I'm not a fan of serials, whether it be comics, radio programs or films. Many of them, such as this one, "Adventures of Captain Marvel," are largely engineered to appeal to young boys, which is why a great proportion of them are Western shoot-'em-ups, pulpy detective mysteries and exotic adventure yarns or otherwise based on comic strips and books about male heroes with the damsels-in-distress they must rescue as they combat dastardly villains with their clandestine criminal organizations--generally with a cliffhanger to end each episode. Some chapter-play aficionados, however, claim this one in particular to be one of the best of the bunch. Indeed, although it is much of the same, from chapter to chapter and from serial to serial, there is an interesting aspect to this one involving its particular adventure and hero.
This one starts out with some standard, derivative Orientalism: the white colonialist archaeologists trespassing in an ancient tomb in some exotic Eastern land and the superstitious natives defending said tomb in a centuries-long tradition and who are ready at a volcano's-eruption-notice to start slaying the infidels. Whether Egypt or Siam, the location doesn't seem to matter to the filmmakers. Case in point, this instance seems to mostly be lifting from the Universal Mummy series (including the 1932 original, but more so the 1940s Kharis entries). From those films, this one adopts, among other things, the business with a scroll. This is the first part of that interesting aspect in this one, where a series of different media are self-referentially included. The superhero Captain Marvel began in the comic-books--picture stories, like hieroglyphs (or other logographs), drawn and written. The scroll, in particular, provides instructions for the scorpion artifact--a device that is rather analogous to cinema in its system of lenses that transmutes real-world objects and people into something else. The scroll, like the comics to the film proper, serves as a sort of script to the scorpion camera-like apparatus within the film.
In the following episodes, the third popular media for serials, the radio, repeatedly becomes an important plot device. The first instance involves Billy Batson telling the story of the first episode for his radio program. I'm a fan of this sort of meta-narrative construction, and I like that Billy works in radio. The Superman comics include a similar framework with Clark Kent's day job as a newspaper reporter--another storyteller of the stories of his super-powered alter ego. Likewise with Spiderman as photographer Peter Parker.
Captain Marvel is an intriguing comic-book character, too. He's basically a rip-off of Superman, and, in fact, DC sued over this before the Marvel character came under their roof--and has since been remade as the 2019 feature "Shazam!" That blockbuster, too, rather cleverly referenced the film it largely imitated, "Big" (1988), which is also about a boy transformed into an adult's body through magic. There's one big difference between Marvel/Shazam and Superman, though, which is that the boy Billy Batson (although, in this serial he's played by a young adult) turns into the muscular manly man in cape and tights. Since the main audience for this stuff were young boys, this was a rather ingenious ploy to fold the comic-book reader and movie-going spectator into the hero. It's effective character identification. Batson makes Marvel more relatable than an alien-turned-god from Krypton or, say, a millionaire-turned-billionaire from Gotham. It's no wonder, as reported, that Captain Marvel was for a time the most popular comic-book superhero.
Additionally, while the production values for serials tend to be exceedingly cheap, the man flying here isn't badly done considering when and for what it was made. It's better than the rear-projection shots involved in car rides, which were also common in big-budget features back then. Marvel's super-strength also aids brevity for some of the numerous and repetitive fistfights, and the business of bullets bouncing off of him is played amusingly. Employing smoke for the transitions between Billy and Marvel is economically effective, too. After all, this entire endeavor consists of smoke and mirrors: cliffhangers re-edited and elaborated upon to achieve resolution; red herring after red herring to keep the Scorpion mystery going; character duality, stuntman duplicity and photographic doubling; the transmutation of the real into fantastic illusion; making a serial formula etched in stone into gold.
This one starts out with some standard, derivative Orientalism: the white colonialist archaeologists trespassing in an ancient tomb in some exotic Eastern land and the superstitious natives defending said tomb in a centuries-long tradition and who are ready at a volcano's-eruption-notice to start slaying the infidels. Whether Egypt or Siam, the location doesn't seem to matter to the filmmakers. Case in point, this instance seems to mostly be lifting from the Universal Mummy series (including the 1932 original, but more so the 1940s Kharis entries). From those films, this one adopts, among other things, the business with a scroll. This is the first part of that interesting aspect in this one, where a series of different media are self-referentially included. The superhero Captain Marvel began in the comic-books--picture stories, like hieroglyphs (or other logographs), drawn and written. The scroll, in particular, provides instructions for the scorpion artifact--a device that is rather analogous to cinema in its system of lenses that transmutes real-world objects and people into something else. The scroll, like the comics to the film proper, serves as a sort of script to the scorpion camera-like apparatus within the film.
In the following episodes, the third popular media for serials, the radio, repeatedly becomes an important plot device. The first instance involves Billy Batson telling the story of the first episode for his radio program. I'm a fan of this sort of meta-narrative construction, and I like that Billy works in radio. The Superman comics include a similar framework with Clark Kent's day job as a newspaper reporter--another storyteller of the stories of his super-powered alter ego. Likewise with Spiderman as photographer Peter Parker.
Captain Marvel is an intriguing comic-book character, too. He's basically a rip-off of Superman, and, in fact, DC sued over this before the Marvel character came under their roof--and has since been remade as the 2019 feature "Shazam!" That blockbuster, too, rather cleverly referenced the film it largely imitated, "Big" (1988), which is also about a boy transformed into an adult's body through magic. There's one big difference between Marvel/Shazam and Superman, though, which is that the boy Billy Batson (although, in this serial he's played by a young adult) turns into the muscular manly man in cape and tights. Since the main audience for this stuff were young boys, this was a rather ingenious ploy to fold the comic-book reader and movie-going spectator into the hero. It's effective character identification. Batson makes Marvel more relatable than an alien-turned-god from Krypton or, say, a millionaire-turned-billionaire from Gotham. It's no wonder, as reported, that Captain Marvel was for a time the most popular comic-book superhero.
Additionally, while the production values for serials tend to be exceedingly cheap, the man flying here isn't badly done considering when and for what it was made. It's better than the rear-projection shots involved in car rides, which were also common in big-budget features back then. Marvel's super-strength also aids brevity for some of the numerous and repetitive fistfights, and the business of bullets bouncing off of him is played amusingly. Employing smoke for the transitions between Billy and Marvel is economically effective, too. After all, this entire endeavor consists of smoke and mirrors: cliffhangers re-edited and elaborated upon to achieve resolution; red herring after red herring to keep the Scorpion mystery going; character duality, stuntman duplicity and photographic doubling; the transmutation of the real into fantastic illusion; making a serial formula etched in stone into gold.