Original subtitles

I like to play with things awhile,

before annihilation.

(RUMBLING)

(LAUGHS, FADES OUT)

(EXCITING RHYTHM)

(PIANO NOTES BEGIN)

♪ Flash!

♪ Ah-ahhh! ♪

As Mike Hodges' flamboyant science fiction epic declares,

Flash Gordon will be the saviour of the universe.

In the iconic song by rock legends Queen

that propels the opening titles,

Freddie Mercury underlines the fact,

"He will save every one of us."

♪ He's for every one of us

♪ Stand for every one of us

♪ Ahhhhh-ahhhhh ♪ He saves with a mighty hand

♪ Every man, every woman

♪ Every child, it's the mighty flash! ♪

Do you think the playfulness of Flash Gordon

is something of a lost art in modern film?

I definitely think that contemporary cinema is not playful.

You know, we sort of forget what cinema is about.

It's about going into a room with a big screen and a load of people,

and enjoying yourself enormously, laughing out loud,

having a brilliant time, throwing popcorn around.

That's cinema. It's a spectacle.

It's kind of the size and scale of it all.

(WHOOSH)

(EXCITING RHYTHM, PIANO NOTES)

(INSTRUMENTAL BUILDS)

♪ Flash! ♪

(EXCITING MUSIC FADES)

(UNSETTLING TECHNO MUSIC)

(DRAMATIC PERCUSSION)

(OMINOUS NOTES)

(CROWD CHANT) Hail, Ming! Hail!

Ruler of the universe!

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

Flash Gordon was born in 1934

as a comic strip rival to Buck Rogers,

and then adapted into a popular black and white serial in 1938,

starring Buster Crabbe,

the unabashed story of the all-American hero,

who heads into space to stop Ming the Merciless

from conquering Earth.

This is a world of glorious nominative determinism.

Flash will be flash,

Ming will be Merciless.

Flash Gordon was invented by illustrator Alex Raymond

when his employers, King Features Syndicate,

demanded a competitor for Buck Rogers.

He drew from Edgar Rice Burroughs

and the Philip Wylie novel When Worlds Collide,

which imagined an alien planet encroaching on Earth.

Flash was a superhero before the term existed,

a beaming American ideal

offering escape from the Depression.

REPORTER: 'A common denominator of all young America

is its love of the comic strip,

read conscientiously daily on Sunday by every US youngster.'

Flash Gordon started life as a comic strip

in American newspapers in the 1930s.

A little before then,

there'd been another comic strip called Buck Rogers,

about an astronaut,

and that had proved very, very successful.

And King Features Syndicate,

who basically created cartoon strips for the Hearst organisation,

wanted to do something similar.

They tried first of all to buy the rights

for John Carter of Mars from Edgar Rice Burroughs,

but that didn't work out.

So they went internally to Alex Raymond,

who was one of their in-house cartoonists, to say,

"Perhaps you can come up with something."

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

'But despite the tremendous popularity of these characters,

few people are aware of the busy processes

of their birth and growth behind the scenes

of the syndicates which develop them.

Each may produce and distribute a dozen or more strips,

all presided over and nursed along by the comic's editor.

In a briskly competitive field that deals with talent and fresh ideas,

he is constantly on the search for new and exciting properties.

It is said that a really great new comic comes along

only on the average of about once every five years.

Some obscure young artist from the bush country

may suddenly be included

among the top-notchers passing over his desk.'

(CHEERFUL, CURIOUS MUSIC)

Let's talk about the comic strip origins of Flash Gordon.

He was invented by an illustrator called Alex Raymond, wasn't he?

Yes, he was a staff illustrator

for King Features Syndicate,

which had, like, sort of, a competitive set of cartoon strips

they'd sell to newspapers across America.

So Alex Raymond was charged with coming up with this.

He was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' work,

so including elements from Tarzan and...

The Mars Stories he did, didn't he? Yes.

And so, he...

There's a lot about the way that Flash Gordon develops,

which moves away from the Buck Rogers

'just people in space with ray guns' and moves out.

And the way he did this was to create this world of Mongo,

which is surrounded by other planets,

all of which were enthralled to the emperor, Ming the Merciless.

