Weirdhouse Cinema: Flash Gordon (1980)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Dino De Laurentiis’s 1980 sci-fi comic book extravaganza “Flash Gordon,” directed by Mike Hodges and featuring the music of Queen. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb and.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
This is Joe McCormick. In. Today's film on Weird House
Cinema is the cheeky nineteen eighty science fiction adventure Flash Gordon,
allegedly starring Sam J. Jones and Max Foncito, but I
would say more like starring Brian Blessed and Queen And boy,
what a film this is, you know. I was just

(00:39):
thinking about how we cover all kinds of movies on
Weird House Cinema. We do good movies, conventionally, bad movies,
well known movies, obscure gems, big and small, loud and quiet.
But lately I think we've kind of been on a streak.
We have featured a lot of very big, very loud
type movies extravags, if you will, Specifically movies like this

(01:03):
from the early nineteen eighties that are kind of a
weirdness overload. So we did The Apple from the year
nineteen eighty, we did Zoo Warriors from the Magic Mountain
from nineteen eighty three, and now we're back with another
movie of this type yet again from the year nineteen
eighty and its Flash Gordon. In the tradition of the
other two I just mentioned, this movie is a lot.

(01:24):
It is almost overwhelming in its thrilling and hilarious flamboyance.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, there's so much here. This is a film I've
seen many times over the years, and yet going into
it again, you know, watching it maybe for the first
time in oh maybe ten years, there's so much I'd forgotten.
So there were the big things that I was eager
to re experience, and then equally overwhelming things that had
slipped my mind, and things that were maybe a little

(01:53):
more subtle that are also just as weird and wonderful.
So it's quite an experience.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
You know. There are a lot of things I want
to talk about with this movie, but one thing that
really struck me about it is that, and of course
it's not the only movie of this sort, but it
felt really strong here is that this is a movie
made with a palpable sense of nostalgia. It feels interesting
because this now is a movie that's like forty three,

(02:19):
forty four years old. Probably a lot of current adults
have nostalgia foreseeing the nineteen eighty Flash Gordon movie as
a kid. But it's also a project where you can
feel how the filmmakers were trying to with some ironic distance,
just like shamelessly indulge in nostalgia for a type of

(02:40):
storytelling they themselves had loved as children, maybe forty years
or so before that.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, yeah, getting into Flash Gordon's origins as a Depression
era comic book. It's passed as a part of these
various action serials and so forth. It was a very
influential a series, a very influential fiction on a number
of future filmmakers, future writers, future comic book authors and illustrators, etc.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Now, this movie is not overtly a comedy. I guess
you would say that the genre is science fiction adventure.
But it is a deeply funny movie. And you could
look at movies like that that are, you know, not
overtly comedies but are very funny, as the kind that
are intentionally funny and the kind that are not so
intentionally funny, maybe the latter category, you know, ed wood

(03:32):
films and such. This movie, though, is very intentionally funny,
even though comedy is not its overt category. One way
I would describe this is a defining sensation in watching
Flash Gordon is the thin clacking sound of plastic pieces
of costume armor hitting one another in the battle scenes.

(03:54):
Like it feels like a significant choice that there was
not an attempt to edit out that plastic clacking sound
or to like folly in a weightier sound. It's just
part of the magic of Flash Gordon. You are supposed
to hear the plastic on plastic grind.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, that's a good point about the plastic armor. Gosh,
there's so much plastic armor. Yeah. It is an extravagant
campy updating again of this old comic book, this old
series into a kind of late seventies cinematic vision comes
out in nineteen eighty, but you know very much the
late nineteen seventies trajectory getting this film made, and it is,

(04:32):
without a doubt, yet another sci fi film of this
era that was chasing the hit that was Star Wars,
which is ironic, of course, because George Lucas was heavily
inspired by the old Flash Gordon comic books and actually
wanted to make a film adaptation at one point, but
the rights were too expensive, so he began an alternate

(04:53):
journey that would result in Star Wars and the Star
Wars franchise that would spill out of it. In the
wake of the success of Star Wars, however, famed Italian
producer Dino de Laurentez, who've talked about on the show before,
picked up the film rights and set out to produce
the picture.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
That is funny and Yeah, I was wondering about exactly
that kind of thing, because for a long time I've
understood that part of the animating spirit behind the creation
of Star Wars was an excitement for this type of
storytelling that George Lucas remembered from when he was a kid. Yeah,
like the adventure serials and stuff, and he wanted to
recreate that feeling with his own movie. I don't think

(05:34):
I realized that he directly wanted to do an update
of the Flash Gordon comics, but that would make a
lot of sense. Ultimately we got Star Wars, which is
a more new, original kind of thing, which is wonderful
in its own right. And then, yeah, like, so you're
saying that the Star Wars that George Lucas had to
make because he couldn't make he couldn't get the rights

(05:54):
to Flash Gordon ultimately inspired them to make a new
Flash Gordon movie.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah. Yeah, essentially, Star Wars is an evolution of the
basic concept. So in a way, what do you know
Delarentis then sets up to do is kind of it
almost feels kind of backwards by comparison, Let's go back
to the thing that inspired the amazing new thing and
see what we can create. And you know, to their credit,
it doesn't feel as much in its substance like a

(06:21):
Star Wars ripoff. It doesn't feel like you're chasing Star
Wars so much, certainly not as much as other pictures
we've talked about. But yeah, with this film have come
into being without Star Wars being the success that it was,
it can make a strong argument that it would not. Now,
of course, Dino Delarento's was not going to direct this.

(06:42):
It's predominantly it's always been a producer, puts the pieces
together right. At one point he had none other than
Nicholas Rogue attached, who of course directed The Man Who
Fell to Earth, which we previously discussed on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
I love Flash Gordon the way that it is, but
I wish we could have seen the Nicholas Rogue version.
I'm imagining it would be a lot sadder and more
psychologically complex and would have like fifty times more full
frontal nudity.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, yeah, there's there's actually a whole special feature about
this project that never came to be on the Arrow
Blu ray of Flash Gordon, which I watched for this episode,
rendered from videodrome. Of course, Rogue apparently wanted to make
a big Hollywood picture, and a lot of work went
into writing and storyboarding his vision for Flash and they

(07:33):
point out that Rogue was notoriously protective of his vision
for a picture. In the end, however, Dino didn't think
that his vision was fun or funny enough. It was
apparently like pretty serious and you know, just like you'd imagine,
it wasn't as campy as what we end up getting.
And so he know, de Learnce is get ends up

(07:55):
going in a different direction, someone perhaps more suited in
his view, you for the vision that he sees for
Flash Gordon. And also, according to some of the commentators
that they talked to in this feature atte someone who's
maybe a little a little more willing to play the
game with a producer like Dino. MM. So yeah, it's
always fun to imagine, you know, pictures that could have been,

(08:18):
especially with some of these big, big films like this,
But you know, it's hard to It's hard to imagine
another version of Flash Gordon being as fun as this
one is.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
I think that would fully depend on whether they got
Brian Blessed or not. And it sounds like the rogue
version of this film Brian Blessed's presence would not make
as much sense.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, he is the atlas holding up this picture. I
don't have an elevator pitch for Flash here, Joe, I
don't know if you if you do it, I mean,
it's it's Flash Gordon. What can I tell you?

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Here's the elevator pitch?

Speaker 4 (08:49):
You only have fourteen?

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, all right. Let's
listen to the original trailer audio here because and if
you haven't seen the film, and there's a lot to see,
but still, the sonic experience of the trailer is pretty convincing. Clites,
I'm bored. What playing can you offer me today?

Speaker 3 (09:18):
An obscure body in the Escase system of your majesty.
The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
I like to play with things while before annihilation.

Speaker 3 (09:31):
Pathetic Earthlings who can save you now.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Dange object imaged in the Imperial Vortex.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Move the Earth Woman. Prepare her for our pleasure.

Speaker 5 (10:00):
Don't kid yet, father, I want him for schools. Can't

(10:26):
know it was as.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
So far as its.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Stream all right. Well, if you want to go out

(11:02):
and watch nineteen eighties Flash and Gordon, there are multiple
places to see the film these days. Wasn't always the case.
I remember a period of time when I wanted to
pick the movie up and I don't think it was
available on disc gett. But again, I watched it on
the excellent Arrow Blu ray. That Blu ray also includes
the full length documentary Life After Flash amid a bunch

(11:23):
of other extras.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
I just streamed it on one of the major services
and the quality was good. So yeah, it's out there,
all right.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Let's talk about the people involved here, Okay. So the
director is not Nicholas Road. The director that Dino Dealer
Netto has ended up going with is Mike Hodges, who
lived nineteen thirty two through twenty twenty two. English director
and writer whose first big film hit was nineteen seventy
one's Get Carter starring Michael Kine, followed by seventy two's Pulp,
seventy four as the Terminal Man, and seventy eight's Damien Omen.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Iwo ah, that's the OMEN movie with the all boys
Prep school.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Okay, have you seen that one? I haven't seen that.
I know you went through a tear with your Omen
movies a while back.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah, a couple of years ago, or either last year
or the year. Maybe it's just last year. Rachel and
I watched all of the Omen movies. We enjoyed the
second one. I don't know if i'd say it was good,
but we enjoyed.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
I just Subsequent credits after Flash included eighty five Morons
from Outer Space, eighty nine's Black Rainbow, and two thousand
and threes I'll Sleep when I'm Dead. Also, he did
some TV, including a nineteen eighty six action movie called
Florida Straits with Raal Julia in the lead role. And
he also did two music videos for Queen Flash, which

(12:37):
is of course, is one of them. The songs from
this film, as well as body language.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
Weird coincidental or I would assume coincidental. Double Panos Cosmados
overlap This guy is a movie called Black Rainbow, and
in Flash there's a planet called Arborea, which is the
name of the center in Beyond the Black Rainbow by
Penos Cazmonos.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, connections are there. One has to believe they have meaning. Now,
apparently Hodges had the right energy for this project, which,
according to some of the bits I was watching on
the Blu ray, involves a lot of sort of going
with the flow on such a large and at times
it sounds like maybe slightly chaotic project, you know, because

(13:19):
you know, a lot of moving pieces, and I think
there were definitely some places where they say that you know,
they had to kind of make things up on the
fly to figure out how to piece everything together.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
I think with one advantage of doing a big extravaganza
movie like this is that the success of the film
doesn't hang so much on the on the story being
executed in a coherent way, so like you can have
you can have a lot of things kind of like
get pieces get moved around and things get messed with,

(13:51):
and still over all the experience will kind of work.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't have to be perfect with Flashboard,
which is not to discount of the talent that went
into this film, Like so much about the just the
visual flare of the film, and we're not even gonna
be able to get into all the names involved there.
But yeah, so many pieces do come together perfectly. It's
just that you can definitely tell their moments where things
feel like certain scenes have been rushed in terms of

