Captain Video - Legacy

Legacy

Captain Video comes close to being a lost series. Only five 30-minute episodes, three featuring Richard Coogan and two featuring Al Hodge, have been available to the public on home video.

DuMont's film archive, consisting of kinescope (16 mm) and Electronicam (35 mm), was destroyed in the 1970s by Metromedia, the broadcast conglomerate that was the successor company to DuMont, thus nearly dooming nearly all of its pioneering TV series to oblivion. To date, the person or persons responsible for ordering the destruction of the kinescopes and other recordings remains unknown.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive has 24 episodes of Captain Video; some prints also contain an episode of Marge and Jeff, a weekday sitcom which aired after Captain Video during the 1953-1954 TV season. As with all of the rest of the archive's holdings, the episodes are only viewable as part of a showing within the archives building.

Alpha Home Entertainment released a DVD containing four of the publicly viewable episodes on November 25, 2008. This marked the first release of a Captain Video and His Video Rangers retail DVD .

As a result of there being so few surviving episodes, it is not clear what time period the series is set in. The Fawcett comic adventures are supposed to take place during the time of publication, in 1951. However, the stories in the surviving kinescopes could take place in 1950, as when Dr. Pauli plots to rob a bank in Shanghai, or centuries into the future, as when Captain Video seeks to establish a reliable mail service for far-flung interstellar (or at least interplanetary) colonies (depicted in a surviving episode generally called "Chauncey Everett") — or struggles to prevent the many space stations circling Pluto from being destroyed by an approaching comet. Later episodes' television listings would seem to indicate that Captain Video and other characters on the show were indeed capable of routine interstellar travel.