A question wqs asked about the fanfare that opened every chapter of FGCTU. It was "Les Preludes: by Lizt. If the viewer is old enough to remember the Lone Ranger program on radio, he will hecall this being played to introduce the second half of the program right after the station break.

Veteran serial scriptwriter Barry Shipman contributed to the script of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. At the time (1940) Shipman was on hiatus from Republic Pictures due to salary negotiations. He had come over to Universal in order to prepare a new script for a Lone Ranger serial. When negotiations for this broke down, he was put on the staff for writing the Flash Gordon serial. Years later, when he was writing documentary scripts for the Air Force, one of the technical officers assigned to work with him claimed that it would be difficult for a layman to understand aeronautical language sufficiently to put it into script form. Barry mentioned that when he wrote the Flash Gordon script years before, that he didn't need any instruction. The officer was so impressed with the fact that Barry had written for Flash Gordon, his boyhood idol, that he cooperated with Barry on the project. It has been said that George Lucas used this particular serial for his ideas for Star Wars, particularly the militaristic uniform Buster Crabbe wears. Barry Shipman also provided the idea for Darth Vader in his creation of the Lightning in Republic's Fighting Devil Dogs.

Hi 'navywrslr' the music at the begining of episodes is ,Les Preludes composed by Franz Liszt. If you like the piece,its well worth hearing it from start to finish,great stuff.

Hope this helps.

I havnt seen this since I was a kid in the 50s and even then it was an old series. I dont care the the special effects are bad,or that there are so many faults with fact and fiction,it just for a second took me back to a time when life was so much simpler. I do have one question,does anyone know the name of the FANFARE used at the beginning?

Why is the file extension changed to ".arc" when I use "Download Express" instead of ".mp4" as it is indicated in the link? And how do I uncompress these particular "arc" files?(Download Express downloads the MPEG-2 files as ".mpegs")

can anyone gime me the correct sequense of the episode numbers?

There always seems to be a little ambiguity about just what was known about Nazis and the Final Solution prior to the fall the fall of the 3rd Reich. The first episode of "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe", released in 1940, actually uses the words "conentration camps" has scenes featuring a kind of gas chamber, and references to a kind of inverted eugenics (instead of a master race, Ming wants to create a "servant race" by using a toxin that will kill only those who are intelligent enough to oppose the emperor. I suspect that this is partly prewar topicality and part coincidence. It definitely adds another layer of interest.

More to the point, the first episode of "FGCTU" promises another great action yarn. I'm a big fan of the earlier Buster Crabbe outing. I loved it as a kid, and recently found a cheap DVD of the first Flash Gordon serial, edited into a wonderfully complicated hour and a half feature. George Lucas likes to talk about his Kurasawa influences, but I'd like to see him try to come up with Star Wars without the precedent these great films, full of danger, action, and weirdness ofr it's own sake.

I've downloaded seven files: the unnumbered chapter (which was actually chapter 2) and those labelled Chapters 1, 3, 3(again a but different url), 4, 5 and 6. Almost all were mis-labelled but I've checked them and I've now got all of the first seven chapters.

This series is worth the hasssle because it is an unmissable a five star romp.

Please, dear people at archive.org, check the numbering of episodes before putting them on the site.

Today (27/1/06) is the first time I've seen to this page since I downloaded. I couldn't help anyway. I just downloaded the lot, watched the openings and renamed the files. I didn't keep any records of URLs.

I watched this because it has so many stars. The stars are wrong. I can't believe you guys like this.
It has a certain campy quality to it and it is a little better than most serials. But basically, it poor cinema.

This is episode one.

Thanks Scott for all the work - he even encoded higher quality MPEG-4 files for folks who are streaming the files.

Skip

terracesider - HI -
do you (or has anybody else) have a direct URL for the episode 1 ftp, please?

but until it's fixed..
IF ANYONE HAS MORE INFO, PLEASE CUT 'N' PASTE 'n'add....

ep01 = broken link
ep01 = 02 (theunnumbered link, but file marked ep01 )
EP02 =
ep03 = 03 | or 04,
ep03 = 04 | depending which link.
| Sorry my logs are cleared
| so can't be more specific.
ep04 = 05
ep05 = 06
ep11 = 11 OK.
ep12 = 12 OK.

Hey at least give us a list of the urls for the episodes that are messed up so we can straighten this mess out.

great stuff.thanks to the uploader!!

terracesider, you say you got episode 1.

please tell us which one is it. LOL

There are problems with the way this seriesÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂô files have been named. Episodes #1 and #5 are missing as a result. Files labeled ep06 and ep07 are the same film - Episode #7.

Otherwise, quality is respectable.

The serial of "Flash Gordon" has always been one of my favorites as it dealt with Sci-Fi genre early on. I was just less than a year old when it first appeared in the theaters, but fortunately in the early years of Television, we got the full treatment with the old universla glass globe.

I was a little disappointed though after downloading the episode that I assumed was episode 1 to find it was episode 2, 2 was 3 and 3 was 4. I stopped there. One other Item I would like to see here, is a new header entitled Serials thus freeing up this data base with only feature films.