(14:18):
the overall vision for the picture and the flow of
the plot. Uh huh, all right. The screenplay credit goes
to Lorenzo simple Junior I live nineteen twenty three through
twenty fourteen, American writer whose credits include one hundred and
twenty episodes of the original Batman series, which I think
is telling, but also films like nineteen seventy three's Papillon,

(14:40):
seventy four's The Parallax View, seventy fives, Three Days of
the Condor, the nineteen seventy six King Cang movie, nineteen
eighty three is Never Say Never Again, and nineteen eighty
four Shena. The other writer that's credited is Michael Allen,
whose other credits include Enter the Dragon and Also I
Have Do and other titles, but Flash being the biggest

(15:02):
by far, and it's where we also should point out
that the character Flash Gordon was created by Alex Raymond,
who lived nineteen oh nine through nineteen fifty six, an
American cartoonist an illustrator who created Flash four King Features
Syndicate back in nineteen thirty four. And I believe it
was essentially an attempt to like, like, Okay, the competitor

(15:22):
has Buck Rogers, we need a Buck Rogers too. Let's
make him. Okay, what are we gonna call him? Well,
we can't call him Buck. How about Flash? We can't
call him Rogers? How about Gordon? There you go, make
it work. And it grew from that. All right. Now,

(15:45):
getting into the cast here, I'm gonna try and divide
it up among like our core factions. You know, it's
sort of like Game of Thrones here we have different
factions involved. Yeah, we're gonna start with the Earth Links,
all right. First up, we have Sam J. Jones as
Flash Gordon born nineteen fifty four, former US marine model
and American football player, who was cast in this film

(16:06):
over various hot commodities in Hollywood due to his debut
in the nineteen seventy nine Blake Edwards ten. His professional
life after Flash, which again is the subject part of
the subject of his twenty seventeen documentary, consisted of a
lot of TV work, as well as films like eighty
five's Jungle Heat, ninety two's Maximum Force, and a lot

(16:28):
of just you know, general action television action films, not
necessarily like the cream of the crop, you know, But
he worked a lot more recently. He was in both
Ted and Ted two, and he remains active to this day.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
It's easy to see why he was cast when you
think about this movie as a comic book adaptation, because
he has such a comic book illustration look about him,
more so than most biological humans.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, there's no denying has a great look. Also no
denying that he's rather green. But at the same time,
it's it's almost unfair to compare his acting to other
actors in the film, because you know, he and also
is co star Melody Anderson, who will talk about in
a minute. I mean, they're in there with just an
international cast that features not only like very tenured actors,

(17:20):
but also generational talents, and so it's you know, how
can you compare one to the other. And then also,
and I think this is more important, he gets there's
a fair amount of fun that's made at the expense
of this character and to a certain degree of this performance.
But I think it's pretty perfect, right, I mean, what
more do you want from the role of Flash Gordon here?

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Oh yeah, come on, let's be nice to Sam J. Jones.
He does Flash great. You know what, what what would
you change? What kind of notes are you going to
give him?

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah? I mean if we were talking about Nicholas Rogues
Flash Gordon. Yeah, okay, maybe that's that's a different animal
we're envisioning. But this vision, this Flash Gordon, I think
there's nobody else you put in there. I've read that
people like Arnold and even Kurt Russell who would have
been interesting in this role, you know, I've heard that
they were up for it, but it just I can't
imagine it wouldn't be the same, wouldn't be the same.

(18:12):
I'd go as far as to say that Arnold, even
at the time, would have been wrong for this role.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah, I'm an Arnold defender. You know, a lot of
people make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting, but I think
he's actually a better actor in a lot of ways
than people give him credit for. But I don't know
if he's who I want is Flash?

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, And I'm definitely not in nineteen eight now, I
mentioned Melody Anderson. This is the actress playing Dale Arden.
This is the other key Earthling. This is his I
guess it's not his girlfriend at the beginning, but becomes
essentially the Flash Gordon love interest.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (18:48):
So.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Anderson was born in nineteen fifty five Canadian actress who
started off on TV with small parts and shows like
Welcome Back Cotter, the Logan's Run TV series Battlestar Galactica.
She also had a supporting role in John Carpenter's nineteen
seventy nine Elvis TV.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Movie Oh interesting, Did that have Kurt Russell in it?

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah? That was Kurt Russell as Elvis.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
She followed up Flash with a nineteen eighty one horror
movie Dead and Buried nineteen eighty six is Firewalker, and
various TV shows. She retired from acting in the mid nineties.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
You know, I think Melody Anderson's a lot of fun
in this. She has the right you could tell she
has the right sense of humor in approaching this role.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah. Yeah, so I like her in this role as well.
All right, So that's two out of three Earthlings. The
important third is doctor Hans Zarkoff played by Topol Topel
lived nineteen thirty five through twenty twenty three Israeli actor, singer,
and illustrator, best known for his starring role in nineteen
seventy one's Fiddler on the Roof and his supporting role

(19:52):
in nineteen eighty one's For Your Eyes Only. It's been
a while since I've seen For Your Eyes Only. He's
not the villain in that Bond movie.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
He's like no, he plays like ally. Yeah, he plays
a criminal that Bond ends up joining forces with to
to take out the villain in the end. He's he's
sort of like a lovable rascal smuggler.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah. Other projects of note include the starring role in
a in a nineteen seventy five Galileo movie, and he
also shows up in one episode of Tales of the Unexpected.
And I have to say it's it's easy to forget
about this performance in a movie that features both you know,
Brian Blessed and Max Foncido just aiming for the rafters

(20:33):
with their performances, but Topaul hits the ground running with
some just great a ridiculousness just also just really chewing
up the scenery. Well. Also later on the picture, you know,
breathing varying degrees of not only ham but also thoughtfulness
in some of the scenes. So it's he does a

(20:54):
great job.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
And you know, for this picture, yes, I'm gonna say
this character and to Paul's performance is all over the map.
It's inconsistent, but it's mostly very good. Like he's zany
in some scenes, and he brings a very good, convincing zaniness.
There is one scene I want to talk about later
that I think is just wildly tonally inappropriate for the

(21:19):
movie in that it gets very serious and even emotionally
moving in a way that does not exactly feel welcome
in the context. But it's mostly because of him that
it works out that way, and it's quite powerful. Strangely,
I think you know what I'm talking about, Like the
mind conditioning scene.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, yeah, that'll be a good one to talk about.
All right, let's get into Ming's court though. This is
like the centerpiece of the film. And of course, as
we mentioned already, we have Max Foncito playing Ning the merciless.
Foncito lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty twenty.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
So one of the things that has not aged well
about this movie is that I think it's pretty undeniable
that there are some elements of racial caricature in the
way Ming the Merciless is imagined.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Yeah, it is important to note that the character Ming
is along with the likes of fictional characters like Fu
Manchu and more than a couple of characters from like
Marvel Comics and so forth. There are examples of the
quote yellow menace trope, and it's also a character here
that's steeped in orientalism and racial stereotypes. Various later adaptations

(22:29):
of Flash have sought to distance the character from these origins,
and I don't know. In this picture we see kind
of like a mixed approach there where certain things are done,
but also you could make a strong argument that not
enough is done, certainly by modern standards.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Yeah, So from what I understand, I'm not deep on
a Flash Gordon lore. From what I understand, the character
is an alien, so it's not like he is from
a country on Earth. But it's just that in the
way he is depicted, it relies a lot on like
on visual and thematic cues associated with stereotypical Asian villains,

(23:05):
mainly Fu Manchu.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Right, Right, So that's that's undeniable with this particular film.
For a long time, I always felt like, Okay, well,
Meing here feels more Satanic, he feels more like they
patterned him after the Church of Satan's founder Anton LaVey.
But I was looking into that more recently, and I

(23:28):
saw folks online pointing out that Leavey may have patterned
his personal look on Ming the Merciless, Oh, because he
would have grown up with the old flash comics and
and I assumed the older film adaptations and serials and
so forth. So on one hand, though, if they did
do that, if they did say, let's make Meing more
like Anton LaVey, well, if Anton Lavay was mimicking Ming

(23:52):
the Merciless from the old comic books, then then what
do you do? Just going in a circle at this point.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah, I would say that in this movie some visual
elements that I think are still being borrowed from the
racial caricature version of this character are there on the way,
on the way that Max Fonsido is dressed and stuff,
But it is not there in Vonsido's performance, Like he's
not performing a racial caricature, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Right, He's not doing a voice, he's playing it and
he's playing it pretty straight and really he brings a
certain grandeur to the role, like it's it's you know,
these issues aside, it's a very fun performance. It's a
it's a very you know, over the top and entertaining
villain role.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Yeah, I would agree. So it's just it's just a
bummer that these elements are still somewhat there.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah. Now as for Max Foncito, Yeah, legendary Swedish French actor.
I think everyone has seen something he was in. If you,
you know, have have watched then movies at all, you
stand a really good chance. Because he was active for
like seventy years, his career span that long. His Swiss
credits go back to nineteen forty nine. Igmar Bergman's nineteen

(25:07):
fifty seventh film, The Seventh Seal was his real like
international breakthrough role, expanding his career to include a host
of European and American films. His many films include nineteen
seventy three's The Exorcist, nineteen eighty two's Conan the Barbarian,
eighty three's Strange Brew just to you know, mix it
up a little bit, eighty four's Dreamscape, eighty four's Dune.

