FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

XoWizIama Excellent adaptation.

Forumrxes Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

nimbus13 I found movie this on one of those internet sites where you can watch old movies and thought this was one of the old Buster Crabbe movies.What the movie appears to be is 3 episodes of a 1954 German produced TV series stuck together into movie length.I only watched the episode where the villain informs the good guys that he went back in time 1000 years and planted a bomb that will go off in one hour in Flash's time. Flash goes back in time to find and disarm the bomb. However,he is trying to do it in that 1 hour time-frame. He actually could take all the time he needed to locate and disarm it! He had 1000 years available!Other than that, the special effects and dialogue were not too cheesy compared to some of the stuff put out in the '50s.

arel_1 "Star Wars" it ain't, to be sure. But for early 50s SFTV it's not that bad, either. Granted, the plots are often dire--but I can recall some episodes of George Reeves' "Superman" series that were real groaners too, and that show had a better budget. Granted, some of the acting wouldn't have made the grade in an elementary school play--but often the inept actors have the saving grace of being unintentionally funny (like the androids in "Return of the Androids", which I first saw excerpted on the "Zacherley's Horrible Horrors" video). Granted, some of the specFX and 'scientific' props are little short of laughable even if you set your mental time machine to the era and 'forget' you ever heard of things like CGI--but so were the ones on many made-in-America SFTV shows of that time. (Remember "Captain Video" checking on his Video Rangers via clips from old low-budget Westerns?) Yet despite all the cheesiness, the old "Flash Gordon" series does have a certain charm to it.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) I recently inherited a massive television set with a blown color tube and have been availing myself of the opportunity to watch exclusively B&W productions on it, which inevitably led me to watch the classic "Flash Gordon" serials again. Which in turn led me to watch these marvelous old "Flash Gordon" TV shows as well. Sure, they don't come anywheres near the epic art deco masterpieces of the Buster Crabbe era, but by golly there's something going on here that's pretty darn interesting.The show was apparently a co-production between US, West German and French studios filmed on & around the rubble heaps of a still partially demolished West Berlin in 1953. The series aired in syndication on the old DuMont Television Network, a fascinating chapter of American pop consumerism eating itself. The series doesn't have Ming or Mongo or the Tree Men, but what it does have is an abundance of US issue Cold War era military industrial complex effect going on, crossed with German neo-expressionism and even some good old Sartre inspired French existentialism.It's easy to laugh at the low budget sets, costumes, space helmets, ray guns and cheap model rocketry spaceship effects, but it's always easy to poke fun at past forms that now seem quaint or silly. Dig up some old pictures of yourself & the crew from the early 1980s and you'll see what I mean. Either you guys deliberately dressed like jerks, or you were enmeshed in the times and unable to see how ridiculous you looked because you & I both didn't know any better. Same thing goes for old science fiction props, production design, costuming, and applied science.The only genuine criticism I can find for the series is the awful theme music, but once you get beyond that what you're left with is a deceptively creepy little television show that, as others point out, make the Captain Video type American made SF efforts of the era seem completely vapid by comparison. There is a sophistication to the execution of the show that belies it's cheapness, and the action scenes set amongst the rubble strewn streets of an actual bombed out city have a kind of eerie pathos to them that is at odds with the space opera scripts. I hesitate to say it creates a profound juxtaposition of pop culture semantics set against the actual ravages of dystopian angst, but that's exactly what it amounts to.7/10: Several episodes have turned up on bargain bin public domain DVD sets out at the dollar stores. Buy a couple, they are worth it.

Geekzilla Digiview Productions has just released three of the series' 39 episodes on DVD, including "Deadline at Noon," "Flash Gordon And The Planet of Death" and "Flash Gordon And The Brain Machine." These are the only episodes I have seen, so keep in mind, all comments are based on this limited exposure. By today's standards, 1954's "Flash Gordon" might not make it to a fan-film awards show. The writing is atrocious, the acting could best be described as forced melodrama and the production values are comical ("Deadline at Noon" includes a lengthy discussion between Flash, Dale and the good Doctor commenting on the wonders of stock footage, for example.) Also, the 'science' behind the fantasy is so dated, it's hilarious (1,200 years in the future, the state-of-the-art still includes Geiger counters.) For all that, Flash Gordon has its good points, one of which has to be Flash's space ship, the Sky Flash, which looks pretty darn good for the early days of television. I'm sure that when "Flash Gordon" was watched through the eyes of a child in the mid 1950s, it had everything a "Star Trek" or a "Battlestar Galactica" had for future generations of young TV fans: plenty of action, adventure, ray guns, space ships and far-flung planets waiting to be explored. In short, if you're a Flash Gordon fan and an all-around sci-fi movie geek like I am, this is some of the best entertainment you can find at the bottom of the DVD bargain bin.