interesting early argument in favor of space travel, contextualizing such endeavors as a natural continuation of humanity’s ancient quest to learn about new and distant realms.
As for the spaceship itself, while it is powered by an otherwise-unexplained “gravity neutralizer,” it looks very much like a standard rocketship, although it blasts off horizontally like the spaceships of later serials. Furthermore, the travelers do not wear spacesuits or experience zero gravity, but there is one touch of realism during their journey, an image of distant Earth against a black sky filled with stars. Once they reach Mars, though, a spirit of absurdity returns, since they find the planet inhabited by a mixture of friendly and hostile humans wearing odd, skimpy costumes (all Martians, they deduce, are twins, one good and one bad); but the Martians at least do not speak English, and there is a rare acknowledgement that conditions there are different than Earth when the travelers effortlessly move their large spaceship around into position for liftoff, an ability explicitly attributed to Mars’s lower gravity. That lower gravity would necessarily mean a thinner atmosphere, naturally, is never acknowledged.
Another film, Things to Come (1936), is more serious and realistic than these predecessors, which is natural enough given that its screenplay was based on a novel by, and written by, renowned science fiction writer H. G. Wells. Yet this extended chronicle of humanity’s future only involves space travel in its concluding scenes, wherein an advanced future civilization has constructed an immense “space gun” to launch a manned rocket, resembling a cross between a spaceship and a bullet, which is designed to circumnavigate the Moon. Interestingly, the drama of these scenes involves a mob of people who are determined to prevent the flight, which makes this one of the first science fiction stories to envision opposition to space travel and foreshadows the efforts to prevent a pioneering space flight which will be observed in Destination Moon (1950). However, the film entirely avoids the question of what might actually happen to its passengers during the flight by ending the story with the rocket’s departure being observed by two speechifying spectators, Oswald Cabal (Raymond Massey) and Raymond Passworthy (Edward Chapman).
Still, despite the fact that its two space travelers do not wear spacesuits, this classic film merits some attention in this survey because Cabal’s final speech offers a singularly eloquent vision of a human destiny to conquer the universe which, in a sense, makes it the first film to present the full potential range of possibilities in the spacesuit film:
[Passworthy:] Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?
[Cabal:] Rest enough for the individual man—too much, and too soon—and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.
[Passworthy:] But...we’re such little creatures. Poor humanity’s so fragile, so weak. Little...little animals.
[Cabal:] Little animals. If we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe, or nothingness. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?2
Strangely enough, at the precise moment when the British Wells was articulating this glorious vision of humanity’s future in space, American filmmakers were in the process of presenting space travel solely as a novel pathway to the sorts of juvenile adventures that had long appealed to young audiences. Taking their inspiration from two popular comic strips of the day featuring space adventurers, they produced four Saturday-morning serials, three starring Flash Gordon (Flash Gordon [1936], Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars [1938], and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe [1940]) and one featuring another hero, Buck Rogers (1939), which all were later reedited as feature films for television and videocassette release. (There was also a recently rediscovered 1934 short, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, produced for presentation during the 1933-1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, informally known as the Chicago World’s Fair.) The serials deal with space flight entirely by means of brief transitional scenes displaying squat rocketships, with sparks emerging from their rear ends, that take off and fly horizontally through the sky more like airplanes than spaceships; these are always viewed in flight only against the backdrop of an atmosphere, and never the blackness of outer space. Furthermore, the alien worlds visited in these serials may be inhabited by exotic but humanoid creatures like the Hawk Men and Rock Men encountered by Flash Gordon or the Zuggs that Buck Rogers meets on Saturn, but the planets’ environments are otherwise identical to Earth; we may be told that Saturn’s atmospheric pressure is ten times greater than Earth’s, but visiting humans breath normally while on the planet, and while the evil Ming’s minions may at times wear metal masks over their faces, these are clearly not airtight and are in no way related to actual spacesuits.
Evaluated as portrayals of space travel, the Flash Gordon serials are the silliest: Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe) and his colleagues Dale Arden (Jean Rogers [1936, 1938], Carol Hughes [1940]) and Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) never wear any special clothing when they fly into space; their spaceship features an incongruous periscope borrowed from the design of a submarine; and their adventures tend to involve a single space flight to another planet, either Mongo or Mars, where they stay to struggle against the schemes of the villainous emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) until they finally triumph with the help of human-like allies and return to Earth. During these sojourns, they may occasionally get into their spaceship or battle against Ming’s spaceships, but these vehicles always stay within the atmosphere.
The Buck Rogers serial was marginally more realistic; if they are not wearing spacesuits, Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) and his crew at least are dressed like aviators of the day, a modest acknowledgment that space travel might demand special garments, and their efforts to defeat the future Earth’s dictator, Killer Kane (Anthony Warde), with the help of virtuous but easily deluded Saturnians, involve several trips from Earth to Saturn and back, with the story’s shifting locales signaled by establishing shots of either Earth or Saturn, observed against a black background with stars, which fleetingly provided an authentic image of outer space. Finally, amidst a crisis during Buck’s first flight into space, there is a brief mention of the ship’s “oxygen tanks,” though these appear to be there as part of the propulsion system and not to help the space travelers breathe during their journey.
It is easy to laugh at these serials when they are viewed today, but their lasting impact cannot be denied: they served as the model for a number of melodramatic spacesuit films and television programs of the early 1950s, including series featuring Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and their influence can also be strongly felt in what became the major space franchises of recent decades, Star Trek and Star Wars. (Indeed, after the success of his American Graffiti [1973], George Lucas had initially planned to film a new version of Flash Gordon, and it was only when he proved unable to obtain the rights to the character that he decided to instead develop the original space adventure he would call Star Wars [1977].)
However, for whatever reasons one might have for celebrating these serials and the other early space films, there were only three films before 1950 that were truly breaking new ground in offering plausible predictions of human space travel: Danish director Holger-Madsen’s Himmelskibet, which acknowledges the potential dangers of outer space by having its space travelers briefly don crude spacesuits; the German Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Frau im Mond (1929), accurately described by David Wingrove as “the first realistic space film about a journey to the Moon,”3 made with the assistance of German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth; and a less renowned Russian successor, Vasili Zhuravlev’s Kosmicheskiy Reys (1935), which drew upon the expertise of the pioneering visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It is with these films, which demand more detailed attention,
