September 5, 1953, to May 29, 1954, a total of 20 episodes.

Sponsors included Post Cereals, Skippy Peanut Butter, DuMont-brand television sets, and PowerHouse candy bars from Peter Paul.

The Captain received his orders from "The Commissioner of Public Safety" (surname Carey), whose responsibilities took in the entire Solar System, as well as human space colonies on exoplanets.

Captain Video was the first adventure hero explicitly designed by DuMont's "idea man" Larry Menkin for early live television.

[citation needed] A spinoff series, The Secret Files of Captain Video, aired on Saturdays from September 5, 1953, to May 29, 1954, alternating with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

However, when the Buck Rogers TV show was announced by ABC, DuMont moved Captain Video's adventures out into space to compete.

In early episodes, Captain Video's opponent was Doctor Pauli (played by Hal Conklin, a writer-actor best known for making dozens of short films in the 1920s and 1930s).

The Doctor Pauli character was an inventor who wore gangster-style pinstriped suits, and spoke with the snarl of a film version of a Nazi or Soviet.

Like the last few theatrical serial films, the television series' plots often involved inventions created by Captain Video or the evil genius, but obviously made from hardware store odds-and-ends, with much double-talk regarding their fantastic properties.

The series originally was broadcast from a studio in a building occupied by the New York City branch of the famous Philadelphia department store Wanamaker's, and the production crew simply would go downstairs for props, often just a few minutes before airtime.

In the first ship, the X-9 (later replaced briefly by the X-10), the crew at takeoff lay upon tilted bunk beds on their elbows, a posture based upon space travel theories of the time.

Conversely, The Video Ranger was played during the entire run of the show by teenaged Don Hastings, who later became a longtime soap opera star on As the World Turns.

[4] Many premiums were offered by sponsors of the show, including space helmets – which received a boost when, as aforementioned, actor Art Carney's Ed Norton character wore one on an episode of The Honeymooners, secret code guns, flying saucer rings, decoder badges, photo-printing rings, and Viking rockets complete with launchers.

[8] This improved after 1952 when scripts began being written by such major science fiction writers active at the time as Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance, and Arthur C. Clarke.

In the book The Box, an oral history of early television,[9] cast members told author Jeff Kisseloff of miscues during the live programs, some forcing actors to turn away from the camera lest they be seen laughing.

However, the stories in the surviving kinescopes could take place in 1950, as when Dr. Pauli plots to rob a bank in Shanghai, or centuries into the future, as when Captain Video seeks to establish a reliable mail service for far-flung interstellar (or at least interplanetary) space colonies (depicted in a surviving episode generally called "Chauncey Everett") or struggles to prevent the many space stations circling Pluto from being destroyed by an approaching comet.

Bram Nossen, who played Dr. Pauli, dropped out after suffering a nervous breakdown from having to appear on TV six days a week, and was replaced by Hal Conklin.

The jarring change in actors who looked nothing like each other was explained by saying that the villainous Dr. Pauli had undergone plastic surgery to outwit Captain Video.

[13] Columbia Pictures made a movie serial, starring Judd Holdren, under the name Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere (1951).

Some of these comics were used as the basis for a British TV Annual, a hardcover collection produced in time for Christmas, which also made the claim that man would venture into space in 1970 and would have a Moon landing by 2000.

The series is briefly referenced in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, when the protagonist Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) sees his young son in a spaceman costume.

The 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once delayed a scheduled TV announcement until after Captain Video had aired, because he feared everyone would be watching that show.

Arthur C. Clarke's experience on the show and his personal friendship with Al Hodge caused him to write "Security Check" a short story about the prop man on a thinly disguised "Captain Video" kiddie program who receives a visit from some of the first men in black to ever appear in science fiction.

After the protagonist, author Harrison William Shepherd, is persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his stenographer and friend Violet Brown observes, "After the hearing he'd stopped writing, for good he said.