Why Flash Gor­don remains a sin­gu­lar­ly joy­ous com­ic book adaptation

Alex Raymond’s adven­ture com­ic strip ​‘Flash Gor­don’ was first com­mis­sioned in 1934 by King Fea­tures Syn­di­cate to rival the sim­i­lar­ly space-set Buck Rogers. Aston­ish­ing­ly, it was still run­ning almost sev­en decades lat­er (the last new strip appeared in 2003).

In the mean­time it inspired the cos­tumed iconog­ra­phy of Super­man and the Bat­man, while spawn­ing three film seri­als star­ring Buster Crabbe in the ​’30s (each sub­se­quent­ly con­densed and re-edit­ed into fea­ture length), var­i­ous TV ver­sions (both live-action and ani­mat­ed), the Turk­ish rip-off Flash Gordon’s Bat­tle in Space, the porni­fied Flesh Gor­don, as well as games, comics and novelisations.

Yet while the influ­ence of this car­toon hero spreads itself through­out the imag­i­na­tive space of 20^th-cen­tu­ry cul­ture, with­out ques­tion its most famous instan­ti­a­tion is Mike Hodges’ fea­ture-length adap­ta­tion from 1980.

Com­ing some 45 years after Flash Gor­don first appeared in news­pa­pers, and after a lengthy pre-pro­duc­tion where at dif­fer­ent times Fed­eri­co Felli­ni (in the film, the pet of Ornel­la Muti’s Princess Aura is named ​‘Felli­ni’ as a trib­ute), Nico­las Roeg and Ser­gio Leone were in con­sid­er­a­tion to direct, Hodges’ film is heav­i­ly marked with its own belat­ed­ness, but makes of that a pecu­liar kind of virtue.

Like the ​’60s tele­vi­sion ver­sion of Bat­man (whose devel­op­er Loren­zo Sem­ple, Jr also served as screen­writer for Flash Gor­don) or like Ran­dal Kleiser’s Grease, Hodges’ film casts its know­ing, wink­ing eye over a world of out­mod­ed val­ues and passé ideas, bring­ing a self-aware irony to all the old-world sin­cer­i­ty and aw-shucks decen­cy that Flash him­self (played by blonde beef­cake Sam Jones, with voice actor Peter Marinker dub­bing his dia­logue) embodies.

George Lucas made Star Wars after fail­ing to acquire the rights to Flash Gor­don from pro­duc­er Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is, and his indebt­ed­ness to Flash’s adven­tures is plain to see through­out his own space saga. With Flash Gor­don, Hodges was sim­i­lar­ly look­ing back to the future, revis­it­ing a prop­er­ty from a long time ago while bring­ing it into a post-Star Wars, post Super­man: The Movie uni­verse, where mattes, com­posit­ing and mod­els had brought a new mode of real­ism to the blockbuster.

Yet Flash Gor­don gets to have it both ways: on the one hand, its open­ing cred­its flash through frames of Raymond’s car­toons in a ges­ture towards the film’s com­ic-book ori­gins (a trick sub­se­quent­ly appro­pri­at­ed for the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse), its heroes and vil­lains are all campi­ly car­toon­ish, and its lurid colours and Dani­lo Donato’s lav­ish pro­duc­tion design are drawn straight from the com­ic strip and 1930s seri­als; while on the oth­er hand, it is very much a prod­uct of its time, updat­ing Flash from elite polo play­er to New York Jets quar­ter­back, intro­duc­ing Queen’s rous­ing rock opera sound­track to com­ple­ment all the on-screen space opera, and even hav­ing the upper fin of War Rock­et Ajax emerge from the clouds in an incon­gru­ous homage to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

As earth­lings Flash, Dale Arden (Melody Ander­son) and mad sci­en­tist Hans Zarkov (Topol) find them­selves drawn into space to save the world from Emper­or Ming the Mer­ci­less (Max von Sydow) of the plan­et Mon­go, they must reunite war­ring fac­tions – Prince Barin (Tim­o­thy Dal­ton) and his Arbo­ri­ans, Prince Vul­tan (Bri­an Blessed, dial­ing it up to 11) and his winged Hawk­men – to fight Ming’s forces of fas­cism (express­ly com­pared to the Nazis, who threat­ened Zarkov’s Jew­ish fam­i­ly in World War Two).