And that allowed him to go to a jungle world,

or go to, you know, an ice world,

which all fitted into his concept of it not just being a space adventure,

it's an epic adventure through, in a sense, through time and space.

I mean... in the cartoon strip,

there are certain Flash Gordon adventures where he fights dinosaurs

or he'll go up against, sort of, lion people.

So it's a very, very exotic take.

He moves that whole idea of the Buck Rogers 'shooting with lasers'

into a very elaborate and very ambitious space.

It was an immediate success.

All the kids loved it.

They all wanted to, sort of, be Flash.

They wanted to go to distant planets.

This was a great idea because,

if you had a successful comic strip like that,

you also had very successful peripherals.

So, very quickly after that,

Flash Gordon toys came out,

Flash Gordon ray guns...

And so immediately, you can see that

this is a question of some kind of new profit

that can be made from basically a cartoon.

♪ ..with a man's courage

♪ You know he's nothing but a man

♪ And he can never fail

♪ No one but the pure at heart

♪ May find the Golden Grail

♪ Oh-ohhh

♪ Ohhh... ♪

Backed by the prolific Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis,

the 1980 adaptation

is science fiction with a European swagger,

paying homage to the history of the genre,

from Georges Melies

to the Hollywood B Movie.

Sam J Jones, a square-jawed former Marine,

was born to embody Flash.

Melody Anderson makes for a sassy heroine as Dale Arden.

And Max von Sydow rules as the wicked Ming.

The entire cast is a match for their outer space counterparts...

Ornella Muti as a seductive Princess Aura,

Topol as half-crazed scientist Hans Zarkov,

Timothy Dalton cutting an Errol Flynn-like dash as Prince Barin,

and of course, Brian Blessed roaring to the rafters,

as the winged brute Prince Vultan.

(EXCITING ROCK MUSIC) Oh, well...

Who wants to live forever?

(LAUGHS)

(ROARS) Dive!

What's also interesting to me is that

there's this contextual element to Flash Gordon,

that he reflects America of the time.

He was idealistic, he offered escapism,

you know, this was the time of the Depression.

But also, there's, sort of, a cynicism in the stories

about science and about government,

and there's a certain kind of anti-authoritarianism about it.

Yes. And later, towards the beginning of the Second World War,

explicitly, there would be a group called The Red Sword,

that were very closely modelled on European fascists.

So, he's kind of commenting on the world around him

as he goes along as a cartoonist,

And so, that makes it feel very alive to the times.

You can learn a little bit about America from reading Flash Gordon.

Just to clarify, what is the difference

between a comic strip and a comic book?

Well, a comic strip would appear in the newspapers in America,

and it would be- there'd be a page of them,

whereas the comic book would be a book

which would be devoted entirely to the cartoon.

So you know, if you think of the way that we think of comics now,

we think of comics as being entirely Beano, Dandy, or a Marvel comic.

But this would be part of the newspaper's offering,

whether that's weekly or whether that's daily.

I mean, we have to realise that Flash Gordon has been going

for a very long time indeed.

In fact, the cartoons only came to an end in 2003.

So, in that period, of course,

there had been many, many different adventures for him to have,

many sort of different villains for him to fight.

But the essential Flash

deals with the evil Emperor Ming on Mongo.

Flash Gordon is a genuine expression of the comic book form,

heedless of realism, bursting with colour and imagination,

and a current of sly self-awareness.

This is a pastiche that knows it must still be thrilling.

Flash has to save the universe!

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(RUMBLING)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC BUILDS, CONCLUDES)

(DRAMATIC, OMINOUS MUSIC)

(EERIE NOTES)

Wake up. Dale, wake-

We're OK.

(GROANS) It's me, Flash. Remember?

We're on the ground!

Back home?

I don't think so.

(DRAMATIC, OMINOUS MUSIC)

(SOMBRE, CURIOUS MUSIC)

Flash Gordon made his debut on the big screen

in three Universal serials, which began in 1938.

Using left-over sets from Universal horror films,

model spaceships that resemble pepper grinders,

a score borrowed from Liszt,

and a habit of agonising cliffhangers,

it was a sensation.

Star Buster Crabbe was so self-conscious

about his bottle blonde hair

that he always wore a hat in public.

