Thrills! Chills! Mystery in the Air!
In the 1930s and ’40s, heroic pilots engaged enemy aircraft — every Saturday morning.
- By Rebecca Maksel
- Air & Space magazine, November 2010
Over 15 episodes, Captain Midnight survived bombs, fire, near drowning, and more, before delivering criminal mastermind Ivan Shark to the police — a departure from the comic strip, in which Shark was devoured by a polar bear.
Courtesy Bill Allen/Allen Airways Collection
Video Gallery
The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack (1943)
A daredevil pilot takes on Axis evil.
Danger Flight (1939)
Tailspin Tommy does it again.
Ace Drummond (1936)
Based (loosely) on the exploits of WWI hero Eddie Rickenbacker.
Was it Lindbergh and his solo flight across the Atlantic or dashing stunt pilot Frank Clarke who finally made airplanes the stars of Saturday morning movie serials? In the first serial with an aviation theme, the 1928 Eagle of the Night (a title echoing Charles Lindbergh’s nickname “Lone Eagle”), Clarke continued a tradition he’d begun in the 1921 silent film Stranger Than Fiction, in which he flew a Curtiss Canuck biplane off the roof of a 10-story building. After Clarke blazed the trail, almost 20 aviation-themed serials were made. Many of the kids who watched the Saturday morning thrillers would have those scenes in mind when they trained a few years later for aerial battle in World War II.
Nearly forgotten today, movie serials were wildly popular with audiences from the 1910s through the 1950s. The Edison Company produced the first serial (What Happened to Mary?) in 1912, and the format’s immediate success led to dozens of copycats, including The Perils of Pauline, which helped introduce the cliffhanger as a plot device. Most serials ran for 12 to 15 episodes, letting the plot slowly unfold every week over several months.
Directors of aviation serials were eager to hire real pilots. The 1937 serial The Mysterious Pilot starred the record-setter Frank Hawks, billed as the “fastest airman in the world.” (He died in 1938, shortly after the serial’s completion, when he crashed his Gwinn Aircar.) And the first Tailspin Tommy, in 1934, starred Maurice “Loop-the-Loop” Murphy (world-record holder for 120 consecutive loops), a stunt pilot from Howard Hughes’ 1930 film Hell’s Angels.
But the serials’ realism didn’t extend to aircraft: A single scene might feature an actual airplane, a model, and stock footage—all of different aircraft.
The era of serials featuring a dashing aviator came to an end in 1952, with Columbia Pictures’ Blackhawk. While less than 10 percent of Americans had taken even one commercial flight by then, putting pilots on the big screen no longer seemed the stuff of adventure. And so, to recapture the same wonder inspired by early aviation, serial storylines turned to space pilots and interplanetary travel.
ACE DRUMMOND
Based on a comic-strip representation of American World War I ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the character of Ace Drummond is as suave a hero as you’ll find in aviation serials. Drummond, writes Rickenbacker biographer W. David Lewis, “was essentially a projection of Rickenbacker’s inner vision of himself, living out a fantasy life based on his own experiences and his faith in technology as the master key to progress.” John King, a vocalist who bursts into song during each installment, plays Drummond in this 1936 serial, in which an evil mastermind known as “the Dragon” tries to drive International Airways and its Clipper Ship air service out of Mongolia.
“For movie audiences at the time,” says Mark Taylor, the motion picture archivist at the National Air and Space Museum, “the Clippers represented the leading edge of air transportation, similar to showing the Boeing 747 or Concorde in movies of the 1970s and 1980s. In both cases, these aircraft represented the epitome of luxurious long-range air transportation.”
Best line:
Ace Drummond to Peggy Trainor:
“We’re gonna crash! Duck under the cowling!”
Comments (2)
Excellent summaries for some really fun films. Have seen the serials, but never knew the actual planes and footage involved. Great research.
BTW-- Smiling Jack is the only film that Keye Luke and Sidney Toler appear in together. Keye Luke was Charlie Chan's #1 son with first Chan (Warner Oland, but never appeared in the Chan films when Toler was Chan... so Smiling Jack was kind of a treat for Chan fans.
Len Freeman
Posted by Leonard Freeman on September 15,2010 | 03:19 PM
Does anyone recognize what the model airplanes are the kids are flying in Tail Spin Tommy?
Posted by Bill DeForest on October 23,2010 | 09:56 AM