It is a clash of titans, with gorm­less good guy Flash bring­ing the human­i­ty and the self-sac­ri­fic­ing deeds of der­ring-do. With its treach­er­ous quick­sand, brain-wip­ing tor­ture, forced roy­al wed­ding and even the line ​“As you wish” all look­ing for­ward to Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, this is a mad, colour­ful swash-buck­ling space saga, where old-school swords, clubs and lash­es fea­ture along­side space-age lasers.

Flash Gor­don is a mid-air skir­mish of corny old-fash­ioned retro­fu­tur­ism and know­ing post­mod­ernism, even as its veneer of home­spun inno­cence keeps being sub­vert­ed by the cor­rupt­ing pow­ers of kink. Every space­craft here is absurd­ly phal­lic (at one point, Flash lit­er­al­ly pen­e­trates Ming with one), Ming’s daugh­ter Princess Aura is a sex­u­alised seduc­tress with a lover in every port, the elab­o­rate cos­tumes come with the tang of fetishism, and Ming’s met­al-masked, Vad­er-like head of secret police Kly­tus (Peter Wyn­garde) – an all-new char­ac­ter – wields whips and chains like a gimpy BDSM dun­geon master.

Shot in glo­ri­ous Tech­ni­col­or, Flash Gor­don presents space not as a dark vac­u­um, but as a psy­che­del­ic vista of chem­i­cal swirls and poly­chro­mat­ic clouds. Hodges’ com­ic book caper is all cheeky, cheesy fun, with mous­tache-twirling bad guys, strong-jawed heroes, and every line drip­ping in self-con­scious absur­di­ty (not to men­tion innu­en­do). And unlike its more seri­ous source text, it is all deliv­ered with a nod and a smile, as reas­sur­ance that it knows exact­ly what it is, and that its gurn­ing, ham­ming cast are hav­ing a blast.

Per­haps this explains not only the film’s ini­tial­ly mixed recep­tion in the then irony-averse Amer­i­ca, and its more imme­di­ate canon­i­sa­tion in the UK with its long-stand­ing pan­tomim­ic tra­di­tions and its ado­ra­tion of savvy naffness. Over the inter­ven­ing decades Flash Gor­don has acquired cult sta­tus, and remains one of cinema’s purest joys, with all its redun­dan­cy and belat­ed­ness built right into its know­ing­ly retro aes­thet­ic. After all, there is no more dynam­ic tense than the future-in-the-past.

Sad­ly a falling out between Jones and De Lau­ren­ti­is put paid to planned sequels, ensur­ing that Hodges’ film remains an eccen­tric sin­gu­lar­i­ty, doomed to have its after­life only in the imag­i­na­tion. In this respect it is not unlike Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, anoth­er exquis­ite­ly fash­ioned old-school space epic which failed to spawn a promised fran­chise. This brings things full cir­cle – for it was only when King Fea­tures Syn­di­cate proved unable to secure the rights to Edgar Rice Bur­roughs’ ​‘John Carter of Mars’ sto­ries that they turned to Ray­mond to invent the Carter-like fig­ure Flash Gor­don instead.

Flash Gor­don is in cin­e­mas from 31 July, and avail­able in a Spe­cial 40^th Anniver­sary direc­tor-approved 4K restora­tion (scanned from the orig­i­nal 35mm neg­a­tive) on Blu-ray, DVD, UHD Collector’s Edi­tion, Steel­book and dig­i­tal from Stu­dio Canal on 10 August.