A rich heritage awaited the age of the blockbuster.

(GRAND, DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(NO AUDIBLE DIALOGUE)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC CONTINUES)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC FADES OUT)

What elevated Flash Gordon then

was this terrific Universal serial

with Buster Crabbe from 1938.

That sort of suggested he was a big screen proposition.

Yes. It was a very unusual decision at that point.

This idea of the serial pictures

which had started in the 1920s with the silent movies,

things like Pauline in Peril,

which were, you know, 1920s thrilling episodes,

and in fact invented the term cliffhanger,

had begun to die away.

And Universal had bought Flash Gordon,

and they decided to invest heavily in it

and make it an adult A-list-style serialised feature,

to try and sort of win back that market.

And so they threw an enormous amount of money for it at the time,

but what they also did is they threw the resources

of the Universal movie-making machine at it.

So they used sets from Frankenstein,

sets from all their horror films.

They would use bits of music

that they'd already had composed for some other movies.

So, it had an enormous, sort of, scale

and movie-like quality to it, which...

You know, at that point,

those little early features had been very small-scale,

they'd been knocked out very cheaply and very quickly.

And this felt epic, you know?

So therefore, it sort of revamped and revitalised the style.

And they were, sort of, for their time,

groundbreaking special effects,

It's model work, but astonishing for the time.

Yeah, because I mean, it was made by movie makers,

rather than people who were, kind of, the leftovers,

people who were on their way up.

This was made by the cream of the Universal,

sort of, props department,

all of the best stuff you could find.

Of course, this gave a whole new dimension to it

because he came off the page and actually was live action

with, you know, fighting monsters, fighting evil villains,

in company of his putative girlfriend, Dale Arden,

and the mad scientist, Dr Zarkov.

And it's, sort of, fair to say that

that's where the iconography is truly born, isn't it?

If anyone remembered Flash Gordon,

it was from those serials,

so the blond Flash as the hero,

the look of Ming the Merciless...

All of it, sort of, came, really, through those serials.

Not just that, the scale of Flash Gordon as well, I think.

And this would go on to influence movie makers

in terms of how they approached sci-fi from then on.

Because those Universal epics were so epic,

because they used the sets from these vast movies,

that begins to establish the template for sci-fi,

which is that when you go to another world, it looks enormous.

You know, other civilisations will have these vast buildings

and these, you know, endless armies,

because it sets out to say, "When you go to these other planets,

they will be big, they will be spectacular, they will be enormous."

And then, filmmakers who grew up watching that,

for instance, George Lucas, would internalise that.

And that, you know, begins to become the template for science fiction.

Dino De Laurentiis,

the extravagant mogul who had nurtured the career of Fellini,

was also a notable champion of genre.

A fan since boyhood,

he had bought the rights to Flash Gordon in the '60s,

preventing a young George Lucas from adapting the comic strip.

When Lucas reworked his ideas into the stellar success of Star Wars,

De Laurentiis decided the time was ripe for the real thing.

Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian producer,

had been very interested in making comic strip movies since the '60s.

In fact, he really wanted Flash Gordon.

And he bought the rights to the serials,

and he'd taken a long time

to actually find someone to actually put it together

to satisfy his own vision of it.

Dino De Laurentiis had worked on many films with Frederico Fellini,

and Fellini was fascinated by Flash Gordon,

and in fact, bought the rights,

or optioned the rights,

from De Laurentiis in order to make the film.

Unfortunately, for various reasons, that project never came to fruition,

and the rights returned to Dino De Laurentiis.

Laurentiis was still keen to do it though,

and he even offered it to Sergio Leone,

with whom he had also worked.

And Leone turned it down because he didn't like the script.

He thought that it wasn't faithful to the original comic strip.

So, let's talk about Dino a little bit,

because he, obviously, is at the centre of this story.

You know, who was he as a producer?

I mean, he was an extraordinary character

and prolific as a filmmaker,

but tell me a bit about him.

Well, he starts off...

I mean, he briefly begins in film just before the Second World War,

but he really flourishes immediately after the Second World War,

where he's part of the neorealist movement.

But his ambition starts to become, er...

more fantastical, more imaginative, more flowery.

