Flash Gordon (1954 TV Series) - Critical Response and Themes

Critical Response and Themes

Variety noted that the series was from a technical standpoint "up to the demands of the script and the average viewer probably won't notice the differences in quality between this and home-grown produce". Flash Gordon was immediately popular in the United States and continued to run in syndication into the early 1960s.

Modern critical reaction to the series has been light but largely negative. The production values are frequently derided, with the series described as "bargain-basement". The televised series suffered in comparison to the earlier film serials with the television incarnation labeled "vastly inferior," lacking "good concepts and scripts" and "most of all, Buster Crabbe, who was Flash Gordon". One positive comment notes Champlin's portrayal of Dale Arden, who was transformed from the typical damsel in distress of the serials into a trained scientist and a "quick thinker who often saved from perishing".

Film theorist Wheeler Winston Dixon, far from decrying the series for its production values, finds that "the copious stock footage and the numerous exterior sequences shot in the ruins of the bombed-out metropolis give Flash Gordon a distinctly ravaged look". He writes that its international origins give the series "an interesting new cultural dimension, even a perceptible air of a split cultural identity". Dixon quotes German cultural historian Mark Baker, who writes of a particular scene from the episode The Brain Machine as emblematic of this cultural split. The scene uses stock footage of a June 17, 1953 demonstration by East Berlin workers against the East German government. Soviet tanks opened fire on both demonstrators and bystanders, thus confirming East Germany's status as a Soviet puppet state in the minds of West Germans. American viewers, Baker speculates, were probably unaware of the iconic power in West Germany of the images of fleeing East Berlinners, which were used to illustrate a panic on Neptune.

Dixon, noting the similarities between the ideals espoused by "space operas" like Flash Gordon, Captain Video and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and American Cold War values, argues that such series were designed to instill those values into their young viewers. Flash Gordon, he writes, along with its fellow space operas, "have a common, unifying theme: peace in the universe can be achieved only by dangerous efforts and the unilateral dominance of the Western powers." This echoes the earlier critique of Soviet writer G. Avarin, who in the Soviet film journal Art of the Cinema had accused Gordon and other space-faring characters of being "the vanguard of a new and greater 'American imperialism'". The "ravaged look" of the series, Dixon writes, "underscores the real-world stage on which the action of the space operas played".