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Watching Any Good Serials?
Topic Started: Apr 12 2006, 09:28 AM (88,365 Views)
panzer the great & terrible
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Mouth Breather
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I take 'em all the time. I still buy serials but rarely watch them. Go figure.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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riddlerider
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No excuses, Gravy! The serial gods must be served!

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Don Daredevil
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 20 2008, 05:45 AM
Of the 12 serials I'm watching, most are at chapter 10, so we're winding down to the climaxes. I read somewhere in this part of the balcony about cheats, I think that's what they're called, I think their crappy. 2 examples I've seen lately.... Monster And The Ape, where a boulder is dropped on our hero. At the end of the chapter we clearly see the boulder smash on top of a rag doll of our hero. In the next chapter the hero easily rolls away from the boulder, even though it landed squarely on his noggin......crappy!!!! Next up - Adv Of Captain Marvel, where a lady is unconscience at a steering wheel of a car that is going around in circles down a parking garage and is headed straight for a head-on collision with a building across the street. At the end of the chapter the car smashes into the building....will she be okey next week????? Well, that was just a pigment of my imagination (either, black, white, or grey), the car is saved by the Shazamiam one and never hits the building ....crappie (go fish)!!!!

This is my biggest gripe with the 20 or so serials I've seen so far. Blow up a building one week and show our hero escaping the next is fine with me as long as you're still blowing up the building the next week.

One thing I find amusing but it doesn't get in my craw...Captain Marvel will knock the hell outta someone's jaw but the perp will get up and have more fight in him. Wouldn't a punch from the 'Ol Cap shatter someone's jaw????

LOL :D ... Ya gotta remember that serials were made for the youngsters.
At that time the studios didn't give enough credit to the youngsters for remembering what transpired from week to week ... nor enough credit for thier visual retention. Boy, were they surprised ! :D

It's not like these things are A, or even B films ... they fall waaaaay somewhere else down the list. :D
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
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I don't know DD....I think some of the serials I've seen are more entertaining than some B movies I've watched.....definately :)
It's like Rodney King used to say, "Can't we all get a bong."
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Don Daredevil
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 20 2008, 02:08 PM
I don't know DD....I think some of the serials I've seen are more entertaining than some B movies I've watched.....definately :)

Oh yeah, I agree, but I was refering mostly to the continuity and cliffhanger "cheats" aspects. The studios back in those days must not of given any forethought about how well us kids could remember from week to week. :D

They just covered up/altered the following weeks chapters any way they could just to insure the Hero/s survival. Didn't they think we would notice ? <_< :D
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
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What was the target age for serials? I think teenagers would've liked them.
It's like Rodney King used to say, "Can't we all get a bong."
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KanSmiley
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 23 2008, 06:39 AM
What was the target age for serials? I think teenagers would've liked them.

You started going at about the age your mother trusted you to behave yourself in the theatre. I would guess at around the age of 8 or 9. i started at about 8 years old and went to the Saturday Matinees fairly regularly until I was in my early teens.

Kan
http://www.saturday-matinee-memories.com/

intoxicated, adj.: When you feel sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
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JazzGuyy
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I would say the prime age for serials was 10-12 year-old boys. All the gee-whiz elements, fistfights, gunfire and explosions and the total lack of any romantic interests would indicate this. Some of the serials of the pre-1935 era seem to be aimed a slightly older audience since there is a lot more sexiness to them.
TANSTAAFL!
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
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I'd like to think I'd have gone to see Undersea Kingdom, The Phantom Creeps and Flash Gordon well into my teens, had I grown up in that era.
It's like Rodney King used to say, "Can't we all get a bong."
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Don Daredevil
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KanSmiley
Jun 23 2008, 06:17 AM
Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 23 2008, 06:39 AM
What was the target age for serials? I think teenagers would've liked them.

You started going at about the age your mother trusted you to behave yourself in the theatre. I would guess at around the age of 8 or 9. i started at about 8 years old and went to the Saturday Matinees fairly regularly until I was in my early teens.