(25:29):
He is in Ghostbusters two, he's the uncredited voice of
Vigo the Carpathian, the real villain of that piece.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, nineteen nineties, Awakenings, nineteen ninety three's Needful Things. He's
in the ninety five Judge Dread Movie, two thousand and
two's Minority Report two thousand and nine, Solomon Kane. He late,
very late in his career. He pops up in twenty
fifteen Star Wars, The Force Awakens and TV's Game of Thrones.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Wait, I feel like I see more Dino connections here,
didn't Dino de la Reenti produced the eighty four Dune,
directed by David Lynch.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah. I think he must have been a favorite of Dinos. Yeah. Interesting,
But he's he's again one of these actors who drop
him in just about anything, be it something like very
serious or something more on the campy, you know, or
even blockbuster scale, and he brings he brings a certain
grandeur to the role, he brings a certain power in presence.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
He improves anything he's in.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, all right, So that's Meing the Merciless. But Meing
has a daughter, and this is Princess Aura, played by
Ornella Muti born nineteen fifty five. This is the evil princess,
evil seductive princess, very sort of typical role that you
might imagine if you haven't seen the film. Muti an Italian,

(26:47):
is an Italian actress who's who has worked extensively in
Italian TV and film. So a lot of her credits
are not things I'm that familiar with, but her early
credits include Romberto Lindsay's Oasis of Fear that's from nineteen
seventy one. Ray Lovelocke is in that we've touched on
Ray love Locke before, but she went on to appear
in such films as Tales of Ordinary Madness in nineteen

(27:10):
eighty one and the nineteen seventy nine Russo Italian movie
Life Is Beautiful.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
She does also some wonderfully comical overacting in this, which
again I think is intentional, Like the way she's ogling
Flash Gordon in the first scene where he comes into
the palace. Throne room is hilarious.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Now another this is essentially our b villain. This is
means immediate underling that Lord's over his secret police. This
is the character Clytis, who is kind of a if
you're familiar with this character think Doctor Doom except gold Mask,
and that's essentially who this character is.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Great villain, extremely over the top, perfect sardonic vocal performance
by the actor here, and also a physical performance which
seems unnecessary given how heavy these costs all apparently work
like even if they are made of plastic instead of metal,
these were apparently really weighty.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
Yeah, and he also is just like a comical depiction
of evil in that he frequently makes statements of disgust
whenever someone expresses love or selflessness in any way. You know,
somebody is like flash, I love you, and he's like pathetic.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, this is a fun performance. The actor here is
Peter Wingard, who lived nineteen twenty seven through twenty eighteen,
British television, stage and film actor, best known without the
Mask for playing the fictional Jason King and a pair
of British TV shows. His other credits include sixty one's
The Innocence and nineteen sixty two's Night of the.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Eagle Top Shelf hinge Yes.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Then then there's another hint, and this is kind of
Clytus's Hinchman or hinchwoman, and that is Kala, played by
Marian gli Malato, who lived nineteen forty one through twenty thirteen,
an Italian actress whose other credits include nineteen seventy three's
Love and Anarchy and nineteen seventy four is Swept Away.
Both of these were directed by Lena Vertmula, And we're

(29:12):
co starring gian Carlo Janini, who, of course great Italian
actor who's been in a lot of big international films.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
Yeah she I guess we're gonna have to say this
about a lot of actors in this movie. But she
also is doing some very pleasing overacting, just like really
punctuated over annunciation of her lines, if you know what
I'm talking about. Yeah, it's really good stuff. She has
a lot of really good lines that get singled out
and appear in the Queen tracks. I guess we'll get

(29:40):
to that in a minute. But like when dialogue is
sampled from the movie, a lot of the dialogue is
either Brian blessed or her saying lines like what do
you mean flash Gordon approaching?

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, I mean it's flash of Gordon. Go big or
go home? Shoot for the rafters. Don't leave your subtle
acting at home, because that's why what that's not what
this movie is about.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
And yet the very next actor we're going to talk about,
I would say gives one of the sort of straightest,
cleanest performances in the movie. And yet is I would
say quite good.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah. Yeah, we're getting into the faction of the Arboians,
who are I guess you describe him as space elves
kind of like what if the Ewoks were British dudes.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Yeah, that's what you have exactly right, Yeah, if the
Ewoks were just humans dressed like Robin hood.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yes, there's space Robin Hoods. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, we
have Prince Baron is Baron here Baron? They just say Baron, Yeah, Baron.
Prince Baron played by the great Timothy Dunton.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
In this role. He is handsome, suave, dangerous. He's great
when he's one of the bad guys, and he's great
when he's one of the good guys. I really like
him in this.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, and he's got that swashbucklan mustache. So it's a
great look for this film. That is, you know, ultimately
hinging on a lot of nostalgia for the like old
action serials and so forth.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Totally Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
So yeah, future James Bond here at the time, he
already had some really impressive credits, including sixty eight's The
Line in Winter, seventy's Cromwell, a nineteen seventy adaptation of
Worthering Heights. Of course, he plays the lead in that.
What's his name not Garfield, the other one Heathcliff. Yeah,
and he followed Flash up with a number of period

(31:21):
pieces for TV before taking up the role of Double
O seven for nineteen eighty seven's The Living Daylights.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Funny thinking about Wuthering Heights because Heathcliff is a classic
byronic hero, and Baron in this movie is kind of
a byronic hero.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
Yeah, you need a character like that in a movie
where your other like romantic lead guy is just a football.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Beef man, you know. And I think maybe this comes
back to his casting in the James Bond franchise. He
only did the two films, the other one being Licensed
to Kill from eighty nine the follow up, but he
was kind of like a pivot to a more dangerous
Bond right getting away from the Roger Moore series, which
I mean a lot of love for Roger Moore, but

(32:05):
I think at the time people had kind of maybe
had enough of the Hammier comic side of Bond, and
they wanted something a little harder, which is kind of
an up and down trajectory you see throughout the entire franchise.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
Roger Moore is a very languid, dry humored Bond. You know,
he's just he's a very raised eyebrow and quip kind
of Bond. Timothy Dalton. Yeah, they brought in to be
a much darker, meaner, more emotional and dangerous feeling James Bond.

Speaker 4 (32:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah, kind of unpleasant Bond, if you will, But.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
In a way that's an interesting place to take the character.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I remember I was quite a
fan of him back in the day because when I
was a kid during my Key Bond movie appreciation period,
like he was the new Bond, he was the current Bond,
and I remember feeling a bit betrayed when we changed
Bonds after only two films. I was like, no, this
is You're not supposed to switch out after two You're

(33:02):
supposed to keep it, keep him going for just years
and years and years.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Yeah. I could see what you mean, especially because after
after him doing two movies, they switched to Pierce Brosnan,
which was basically a reversion to the Roger Moore bond. Yeah,
it's more again the raised eyebrow and the quip.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
And then going dangerous again with the with the harder bond.
So I think we're due for a comic bond. I'm
people keep talking about, Oh, which which which handsome fella
or or or lady or what have you is gonna
play bond next? But really the pattern shows we need
somebody funny, We need somebody with that dry wit.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
And like a bond who doesn't sweat. You know. This
is the thing about the funnier bonds, like Pierce Brosnan
and Roger Moore, just seems like they they move less.
They're more just stationary, you know.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, yeah, we'll see what they put together, all right.
So that's the Prince of the Arboians. They are a
bunch of Arborians, but the only other one that really
matters for just our quick discussion here. We may touch
on some others later on, but we have Richard O'Brien
playing the character Fikoh. I didn't catch him at first.
It took me a bit to realize, like, oh wait
a minute, that bold guy's Richard O'Brien. Yeah, that's right.

(34:12):
Born nineteen forty two, the mastermind behind the Rocky Horror
Picture Show, in which he also played riff Raff, the
future Mister Hand in nineteen ninety eight's Dark City. So
it's a very small role, of fun role. And we'll
come back to Rich O'Brien another time.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Are we done with the cast yet?

Speaker 2 (34:30):
No? No, because the next faction, we can't forget the
hawk Men. Oh yeah, and we cannot, absolutely cannot forget
the Prince of the Hawkmen, Prince Voltan, played by Brian Blessed.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Brian Blessed, did you say.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
That's right? Oh my god? This has any actor ever
made such a feast of his lines as Brian Blessed
in this film.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Maybe I've said this before, but he is vomiting digestive
enzymes all over the scenery so he can slurp it
up like a spider.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah. He has like the galactus of consuming the scenery
for sure. Oh my god. Every moment Brian Blessed is
unscreen in this is just amazing. Just I mean, a
booming actor for starters. Even if you didn't see him,
oh you've only heard him if he were voicing a puppet.
It would be overpowering, and it's just so intense. But
on top of that, you get to see him and

(35:27):
he has this, you know, just intense eyes and a
laugh that somehow manages to allow you to see all
of his upper teeth at once.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Yeah. Yeah. One way I was thinking about it was,
you know, when there's an actor in a movie who
only has one line, they're like a little bit part.
They have one line, but they're trying to be really memorable,
so they go way over the top. He's like that,
except he has like fifty lines and he treats every
one of them like that.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
He does Oh my god, like the famous one that
will come back to being Gordon's alive. Even do it
the way he does, like the way he says it.
He just complains, you've heard it. It's just how does
he do it? I don't know. It's amazing.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
He looks like he has bitten people's fingers off, you know. Yeah,
and just imagine somebody got too close and he just chomped.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah. I mean, just amazing physical presence. They would be
clear the hawkmen as well described, but they are wearing
like sort of like leather pants and like and belts
and they have big like helmets on with horns, and
then they have full sized like eagle wings. So there's

(36:38):
a lot going on here in the visual presentation of
Prince Fulton.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
A lot of leather straps and stuff, and they've got
these clubs that have a hook on the end. It's
a very nasty looking weapon.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, vicious cudgel. And then I think they all have
spray tand on as well. Yes, all right, so we'll
keep talking about Brian Blessed, but yeah, he is a
legendary actor of stage, screen and TV. A lot of
his early roles were on TV shows, such as the
nineteen sixty three Musketeers series, in which he of course

(37:11):
played Porthos. He was also on The Avengers a few times.
Other TV roles include I Claudius in seventy six. He
was on multiple episodes of black Adder in eighty three.
He was in an eighty three adaptation of the Hound
of the Baskervilles. He was on Doctor Who in eighty six.
He was on the series Crossbow in eighty seven, and
he made a big splash, of course in Henry the

(37:33):
Fifth in nineteen eighty nine, directed by and starring Kenneth Bronna.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
Oh did he play Exeter?

Speaker 2 (37:39):
I had to look it up, but yes, yes, that
was the role he played in The Nice Perfect He'd
ate ultimately appear in four of the five Shakespeare films
directed by Kenneth Bronna, the others being Much Ado About
Nothing in ninety three, Hamlet in ninety six, and As
You Like It in two thousand and six.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
I can just really imagine him getting mad about tennis balls.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
So really too many things to list here, but we
do have to mention that he provided the voice of
Boss n Ass in The Phantom Menace and continues to
do just a lot of voice work, so he's still
still active, at least as a voice actor.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
Has anybody ever interviewed him about like what he was
thinking going into this role? Like what why did he
choose to act to the level that he did?

