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

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Thematic kinship, well documented.

George Lucas had tried to buy the Flash Gordon rights before writing Star Wars, but De Laurentiis held them. Star Wars' 1977 success persuaded De Laurentiis to fund a lavish version of his long-planned project. Hodges and Semple deliberately went for pantomime colour and camp rather than Lucas's earnest tone.

Where it came from

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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 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Stylistic influence, probable.

De Laurentiis produced both films. Flash Gordon revives Barbarella's model of an adult, erotically tinged, lurid comic-strip space adventure on a decadent alien world. The ornate palace sets, fetishistic costumes and winking performances follow the earlier film's pop manner.

Where it came from

Flash Gordon (serial), film by Frederick Stephani 1936 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Lorenzo Semple Jr., who wrote the 1966 Batman feature and developed the TV series, wrote the Flash Gordon screenplay. He brought the same deadpan, self-mocking treatment of comic-book heroics, with straight-faced absurd dialogue and villains played as grand theatrical turns.

Where it came from

Batman (serial), film by Lambert Hillyer 1943 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Star Wars (1977)

Structural model, well documented.

Lucas has acknowledged that Kurosawa's film shaped his story. Two squabbling peasants become the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, through whose eyes much of the tale is told, and Kurosawa's spirited princess escorted through enemy lines by a veteran general shaped Leia and Obi-Wan's roles.

Where it came from

Stagecoach, film by John Ford 1939 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Star Wars (1977)

Direct source, well documented.

Lucas assembled a temporary cut of the Death Star attack from Second World War aerial combat footage, including The Dam Busters. The X-wings' trench run, with its single target reachable only by a precise low-level run under fire, restages the film's bombing runs, and some dialogue is closely echoed.

Where it came from

The line stops here: based on historical events and Paul Brickhill's nonfiction account.

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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.

What it handed down

To Batman (1966)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Revival screenings of the 1943 Columbia serial, shown to laughing adult audiences at the Playboy Club in Chicago in the mid-1960s, helped prompt ABC to develop the camp Batman series that produced the 1966 feature. The serial's stiff heroics and cliffhanger traps became material for parody.

Where it came from

The line stops here: drawn from Bob Kane and Bill Finger's comic books, which lie outside literature and film.

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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.

What it handed down

To The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Thematic kinship, conjectural.

Kurosawa repeatedly spoke of his admiration for John Ford. The Hidden Fortress shares Stagecoach's structure of an ill-assorted group crossing hostile territory, though no statement by Kurosawa links this film specifically to Stagecoach.

Where it came from

Boule de Suif, Guy de Maupassant 1880 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (1980)

Direct source, well documented.

Both films adapt Alex Raymond's strip, and Hodges' film keeps the serial's core cast of Flash, Dale, Zarkov, Ming and Prince Barin, along with the Hawkmen and the rocket journey to Mongo. The 1980 film exaggerates the serial's cliffhanger rhythm and cardboard heroics into knowing camp.

To Star Wars (1977)

Direct source, well documented.

Lucas has said that Star Wars began as an attempt to remake Flash Gordon. When he could not get the rights, he wrote his own space opera. The opening text crawl, the wipe transitions and the cliffhanger pacing come from the Universal Flash Gordon serials Lucas watched as a child.

To Barbarella (1968)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Jean-Claude Forest drew on the Flash Gordon tradition when creating Barbarella, the comic Vadim adapted. The film keeps its winged men, cruel queen, labyrinthine city and episodic captures and escapes, now played for erotic comedy.

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (serial) (1936)

Direct source, probable.

The low-budget Universal serial reused props and sets from the studio's recent horror films. These include electrical laboratory apparatus from Bride of Frankenstein that dresses Ming's and Zarkov's laboratories, giving Mongo the look of Universal's mad-science pictures.

Where it came from

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley 1818 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (serial) (1936)

Direct source, well documented.

