FLASH GORDON (Steve Holland)

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

Leave a Reply