The Phantom Empire

This week, outside of my Netflix flicks (say that three times real fast), I've watched most of a serial entitled The Phantom Menace. This was part of a two-serial set I bought a Sam's (I also recently got a Sherlock Holmes set -- four movies!). Being from 1935, I didn't expect a great deal of depth or super special effects (everybody knows special effects didn't exist until Star Wars in 1976, right? but IMDb says that two guys worked on special effects -- something must be wrong).

Yes, it's cheesy; the video quality is pretty poor; the audio drops out occasionally; the effects are pretty minimal; the cliffhanger endings are cheated horribly; and the subtitles, if enabled, just show "AUDIO" occasionally rather than actual speaking parts, as though someone forgot to master the words onto the track. Well, it's a lot of fun.

I kept thinking while watching it, though, how could the story be updated and appeal to modern audiences? No singing cowboy (sorry, Mr. Autry, though you did okay for the time) for our day. Special effects can be better, for sure. For one, they could actually exist. Hey, if "The Outer Limits" can do okay with the serviceable yet unspectacular effects, we could probably do okay, too. The biggest problem would be to find a motivation for a bunch of kids to get together to form the Junior Thunder Riders. Okay, I'll stop now. (though I would love to develop my five-year plan for a TV version of Reign of Fire -- more dragons!)