Theme: Serials

Serials were adventures intended for juvenile matinee audiences. They would be shown in theatres before the main feature in either twelve or fifteen weekly chapters of about 15-20 minutes each. Each chapter ended with the heroine tied to a railway track before an oncoming train, the hero hanging from the edge of a cliff by his fingertips (which gave rise to the term ‘cliffhanger’), falling from a plane or some such. The audience would have to wait to the following week where the means whereby they escaped would be revealed at the start of the next chapter (often with a lame resolution – they fell into a haystack, freed themselves or discovered a parachute just in time etc).

Though the principal focus was adventure, serials varied through a number of genres, including the Western, the G-Man film, various Comic Book Adaptations, the first ever Superhero Films and, of course, the Space Opera, which included classics like Flash Gordon (1936) and sequels and Buck Rogers (1939).

Budgets were low – effects scenes were frequently recycled and some episodes would be padded entirely with recaps. Plots were often repetitively stretched out around seeking parts for devices or retrieving purloined ones. Serials could be counted on for some great action set-pieces and stuntwork, in particular their frequent room-destroying fistfights.

The first serial was What Happened to Mary? (1913), the one that popularised the genre was The Perils of Pauline (1914). The genre was at its height during the 1930s and 40s. The last serial came out in 1956, the genre dying away with the arrival of television. The genre’s exploits and derring-do influenced later films, most notedly the Indiana Jones films.