Terry and the Pirates

I'm "trying" to watch this, and the other recent serial offerings on TCM Saturday mornings. I'm not sertain how many more chapters of this embarrassingly bad Columbia serial I can endure. The acting is only a step above amateur, "cliffhangers" not at all exciting, the gorilla is just stupid, and the plot not only implausible but almost non-existent. If TCM wants to run serials, even Monograms would be better than this. Republic was the greatest serial company. Universal was a strong second. Columbia produced a few worth viewing. This is not one of them.

Unlike the other reviewer, I really enjoyed this. I barely remember the old Terry and the Pirates comic strip. The other reviewer was upset because the serial wasn't the same. The comic strip was boring, this definitely isn't. I can honestly say this is one of the very few serials that actually got more interesting in the later chapters. There are plenty of death traps, fights, chases, explosions, pretty girls, and dastardly bad guys to please most serial fans.

It was kind of fun to see several of the old western bad guys head to the jungle to make life miserable for our heroes and heroines. Terry and the Pirates looked pretty darn good too, with a handful of solid sets. There was also quite a few effects in this film. Some stock footage was used in the early chapters but it was edited well and didn't pose any problem as far as I could determine.

The plot is pretty thin as one might expect with a serial. Some thugs led by the Fang are looking for a fortune in treasure located near the domain of the Dragon Lady. Lots of characters play into the action and it all works pretty well as a vehicle at least. I thought the cast was really good and the entire production tries hard to please. I think they succeeded. The fights were well staged and the death traps were cool looking. Throw in a really cool gorilla, some croc wrestling, a few large scale battles, some bizarre costumes, some pretty well done humor (or camp if you will) and you have a true winner. There really aren't any name stars but Terry and the Pirates was well cast. I definitely recommend this, especially to fans of the jungle serials.

OK, I know that serials in the 40s were definitely B-features, but this is plain awful, especially in view of the fact that it was (loosely) based on one of the best comic strips of all time, chuck full of atmosphere, romance, great characters, and fine artwork. The entire serial seems to be one long running chase punctuated by fist fights every few minutes. The best part of each episode is the rapid-fire narrated preview of the next chapter.

As the serial begins we find Terry and Pat Ryan disembarking and heading upriver through jungles and zebras and hippos (oh my)...er...wait a minute, wasn't the comic strip set in China? This appears to be Malaya or India, or the hills of the Columbia back lot with a few potted palm trees, so right away we lose the exotic setting of the original. We never see a single Chinese junk, much less any pirates, unless you count the guys in cheap beach robes who chase our heroes around for 15 chapters.

William Tracy at age 23 does a pretty fair job with the role of Terry, trying hard to act young by letting his voice crack every little while and maintaining a high level of enthusiasm, and Jeff York is passable as Pat Ryan, given the material he has to work with. That's about it. Dick Curtis as Fang is the worst inscrutable Oriental villain ever, Allen Jung as Connie has ludicrous rubber ears, the Dragon Lady (Sheila Darcy), supposedly an Asian temptress, looks and talks more like she's from Cleveland, and the high priest looks like a Shakespearian actor who wandered onto the wrong set. The worst sin of all is that they have Big Stoop talk! Every Terry fan knows that he never uttered a single word, and his lines are all throwaway anyhow, so why do that? The villains all talk like extras from a cowboy movie, and, yep, there's good old Charles King, bad guy of a hundred westerns, as a member of the gang, with a guy in a raggedy gorilla costume thrown in for good measure. (Now that I think about it, he gets more footage than most of the other actors.)

You can try treating this as high camp and laugh it up for a few chapters, but it gets old in a hurry as there's no real mystery and nothing very new happens. I've always wondered why someone like Steven Spielberg didn't grab this great story and give it the full Indiana Jones treatment; maybe someday someone will, but until then we have only this really bad rendition to live with. Maybe the TV series in the 50s was better, I haven't seen it, but somehow I don't think so.

Hang onto your secret rings, fans, we may yet see the real thing.