And in the end, he sets up his own studio, Dino Cheater,

where he's allowed to have the,

sort of, the full run of what he wants to do.

And he decides that he's going to pay top dollar

for Hollywood stars to come over to Italy and star in his movies.

So, he'll pay for Jane Fonda to appear in Barbarella, or...

You know, he thinks that it is important to be big,

that Italian cinema can compete with the rest of the world

in terms of the scale of its ambition

and the names that it draws in.

And he struggles in the end,

towards the end of the '60s, to keep that going.

There's a slump in Italian cinema.

And so he moves to Hollywood to pick up, kind of, where he left off.

But where he works in Hollywood, I think, is... unexpected.

He starts making films like Serpico,

Death Wish, Three Days of the Condor.

Very dark, very paranoid films,

films which are very much against the kind of...

style and pleasure that he showed

when he was making these big cartoony comic book films.

And then he decides to make Flash Gordon.

De Laurentiis had big ideas.

Nicholas Roeg was on the project for over a year.

He had pursued a metaphysical take

with a bold, erotic subtext

and Debbie Harry as Princess Aura.

As far as Mike Hodges was concerned,

he was entirely wrong for the material.

He had made his name with the grim British noir of Get Carter.

But there is something in that tension.

Hodges was the sense to Dino's sensibility.

Dino De Laurentiis is a very hands-on producer.

And so he basically sacked Roeg, he left the project.

And so he was still left with this unrealised project

that he was increasingly, you know, interested in doing.

George Lucas wanted to do it back in the '70s,

and Dino turned him down.

That made George Lucas go off and make Star Wars instead.

And so finally, Dino De Laurentiis chose

the British director Mike Hodges, for several reasons.

Mike Hodges had had a huge success with Get Carter,

which is one of the greatest British gangster films ever.

He had also done a science fiction film called The Terminal Man,

but he wasn't really... we didn't, you know,

we couldn't see why Hodges had actually been hired,

until you realised that he was not an auteur,

he was a man who could actually work in any genre,

and he could work fast,

having worked extensively in television and plays.

And the great thing about working in television

is that you don't waste time.

De Laurentiis felt that he was the right man for the job.

But, you know, more seriously,

I think the choice of Mike Hodges is actually crucial

because I think the tension

between his grittier, more pragmatic view of film,

and the material, and Dino,

and all the, kind of, science fiction elements,

is actually a good one.

And it's also important

the way that Mike Hodges comes across the original material.

So Mike Hodges does not understand, or know, Flash Gordon at all.

Dino De Laurentiis, in classic Dino style,

books him Concorde tickets to fly over to America for a meeting,

and Mike Hodges then starts to read Flash Gordon on the plane.

And he's looking at this comic strip,

and during this flight, he starts to think,

"There's no way I can really change this into Get Carter.

So why don't I just take this as the story board for the film?

Why don't I take this comic strip idea, and work with that?"

And that's very important, because he doesn't have any preconceptions,

he's able to work from the comic

rather than impose himself on the comic.

I mean, also, it didn't help... it didn't help him impose his vision

the fact that Dino De Laurentiis had a very clear idea

and a lot of the stuff was already in place.

So it enabled him to release himself from trying to control too much,

and just say, "Well, this is going to be a comic book film."

Rewritten by Lorenzo Semple Jr,

the script stays faithful to the original story.

We have the arrival of the planet Mongo,

ruled by the despotic Emperor Ming.

New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon,

Dale Arden, and the unhinged Zarkov,

take off in a homemade rocket to confront their foe.

While Ming takes an unsavoury interest in Dale,

Flash escapes certain death

to rouse the troubled kingdoms of Mongo to revolt,

in a flurry of laser beams and guitar chords.

Shall I inform his majesty? Imbecile.

The Emperor would shoot you

for interrupting his wedding with this news.

Fire when Gordon's in range.

♪ Flash!

♪ Ah-ahhh! ♪

(TENSE MUSIC)

Tricked you, Barin!

Back off!

One move and you're looking for a new prince.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Leave him!

He's mine!

I hunt him alone.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC CONTINUES)

(TENSE STRINGS MUSIC)

De Laurentiis was famed for casting his films on a look.

