Serial film
Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and typically ended with a cliffhanger, in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape.
Notable American serials of the silent era include The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine made by Pathé Frères and starring Pearl White.
[2] Europe had its own serials: in France Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset launched his series of Nick Carter films in 1908, and the idea of the episodic crime adventure was developed particularly by Louis Feuillade in Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915), and Judex (1916); in Germany, Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert, was a six-part horror serial about an artificial creature.
The classic sound serial, particularly in its Republic format, has a first episode of three reels (approximately 30 minutes in length) and begins with reports of a masked, secret, or unsuspected villain menacing an unspecific part of America.
In the succeeding weeks (usually 11 to 14), an episode of two reels (approximately 20 minutes) was presented, in which the villain and his henchmen commit crimes in various places, fight the hero, and trap someone to make the ending a cliffhanger.
It was scheduled as a standard 12-chapter adventure, but when bad weather on location delayed the filming, writer Barry Shipman was forced to come up with two extra chapters to justify the added expense.
This was an emergency measure at the time, but Republic recognized that it did save money, so the recap chapter became standard practice in almost all of its ensuing serials.
In 1936 Universal scored a coup by licensing the comic-strip character Flash Gordon for the screen; the serial was a smash hit, and was even booked into first-run theaters that usually did not bother with chapter plays.
Universal followed it up with more pop-culture icons: The Green Hornet and Ace Drummond from radio, and Smilin' Jack and Buck Rogers from newspapers.
Universal was more story-conscious than the other studios, and cast its serials with "name" actors recognizable from feature films: Lon Chaney Jr., Béla Lugosi, Dick Foran, The Dead End Kids, Kent Taylor, Robert Armstrong, Irene Hervey, and Johnny Mack Brown, among many others.
In addition to solid screenwriting that many critics thought was quite accomplished, the firm also introduced choreographed fistfights, which often included the stuntmen (usually the ones portraying the villains, never the heroes) throwing things in desperation at one another in every fight to heighten the action.
Republic serials are noted for outstanding special effects, such as large-scale explosions and demolitions, and the more fantastic visuals like Captain Marvel and Rocketman flying.
From newspaper comics, they got Terry and the Pirates, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, and Brenda Starr, Reporter; from the comic books, Blackhawk, Congo Bill, time traveler Brick Bradford, and Batman and Superman (although this last owed more to its radio incarnation, which the credits acknowledged); from radio, Jack Armstrong and Hop Harrigan; from the hero pulp characters like The Spider (two serials: The Spider's Web and The Spider Returns) and The Shadow (despite also being a popular radio series); from the British novelist Edgar Wallace, the first archer-superhero, The Green Archer; and even from television: Captain Video.
[3] Former silent-serial director James W. Horne co-directed The Spider's Web, and his work secured him a permanent position in Columbia's serial unit.
Horne had been a comedy specialist in the 1930s, often working with Laurel and Hardy, and most of his Columbia serials after 1939 are played tongue-in-cheek, with exaggerated villainy and improbable heroics (the hero takes on six men in a fistfight and wins).
There was always a market for action subjects in theaters, so as far back as 1935 independent film companies reissued older serials for new audiences.
As Republic executive David Bloom explained, "Attempts to program serials with full week intervals between chapters during the earlier days of television just about killed them off as effective sales product.
Republic followed suit with condensed silent versions of its own serials, including Adventures of Captain Marvel, G-Men vs. the Black Dragon, and Panther Girl of the Kongo.
With the rise in popularity of Super 8 sound-film equipment in the late 1970s, Columbia issued home-movie prints of entire 15-chapter serials, including Batman and Robin, Congo Bill, and Hop Harrigan.
Film serials released to the home video market from original masters include most Republic titles (with a few exceptions, such as Ghost of Zorro)—which were released by Republic Pictures Home Video on VHS and sometimes laserdisc (sometimes under their re-release titles) mostly from transfers made from the original negatives, The Shadow, and Blackhawk, both released by Sony only on VHS, and DVD versions of Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Hearst), Adventures of Captain Marvel (Republic Pictures), Batman and Batman and Robin (Sony), Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman (Warner).
VCI is offering new Blu-Ray and DVD restorations of many Universal serials, including Gang Busters, Jungle Queen, Pirate Treasure, and three Buck Jones adventures.
The best-known fan-made chapter play is the four-chapter, silent 16mm Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates, made to resemble Republic and Columbia serials of the 1940s and completed in 1966.
[9] Seymour's only daughter, who operated the camera at the age of 8, attests that as of 2008 the serial was indeed filmed but the raw footage remains in cans, unedited.
In 2001, King of the Park Rangers, a one-chapter sound serial was released by Cliffhanger Productions on VHS video tape in sepia.
It concerned the adventures of a Park Ranger named Patricia King and an FBI Agent who track down a trio of killers out to find buried treasure in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
A second ten-chapter serial, The Dangers of Deborah, in which a female reporter and a criminologist fight to uncover the identity of a mysterious villain named The Terror, was released by Cliffhanger Productions in 2008.
The story revolves around a super hero named Wildcat and his attempts to save the fictional Rite City from a masked villain known as the Roach.
In England, in the 1950s and 60s, low-budget six-chapter serials such as Dusty Bates and Masters of Venus were released theatrically, but these were not particularly well-regarded or remembered.
On February 27, 1979, NBC broadcast the first episode of an hour-long weekly television series Cliffhangers!, which had three segments, each with a different serial: a horror story (The Curse of Dracula, starring Michael Nouri), a science fiction/western (The Secret Empire, (inspired by 1935's The Phantom Empire) starring Geoffrey Scott as Marshal Jim Donner and Mark Lenard as Emperor Thorval) and a mystery (Stop Susan Williams!, starring Susan Anton, Ray Walston as Bob Richards, and Albert Paulsen as the villain Anthony Korf).
Though final episodes were shot, the series was canceled and the last program aired on May 1, 1979 before all of the serials could conclude; only The Curse of Dracula was resolved.
