I love science-fiction movies and TV. For whatever reason I tend to gravitate toward the older stuff. One such example is the 1950s FLASH GORDON television series starring Steve Holland. I wouldn’t call it a great show, but I can see how it would be entertaining for children of all ages… like me.

Of all television and film incarnations of Flash Gordon, this show probably deviates the most from the basic premise of the original comic strip. In the 1950s TV series, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Doctor Zarkov live in the far future — some 1250 years after the 1950s, or roughly the year 3200. They fight for all things good as agents of the Galactic Bureau of Investigation, and Flash and Dale often race across the stars in the suitably named spaceship, the Sky Flash.

The 1950s FLASH GORDON TV series consists of only 39 episodes. According to Wikipedia the first 26 episodes were filmed in West Berlin, and the last 13 were filmed in Marseilles, France. I’m not enough of an aficionado of the show to be able to tell which episode was made in which location, but since Flash and friends travel back in time to 1950s West Germany in episode #36, I have to assume that the episodes weren’t broadcast in the same sequence in which they were produced.

Many episodes of the series are available on low-priced DVDs, but for whatever reason, many of these DVDs have a lot of the same episodes. I own three different 1950s FLASH GORDON compilation DVDs, but only 14 episodes are represented across all three of them. Below is a list of every 1950s FLASH GORDON episode in broadcast order. Episodes marked with an asterisk are in my DVD collection.

1. *Flash Gordon and the Planet of Death
2. Escape Into Time
3. The Electro Man
4. The Vengeance of Rabeed
5. *Akim the Terrible
6. *The Claim Jumpers
7. The Dancing Death
8. *The Breath of Death – This episode is fun, because the standing set for the Sky Flash serves double-duty as a separate spaceship of the Galactic Bureau of Investigation, and the Sky Flash control console is recycled yet again for a “bad-guy” ship.
9. The Great Secret
10. *Return of the Androids
11. The Frightened King
12. The Deadly Deception
13. Duel Against Darkness
14. The Sound Gun
15. The Weapon that Walked
16. Mission to Masca
17. *The Lure of Light
18. The Rains of Death
19. *Flash Gordon and the Race against Time
20. *The Witch of Neptune
21. *The Brain Machine
22. *Struggle to the End
23. The Water World Menace
24. *Saboteurs from Space
25. *The Forbidden Experiment
26. Heat Wave
27. The Hunger Invasion
28. Encounter with Evil
29. The Matter Duplicator
30. The Micro-Man Menace
31. The Space Smugglers
32. The Mystery of Phoros
33. The Shadowy Death
34. Death in the Negative
35. The Earth’s Core
36. *Deadline at Noon – In this episode Flash and his friends travel back in time to 1950s West Germany.
37. The Law of Velorum
38. The Skyjackers
39. *The Subworld Revenge