Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All

Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov travel to the planet Mongo to fight the evil emperor Ming the Merciless who is secretly giving military technology to Hitler.

Despite Filmation reuse and overused of recycled cells (notably Ming laughing) this truly is one of Flash Gordon's greatest adventures. The setting and scenes ooze the imagination, with giant statues, palaces, space crafts and monsters. The 1980's live action movie borrows plenty from this Filmation film. Although shown in 22 December 1983 in the UK on ITV it was split up and used as the bases of the Saturday morning series Flash Gordon (1979).

Written by Samuel A. Peeples, whose credits include the original Star Trek series, its packed with great action set ups and array of memorable characters including the voice talent of Melendy Britt as Aura (later she voiced She-ra) and Ted Cassidy's Chewbacca lion like Thun. It's only short coming is that Dale Arden is sorely underused, reduced to a damsel in distress.

It's edgy has a great atmosphere and even delivers a twist ending that outdoes it's 1980's live action counterpart.

This animation was my first contact with magical world of Flash Gordon. I had never before even heard of him, although there was some similarities with one Micky Mouse story. This film was made with love and it shows: the animation is absolutely fabulous.

I never saw this movie in its original network broadcast (NBC late night Sunday after the local news) and assumed that it was merely a compilation of the first 4 episodes of the TV series, "The New Adventures of Flash Gordon." In fact, "Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All" was an original movie separate from the TV series. This movie is the pilot episode made by Filmation to sell the TV series to the networks.

Although some of the footage from this pilot movie was recycled and reused in the TV series, the movie tells an original story that parallels some of the story elements from the TV series, but also has many scenes that never appeared in the series at all. As just one example, the TV series begins with the arrival on Mongo by Flash, Dale, and Zarkov. The movie begins earlier, with Flash still on Earth in Poland in 1939, as the Germans are bombing Warsaw. Flash later meets Dale Arden on a commercial airplane flight, and they both meet Zarkov after they bail out of their plane before its crash. Eventually, the three blast off in Zarkov's rocket immediately before a flaming comet destroys Zarkov's lab. (The first scene in the credits for the TV series included several seconds of this footage of their departure from Earth.) All of this is straight out of the original Alex Raymond comic strips, and the entire movie is faithful to the spirit and sense of wonder in the original 1930s and 1940s comic strips.

This movie is much more adult in tone than the Saturday morning TV series it inspired,which may explain why NBC effectively buried this movie by airing it late at night on Sunday. Although broadcast standards have changed since 1979, this movie would have been considered too violent to be aired on Saturday morning in the 1980s. This is unfortunate because this movie is so entertaining and well animated. The story is superb, and the animation is superior to most of the animation in the TV series. (The best animation in the TV series is the animation reused from this movie.) This is one of those rare cartoons (like Jonny Quest) that can be enjoyed equally by adults and children. It is a crime that this movie has never been released on home video (yet), since it seems never to be aired on TV. You may be able to find a bootleg copy on eBay if you are fortunate.

Filmation has gotten its ample share of criticism of their somewhat slap-dash animation, and not undeservedly (although the same can be said for pretty much every animation studio producing Saturday morning fare). Their animation did improve in the '70s as they, somewhat surprisingly, adopted rather expensive and intesively-detailed rotoscoping technology to their bag of tricks. This upgrade was evident, if overly overused, in their later offerings of Tarzan, Zorro, The Lone Ranger, and so forth.

None of these come close to comparing to the masterpiece that is "Flash Gordon - The Greatest Adventure of All".

While the animation style is utterly familiar as being Filmation's, there is a subtle grace here that is not evident in even their better Saturday morning productions. There are actually entire passages where the lip movements match the dialog. What you have to understand is that Filmation was not known for this type of detail, so to the initiated, it's nothing short of breathtaking to behold.

The story is extremely faithful to the comics and mythos, while having some darker, more realistic elements added, another pleasant surprise.

While initially intended as a live action feature, costs mandated it be animated, and it's much better for it. NBC were so impressed that they shelved this movie in favour of ponying up more geld for a Saturday morning series (not going into that here), finally airing it in 1982, three years later.

This can be found on YouTube, as well as other places around the web, so it isn't difficult to locate, but it would be wonderful to have a proper, official blu-ray release.

Flash Gordon began as a comic strip drawn by Alex Raymond. In the 1930s it was the inspiration for three much-loved movie serials starring Buster Crabbe, which George Lucas says were his inspiration for Star Wars. In the 1950s, there was a really bad live action TV version. In the 1970s, there was a camp live action film, most famous for its Queen soundtrack. "Frash Wawa, he saved every one of us..." Al Williamson drew some beautiful Flash Gordon comic books, before moving on to draw the Star Wars comic strip.

The Flash Gordon comic strip is now all reprint. My favorite Flash Gordon stories are those written for the comic strip by Harry Harrison, of Stainless Steal Rat fame, and drawn by Dan Barry, reprinted in Comics Revue.

This TV movie, also released as a Saturday morning cartoon, was written by Star Trek writer Sam Peeples, and more or less faithfully follows the early Alex Raymond comic strip adventures. The less polished, more repetitious, Saturday morning version is now out on DVD.