Speaker 2 (38:26):
You know, I didn't see anything offhand. I'm sure someone
has asked him about it, but I mean I don't know.
I almost like, why would I question the man, Like, Yes,
he nailed it, you know. I mean this is a
very like loud, boisterous character and he's just played as
loudly and boisterously as possible. Okay, all right. Now at

(38:49):
this point we're gonna we're gonna skip ahead a little
bit again. I'm skipping over so many talented people involved
with the visual look of the picture. But we've got
to get to the music.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Oh lord, the music. That's one of the real stars
of the film.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
That's right, because now we have sort of two things
going on with the music here. We have the more
traditional swashbuckling orchestra music in this picture, and it's very
effective and again fitting since you know swashbuckling and so forth.
But this is the work of Howard Blake born nineteen
thirty eight, whose scores include nineteen seventy seven's of the Duellists,

(39:24):
That's the Ridley Scott Picture eighty three's Amityville three D,
and he was nominated for a BAFTA for his work
on this film. But the rest of the music is
famously the work of the legendary rock band Queen.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
I knew the song the theme song from Flash Gordon
before I knew there was a movie Flash Gordon, like
way back when I was letting like middle school. I
somehow was able to download an MP three of the
Queen song Flash and not even realize that it was
connected to a movie. I just leught there were these
wacky lines people were saying in the song.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah, because the track as is featured on the soundtrack
for the album, which is available you know, anywhere you stream,
anywhere you find Queen music, you can find this. It
has all these samples from the picture, which in their
tremendous samples, like any they managed to fit like so
many great lines into the track.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
We get Flash gordons alive, we get what do you mean,
Flash Gordon approaching? We get I think dispatch war rocket
Ajax to bring back his body.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yes, so many great lines. So this movie in nineteen
eighty six is Highlander. Are the only films that Queen
ever really worked on in this sort of exclusive capacity,
you know, in both cases creating tracks exclusively for these films,
with Flash being the only film where Queen contributed not
only to the soundtrack but also to the score. This

(40:53):
is something I don't think I quite appreciated as much
until recently. But yeah, some of the most stirring and
just vibe defining tracks in the score for Flash Gordon
are Queen compositions.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Yeah. Yeah, so there is the main theme which we
can talk about I mean that has like singing in lyrics,
but there also is a lot of just great sort
of mood music, you know, setting the scene for things
happening in the plot. That is part of the Queen score.
You know, these great these drum tracks when they're like
approaching the Imperial Vortex and the you know, the the

(41:25):
pulsing synthesizers and all that that are just doing the
you know, the regular work that a film score needs
to do to put you in the in the right
frame of mind for a scene. But it's it's part
of what Queen contributed.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah. Yeah, So the writing credits are broken up a bit,
but Freddie Mercury is credited for Ming's theme. This is
a blistering synth number that plays whenever, especially the first
scene when we see Ming, you know, enter the throne room.
And then Brian May is credited on Flash's theme. John
Deacon is credited on execution of Flash, and Roger Taylor

(42:01):
is credited on in the space capsule, the love theme.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
It's amazing how well Queen fits the subject matter. And
so we were talking about this on chat before we
came into the to the session here. But I was
thinking about how part of Brian May's signature guitar sound
is that like that harmonized double lead thing where he would,
you know, he would multi track lead guitar lines and
solos in harmony together, and that it just sounds like

(42:29):
Flash Gordon. But he was doing this from before the
Flash Gordon soundtrack. He does that on you know, much
earlier albums.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, it's I have to have to
admit with Queen, I've I've been a Queen fan since
I was a kid, but I've always been a Queen's
Greatest Hits Queen fan, so like, there were a lot
of tracks I missed out on and had to like
re explore later on. And I've never been like like
super tuned in too, like their trajectory from one album
to the next. But I was reading an article by

(42:57):
an author by the name of Ryan Reid. This was
on Ultimate Classic Rock dot com. It came up in
search titled how Queen embraced the synthesizer on Play the Game,
And this article points out that Queen first embraced the
synth on their nineteen eighty album The Game, just six
months prior to this film score.

Speaker 3 (43:15):
Mmm, yeah, okay, so they had said, I think on
earlier albums that they were not really interested in synthesizers
like that. They even had one album that in the
liner notes it had a little dig that said something
like no one on the synthesizer. But then they I
guess they came around to it and you know what,
they use it?

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Well? Yeah, absolutely, Again that Ming track. Ming's theme alone
is just so great and just sets the tone.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
I was trying to think of another non musical movie,
meaning like a movie where the characters don't sing, that
has an original soundtrack with music that has lyrics about
the characters and plot, which the title track here Flash
does have and doesn't just play in the credits, by
the way, plays within the movie. There are the parts

(44:02):
where you hear them singing about Flash. Is there another
I can't think of another thing like that.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Yeah, And to be clear, it needs to be a film,
it does it. Not a film that is based on
a ballad, but a film that has essentially a ballad
that was created to be the theme song for the
picture about the main character.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
Yes, exactly. It'd be like if there was like a
Captain America movie that had a song that played what
in a scene in the movie with lyrics about Captain America.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Ooh, I guess the main example that comes to mind
is the theme song to Shaft.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Oh, okay, there you go. Or I can't remember. Does
that only play over the credits or that plays in
the film as well.

Speaker 2 (44:44):
I don't remember, you know, I don't know that I've
ever seen Shaft, but I mostly just heard the theme song.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Okay, we gotta go back and confirm that. Listeners, if
you can think of examples of songs like this, let
us know, contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
All right, well, let's get into the plot of this baby.
Because there's a lot of stuff that happens.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
We're not gonna be able to do the entire thing
in exquisite detail that the kind of detail deserve. We'll
have to skip over some things, but we'll do our best.
So it begins with the star field, and we hear
the humming of the engines of a starship, and then
we hear the voice of Max Foncido, who's again playing
the villain Emperor Ming, who says he says, clitis, I bored.

(45:35):
What plaything can you offer me today? And the voice
of Clyta says, an obscure body in the s K system,
Your majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth.
And then we see giant Sci Fi crosshairs zooming in
on the planet Earth as it rotates in space, and

(45:55):
Ming says, how peaceful it looks. And then we see
a close up of a gloved hand with this elaborate
chunky ring and the ring lights up, seemingly activating some
kind of machinery. Then we see a console with flashing
indicators that say things like earthquake, tornado, hot hail, typhoon.

(46:17):
What is hot hail?

Speaker 2 (46:18):
I don't know, will we find out?

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Yeah? And then just here laughter, and Clita says most effective,
your majesty, Will you destroy this Earth? And Ming says later,
I like to play with things a while before annihilation,
And then we begin the pulsing of the theme song
by Queen. The title screen flash Gordon, which is written

(46:40):
in this great I don't know what you call this
kind of font, but it's a it's kind of swooping
script with red and gold letters. And then over the credits,
we occasionally see television feeds of natural disasters occurring on Earth.
Intercut with hand drawn imagery from the Flash Gordon comics

(47:01):
and the sound of Max Foncito laughing again. He's just
ba They're going, Oh, these tornadoes are hilarious. And after
the credits finish, we go down to the surface of
Earth and we are at some deserted rural airfield where
we meet Flash Gordon. Now you might expect him to
be doing some heroic or impressive stunt at first encounter,

(47:22):
but instead he is sitting in a station wagon reading
a newspaper, listening to football on the radio, and watching
the hot hail come come down around the car while
he's waiting for a flight. So maybe he's more active
when he's not waiting for a flight.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
This whole section of the movie, it's it's it's it's
interesting to look at because this movie knows it needs
to get into outer space as soon as possible. It
knows that any time spent on Earth in a mundane
setting is wasted time for this film. But they've got
to do it. They've got to set these characters on
Earth before you can place them in this other world.

(47:58):
But the clock is and you got to get them
there before you lose the audience. And I think it's commendable.
They try and keep the pace up.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
Oh yeah, it moves right along. By the way, I
should mention that Flash Gordon is wearing a T shirt
that says Flash.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
He's got a brand he's got to represent, you know exactly.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
We see another passenger who's going to be on the
same flight as she arrives in a transport van from
a local resort. This is Melody Anderson playing Dale Arden,
who we learn is a travel agent, and they exchange
a meaningful glance as she passes by his car, and
then they both get on the airplane. This seems to
be some kind of private flight. It's not a commercial flight.

(48:35):
They're like no other passengers, just the two pilots, Flash Gordon,
Dale Arden. So the plane takes off soars into the sky. Meanwhile,
the ming induced weather gets worse. We see hot coals
raining down from the sky and just plunking into bodies
of water, leaving these trails of steam. And in the airplane,
the pilots are talking about their famous passenger. One of

(48:58):
them says, well, I sure ope, Flash Gordon had a
great vacation. He's going to have to work hard to
top last season and He's also holding an issue of
People magazine with Flash Gordon on the cover. So we
learned Flash Gordon is a famous football player. And I
was watching this with Rachel and we were wondering, is
Flash Gordon already known to be some kind of hero

(49:20):
or savior of the world at the beginning of this movie.
Is this like another one of his adventures, or at
this point is he simply a famous football player and
this movie depicts the first of his world saving adventures.
I think it is the latter.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
I think so. Yeah, I think he's football famous at
this point.

Speaker 3 (49:39):
Anyway, the plane starts jerking around in the air and
we hear Max Foncito just bellowing laughter again, echoing through
every corner of space time, and the turbulence is clearly
upsetting Dale, the travel agent because she is afraid of flying.
The irony of this is noted, and then Flash goes
up to check with the pilots to see if anything

(50:00):
is wrong, and he suggests that the air might be
smoother at a higher altitude. This amazing early example of arrowsplaining.
I think all flights should allow passengers to come up
to the cockpit and tell the pilots what they're doing
wrong anyway, Dale, who appears to be extremely uncomfortable and anxious,

(50:21):
yells up to Flash to tell him to leave the
pilots alone. So he comes back, and he starts telling
her that the plane is bouncing because of turbulence. He's
like explaining how turbulence works, and they start chatting and
hitting it off. A Flash confesses that he saw Dale
at the hotel the night before and ask the matre
d who she was, because he's clearly he's smitten. He's like,

(50:43):
I couldn't believe a girl like you was alone, and she's,
you know, impressed. They're flirting and stuff. Flash talks about
how he's taking flying lessons, more about how turbulence works,
and then out of the windows the skies turn red.
Clouds of blood block out the sun, and somehow, Ming
the Merciless appears bodily in the form of a giant

(51:04):
meteor in the sky and abducts the two pilots. I
didn't quite understand this part. It doesn't seem to fit
with anything else.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
This is never explained, but this is what appears to happen.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yes, but also like Ming seems confused when they show
up later, so it's not like Ming is trying to
retrieve the specific plane of Flash Gordon. He doesn't know
who Flash Gordon is.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah, it seems to be a questionable choice.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
So Flash and Dale they go up to the cockpit
and pilots are missing, so they try to take over
flying the plane, but it is clear we are headed
for a crash landing. Meanwhile, elsewhere, we check in at
some kind of remote atmospheric monitoring facility where two scientists
are stationed. One of them is doctor Hans Zarkov played
by Topol, and we learn from TV reports he is

