The Turkish love for masked superhero movies spills over into Saturday Matinee serials as The Mysterious Doctor Satan is plundered and transformed into The Deathless Devil. The 1940’s Copperhead runs headlong into 1970s Eurospy territory with wanton villainesses and, sadly, the near-Lovecraftian horror of an Odious Comic Relief in a Sherlock Holmes outfit. Who will kill the Copperhead first – DOK-TOR SEY-TAN’s indestructible keeler robut, or Bitik, the rubber-mugged horror Holmes? That…. would be telling!
Posted even later than Ken’s, but still on the 29th… I, too, am legal and yet remain an outlaw!!!!
#1 by Blake Matthews on February 29, 2008 - 4:14 pm
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Glad to see you writing again, Dr. Freex. I always wanted to watch the Dr. Satan’s Robot serial. Isn’t that the serial that managed to cram stock footage of the Hindenberg disaster into it?
#2 by drfreex on February 29, 2008 - 10:48 pm
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That I don’t know about… given that the Hindenberg crashed and burned in 1937, and The Mysterious Doctor Satan was produced in 1940… well, I’d like to give Republic credit for more restraint than that. Having never seen the entire serial in question, though, I can’t speak with any authority.
#3 by lyzard on February 29, 2008 - 11:04 pm
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Can’t remember if that’s so. The serial Dick Tracy has the bad guy’s dirigible crashing and burning, though, which considering it was made in 1937, struck me as pretty damn tasteless.
#4 by lyzard on March 3, 2008 - 7:01 pm
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Okay, then: turns out it’s not The Mysterious Dr Satan that we’re talking about here; it’s The Phantom Creeps (1939) that has “Dr Alex Zorka” (Bela) destroying the Hindenburg….and yes, they did use the stock footage of that, and real train wreck footage, too. Tacky.
#5 by Blake Matthews on March 4, 2008 - 12:32 pm
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Oh okay. I knew it was one of the serials that involved a giant robot. I think I remember Leonard Maltin mentioning that Dr. Satan’s Robot could do a double take.