Kan

Same here ... except a year or two younger.
My Grandmother at that time used to work at a Theatre and she would take me too work with her on Saturday mornings. Lucky me, huh ? :D
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panzer the great & terrible
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Serials died when I was thirteen so I don't know if I would have sought them out as a teenager. I sure as hell sought them out in the serial revival when I was in my twenties.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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riddlerider
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Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer
Jun 23 2008, 03:39 AM
What was the target age for serials?

This, truly, is the $64,000 question for anybody who researches serials.

Conventional wisdom holds that, by the sound era, serials were geared toward young viewers, especially 10-to-15-year-old boys. In theory, the perfect serial would thrill kids and not annoy parents -- who, in at least some cases, were expected to accompany their children to the theater. In actuality, few sound serials could be taken seriously by adults. It's true that serials featuring such famous characters as Flash Gordon, the Lone Ranger, and Superman played the big downtown houses that catered to "family trade," but in these cases it was always presumed that the chapter plays appeared primarily to the kids and were simply tolerated by the adults who were waiting to see Clark Gable, or Joan Crawford, or whomever.

Going back to the silent era, the market for serials was more complicated. In the genre's earliest days, pre-World War I, serials were clearly intended for adult audiences -- especially since most of the early ones were promoted with fictionalizations that appeared in newspapers, which typically were purchased and read by adults rather than children. But the increasing reliance on simple melodramatic formulae attracted kids to the serial early on. In news stories from movie-industry trade journals dating as far back as 1918, you can find references to serials appealing primarily to kids. In fact, the belief that kids would be adversely affected by depictions of crime and violence was behind the industry's 1921 push to self-censor the serials.

And yet, exhibitor reports in those same trade journals refer to running chapters at weeknight shows, sometimes making a serial the prime attraction of a weekly show (usually Monday or Tuesday night) that consisted solely of short subjects. These programs drew largely adult audiences. I've read accounts of theatergoers driving into town from miles around, in the middle of a snowstorm, to catch the final chapter of a serial that played only on weeknights.

I've explained some of this before; sorry for the repetition.

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Laughing Gravy
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You needn't apologize; you're never less than fascinating.

My father came to live with me late in life, and the first serial he watched with us and the FNF gang was SPY SMASHER, which he thought was hilarious, not least of all because of the repetitousness inherent in the format. As the years passed, though, and he saw more and more serials, he grew to enjoy them very much; I particularly recall him liking King of the Texas Rangers and Daredevils of the Red Circle.

I asked him if he saw serials as a kid, and he said yes, during the silent movie days. He couldn't recall any specific titles. But one day he shocked me with, "I can recall seeing a serial with, I think it was Gene Autry, and a bunch of robots. There were guys with buckets on their heads, too." Now, unless he saw this on TV in the 1960s, which I seriously doubt, he saw it in 1935, the year he turned 16. It was of course the middle of the Great Depression, but he told me that he went to movies as often as he can. Which reminds me of another story.

Me: "Dad, do you remember what you were doing when you heard Pearl Harbor had been attacked?"

"Yes. I had just come out of the movie theatre, and people were running around everywhere yelling that the Japanese had attacked us. It was Sunday afternoon."

"I don't suppose you recall what movie you'd seen?"

"I'll never forget it. It was Sergeant York."

"Oh, with Gary Cooper!"

"No, I was with some broad."
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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OzRadio
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As bad as they are, I'm a serial nut. I'm halfway through the Adventures of Smilin Jack and have enjoyed it so far. There's perhaps less action than some but it's certainly less off the wall than many and the story is pretty straight forward.
Ryan
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igsjr
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Smilin' Jack is a really first-rate serial, although it's kind of like the Rodney Dangerfield of chapter-plays: it don't get no respect.
"Life is in color--but black-and-white is more realistic..." -- Samuel Fuller, director

So many DVDs...so little time...
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