(51:52):
a researcher formerly affiliated with NASA who has been ridiculed
and dismissed by the scientific establishment for basically suggest that
all the bad weather is being caused by alien intervention
instead of regular physical forces. Zarkov's partner gets woken up
when flaming rocks crashed through the skylight and set his
blankets on fire. He wakes up Zarkov. They look at

(52:16):
their feeds and stuff and figure out what's going on,
and the scientists observe that the sun is blotted out
due to an unscheduled eclipse. H that's not supposed to happen.
The moon has been spiraling into the Earth, and a
Zarkov takes stock of the situation. He concludes, this is it.
This is the alien attack. It's begun. All my fringe

(52:38):
theories are finally vindicated. So he's got some kind of
scheme where he has constructed a secret rocket ship that
will be used to fly up into space and counter
attack the evil that is causing the moon to spiral
into the Earth. But the rocket ship needs at least
two people to operate it. I don't know why he
built it that way, but that's what he did. Zarkov

(53:01):
tries to get his partner, Munson, into the ship, but
Munson doesn't want to do this. He freaks out and
runs away. Zarkov tries to appeal to his spirit of humanity.
He's like, yes, they will probably die on this mission,
but they alone have a chance to save the human
race anyway. This conflict is interrupted by a plane crash,
flash and dale. Their plane crashes into Zarkov's laboratory. Does

(53:26):
the plane crash kill Munson? Unclear? We just never see
him again.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Yeah. I took it to mean that Munson had just
taken off.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
But oh, okay, so unclear, but Flash and Dale survive
the landing. They're fine. They climb out of the plane
and meet Zarkov and they're like, can we use your phone?
And Zarkov is like, oh, yes, yeah, good to see you.
You're well, Yeah, the phone is right here inside this
rocket ship. So they go and they go inside, and

(53:53):
then Zarkov confronts them with a revolver, explains his plan,
locks them inside, and they blast off.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Yeah, Zarkof is just in full mad scientist mode of
this whole this whole initial meeting, Like we were saying earlier,
this performance, this character is all over the place. But
that's where we are now with him.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
He is a mad scientist, but he's like a benevolent
mad scientist. He's very committed to like sacrificing his life
to save the planet Earth.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yes, and his and his plan to save the planet Earth.
As we'll find out, he's basically go into space with
a pistol and take out who's responsible.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Yeah, confront the leader of whatever aliens are causing the
hot hail, and just and and shoot them, I guess.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
So anyway, the rocket launches into space and our heroes
pass out from the g forces. That we see Dale
and Flash join hands as they lose consciousness, so they
are quickly like they're they're basically already in love there,
you know, love story are complete at this point.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Yeah, and we're finally like rid of the Earth at
this point, we are successfully in space. We don't have
to worry about the real world anymore. It's just gonna
be aliens and craziness from here on out.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Disgusting Earth, Get it out of here. There's a shot
where they're in Earth orbit and we could see like
a dozen planets hanging in the background. What what are
all these extra planets? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Everything's been thrown into disarray.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
So our heroes are unconscious and we see their space
capsule drift through space towards this vast spiraling portal. It's
kind of like a whirlpool of color in the void.
And then we see a close up of some alien
creature in like a command room somewhere. It's a humanoid face,
pale skin, bald head, cold voice, with computerized goggles over

(55:38):
his eyes that have all these creepy gold displays on them,
and the alien says strange object imaged in the Imperial Vortex.
One thing.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
I noticed.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
It's out of frame in the screenshot I have for
you to look at, Rob, But did you notice the
little hood ornament on the top of their goggles has
a Freemason symbol on it. It's got the little square encompass.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
I didn't notice it much here, but I think Clydus
perhaps has some symbolisms on him that look like Freemason imagery.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
So yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
Somebody snucks someone in there. Maybe it's a coincidence, but
it seems like they're suggesting that the aliens are Freemasons. Anyway,
the spaceship tumbles into the vortex, and this part I
thought was just awesome, Like the feeling it creates is
so exciting. The score is heavy with synth, bass and drums,

(56:29):
and I like the sound of the drums. It's like
a very cool, like dry tom sound with this marching,
galloping beat. And in the background, space is represented as
this chaotic fusion of colors, like different shades of paint
or spilled together and mixing on panes of glass. It's
very cool.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Yeah, it's like a psychedelic liquid light show, like a
Joshua light show. Thing going on, like, that's this movie's
vision for what space is, and I have to say
I really like it. One of the things that I've
liked about the Spacier Marvel Cinematic Universe movies is that
they two varying degrees embrace this kind of like a

(57:09):
colorful fantasy space setting for their pictures.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Yeah, that's great. I mean it's not like your movie
needs to be realistic anyway. It's unrealistic in other ways,
so why not make it beautiful?

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Yeah, but this goes even beyond anything. If you've seen
MCU films and you haven't seen Flash Gordon, like in this,
like you don't even see any darkness of space. There
is no darkness in space. Everything is colors and psychedelic intensity.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
Right. So we hear Alien mission control talking about this
object with clitis. They are instructed to bring the craft
through the Sea of Fire and land it safely at
the Palace and the effect shots here involve a lot
of miniature models and sets. As we see the ship
approaching on the ming planet. I think it's the planet
called Mango.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
I believe so. Or that's the city I can't remember
as the planet or the city.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
Yeah. Or They also say Mingo about something I don't know.
So they're moving through these little models sets and miniature sets,
and it's great, stuffed to some degree, intentionally corny looking,
I think, trying to invoke a nostalgia for earlier films
and serials with corny special effects, but at the same

(58:20):
time a spellbinding pleasure for the eyes. It is equal
parts corny self parody and genuine finesse.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Yeah, and a lot of like have excellent craft went
into creating these models and sets and effects for sure.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
Absolutely. Yeah. So flash Dale and Zarkov they crash land,
they're taken prisoner by the Emperor Ming's evil guards, and
they are escorted to the heart of the palace and
there's like a giant state room that they passed through
that has this red and gold motif with these giant
statues of Ming's head. Some of the soldiers are covered

(58:55):
in gold armor that seems slightly Samurai inspired. Others look
like old school sardok car and they've got like red
robes with hoods with the faces completely hidden behind gas masks.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Oh yeah, the gas masky guys that we see. They
also have kind of a mobious look to them and
remind me of it. They also look like something that
could be a villain from like Super Mario Brothers too.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
They look like they may well be following the smoke
to the rift filled land. Yeah. So, as the heroes
are walking through the middle of this massive room full
of alien soldiers, Flash and Dale comment that this place
looks like quote, a police state, and Zarkov says that
that could be to their advantage because it will mean

(59:37):
they can easily find allies. Zarkov says, look at them,
the poor wretches are just waiting for someone to lead
them in revolt. And Dale is like, will you stop
talking about revolts? I just want to go home. Oh,
another thing we should mention here is this flying robot
that occasionally vaporizes people. I think this is called the
Imperial Globe. It's like this floating gold thing that has

(01:00:00):
spikes on it, and sometimes it shoots people with lasers.
The Globe commands the prisoners to follow it, and on
the way to meet with the Emperor, the Globe executes
another escaping prisoner, a lizard man, and it removes the
revolver from Zarkov's pocket. Also, should we take a minute
to mention the lizard man in this movie. They are

(01:00:20):
a sort of unexplained faction. But they've got like they're
like snakeheads with open mouths that have fangs and their
faces are inside the snake mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
It's incredible, like it it's not a situation. Oh, it's complex,
Like it works on several different levels, because it's sort
of like you have a crappy costume of a lizard
in which the person's face is in the mouth, but
then they've taken that concept and evolved it to wear No,
there's like red flesh inside the lizard's mouth and it

(01:00:51):
has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Yeah, it's
so weird.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
So it's not like a person's face hiding. There's like
a face represented in the mouth as part of the costume.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Yeah. So, and it's it's equal parts goofy, but also
like it gets here, your wheels turning, Like, what's going
on here? Did these things like manifest the mouth? Is
this just for communicating with the humanoid world? Like, what's
going on? It's so weird?

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
No idea. Anyway, they move on. The Zarkov says here
that he's going to sacrifice himself to kill They haven't
met ming yet, so he doesn't even know who ming is.
I guess whoever the boss is of the bad guys.
He's going to do it. He says, it's a quote,
it's a rational transaction, one life for billions. But the
globe overhears this and destroys Zarkov's gun.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Oops, now we're back to square one.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
The globe is a real tattle tale. This will come
up again in the next scene. So we pass on
to the Throne Room, which is just an avalanche of
all these different like characters and aliens, costumes, designs. One
type of character in that stands out to me are
these guys in red hoods who have the golden skull masks,

(01:02:06):
but they look like sad skulls, so like, you know,
the eyebrow ridges of the gold skulls are sloped downward,
as they received from the bridge of the nose, which
you know, when the eyebrows are tilted that way, we
naturally interpret that as a sad face. So for some reason,
these rigid gold masks are sad.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Yeah, they're kind of like sad muppet skulls, but made
of gold.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Interest weird choice, I don't know. And there's so many
other types of aliens assembled here. They're like these people
who are like they have like black and white motifs
split down the middle of their costume. There seem to
be like delegations from the many different planets that are
subjugated by the Emperor here. But the Emperor demands fealty,

(01:02:51):
and one thing that's for sure is everybody's got to
show that they're loyal to him. So when Emperor Ming
shows up, everybody starts screaming his glory. They say, Hail Ming,
Hail Emperor of the galaxy. And here finally we see
Max Foncido as Emperor Ming. He emerges from red fog
as if he were the Devil incarnate, and he's bald,

(01:03:12):
he has a goatee, he's very arched eyebrows, and he's
wearing this big like red robe with a high collar.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Yeah, and again that the Queen music that SYNTHESIZERR track
is just blaring and it's fabulous.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Here we also meet Ornella Mooti as Princess Aura, the
daughter of Ming. And when we first meet her, she
looks like a walking jewelry display case. It's just like
a bikini made of gold and diamonds and this like
crown on the head that's sparkling from the moment the
Earthlings enter the room. She's ogling Flash Gordon, So I
think we know what's going to happen here. She wants

(01:03:49):
Flash Gordon.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
One of the interesting things about all of the especially
like Ming's Court, there are places where they reference the
idea that the human mind is more limited, it doesn't
have the same capacity for thought that these other alien
characters have. But these other alien characters, for the most part,

(01:04:10):
don't seem to be displaying like heightened awareness and heightened cognition,
Like they're just focused on pursuits like romantic pursuits and
pursuits of the flesh and so forth, as opposed to
any other kind of like higher functioning that I guess
they're supposed to be doing here. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Maybe they have extremely standard carnal desires basically all the
aliens do. None of them are really shown to be, like,
I don't know, considering the philosophy of deep space or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Yeah, I mean, maybe they're doing all that in the background,
and that's why everything else is dumped down a bit.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
In this scene, we also meet Peter Wingard as Clytis.
This is the figure in the black hood with the
spiked shoulder pads, also wearing a rigid gold mask. This
mask does not look sad. Instead, it looks kind of
coldly curious.