And he took one look at Sam J Jones, and saw Flash Gordon.

It had taken a year to find him.

Kurt Russell had said no,

and Arnold Schwarzenegger's accent was an issue.

De Laurentiis' mother had spotted Jones

on the television show The Dating Game.

He looked as if he had been drawn by a comic book artist.

De Laurentiis realised that he had to have

a really strong force as Flash Gordon,

and spent a year looking for him in vain.

It wasn't until a family member suggested Sam Jones,

who she'd seen in The Dating Game on television,

and said, "Have a look at this guy.

He's got the sort of... right sort of presence."

Jones came along,

and was cast as Flash Gordon.

De Laurentiis liked the look of him,

he had his hair dyed blond,

and he had the right kind of athletic figure

and energy for the role.

And in some ways, it's the hardest role, isn't it?

Because he has to be absolutely earnest

and the hunk and the hero.

And he gets no humour at all, essentially.

But Sam J Jones holds it together, doesn't he?

Well, he is an ex-Marine, football player,

who appears on a dating show.

He's done a little bit of acting,

he's appeared in the Dudley Moore film 10 as a small part.

And so then, they had- it took 10 months from there

of auditions and tests,

screen tests and chemistry tests.

But basically, he was hired because he looked like Flash Gordon.

Pathetic earthlings.

Hurling your bodies out into the void,

without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here.

Casting Ingmar Bergman favourite Max von Sydow as Ming

was an emblem of the film's pan-European verve.

Von Sydow sets the tone.

These are one-dimensional characters

enriched by colourful actors.

There is a wonderful dry superiority to Ming,

opening the film with the jaded line, "Klytus, I'm bored."

Flash Gordon is as quotable as Casablanca.

Surrounding Sam Jones was an absolutely wonderful cast.

Max von Sydow was, of course, key as the Emperor Ming.

Max von Sydow, who was adept

at playing villains of all kinds, as well as heroes.

But in this case, he embodied

the evil master of the universe,

the ruler of Mongo,

absolutely perfectly.

Not only was he made up to look very much like

the character in the comic strips and in the early serials,

he actually brought something else to the thing.

Because he is a very fine actor,

he gave a level of sadistic evil

that was wholly convincing,

which kind of brings a new dimension to the whole idea

of a master of the universe who really will do anything.

There's something also, I think, in von Sydow's performance and look,

of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu,

another great, sort of, epic villain.

Bear in mind this is coming out of the '70s.

The idea of the villain has been

someone who is genuinely psychotic,

or, sort of, Darth Vader.

And what Max von Sydow brings to the role of Ming is

an intelligence, a weariness...

real class.

I mean, I was watching the film

and going back to watching him in The Seventh Seal,

where he's involved in a chess match between a knight and death.

And there is something about

the gravity of working in that film

that he brings to this part.

But at the same time, he has a sparkle and a slight sort of smile

which suggests that he's enjoying himself.

And indeed, that was what Mike Hodges said,

is that most of the films that he'd been in,

were just really hard work, miserable films,

and he got the chance to be in a film which he really enjoyed

based on a comic strip he loved,

and he was enjoying every minute of filming.

There's this legacy of Nicholas Roeg's original idea

that he was going to wipe out, you know, all earthlings

and repopulate the planet with entirely his own species,

so a planet full of Mings,

and that was one of the reasons why he'd chosen Dale Arden as his bride.

But I think he's glorious in the film.

I think, as you say, there's this measured approach to it,

his sort of eloquent delivery of lines, his weariness.

He sort of defies the audience to laugh at the film.

Yes. And I think he sets up, actually,

a series of Hollywood villains from then on.

If you think of Beverley Hills Cop, if you think of Die Hard,

you think of these Alan Rickman villains,

you think, you know, this kind of idea of the weary British villain,

or the very, very intelligent, like...

Those people are formed, really, by Max von Sydow in this film.

Prior to that, we've not had villains like that.

We've had raging psych- you know...

He plays it so subtly, and...

But again, that weariness.

"I am so much better than everybody else,

and I can't believe I'm being defeated."

(CURIOUS MUSIC)

Come along, Fellini.

