Smashing Spies On Home Fronts

Thanks to Mike (Then Playing) Cline For Sending Me This Wonderful Image

Were Serials the Salvation of 40's Youth?

Now here is why movies once knew a Golden Era. It thrived in part for displays in the street powerful as performance inside. This was no new dodge, barkers outside carny tents since a past century giving preview to lure crowds for the cootch show within. Above could well have been Opening Day for Spy Smasher, as in Chapter One on the Civic Theatre’s screen (Farmington, Michigan), and what was any Chapter One but first taste of opiate you’d be back eleven more times to get high on? Maybe serials like Spy Smasher kept youth off hard stuff that wracked a later counterculture. How many would dig Kane Richmond at heroic pursuit, then go looking for hallucinogens? Seems to me anti-climactic, but movies being always my drug-of-choice must be factored, plus fact there were no more serials by the 60’s. Again to the Civic's display, note the more than life-size standee. I’ll bet not a one is left today. To save it, you'd have to run gauntlet of scrap drives, find storage space at home, preserve/protect the fragile and awkward thing for a next seventy-five years, a test of any fan's dedication. Surely there were weightier matters to cope with in 1942.

The Rains Came In 1967 and Washed Away One of These at the Liberty

Hope it didn’t rain that day and ruin such a striking display, similar concern I had when the Liberty brought back Panther Girl of the Kongo for a 1967 effort at making us serial-conscious again. It ran incongruous with Saturday serves of Frankenstein Created Woman, Island of Terror, others '67 released, all preceded by Phyllis Coates aboard an elephant, and in black and white. Serials were welcome and prolific on N.C. TV, but having one turn up theatrically was like dead rising from tombs. Point is, the Liberty had a Panther Girl one-sheet pinned to a free-standing frame out front and left there for the run of 12 chapters, weather be hanged. Republic posters tended toward dynamic even where films did not, and I coveted this one, but time, heat, and rain took pitiless toll. Within a few weeks, the thing was ruined. Sic Gloria transit mundi, as so went Panther Girl to peel off and disposal, though later, a Spy Smasher lobby card (above) came my way from Liberty storage, minor distress put back to beauty by experts at Lumiere Poster Restoration. An 11X14 card is far more likely to survive, of course, than sky-reaching ballyhoo Farmington's Civic crowd saw.

Of course, I had to see some of Spy Smasher, having more serials put back than years left to watch them (“Do you suppose he ever looked at this stuff?,” they'll say as someday it is all hauled to the dump). I keep DVD's for easy reference, you see, so no hoarding here, says I to doubtful listeners. Couple of weeks ago was an auction of pressbooks for comic-based serials, things like the Superman and Batmans for 40’s Columbia, and Flash Gordon from the 30’s. Prices realized? In the thousands. These are beyond heroes now, iconic past a point of once-dime purchase. I drove past a theatre last week and there was a new Captain Marvel on the marquee, and didn't we get more Captain Americas a few years back? You cannot compete among fan following of these and expect to win, my interest way too casual to deserve placement among them. When a comic book sells for three million dollars, it's time to throw in your dice and go home. I let those pressbooks pass, having seen futility of bidding. They are holy relics and I am not worthy of them. Perhaps a best quality collectors can have is knowing when to pull back so hungrier lions can feed. 

But what of Spy Smasher? Last night I watched some chapters, a fancy DVD rendition from Accomics (multiple tinting throughout --- inauthentic, but no fuss). This serial isn’t just good --- it is exhilarating. Nazis capture Spy Smasher (Kane Richmond) in the first scene, after a floor-up-a-staircase fistic exchange, bullwhip him in a dungeon, put him before a firing squad, he escapes, meets his twin brother he long thought was dead, they sock-fest more Huns, this in a first six or so minutes. I wonder that children’s heads didn’t explode in 1942, or make them age-lie their way into uniform. Kane Richmond was a swell serial hero. Remember him supporting Bogart and company in Action In The North Atlantic, an unaccustomed “A” stopover? Spy Smasher came where Republic rolled at peak efficiency, each chapter-play a wow. Might viewers be induced to "binge-watch" old serials like with latter-day TV series? Spy Smasher and (better) others of Republic origin put pep in my step, even if I can but imagine impact they once had. Smasher derived from “Whiz” comics, Smasher’s frank credo a memorable one: Death To Spies In America! World War Two made it OK for children to be bloodthirsty, but was it as easy to turn off that impulse once peace was back?