Speaker 2 (01:04:56):
Yeah. Yeah, this is total like vibes of Doctor Doom
of Death from g I Joe, that sort of thing.
Great presentation here, a golden death.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
You know, I was waiting for his big unmasking scene,
but I don't think it ever comes, or if it did,
I must have missed it was there. Any time we
see him without the mask.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
We see some stuff leak out of the mask.

Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
Yeah, that's it, all right. We're not done meeting characters
in the scene. We meet a couple of princes. We
meet Brian Blessed as Voltan, the Prince of the Hawkman.
We meet Timothy Dalton as Baron, the Prince of the Arboreans.
I think the tree people, yep. And when we first
meet these two, they are fighting with each other. They're
arguing about who gets to present the fabled ice Jewel

(01:05:38):
of Phrygia to Emperor Ming as a tribute. Voltan tries
to present it first, but then Barn comes into the
room and says, ah, you stole that from me. I
unearthed it to give to Ming as a tribute. I
saw it first, but then Voltan stole it and they
get mad at each other. They're about to duel, but
then Clytas shuts it down. He says, no one in
the palace dies without a command from the Emperor. And

(01:06:01):
oh boy, Brian Blessed looks so eager to fight. He also,
his beard looks so wild. It's very like, I don't know,
it's very like not smoothed out. It has the look
of like when a cartoon character gets gets like electrified
and like their hair stands on end.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Yeah. I mean, it's rare to see a picture of
him without a full glorious beard, but this one I
feel like, yeah, they made it more bushy than usual. Here.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Yeah, now we gotta have a scene here in this
big gathering where we witness Ming's cruelty. So we see
the prince of one of the assembled people's here, the
prince of Ardentia named Thun, and he's dressed in sparkling gold,
and he approaches. He's called up before Ming, and he's like,
we have suffered greatly since you blasted our kingdom. He says,

(01:06:51):
they don't have any riches to offer, but the Ardentians
can offer their loyalty.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
You pointed out that I'd forgotten to mention them in
the I mean, there are a lot of actors in
this film. We can't mention them all. But this is
George Harris playing thun Born nineteen forty nine. Fans will
definitely recognize him as Katanga in Raiders of the Lost
Art small part, but a memorable one, and he also
played Kingsley shackle Bolt in the Harry Potter films.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
Yeah, so Prince, he goes up before Ming and he's like, okay,
we can offer you loyalty. That's all we got after
you attacked us, and Ming commands him to show his
loyalty by falling on his sword. So Prince he tries
to do a smart double cross, like he tries to
look like he's going to fall on his sword but
then strike out and kill Ming, but the globe robot

(01:07:40):
gets in the way. It freezes him in place before
he can do it, and then Ming kills him with
his own sword.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Purple blood right or blue blood, I can't remember, but
some sort of crazy alien colored blood.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Oh yeah, the aliens in this movie have many different
colors of blood, except for Timothy Dalton, who appears to
have regular He's got like red blood, which makes you wonder,
is Timothy Dalton just an Earthling who has been transplanted
to Arborea? Don't know?

Speaker 2 (01:08:06):
Yeah, you think they would have green blood, because it's
just you have aliens with all different colored bloods, and
I guess you probably have that whole situation going on
here where sensors famously are okay with blood if it's
not red, you can have as much as possible if
it's green, but if it's red, and they're like, okay,
it's too much.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Yeah, anyway, So our Earthlings watch Ming just murder this guy,
and then Flash mutters to Dale, this Ming's a psycho.
Then the globe robot overhears him in tattles It like
blares out on speakers, this Ming is a psycho, And
they're like, who said that? And now all eyes are

(01:08:44):
on the Earthlings, including Princess Aarrah, who is still aggressively
ogling Flash Gordon from Afar. Gordon does notice this, and
he like looks back at her, and Dale gets jealous.
Oh also, they've never explained this, really, but Princess Aura
just has like a guy on a leash.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Yeah, and I'm pretty sure this is Deep Roy, an
actor who's come up on the show before. Again, very
very deep gast on this picture. Among other things, Robbie
Coltrane shows up at the airport scene early on in
the picture. It hits a blink and you miss it situation,
But there's Robbie Coltran.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
I didn't even notice anyway. So the humans come forward
and Ming is like, who are you? Flash says Flash Gordon,
quarterback New York Jets. I didn't expect we were going
to get a specific team mentioned Dale says Dale, Arden

(01:09:41):
your Highness live and let live. That's my motto. And
then Zarkov says, my name is Hans Zarkov. I am
a scientist. I kidnapped them here in an effort to
save our planet Earth. And Zarkov goes on to say,
you know, we're interested only in friendship. Why did you
attack our planet? And the Emperor Ming explains his mindset.
He says, this is a quote, why not pathetic Earthlings

(01:10:03):
hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest
inkling of who or what is out here? If you
had known anything about the true nature of the universe
anything at all he would have hidden from it in terror.
Oh that's a kind of I didn't expect it to
go in that direction, but that's that's kind of creepy.
It has some cosmic horror going on.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
Yeah, absolutely, there are moments like this in the picture
where yeah, it'll get really serious and like, oh man,
this being is terrifying, and then you know, a football
game may break out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:36):
That's right. So well, first, Ming, like he looks at
Dale Arden and he is suddenly filled with lust and
he's like, ah, yes, you are my new imperial concubine now,
and he hypnotizes her with his ring and like makes
her do this weird slow dance. It is an unusual
vibe and Ming, I guess he's happy with what he

(01:10:58):
sees and he's like, okay, she's mine now sees her
and Flash Gordon says, forget it being DALs with me,
and then we commenced the football fight. This had to
be one of my favorite moments of the movie, where
the fight breaks out and the form the fight takes
is football more so than you're probably imagining here. So like,

(01:11:19):
at first, there, Flash Gordon starts fighting the soldiers and
he's having trouble defeating them until Zarkov snatches like an
egg from one of the aliens in the room, and
the egg is basically football shaped and he throws it
to Flash Gordon and then this apparently activates his football

(01:11:41):
brain so he can tackle the bad guys. Rob. I
don't know what you want to say about the scene.
There is a lot going on and it is really funny.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Your note on it being more football theme than you
can possibly imagine if you haven't seen the film is
totally on point, because, yeah, it is like a straight
up football game that breaks out to the point where
there's a there's this one moment where Clyde has like
gets some of the cronies and again these are okay
two things. First of all, the aliens who are engaging

(01:12:10):
in the football fight are of like a different type.
They have different armor that strongly resembles like football padding.

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
Yes, they're dressed up like football players.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
Yeah. And then when they when they're getting their butts
kicked by Flash, Clydus jumps in and he's like, all right,
huddle up. He like does like a football coaching thing
where it's like you need to do like this, do
this play and they go out and try it again,
and it is. It is tremendous fun. It is just
absolutely goofy, and it can come as a shock, Like
I say, if you kind of like we're buying into

(01:12:42):
Ming a few seconds earlier and you're like, oh man,
this this bad guy's pretty terrifying.

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
We go from cosmic horror to football fight in like
eighty seconds. And also in this fight, Dale is doing
cheerleader cheers. She's like, go Flash, Go Flash. Also, Brian
Blessed likes watching. He keeps just like watching the fight
and grinning, gigantic toothy grin, casually intervening here and there

(01:13:08):
to help out Flash.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Yeah, tripping a few aliens us. I think he uses
the cudgel on him a little bit too.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
Yeah, but he's doing it like on the Sly. I
guess he didn't get caught. But unfortunately this fight ends
with Flash getting knocked unconscious. I think Zarkov like screws
up and it's his fault. And so Ming is victorious
over the Earthlings, and Aura goes up to Ming and
she begs him to give Flash to her, even though
she's already engaged to be married to Prince Baron Timothy Dalton.

(01:13:37):
She's like, no, give me this other husband as well.
I will marry both of them. But Ming refuses, So
Zarkov is taken away by Cleitis to be conditioned for
the Imperial Secret Police. Flash is to face public execution
later that night for his defiance of Ming.

Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
The football rebellion is over.

Speaker 3 (01:13:56):
Oh yeah, so yeah, they're in prison and condemned. So
we get one scene that comes up soon is this
little well. First, there's a there's a moment with Prince
Baron and Princess Ara where he says he doesn't trust her,
but she convinces him to go back to Arboria tonight
and she will come and meet him there with a surprise.

(01:14:17):
And then we see Flash in prison in Ming's dungeon
here wearing one of the best helmet mask things I've
ever seen. It looks like a like a giant die
of some kind, and it's got spikes shooting out of
it where his face would be. I don't know if
that's like to prevent anybody from getting close to his face,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
Or maybe it's because if he runs away, he'll like
stick into the wall and then he can't move. I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
It looks impressive though, So as a final request before
his execution, he tells Clydas that he wants to see Dale,
and they're given a moment together, and Clydas, of course
regards it as pathetic that they are in love. And
Dale comes in in her emperor's concubine uniform and the
first thing Flash Gordon says when he sees her is

(01:15:03):
you look great. That about at us rolling on the floor,
You look great. Anyway. They say that they hope this
is only a bad dream. You know, soon they'll wake up,
and Flash tells her, you know, after he's dead, she's
gonna have to meet up with Zarkov to find a
way to save the earth. So we go to the

(01:15:24):
execution and it's going to take place in this chamber
that's like a hat, it's like a glass hemisphere with
this chair where this like yellow smoke comes out that
is apparently some kind of poison that will kill Flash Gordon.
The execution scene set is actually gorgeous, with these clouds
blooming in the sky and all these bizarre costumes. It's
really again one of the many feast for the eyes

(01:15:47):
scenes here.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
Yeah, it's like a cross between church and a gas
chamber exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:15:53):
And the Imperial Surgeon is a character we meet in
this scene. He's dressed in like white robes, looks very
boring compared to everybody else around him. He's like he's
like the square in Ming's palace. And we see him
slip Flash Gordon some kind of secret medicine before the execution.
There's a great moment in the scene where I think
we see Dale and Zarkov and they're watching Flash Gordon

(01:16:16):
be prepared for execution and they're they're crying, and Princess
Ara says to Ming, look, water is leaking from her eyes,
and Ming says, it's what they call tears. It is
a sign of their weakness.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
Yeah, this is I mean, ultimately, an important theme in
the film is that what humanity offers is compassion and
reason and that's what that's what's ultimately going to win
the day. And that's that's ultimately what Flash has. That
is his superpower. But it's not helping him out a

(01:16:49):
lot right now.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
Right well, No, in fact, what helps him out right
now is that he is good looking, and Aura is
obsessed with him because she in fact has gotten the
the Imperial Surgeon to give him an antidote that will
protect him from this yellow smoke that is supposed to
poison him. So he just like gets knocked out by it,
and we come back to him later in this room

(01:17:12):
where his coffin is laid out next to like a
stylized custom tombstone that says Flash Gordon Earthling executed by Ming.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
Oh man, that's so good. It's likes branded.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
So they wake him up and the Imperial Surgeon is like,
I'm a fool doing everything you ask for Aura, and
she kisses him and she's like, Yep, you're a fool.
You're gonna do everything I say, and so he scurries
off and Flash awakens wearing weird plastic underwear, and Aura
kisses him and tells him she has revived him with magic,
and she's like, quick, put on this uniform before the

(01:17:47):
lizard men arrive to bury you.