(BELLS JINGLING)

Hey! Remember me?

(UNSETTLING MUSIC)

Melody Anderson was a charming,

absolutely lovely, fresh-faced actress,

who plays Dale Arden.

She was perfect for the job.

She looked like a sort of, erm, prom queen.

She was perfect because she had that aura of innocence,

and yet a sense of capability about her.

There is no side to her at all,

she is exactly how she presents herself on screen.

Ornella Muti was, of course, the exact opposite.

She was the sort of exotic,

threatening, femme fatale.

There's a strong sense of morality throughout this film,

and Ornella Muti is, of course, utterly immoral.

She has, as far as one can see, as Princess Aura,

who is the daughter of Ming the Merciless,

she seems to have numerous lovers of various kinds.

And of course, she sets her cap at Flash the minute she sees him.

Among the cast are some real curios to bolster the cult appeal,

such as Blue Peter presenter to be, Peter Duncan,

failing his initiation into the Tree Men of Arboria.

Or kitchen sink playwright John Osborne,

who featured in Hodges' Get Carter, straight-faced, as a woodland priest.

Or Rocky Horror's Richard O'Brien, as a traitorous ally to Flash.

And beneath the golden mask of Klytus,

Ming's chief henchman, is Peter Wyngarde

from the '60s television show Jason King.

No one, but no one,

dies in the palace without a command from the Emperor.

(LOW, TENSE MUSIC)

Hail, Ming. (ECHOES)

(YELLS) Vultan!

I'm gonna ask you about two performances in particular

that are very, very memorable.

And the film is so memorable.

Two British actors, doing very different things, but get it right.

One is Timothy Dalton, who's clearly doing

some kind of riff on Errol Flynn as Prince Barin.

And the other, of course, is Brian Blessed

as the winged Prince Vultan,

who's kind of playing Brian Blessed in it.

Well Brian Blessed said that when he was a boy,

he'd gone to see Flash Gordon at the cinema,

and he'd felt that he was Vultan.

He thought that's what, you know,

he would always afterwards with his friends play Vultan.

And when he went into the audition,

the mock-ups of what the character looked like, he said,

"Well, they've already cast me, I just look like him."

But they hadn't, that was just how they drew the character.

So he was, really.

It was a role that he was born to play.

And he inhabits it so wholeheartedly,

that it's genuinely joyous to watch him laugh.

And then Timothy Dalton, conversely,

is playing to a very particular type,

and it works incredibly well.

The thigh slapping, taking off the gloves,

"Come on, I'm going to dare you."

I'm surprised he doesn't have a rapier

because he really is crying out for one.

You know, a man in a jungle who's leading his men to victory.

He is, as you say, he's very much the Errol Flynn role.

But he's dashing.

So you've got these two...

I mean, they're archetypes, absolutely archetypes,

but both these actors inhabit these archetypes

with so much commitment and so much talent

that you forget the archetype almost instantly.

There is another actor in there

that I only just noticed when I saw it again.

A small role, but a surprising face to see, is John Osborne,

who plays the father of a boy

who has to go through an initiation ceremony

and subsequently fails and dies.

That was quite a treat.

So, you can see that there are a tremendous amount

of support for the relatively inexperienced Sam Jones around him.

And Dino, sort of, made sure

that he's peopled his cast with really famous faces.

Shot on British sound stages,

including a converted hangar in Weybridge,

the film is a cocktail of textures.

It draws from the high style of De Laurentiis' '60s comic book hits,

Danger Diabolic and Barbarella.

Hodges wanted the audience to laugh along with the film knowingly,

like a grand pantomime.

Yet this surreal universe has a vivid immediacy

like the sets of an opera.

What works so well is

the performances live up to the flights of fantasy.

They recall the golden era Hollywood of charisma over naturalism,

but without breaking the spell.

It is a delicious balance.

There is real zest and sexiness,

making it more grown up than Star Wars.

As Brian Blessed extolled, it isn't camp, it's comic strip.

Tone is all important here, isn't it?

And it is a tone that's on a knife edge.

It sort of peers over into the world of parody.

And it's still a pastiche,

but it never breaks the spell.

It holds it.

