Flash Gordon saves the universe on December 5, 1980


It is a little-known fact that the Earth was very nearly destroyed on December 5, 1980. The instrument of this near-apocalypse was a motion picture called Flash Gordon, directed by a man named Mike Hodges who, one suspects, had been locked in a screening room with too many Saturday-morning serials and an industrial quantity of gin. The result was released upon an unsuspecting planet exactly forty-five years ago today, and the universe has never quite recovered.

Picture the scene. Somewhere in the trackless depths of space, the rogue planet Mongo is being steered – by hand, apparently, because Emperor Ming the Merciless has strong opinions about power steering – directly toward Earth. Ming, played by Max von Sydow with the sort of gravitas normally reserved for reading the shipping forecast during an alien invasion, has decided that Earth is simply too cheerful and must be punished. His solution is to hurl hot hail, cold hail, tidal waves, and the occasional bit of erratic wind at us until we learn to be miserable like everyone else in his empire.

Enter Flash Gordon. Not a sophisticated man. Not, by any reasonable definition, a man with a plan. Flash Gordon is a professional American football player whose chief qualifications for saving the universe appear to be blond hair, an ability to run in slow motion, and the sort of grin that suggests he has never once considered the possibility that he might be in danger. 

He is accompanied by Dale Arden (a travel agent who packs evening gowns for interplanetary crises) and Dr. Hans Zarkov, a scientist so deranged that he has built a rocket in his greenhouse and intends to fly it into Mongo because, well, why not? Together this trio – who between them possess the survival instincts of a stunned goldfish – blunder into the middle of Ming’s court, accidentally incite three separate rebellions, and somehow persuade every winged, lizarded, or metallic species in the galaxy to put aside centuries of perfectly reasonable enmity in order to belt out a rousing chorus of “Flash! Ah-ahhhh!” at the climax.

It was all terribly serious business presented in the most unserious way imaginable. And yet, against all probability, it works. It works because it is utterly, shamelessly sincere in its own absurdity. There is no smirk behind the camera, no ironic winking at the audience. When Flash finally impales Ming on his own rocket ship while Queen reaches a note normally only audible to dogs, you do not laugh at the film. You stand up in the cinema and cheer, because the universe has been saved by a man in red underpants and the best soundtrack in recorded history.

In the end, Flash Gordon managed to achieve something few films ever do: it found its purpose not in the cinemas of 1980, but in the glorious, muddled retrospection of later years. It’s a tale of a man who accidentally saved the universe, mostly by just showing up and refusing to be terribly good at anything specific, which, when you think about it, is a very human way to go about things.

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more