El capitán Video: el amo de la estratósfera

As a little kid, I remember taking the Radio City tour. We walked through a studio where Captain Video Al Hodge, and Ranger Don Hasting, were rehearsing a show. It was supposed to take place under water. The two actors were sitting on barstools, scripts in hand for the read through. The camera was shooting them through a fish tank, with goldfish swimming around. No special effects budget, indeed! All us kids watched the show, which was very imaginative.

In those early days of TV, the first family in a neighborhood to get a TV would often have to host the neighbors' kids, especially for popular shows. As has happened with flat screen TVs, and the first color TVs, they went through the "tavern stage," where bars would buy the first expensive sets most families couldn't afford, to attract customers with sports events, etc. As sets became more affordable, families bought their own. Today's sports bars seem derivations of the tavern stage.

Also interesting to note, in the early days of TV, there were only a few channels, so audiences pretty much all saw the same shows. With today's proliferation of satellite and cable channels, each has a much smaller share of audience. Except for major sports events, and things like the JFK funeral, presidential inaugurations, etc., we share fewer common experiences than in those days.

Who would have thought that a space adventure show could be done with (1) no special effects budget, (2) no prop department, (3) no wardrobe department, (4) sets that generally consisted of blank walls, (5) no space suits or space ships, and (6) a minimum of action? Well, Captain Video for its first year fit these conditions precisely! Yet it became wildly popular. It was more like radio than television, with the active imaginations of the young viewers having to fill in the many blanks. It would have probably continued to be broadcast indefinitely, 30 to 15 min per day, 3 to 5 days per week, if the always underfunded DuMont network had not gone bankrupt in 1955.

In 1949, "Captain Video" started off slowly on the fledgeling television airwaves, but CV soon became the rip-roaring space adventure anthology that is still so well remembered today.

The series' producers, blessed with CV's New York origination, had top Broadway actors with which to work, and scripts by famous playwrights and science-fiction writers. The result was an on-screen synergy of vibrant performances and still-classic storytelling which more than compensated for the stagelike sets from the chronically-impoverished Du Mont Television Network. (In my view, those limited sets were actually a blessing to the series' quality, though it must hardly have seemed that way then.)

Al Hodge, the stolid hero-scientist, and Don Hastings, the trusty young aide, were perfectly cast as traditional role-models in the classic sense.

As the series progressed and matured throughout the early 1950s, adult fan-viewers were as captivated by the CV sagas as the younger audience for which they had been intended. The series developed a huge nightly following, which would have been greater still had Du Mont controlled more airspace than the relatively small number of channels from which it did broadcast.

The demise of the Du Mont Television Network ended the popular series ... and then the tragic destruction of most of the Captain Video kinescopes for their silver content ended any hopes for a rediscovery by younger, newer audiences. The few remaining now-out-of-context CV episodes can only hint at the great on-screen chemistry that was "Captain Video and His Video Rangers".

That the series is still fondly remembered and talked about, even by those far too young to have seen it, can be termed a tribute.

One other thing: many CV scripts and story concepts remain. And I hold the hope that someday, some imaginative producer may latch onto the idea of a revived retelling of the legend of the "master of space and hero of science": Captain Video.

Captain Video, flying fearlessly from planet to planet, protecting the universe from evil, introducing a little child to space ships, exotic peoples and worlds, robots, science, and science fiction. What a legacy to the world! Captain Video is the pioneer who made possible Star Trek and Star Wars and countless other flights of the imagination.

The stories were hokey, the special effects were nonexistent, even the Polaris and the Galaxy were obviously little plastic models with sparks coming out their exhausts, but none of that was important. The courage and the excitement of traveling to strange places and meeting exotic people and bravely defending the weak and the helpless were the things that mattered, the things that lasted through the years, the things that inspired the future.

Captain Video and His Video Rangers is one of the many television series that the "forgotten" fourth network Dumont is most notable for. First airing in 1949, it may be the first popular science fiction show in North America, if not the world, predating Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and the two shows that begun as a result. When Captain Video was broadcasted, it was an unbelievable success. Both children and adults associated with the show and it gave Dumont an audience for once. The show was filmed live, giving way for improvisation, about five or six days a week. This provided >1500 episodes in the shows six year run, which sounds daily considering there were only about 2130 days in that time. This statistic is also unfortunate as it gives way to the fact that almost none of those episodes may ever be seen, but maybe it wasn't too disappointing. Even with the attention the show got, the show was made on a shoestring budget. Some later science fiction shows like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica showed how heavy budgets may defeat audience reception, but Captain Video persisted despite several difficulties. The original actors who played Captain Video and his nemesis Doctor Pauli left due to the low wages obtained and the stress produced from working on such a frequent show. In many of the early episodes, there is a moment where the camera zooms into a monitor that then shows, a western, in a science fiction show! These were taken from films that Dumont had purchased and decided to splice in in order to make the most of their purchase, despite having nothing to do with the story's plot. The show is not very cohesive at all but it may provide enjoying at times. Some later episodes were written by figures synonymous with the science fiction genre such as Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov, but it is very unlikely those episodes still exist. As a result of Dumont's successor wiping, less than a hundred(or even half a hundred) episodes of Captain Video exist. Most surviving episodes are held in the UCLA Film and Television Archive but they have yet to release all of them. Currently, only four episodes from the show are available to be seen, all that is left so far of such a pioneer and forerunner of television history. Those episodes may be seen either on DVD or on the Internet, but their lack of quality and perhaps continuity leaves little to obtain from watching. There was also a movie serial produced by Columbia but that's another story. Overall, Captain Video is an interesting show when it comes to television history but it has little to show with its cheap quality and few episodes.