I mean, I think one of the most spectacular

pieces of directing he does

is during the fight between Barin and Flash Gordon

on this tilting platform,

as the spikes come up,

Dale Arden says, "Flash, I love you,

but we only have 14 hours to save the earth." (CHUCKLES)

It's a laughable moment, it's a laugh out loud moment,

but then you go back to the fight.

And when you're back to the fight,

immediately, the peril is there as well.

There's something about the way he cuts so sharply

between these unusual script moments,

and the terror of what's there.

Production designer Danilo Donati had worked with Fellini.

Rather than the lived-in futurescapes of Star Wars or Alien,

he embraced the variety of the original comic strip

and art deco serialisation.

Mongo hints at the brutal formality of fascism.

We take a ship to the fairytale forest of Arboria,

and the floating sky city of the Hawk Men,

which resembles a giant chandelier.

The skies swirl with inky colour as if painted by Dali.

(HORN BLOWS)

He's not coming out, sir.

Charge capacities to electrify cloud.

Prepare Sky nets to catch Gordon's body.

Fire capacitators.

(LAUGHING)

They're trying to flush you out!

OK, let's go in after him.

(GRAND MUSIC)

(EXCITING RHYTHM)

Squadron 40!

Dive!

(DRAMATIC TECHNO ROCK MUSIC)

(MUSIC FADES OUT)

Hodges had wanted Pink Floyd to write the score,

but who is more Flash than Queen?

Their exuberant music gives the film the feel of a rock opera.

Based on the idea of thunder and lightning,

their tunes are a special effect in themselves.

Queen's score electrifies Flash Gordon.

The music just adds an extraordinary dimension to it.

It was entirely fitting.

It matched it tonally.

There was something about Queen's style of music

that matched the story of Flash Gordon.

But it almost serves as a narrative device.

It serves us, to give us the heroism and the passion.

It all comes from the music. Yes.

I mean, the music for the original TV series,

had come from the full work of the Universal movie studios' orchestras.

There are pieces of Liszt in it and so forth.

So, they really had this idea of big music.

And Queen had already done this album,

A Night at the Opera, with Bohemian Rhapsody,

these grand, operatic, sort of, rock styles.

Now, the movie came along

just as Queen, which had made this... a vow, really,

on a lot of their albums, never to use synthesisers,

had just decided they were ready to use synthesisers.

And you can sense them playing with it.

It couldn't be more appropriate

to hire Queen for that soundtrack.

I- I can't think of another band.

Queen were ironically the second choice.

There was originally Pink Floyd,

which I don't think would've been as appropriate for this film,

because there's something about

the way that Freddie Mercury and Brian May

cut straight into that, "Flash! Ah-ahh!"

This enormous crashing sound.

It's hard to think of another band that would enjoy that so much.

Yeah, it's the talent of being over the top, isn't it?

Yes. And it's a great talent.

To be over the top and still greatly enjoyable is a skill.

I mean, when you watch videos now

of Freddie Mercury at the peak of his success,

strutting around the stage in his white vest,

he's very, very similar to Sam Jones

strutting around the set in his white T-shirt.

There's something about that kind of...

just spectacle and glamour,

and, sort of, performance that just makes it exactly right.

The energy and excitement, and indeed quirkiness, involved

made Flash Gordon a splendid success in the UK and Europe,

if less so in a bemused America.

The singularity of the film

allowed it to pass into the realms of a cult hit.

It still has a huge following,

fans who laugh along with it and quote it at will.

The response to Flash Gordon

as the decades have gone on

has altered slightly.

At the time, it was very successful

with audiences and critics in the UK and Italy.

Outside of those two regions,

it didn't do very well.

It wasn't the big hit that Dino wanted it to be.

It doubled its budget. That's OK, you know, he made money on it.

But I don't think people were ready

for this kind of mutant film.

And it is a mutant film in many ways.

However, as time has gone by,

I think more and more people have come to realise

the fascinating elements of it.

And the fact is that what everybody concerned,

but De Laurentiis particularly...

What he wanted was what he got,

which was a film that was exciting,

that was a kind of retro, nostalgic movie,

science fiction movie, you know?

The rockets look exactly like they are drawn in the first place,

which, of course, by 1980, they would not have done.