Speaker 2 (01:17:50):
Everyone is if you're executed by Ming, you are buried
in hotpants. That's that seems to be the tradition.

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
Yes, and as oh by the way, I mentioned this
scene coming up. As Aura and Flash are escaping the palace,
they pass by a room where doctor Zarkov is strapped
to a table with some giant beam emitter aimed at
his head. And as she's like, oh, it's only conditioning,
come on, and so they leave, Aura and Flash leave
the palace. But then we zoom in on this room

(01:18:17):
where Ming and doctor Zarkov are talking, and Ming explains
his whole plot. He says, quote, every thousand years, I
test each life system in the universe. I visit it
with mysteries, earthquakes, unpredicted eclipses, strange craters in the wilderness.
If these are taken as natural, I judge that system

(01:18:37):
ignorant and harmless. I spare it. But if the hand
of Ming is recognized in these events, I judge that
system dangerous to us. I call upon the great God Diezan,
and for his greater glory and for our mutual pleasure,
I destroy it utterly. And so Zarkov realizes. He says,
you're saying it's my fault. The earth is being droid

(01:19:00):
and Imperming says, precisely, it's a real bad twist. But
then they explain, Okay, they're gonna empty his memory as
we might empty your pockets. They're gonna steal all his
memories out of his mind, and then we get this
brain wiping scene where we see, like, as this beam
is beaming at his head, we see on a television

(01:19:22):
screen Zarkov's whole life playing like in super speed in reverse.
We see all these formative memories, personal tragedies, family struggles.
So in the middle of this goofy movie, this sequence
is strangely powerful, mostly because of the way Topaul performs it.
We see him like losing his wife in a horrible accident,

(01:19:45):
we see his family suffering under the Nazis, and finally
he regresses to being a baby, and he just says, Papa, Papa.
I don't know what to make of this. I would
say it is wildly tonally inappropriate for the film, but
it's also quite strong. It's strangely moving.

Speaker 2 (01:20:04):
Yeah, this is exactly how I've always felt about that,
or that's the way I feel about it now. I
remember seeing this when I was a kid, and this
scene was was like kind of disturbing, you know, because
it's it's you're used to seeing characters vaporized by lasers.
We've seen it already in this picture, you know, run
through with swords, but this is just this is this

(01:20:24):
is rather poignant and disturbing. And and yeah, we just
had a football fight, now we're having this. So it
seems like something that maybe should have been cut or
maybe should have been saved for another movie. But again,
the performance is so solid. What can you do? And
and and the way they the images are cut together
with other like random images of like cats and faces,

(01:20:45):
it's yeah, it's quite troubling.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
Yeah, I would say it's like really good, but it
doesn't belong here.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
It's so weird, like this belongs in the Nicholas Rogue
movie that we didn't get. This needs to be in
that alternate reality.

Speaker 3 (01:21:00):
So back to the goofy stuff. We see Flash on
Aura's rocket ship. They're going to our Borea, and this
is the scene where he like, you know, he'd like
endangers the ship in order to convince her to allow
him to use the Thought Amplifier, which is like a
telepathic communicator machine to contact Dale telepathically and let her

(01:21:20):
know he is still alive. She's hanging out with I
guess Ming's other concubines, and she's just like she thinks
he's dead, but this conversation lets her know that he's alive,
and she sort of gets the idea, Okay, I got
to escape here and do something now, Flash and Aura.
They go to this place, Arborea. This is like a
moon or a planet characterized mainly by trees. It's sort

(01:21:43):
of an Ewok village, as we were saying, but full
of people, including Timothy Dalton and Richard O'Brien, and we
witness this interesting ritual when they first arrived there where
like a young man, he says, I am now of age, greenfather,
I ask for the test of manhood, and this ritual
commences where he has to go around this like tree
root and reach into one of many holes in it.

(01:22:04):
If he reaches into the wrong hole, he will be
stung by this weird tree beast. It's like a scorpion
inside the tree that has a venom that tortures people
with madness until they die. And he does get stung.
So this kid is like Timothy Dalton, you must you
must end it now, and Timothy Dalton Mercy kills him.
And this is apparently they're they're very harsh initiation into

(01:22:26):
adulthood and their society.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Yeah, the tree beast sequences are very memorable. In fact,
I was watching this with my wife last night. She'd
seen it before, and I was at one point we
reached we reached a point in watching the film where
I was like, Okay, do you want to go to
bed and I can finish it in the morning, And
she's like, no, I need to stay up at least
until the tree beast scene happens. At least until we
start sticking their arms into the big stump. So we

(01:22:53):
ended up watching the whole thing. But that was nice,
one of her favorite scenes.

Speaker 3 (01:22:57):
It is quite me They are actually a couple of
these scenes. We see this other guy fail to test
early on and then Aura dumps dumps flash on this planet.
He's like, Barn, take care of him. I've got to
go back and do other things. I'll be back and
Barn does he like this? Of course not. This is
like my fiance's other boyfriend just has to hang out

(01:23:17):
with me now.

Speaker 2 (01:23:18):
Yeah, so he's gonna instantly orchestrate his death.

Speaker 3 (01:23:21):
Right, So they like put him into this cage that
gets lowered into the green swamp below the trees, and
he's there with these other prisoners. Oh, it's a very
it's a very unpleasant set piece. They're like up to
their shoulders, just barely trying to keep their heads above water. Meanwhile,
there's a there's a great escape scene where Dale she's like, Okay,

(01:23:41):
I gotta get out of here. So she orchestrates an
escape where she they bring her this kind of like drug,
this like drugged beverage, and they're like, take it, you know,
it makes everything feel good, and so she's she gets
the servants to drink it instead, they fall unconscious. She
swaps uniforms with them, escapes the escapes the palace by

(01:24:04):
like doing some real moves. I didn't expect Dale to
become such an action hero in the movie, but she's
like running around beaten up and blasting a bunch of
the soldiers on her way out.

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
No explanation whatsoever for it but that it's fun.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
Great. Yeah, it's like halfway through the movie they just decided, wait,
what is she not just a damsel in distress? Like
she you know, she's kicking butt too. As you said,
it is not explained, but okay, great.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
Yeah, maybe it's because she drank a little bit of
that potion from the Galaxy of Pleasure or wherever they
said it was from, and so she drank just enough
to give her like super combat the skills, and that's
what we see.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
Here, that's right. Yeah. So she meets up on her
way out of the palace with Zarkov again, which at
first we worry is agent Zarkov and apparently brainwashed drone
form Ming and Ming thinks this guy is working as
a double agent. But once they're out of the palace,
Zarkov has this moment where he reveals he is still
himself and he still has all his memories. He I

(01:25:01):
couldn't fully understand it, but he says like he was
able to resist the brainwashing by holding onto memories including
I think, the theories of Einstein, bits of the Talmud,
and songs by the Beatles, and then he says that,
like spoke, focusing on these specific memories allowed him to
keep all of his memory and knowledge. He says, it's

(01:25:23):
you can't conquer the human spirit.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
The performance sells it, but it is a complete turnaround
because it's just like, oh yeah, all that you thought happening, No,
not happening. I'm fine, disregarded, I'm good.

Speaker 3 (01:25:43):
So, like Ming, Calla and Clytas learned that Flash Gordon
is still alive, they're very unhappy about this, and they
learn he's still alive due to the intervention of a trader,
and Ming authorizes Clytis to discover who the trader is,
no matter, no matter where the trail leads, by any
means necessary. So this leads to the torture scene of
Princess Aura. Clydis has her like chained up and they're

(01:26:08):
torturing her for information. They're like, where is Flash Gordon?
Where did you take him? Clydus seems to be kind
of enjoying this because he's he's portrayed to be somewhat
of a creep when it comes to Aur and uh
then it Oh, there's the part. It gets to where
he's like, bring me the bore worms and she goes, no,
not the bore worms. Ara has has multiple lines where

(01:26:32):
she just has to make very very straight reference to
the horror of the boar worms. It'll come up again.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
It works, I mean, you're it builds up a sense
of fear of these worms that we will never see,
never see. Yeah, I mean maybe Dino came in. He's like, Okay,
look I gave you the cage lowered into the swamp.
I gave you the tree Beast, but we can't have
bore worms where we're at the very limit of the
budget right now.

Speaker 3 (01:26:57):
Speaking of the swamp, there's like an escape scene where
they get Gordon out of the cage in the swamp,
but then Timothy Dalton confronts him and they're like, Okay,
we're gonna make you do the tree Beast test, and
he does pretty well, but eventually this escalates to a
fight and Flash Gordon has to like pull a sword
on Timothy Dalton and try to escape, but then he

(01:27:20):
gets caught in the swamp by some kind of giant
monster that's like gobbling him up, and barn I don't
know how to even describe this thing. It's like a
big sack that has bamboo legs.

Speaker 2 (01:27:31):
Yeah, it's monstrous and it doesn't make a lot of sense,
but it's a monster. It's a space monster. It's not
supposed to So.

Speaker 3 (01:27:38):
Timothy Dalton comes it, kills the monster, and then you
think he's about to kill Flash Gordon. But then I
don't even remember what happens here. Is it that the
Hawkmen show up and stop him from killing him?

Speaker 2 (01:27:48):
Yeah, the Hawkmen come at that point because they're here
for Flash and the hawk Men are still trying to
play right by Ming. They're not an all open rebellion.
This is all heading to, of course, open rebellion, but
right now there's still division between these factions that will
eventually rise up together against me.