Raymond's strip took its opening from the Balmer and Wylie novel: a rogue planet hurtles toward Earth and a scientist launches a rocket to meet it. The 1936 serial opens the same way, with Mongo on a collision course and Zarkov's rocket carrying Flash and Dale into space.

Where it came from

The Star, H. G. Wells 1897 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Flash Gordon (serial) (1936)

Direct source, probable.

Universal economised by borrowing material from Fox's Just Imagine. Its futuristic city backdrop and rocket-ship imagery reappear in the serial's depictions of space flight and Mongo's cities.

Where it came from

The line stops here: a studio musical with no documented literary source.

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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.

What it handed down

To Star Wars (1977)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Ralph McQuarrie's design for C-3PO, made at Lucas's direction, was modelled on the gleaming female robot of Lang's Metropolis. The golden humanoid body and art-deco styling are taken from Maria's mechanical double.

Where it came from

Genesis (Hebrew Bible), Anonymous c. 550 BCE follow this thread
When the Sleeper Wakes, H. G. Wells 1899 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Star Wars (1977)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Lucas cited Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels among the adventure fiction behind Star Wars. Desert planets, a captive princess, alien warrior races and swordplay amid advanced technology carry Burroughs's planetary romance into the film.

To Flash Gordon (serial) (1936)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Through Raymond's strip, the serial inherits Burroughs's sword-and-planet formula. An Earthman cast onto an alien world wins a princess, allies with exotic warrior races and fights in a feudal patchwork of kingdoms with both swords and ray guns.

Where it came from

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Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His VacationEdwin Lester Arnold

1905

Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation

Edwin Lester Arnold

Edwardian. England. Written in English.

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

What it handed down

To A Princess of Mars (1912)

Disputed link, conjectural.

Arnold's novel has an American officer mysteriously transported to Mars, falling among decadent peoples and rescuing a princess. Critics including Richard Lupoff have argued Burroughs drew on it, but no documented reading has been established.

Where it came from

The line stops here: minor branch with no documented sources followed.

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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.

What it handed down

To A Princess of Mars (1912)

Thematic kinship, conjectural.

Wells's novel popularised the scientific romance of an Earthman stranded among an alien civilisation with its own castes and ruler. Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in a pulp market shaped by Wells's success, though he turned the satire into swashbuckling adventure.

Where it came from

From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne 1865 follow this thread

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When the Sleeper WakesH. G. Wells

1899

When the Sleeper Wakes

H. G. Wells

Late Victorian. England. Written in English.

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

What it handed down

To Metropolis (1927)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Wells reviewed Metropolis in the New York Times in 1927, complaining that it recycled ideas from When the Sleeper Wakes. Both works have a towering, stratified city of the future with labourers kept in the depths below a privileged elite. Lang and von Harbou never acknowledged the debt.

Where it came from

Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy 1888 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To When Worlds Collide (1933)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Wells's story set the template for the cosmic-collision tale: an intruding body from outside the solar system bears down on Earth and astronomers track its approach while catastrophe builds. Balmer and Wylie expanded this premise to novel length, adding an escape by rocket.

Where it came from

The line stops here: grounded in contemporary astronomy rather than a literary model.

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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.

What it handed down

To When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Wells's novel borrows Bellamy's device of a man who sleeps for generations and wakes in a future society, and inverts its outcome. Bellamy's sleeper finds a benevolent socialist utopia; Wells's finds a capitalist dystopia.

Where it came from

The line stops here: bellamy's debts lie chiefly in political and economic thought, not traced here.

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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.

What it handed down

To Stagecoach (1939)

Direct source, probable.

Ernest Haycox's story 'Stage to Lordsburg', the film's credited source, reworks Maupassant's coachload of hypocritical travellers and their scorned prostitute. Ford acknowledged Boule de Suif as the model for Dallas, the outcast whom the respectable passengers snub.

Where it came from

The line stops here: minor branch, not followed further.

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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.

What it handed down

To The First Men in the Moon (1901)

Thematic kinship, well documented.

Wells wrote his lunar voyage as an answer to Verne, replacing the cannon with the invented anti-gravity metal Cavorite. Verne publicly objected to the difference in a 1903 interview, contrasting his own ballistics with Wells's invention.

