The influences behind Flash Gordon

1980

Flash Gordon

Film by Mike Hodges

New Hollywood blockbuster era. United Kingdom / United States. In English.

Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon (1980), produced by Dino De Laurentiis and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., is a camp, brightly coloured space opera adapted from Alex Raymond's 1934 comic strip. In it, football player Flash Gordon and his companions defy Ming the Merciless, tyrant of the planet Mongo. Its lineage runs through the 1930s Universal serials, Star Wars and 1960s camp cinema back to the earliest literary voyages to other worlds.

Where it came from

Where to watch

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1969

Fellini Satyricon

Film by Federico Fellini

Italian art cinema. Italy. In Italian.

Fellini's free, hallucinatory adaptation of Petronius's fragmentary Roman novel. Sets and costumes were designed by Danilo Donati.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Stylistic influence, probable.

Danilo Donati, who designed sets and costumes for Fellini Satyricon, designed Flash Gordon. Mongo's crimson-and-gold palaces, barbaric pageantry and grotesque court of Ming echo the decadent imperial spectacle Donati built for Fellini's Rome.

Where it came from

Satyricon, Petronius c. 60 CE

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c. 60 CE

Satyricon

Petronius

Neronian Rome. Imperial Rome. Written in Latin.

A fragmentary comic novel in prose and verse following the wanderings of Encolpius through the low life of the Roman world, including Trimalchio's feast.

What it handed down

To Fellini Satyricon (1969)

Direct source, well documented.

Fellini adapted Petronius directly, keeping Encolpius, Ascyltus, Giton and the feast of Trimalchio. He made the text's fragmentary state a principle of form, with episodes that begin and break off abruptly like surviving pieces of a damaged manuscript.

Where it came from

The Odyssey, Homer c. 725 BCE

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c. 725 BCE

The Odyssey

Homer

Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.

The epic of Odysseus's ten-year voyage home from Troy through monsters, enchantresses and strange peoples.

What it handed down

To Paradise Lost

Structural model, probable.

Milton built his biblical poem on the frame of Homeric epic. It has an opening invocation of the Muse, a beginning in medias res, catalogues, extended similes and long retrospective narration, as when Raphael recounts past events to Adam much as Odysseus tells his wanderings to the Phaeacians.

To A True Story (Vera Historia)

Direct source, well documented.

Lucian opens by naming Homer's Odysseus as the founder of lying travel tales and builds his parody on the Odyssey. His crew sail past the known world, meet monstrous peoples and visit the Isle of the Blessed, where Lucian interviews Homer himself.

To Satyricon (c. 60 CE)

Structural model, well documented.

The Satyricon is widely read as a mock-Odyssey. Encolpius is hounded across the Mediterranean by the wrath of Priapus as Odysseus is by Poseidon, and the novel repeatedly parodies Homeric episodes and verse.

Where it came from

This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.

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Where it came from

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Fellini Satyricon (1969)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Paradise Lost

To A True Story (Vera Historia)

To Satyricon (c. 60 CE)

Where it came from

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