Speaker 3 (01:28:06):
Our Earthlings are constantly trying to appeal to the factions
to band together and fight against Ming instead of being
loyal to Ming and fighting each other. Right, and they
are eventually able to convince them, But before that we
get to the trial by combat scene, which is another
one of the best scenes in the movie. Flash Gordon.
I've said this before on the show that a lot

(01:28:28):
of times action scenes are boring because a lot of
times they are it's just you know, like close ups
of people shooting and things exploding, the lax drama. Flash
Gordon is not like that. The fight scenes are some
of the best stuff in the movies. The fight scenes
are so fun.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
Yeah, yeah, this one especially. So it's going to be
trial by combat in the Hawkman floating city. Yeah, and
there are a few steps to get where we're going
to go with this, but it's like Barren is going
to be tried and executed, but it's got to be
trial by combat. Who's he gonna fight. Seems like he's

(01:29:03):
gonna probably fit. He's gonna probably pick Brian Blessed, right,
he's there, he has his cudgel, he's eager for it,
but no, he chooses Flash Courton. He's like, I will
fight him.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
So they put them out on this disc in the
middle of a void, and so the Hawkman Palace is
like up at the air, so he's like, they at
the moon door basically, and they're on this disc there
and while and they're fighting with whips. Flashboard and then
Timothy Dalton are whipping each other on this disc and
then Brian Blessed gets this remote control that allows him

(01:29:35):
to tilt the disc around and make spikes come up
out of the bottom of it. So it's just it's
extremely chaotic and it's very very fun. And the fight
ends with a I think a super well earned reconciliation.
So Timothy Dalton is defeated at the end of the fight.
He's like about to fall off, but Flash goes to
save him. He's like, we can be friends, we can

(01:29:56):
work together, and you know what, bye Gollia there. I
think this this friendship arc has been earned.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
It really was earned here in this scene, great fight
with whips of all things. Even going back into this,
when I saw the whips come out, I'm like, oh lord,
you know, not swords but whips. But it works. They
make it work. It's well choreographed, the pail feels real,
and then yeah, it's earned. It's a whole it's a
wee can live moment. To call back to robot jocks.

Speaker 3 (01:30:24):
My god, you're exactly right, except instead of saying no,
we are dead, we are robot jocks, he says, okay, yeah,
we can live.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
We can do it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:32):
This is also the scene where in the middle they're
like fighting and Dale Arden yells of flash, I love you.
But we only have fourteen hours to save the earth
because oh, I haven't even mentioned this, but the moon
is spiraling into the Earth and Zarkov determines that they
only have fourteen hours before it cannot be stopped.

Speaker 2 (01:30:50):
Yeah, I think he set a timer earlier, or he
will set a timer in a bit so that we'll
stay on top of this whole Moon Earth situation.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
So I think we got to go a little bit
more lightly over what happens from here, because I know
we're running up on time. But oh my lord, there's
a lot of a finale, a lot of final conflict here.
So like Ming's forces come to attack the Hawkman Palace,
and one of the things that happens here is that mingko,
oh well we do we do get the death of Clytus.

(01:31:18):
How does that happen?

Speaker 4 (01:31:19):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
Oh, well, he shows up. He's upset about this whole
scenario with these warning factions suddenly joining forces. He gets
thrown out. There's like a double team, and he eventually
gets thrown out onto the spike platform run through, and
we do get that scene of his mask doesn't come off,
but we see like his eyes and his tongue like

(01:31:39):
melting out through the mask. Yeah. Gross, ending, But this
is an evil dude, so you know, yeah, it's fine.

Speaker 3 (01:31:47):
And then Ming is like, Flash Gordon, everybody else can leave,
you know, take the prisoners back to my palace, Flash Gordon,
I would like a word with you, And then he
offers Flash Gordon to be the Prince of Earth.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
The last temptation of Flah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:02):
Yeah exactly. He's like, how about how about this. I
make you the Prince of Earth, and all of the
people of Earth must serve you, and be your slaves
and you you just must be loyal to me? How
about that? And Flash is like, no, I won't do it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
It's a creepy scene because uh Ming is saying things like, oh,
they'll be different once I'm done with them, they'll be
easier to manage, yeah and uh and all that. Yeah,
Flash is our hero. He doesn't want any part of that,
he says, No.

Speaker 3 (01:32:30):
I think Ming says that he will condition the people
of Earth to be satisfied with less.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):
A yeah, that's what he says.

Speaker 3 (01:32:37):
Yeah, but no, Flash would never do that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:40):
All right. So Flash is left on the Hawkman floating
castle thing and they're gonna blow up, and Ming's force
to start blowing it up. But fortunately he finds a
rocket slab, which is kind of like he finds a
jet ski. It's a jet ski. It's a space jet ski.
I don't know why the hawk Men need a jet ski.
They have wings that allow them to fly through space,
but it's it's fortunate for our friend Flash here, who

(01:33:03):
has no wings.

Speaker 3 (01:33:04):
And ultimately this all culminates in like the factions are
going to band together. He Flash convinces Brian Blessed and
the Hawkman to like all work together to go oppose Ming.

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):
That's right, just as Ming is about to get married
to our heroine. So you know a lot of things
predictably coming to a hat here.

Speaker 3 (01:33:26):
That's right. So several things are happening here somehow. I
think the Zarkov and Timothy Dalton are in the dungeon
together in the palace, and we come in on them,
and Timothy Dalton's like, tell me again about this Houdini man,
and but they get what happens?

Speaker 2 (01:33:45):
Do?

Speaker 3 (01:33:46):
They get rescued by Princess.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Aura, I believe so, Yeah, she completely turns face at
this point, and she's working for the good guys.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
We've been told that she's going to be punished for
her treachery by like being sent to a planet where
she will she will like freeze and suffer, and I
guess this will purge her mind of all disloyalty. But
before that happens, I don't know. She's just wandering around
and she Yeah, she rescues them, and then they go
and do some fighting inside the palace to like sabotage

(01:34:15):
Ming's defenses and General Kala and all the guys with
goggles on their eyes, and there's a great moment where
a guy gets the goggles pulled off of his head
and we find he has no eyes underneath. It's just
like sockets full of wires.

Speaker 2 (01:34:27):
Oh yeah, and they're all interconnected, so they all short
out and die.

Speaker 3 (01:34:31):
So the Hawkman and Flasher are attacking first the ship
that's out there, General Kala's ship, and then they're attacking
the palace while this wedding is happening. And I noticed
something about the wedding. The sniveling, obsequious priest performing the
marriage ceremony, he seemed familiar to me, and I was like,
wait a second, is that Delbert Grady from The Shining

(01:34:53):
And yep, that's right. It is Philip Stone, British character
actor who was also in a couple of other Kubrick movie.
He was in a Clockwork Orange and he was in
Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. He's like the
British army officer. But I caught that I caught something
about his voice and his eyes there good eye.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
Yeah. And it's a very small role, but it's also
very fun. This is a kind of predictable comedy here
with your tyrannical ruler going through some vowels with his
soon to be forced wife.

Speaker 3 (01:35:23):
Yes. The priest is like, do you Ming, the merciless
ruler of the universe, take this earthling dale Arden to
be your impress of the hour? And Ming says of
the hour? Yes, And the priest is like, you promise
not to blast her into space? And then Ming like
glares angrily at him, and he's like it tills such

(01:35:44):
time as you grow weary of her and promises I
do another great scene this in this whole like assault
on the Palace at the end is the like the
codes have changed and so have we moments.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
Oh god, this is my favorite favorite, one of my
favorite moments. Upon this rewatch, like it's not effects, it's
it's just like really weird writing. And this this feels
very improvisational, like they realized they needed something to get
him from point A to or point are to point
s wherever we are in the transition here. But yeah,

(01:36:19):
they're like, oh, well we got to open this lock.
The locks have changed. And then they're like, oh, well
you know I've changed too, how about you? Yes, I've changed.
It's like this moment where they're using a change in
passcodes to quickly comment on their own capacity for change
as human beings. It's just so dumb.

Speaker 3 (01:36:37):
I love it that that scene is between Princess Ara
and Prince Baron. I guess it's like their sort of reconciliation.
And then meanwhile, Zarkov is in the back, like trying
to hack the terminal here, and he's like, I haven't changed.

Speaker 2 (01:36:54):
So I don't know what was going on with this scene,
if this was there's something, if this was improv or
there was something lost in translation. I don't know, but
it's great.

Speaker 3 (01:37:03):
The way that Ming is defeated in the end is
so good. It is that the ship crashes into the
wedding ceremony and the ship has like now that it
has been taken over by the Hawkman and Flash Gordon,
and it's got like a big prong on the front
of it, and it just like stabs Ming through the stomach,

(01:37:25):
like the spaceship skewers him.

Speaker 2 (01:37:27):
Yeah, like upper like not quite through the heart, like
he's a vampire, like a little lower than that, but
still vampire slaying esque. So it's right as he's turning
away from it. So it's a pretty great villain skewering scene.
And then there's the you know the sixth scene where
he like pulls himself off of the impalement and I
forget what is it? Purple blood it's one of the

(01:37:49):
alien colored bloods, I believe. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:37:51):
Yeah, and then he tries to use his his chunky
magic ring to to fight back against Flash Gordon, but no,
he can't win.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):
Yeah, he's weakening, and then he just kind of blinks
out and the ring falls to the floor.

Speaker 3 (01:38:06):
So it's a happy ending, it seems a Flash Gordon
is is he like declared the new emperor or something.
I don't know if he would take the job, but.

Speaker 2 (01:38:14):
Now I think Timothy Dalton is the new Emperor, right, yeah,
and then Brian Blessed is the new General.

Speaker 3 (01:38:19):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:38:21):
I can't imagine anything going wrong with this scenario, but
for the moment, things are united and peaceful.

Speaker 3 (01:38:27):
But we get the end question mark with just like
ming laughter echoing into eternity.

Speaker 2 (01:38:33):
Yeah, we get to close up with that ring and
some dust being blown away. So yep, it looks like
there's gonna be a sequel, except there was never a sequel. Ah.

Speaker 3 (01:38:43):
Well, Rob, I'm glad you suggested Flash Gordon this week.
This one was was such a delight.

Speaker 2 (01:38:49):
Yeah, this was a lot of fun. I feel like
listeners have have requested this one in the past as well.
It's a pretty pretty obvious picture to hit on the
Weird House Cinema journey, and I'm glad we did it. Agreed,
all right, We'll go ahead and close out here, but
as always, we invite you to write in. We'd love
to hear from you about your experience with this film,
your thoughts on the film, your history with the film,

(01:39:12):
and so forth. A reminder that Stuff to Blow your
Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursday's been on Fridays. We set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. If you want to see a complete
list of all the movies we've covered so far, you
can go to letterbox dot com. That's l E T
T E R b oo xd dot com and you
can find us there a we are Weird House that's

(01:39:32):
our user handle there, and we have a list of
all the movies we've covered, and you can toy around
with that, you know, separate them by genre and so forth,
and see what we've been up to. And sometimes there's
a peek ahead at what's coming up next.

Speaker 3 (01:39:44):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:40:05):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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