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We
pick up the action right after Flash
Gordon saves Vultan from Ming the
Merciless’ shock troops, the
aesthetically pleasing Metal Men.
(How pleasing? Just ask George Lucas. See
illustration below.) His
floating city destroyed, Vultan -- the king
of the Hawk Men, joins the rebellion
against Ming. Allying himself with Flash,
Prince Barin and Thun the Lion Man, they
must abandon the burning refuge and head
for Barin’s kingdom of Arboria. Preparing
to disembark, they receive a psychic S.O.S.
from Flash’s friend, Dr. Hans Zarkov. (Who
along with Dale Arden, is held prisoner in
Ming’s palace.) Zarkov warns that
Arboria is under attack from below, but
before he can get too specific, Ming cuts
him off.
The
rebels reach Arboria just in time to fend
of an attack from the burrowing Mole Men.
Making quick work of Ming’s minions, the
rebels commandeer their Mole Machine. They
hatch a plan to use it to dig their way
into Mingo City and rescue Dale and Zarkov.
And they'd better
hurry up, because Ming has announced his
plans to marry Dale -- and we get to see
the inside of his Harem of exotic alien
women. (Quite
a site for those of us reaching puberty at
the time this first aired. More on this
subject later.) He also announces
his plan to add Earth to his empire -- by
basically running the planet Mongo into
it!
After
a harrowing trip through Mongo’s molten
core, the rebels arrive in time to disrupt
the wedding. While Barin and the others
hold off the Metal Men, Flash and Zarkov
go after Ming. They rescue Dale, and in
the process, manage to destroy Mongo’s
planetary controls, diverting its crash
course with Earth. The
only problem with that is, Mongo is now
spinning out of control, toward deep space,
leaving our Earth heroes stranded there.
Back
in the main hall, the attacking party
can’t hold and is forced to retreat
before the Earthlings can get back. Flash
steals a rocket car and leads quite a
merry chase -- but eventually crashes into
a river, and they are presumed dead.
Ah,
but our heroes are tougher than that, and
swim to apparent safety. I say apparent
because they’re barely dry when the
Beast Men capture them and drag them into
the desert toward their temple. They enter,
and Flash and company discover they’re
to be sacrificed in front of a giant
statue of the despot Ming. But they get a
last second pardon from the governor, so
to speak, as the giant statue speaks and
tells them to hold the captives until Ming
comes for them. Mongo has less gravity
than Earth, so Flash is able to do some
superhuman things and engineers their
escape. They shimmy up the giant statue
and find an empty control room inside the
head. They also find an escape hatch out
the back, and manage to cut off the
pursuing Beast Men.
Once
outside, they see Zarkov’s rocket come
in for a landing. (It's
the rocket they came to Mongo on that Ming
annexed into his own fleet, if memory
serves.) The hatch opens and a
search party, led by Princess Aura,
Ming’s daughter, disembarks and begins
searching for the missing prisoners. (Aura,
*sigh*, that’s her on the ostrich over
there. Sorry, puberty memories again.)
The
Earthlings hatch another plan. While Flash
distracts the search party, Zarkov and
Dale recapture the ship. Flash circles
back, barely beating the pursuing Aura,
and once again, they manage to escape
Ming’s clutches. They
blast off, but Ming doesn’t give up that
easy, either, and sends a couple of
fighter-rockets after them. They manage to
lose the pursuing crafts by flying into
the fog-enshrouded Sea of Mystery. Setting
course for Arboria, they appear to be home
free when the rocket is seized in a
tractor beam and crashes into the water.
As
they sink toward the bottom, our heroes
appear to be in serious trouble, but are
rescued by shadowy figures. They awaken in
the laboratories of the under sea kingdom
of Corelia. Shocked that they aren't
drowning, the Corelian Queen tells them
they’ve been surgically altered to
breathe underwater. None to happy about
their condition, Flash schmoozes the Queen,
to distract her, until Zarkov can figure
out a way to reverse the process, so they
can escape.
Meanwhile,
Ming has managed to track them down. He
demands that the Corellians turn the
Earthlings over. When the Queen refuses
his ultimatum, he send his Mer-Men to
attack. The battle goes bad for the good
guys, because the bad fish-guys manage to
knock out the tractor beam (the
domed city’s only defense.) Zarkov
saves the day, however, when he figures a
way to harness the beam's power supply and
boils the water outside the dome, cooking
the Mer-Men, and saves Corelia. (Wow,
boiled Mer-Men. I’ll bet that really
stinks.)
As
a reward for saving the city, the
Corellians revert them back to normal, and
return Flash and the others to the surface
world. The episode ends as they once again
head off for Arboria. Will they make it
this time? Tune in next week to find out.
The
End
Now
as much as I love the Buster Crabbe
serials, and Dino De Laurentis’ lavishly
manic feature film -- hell,
I even enjoyed Flesh
Gordon,
although my faulty memory remembered it as
soft-core porn until I recently watched it
again, and realized, that no, it’s a hard
core porn --
I'll have to say my absolute
favorite interpretation of Alex
Raymond’s ray-gun firing, rocket-jockey
was Filmation’s wonderfully animated
adaptation from the late '70s: The
New Adventures of Flash Gordon.
Every
Saturday morning, I sat glued to the tube,
watching Flash and his buddies battle Ming
and his evil minions. Each week, you were
introduced to a new exotic locale of Mongo
as he recruited more rebels to help
overthrow Ming. There were the forests of
Arboria, the underwater city of Corelia,
the harsh deserts of (I
can't remember), and the high steel
of the Hawk Men’s Sky City. And just as
adverse as the locales, were the locals:
Hawk Men, Lizard Men, Beast Men, Mole Men,
Mer-Men, Metal Men and Thun the Lion Man. (In
fact, if there was one thing I didn’t
like about the big D’s movie was
Thun’s absence.)
Now
not only were there men, but there were
also exotic alien women, and this cartoon
boasts some of the sexiest cartoon babes
ever committed to animation cels; it was
either Aura or Princess Ariel, from Thundarr
the Barbarian,
that commanded the most of my attention. (Oh
like you’ve never thought about this
kind of stuff when you were a kid!)
The
cartoon sat in a nice little corner of my
over indulged brain for about twenty
years, when I found a copy of it for sale
on eBay. I bid on it and lost. Then there
was another one. Lost that one, too. (I
guess there were others who had fond
memories of this cartoon.) Finally,
on the third attempt -- after fending off
a late sniper bid, I won.
The
tape arrived, and I frantically jammed it
into the old VCR. As it cued up, I felt
myself regressing as that volcano erupted
and the theme music cranked up. Then, to
my horror, amidst the credits appeared Flash
Gordon: To Save the Earth...Part Two.
Aarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!
You
see, I remember back in the early '80s
they took the series and spliced it
together into a feature length film -- and
I thought that that’s what I
bought. No such luck. It was a little
disappointing, but that quickly evaporated
as I immersed myself in my childhood.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Pure
animation enthusiasts may be a little
disappointed because a lot of the
animation is recycled. (The
characters use the same motions over and
over again.) However, it's clean,
smooth, and extremely detailed, with no
distracting lapses. (A quick eye
will spot John Krickfalusi’s name in the
credits.)
If
you couldn’t tell already, I really love
this cartoon. Now normally, when you
revisit things from your childhood, you
usually come away disappointed. That
definitely wasn’t the case here.
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