Where it came from

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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.

What it handed down

To From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Direct source, well documented.

Verne admired Poe and discussed Hans Pfaall's balloon voyage in his 1864 essay on Poe. From the Earth to the Moon names Poe's tale among earlier lunar journeys and adopts Poe's method of dressing a fantastic trip in detailed calculation.

Where it came from

The Man in the Moone, Francis Godwin 1638 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Direct source, well documented.

Whale's sequel draws on episodes of Shelley's novel left out of the 1931 film: the creature's longing for a mate, his learning to speak and his time with the blind hermit. The film opens with a prologue showing Mary Shelley, Byron and Percy Shelley.

Where it came from

Paradise Lost, John Milton 1667 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Direct source, well documented.

Shelley's title page carries an epigraph from Paradise Lost: 'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man?' The creature reads Milton's epic and compares himself both to Adam and to Satan, framing the novel as a story of a creator and his abandoned creation.

Where it came from

Genesis (Hebrew Bible), Anonymous c. 550 BCE follow this thread
The Odyssey, Homer c. 725 BCE follow this thread

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The Comical History of the States and Empires of the MoonCyrano de Bergerac

1657

The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon

Cyrano de Bergerac

French libertine age. France. Written in French.

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

What it handed down

To From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Thematic kinship, probable.

In his survey of earlier moon voyages in From the Earth to the Moon, Verne names Cyrano de Bergerac. He sets his engineering-minded projectile against Cyrano's fanciful devices, placing his novel at the end of that comic tradition.

Where it came from

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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.

What it handed down

To The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835)

Thematic kinship, probable.

In the note appended to later printings of Hans Pfaall, Poe surveyed earlier lunar fictions, including a book he described as 'L'Homme dans la lune', Godwin's tale in French. He criticised its scientific naivety while placing his own hoax in the same line of moon voyages.

To The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657)

Direct source, well documented.

Cyrano borrowed Godwin's hero outright: Domingo Gonsales, Godwin's swan-drawn Spaniard, appears on Cyrano's Moon as a fellow Earthling kept as a curiosity alongside the narrator. Godwin's book was available in a 1648 French translation.

Where it came from

Somnium (The Dream), Johannes Kepler 1634 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To The Man in the Moone (1638)

Disputed link, conjectural.

Some scholars have suggested Godwin knew Kepler's lunar ideas, which circulated before the Somnium's 1634 printing. Godwin's book was probably drafted in the 1620s, however, and a direct debt to the Somnium is unproven.

Where it came from

A True Story (Vera Historia), Lucian of Samosata c. 170 CE follow this thread

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A True StoryLucian of Samosata

c. 170 CE

A True Story (Vera Historia)

Lucian of Samosata

Second Sophistic. Roman Syria / Greek East. Written in Ancient Greek.

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.

What it handed down

To The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Cyrano's satirical voyage follows the Lucianic model, using a fantastic journey to the Moon as a vehicle for mocking human customs, philosophy and religion, with alien kings and courts. Lucian was widely read in seventeenth-century France.

To Somnium (The Dream) (1634)

Direct source, well documented.

Kepler records in the notes to the Somnium that he first read Lucian's True History in 1593, translating it to learn Greek. He credits its lunar voyage with first making him imagine a fiction set on the Moon.

Where it came from

The Odyssey, Homer c. 725 BCE follow this thread

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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 follow this thread

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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.

What it handed down

To Metropolis (1927)

Direct source, well documented.

Midway through the film, Maria tells the workers the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11. Lang stages it as a parable in which the dreamers of the tower are cut off from the hands that build it. The film presents its city's master building as a new Babel.

To Paradise Lost (1667)

Direct source, well documented.

Milton's epic expands the first chapters of Genesis: creation, Eden, the serpent's temptation and the expulsion. Many passages paraphrase the biblical text closely.

Where it came from

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

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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 (1667)

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) (c. 170 CE)

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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