This is nostalgia, this is the harking back to a different era.

This is harking back to not just the 1930s,

but the 1940s and the 1950s.

It's not until later that people go,

"Ah, no, this is... this is silly stuff." You know?

And then the cult begins

because the cult that has grown up around Flash Gordon,

is of genuine appreciation

for something that could not be made now.

And this is the definition of a cult film, isn't it?

It's not just you enjoy the film,

you have a kind of relationship with it,

you know the lines, you can follow the scenes,

you have the soundtrack, you know.

I think there's now people who do Flash Gordon cosplay and dress up.

It is definitely what we would call a cult hero, isn't it, a cult movie?

Yes. I mean, the script really lends itself to that

because there are so many lines.

"Flash, I love you, we only have 14 hours to save the earth."

"Gordon's alive?!" All of these lines which-

In fact, it's very hard to say those lines without actually quoting

and trying to do minor impressions of Brian Blessed.

All of Brian Blessed's lines, every time you do it,

you have to sound a little bit like him.

There's something compelling about them.

(LAUGHING) And also those lines, they are the kind of lines

that you can use in the pub, which is even better.

So that builds that up.

It's something that you can watch and enjoy,

you know, late at night, or in the afternoon.

It's a perfect film, it doesn't have any...

There's no difficulty in watching that film.

To the death!

(ROPE THUDS LOUDLY)

(TENSE MUSIC)

(GRUNTS)

(ALL GASP & SCREAM)

(BOTH GRUNTING) (GASPING & SCREAMING CONTINUES)

(WHIP CRACKS) (YELLS)

(GROANS)

(CHANTING) Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

(WHIP CRACKS) (LAUGHING)

Give me the remote control!

One of the most impressive things about Flash Gordon

is of course the way it looks.

It is beautifully designed,

in every respect, by Danilo Donati,

who designed not just the sets,

but also the costumes,

for several Dino De Laurentiis productions.

The great thing about Donati

was that he was equally at home

with historical reality and fantasy.

He knew exactly how far to push the designs

in order to make an impact on the screen.

Do you think there's a relationship

with the style of Flash Gordon and its use of music,

and the kind of, flourishing of the music video,

which probably happened shortly after that?

It does have very much a quality of some of the music videos

that the '80s, particularly the early '80s, produced.

Those kind of performative, over the top,

you know, collapsed epics

that dominated the early part of MTV's output.

There are lots of just amazing vistas,

amazing, sort of, erm, breathtaking scenes

without any of the dialogue, just the look of them, you know.

The colour is extraordinary.

And the strips were in colour, so they...

In fact, Alex Raymond's strips are used in the opening credit sequence.

They are the actual, sort of, cartoons.

And within that,

I think you have a sense of a world or several worlds

that can exist

within the context of the film.

The film's strongest influence has been on a different genre.

Put simply, there would be no superheroes without Flash Gordon.

And the translation of the cells of a comic book

into film form has become an industry.

In its way, Flash Gordon helped shape the future of cinema.

Yet its abiding pleasure is one of escapism

into a universe of charm, wit,

bold style and a glint in its eye.

You can really see,

starting with the original comic strip, which became a comic book,

and then obviously, the adaptation,

you can see the future of films. Yes.

You can see the superhero genre emerge,

and it's right here in Flash Gordon.

Well, as you say, I mean, the idea of the name Flash

in and of itself, the idea that you would

have a character whose name wasn't...

I mean, even Buck Rogers is, it's cowboy name.

This is the name of someone who is going to be what they do.

It's nominative determinism at its finest! (CHUCKLES)

So the idea, then, of a superhero who is the name of the thing he is,

Superman! Flash Gordon!

These things are very interchangeable.

I mean, there is even, much later on, of course,

a comic strip character called The Flash.

And so that beginning of that idea of these...

I mean, he doesn't have superpowers. No.

He's nothing but a man with a man's courage

as Freddie Mercury reminds us.

(GRAND TRUMPETING)

(EXCITING RHYTHM)

♪ Flash! ♪

(LOUD DRUMMING, DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

♪ QUEEN: The Hero ♪

(EXCITING ROCK INSTRUMENTAL)

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky