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.

1977

Star Wars

Film by George Lucas

New Hollywood. United States. In English.

A space fantasy in which a farm boy joins rebels, a princess and a smuggler against a galactic Empire. Its box-office success revived the space-opera genre.

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.

1968

Barbarella

Film by Roger Vadim

1960s European pop cinema. France / Italy. In English.

Dino De Laurentiis's adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's comic. Jane Fonda plays a 41st-century astronaut on an erotic, episodic adventure across a decadent alien planet.

1966

Batman

Film by Leslie H. Martinson

1960s pop camp. United States. In English.

A feature spun off from the television series, written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Adam West's Batman faces a united front of four supervillains in a self-consciously absurd, comic-book manner.

1958

The Hidden Fortress

Film by Akira Kurosawa

Golden age of Japanese cinema. Japan. In Japanese.

Two bickering peasants are drawn into escorting a general and a disguised princess with her clan's gold through enemy territory.

1955

The Dam Busters

Film by Michael Anderson

British postwar cinema. United Kingdom. In English.

A war film about the 1943 RAF raid on the Ruhr dams with Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb, climaxing in low-level bombing runs along the reservoirs.

1943

Batman (serial)

Film by Lambert Hillyer

Classical Hollywood serials. United States. In English.

Columbia's 15-chapter wartime serial, the first screen version of Batman and Robin, in which they fight a Japanese spy ring.

1939

Stagecoach

Film by John Ford

Classical Hollywood. United States. In English.

A mixed company of outcasts and respectable passengers crosses Apache territory by stagecoach.

1936

Flash Gordon (serial)

Film by Frederick Stephani

Classical Hollywood serials. United States. In English.

Universal's 13-chapter serial starring Buster Crabbe, the first screen adaptation of Raymond's strip. Flash, Dale and Zarkov fly to the rogue planet Mongo to stop its collision with Earth.

1935

Bride of Frankenstein

Film by James Whale

Universal horror cycle. United States. In English.

Universal's sequel to Frankenstein, in which Dr. Pretorius forces Henry Frankenstein to build a mate for the creature, using an elaborate electrical laboratory.

1933

When Worlds Collide

Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie

Depression-era pulp. United States. Written in English.

Two rogue planets approach the solar system, one destined to destroy Earth, and a small band of scientists builds a rocket to escape.

1930

Just Imagine

Film by David Butler

Early sound Hollywood. United States. In English.

A science-fiction musical comedy set in the New York of 1980, climaxing in a rocket flight to Mars.

1927

Metropolis

Film by Fritz Lang

Weimar cinema. Germany. Silent.

In a towering future city, workers toil underground for the elite until a scientist's robot double of the saintly Maria incites revolt.

1912

A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pulp era. United States. Written in English.

Civil War veteran John Carter is transported to Mars (Barsoom). There he fights among multi-armed green men and red-skinned city-states and wins the princess Dejah Thoris.

An American naval officer is carried to Mars on a magic carpet, where he has adventures among its decadent peoples and wins a princess.

1901

The First Men in the Moon

H. G. Wells

Edwardian. England. Written in English.

Two Englishmen reach the Moon in a sphere coated with anti-gravity Cavorite. They are captured by the insect-like Selenites, who live in a caste society ruled by the Grand Lunar.

A man wakes after two centuries of sleep in a vast, stratified, mechanised London where a downtrodden labouring class lives below the elite.

1897

The Star

H. G. Wells

Late Victorian. England. Written in English.

A short story in which a wandering body from outer space enters the solar system and passes perilously close to Earth, causing global catastrophe.

1888

Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy

Gilded Age. United States. Written in English.

A Bostonian falls into a hypnotic sleep and wakes in a socialist utopia in the year 2000.

1880

Boule de Suif

Guy de Maupassant

French Naturalism. France. Written in French.

A long story about a coachload of respectable travellers fleeing the Prussian occupation, who exploit and then shun the prostitute among them.

1865

From the Earth to the Moon

Jules Verne

Second French Empire. France. Written in French.

The members of Baltimore's Gun Club build a giant cannon to fire a manned projectile at the Moon.

1835

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

Edgar Allan Poe

American Romantic. United States. Written in English.

A comic hoax tale of a Rotterdam bellows-mender who travels to the Moon by balloon, told with mock-scientific detail.

1818

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley

Romantic. England. Written in English.

Victor Frankenstein builds a living being from dead matter and abandons it, and the creature turns on him.

1667

Paradise Lost

John Milton

Restoration England. England. Written in English.

A blank-verse epic of Satan's rebellion and the fall of Adam and Eve, retelling Genesis in the form of a classical epic.

A satirical philosophical voyage to the Moon. Its narrator tries several absurd means of flight and debates lunar inhabitants.

1638

The Man in the Moone

Francis Godwin

Caroline England. England. Written in English.

The Spaniard Domingo Gonsales is carried to the Moon by a team of wild swans and finds a utopian lunar society there.

1634

Somnium (The Dream)

Johannes Kepler

Scientific Revolution. Holy Roman Empire. Written in Latin.

A posthumously published fiction of a journey to the Moon, used to describe how astronomy would look from the lunar surface.

A satirical traveller's tale in which a ship is blown to the Moon and its crew is caught in a war between the kings of the Moon and the Sun.

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.

c. 550 BCE

Genesis (Hebrew Bible)

Anonymous

Babylonian exile and Persian period. Ancient Judah / Babylon. Written in Hebrew.

The first book of the Hebrew Bible. It covers the creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, the flood, the Tower of Babel and the patriarchs.

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.