Flash Gordon
Two Shows at Once
Flash Gordon arrived on American radio in April 1935 in an unusual arrangement: two separate productions, with two different casts, running simultaneously on opposite ends of the country. The first was a Hearst-produced serial, transcribed and distributed weekly to stations in the West, timed to run alongside the Flash Gordon comic strip that Hearst newspapers were publishing. Its full on-air title was The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon, and the premiere episode, "On the Planet Mongo," went out on April 27, 1935, drawing its plot from comic strip installments published more than a year earlier. The second production launched a few months later, in October 1935, and ran weekdays in the East — heard on WMCA and WOR in New York and WJR in Detroit, as well as other network and nonnetwork stations.
The two productions shared a character but not a cast, not a crew, and apparently not much else. Each ran in 15-minute episodes, which was the standard format for serialized radio adventure at the time. The Hearst serial ran for 26 weeks. The eastern production, billed as The Further Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon, ran 74 episodes before ending on February 6, 1936, and strayed considerably from Alex Raymond's strip, sending Flash, Dale, and Zarkov into an adventure set in Atlantis.
Survivorship has gone in opposite directions for the two serials. All 26 episodes of the Hearst run are extant and publicly available through online archives. Of the 74 Further Interplanetary Adventures episodes, only four are known to survive — those four were combined and rebroadcast on two separate occasions as part of the Lights Out program hosted by Owen Coppin of CFMI FM (Rock 101) in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Casts
On the Hearst side, the cast is well documented. Gale Gordon — born Charles Thomas Aldrich Jr. in New York City on February 20, 1906 — played the title role. He came from a vaudeville family: his father was a quick-change artist, and his English-born mother performed under the stage name Gloria Gordon, from which her son took his own professional name by 1923. He had made his first radio appearance at KFWB in Los Angeles in 1926, reportedly singing and playing the ukulele, and by the early 1930s had become the highest-paid radio actor in Hollywood. Flash Gordon was his first starring role; he followed it by playing the villain "The Octopus" on Speed Gibson from 1937 to 1939, and went on to a long career that closed only with his death from cancer in Escondido, California, on June 30, 1995. Maurice Franklin played Dr. Zarkov, the scientist who accompanied Flash on his adventures. Bruno Wick played Emperor Ming, ruler of the planet Mongo, whose schemes Flash spent most of his time thwarting. The actress who played Dale Arden, Flash's companion and love interest, is not recorded. (The frequently repeated claim that the role belonged to Irene Champlin can be dismissed on arithmetic alone — Champlin was four years old in 1935. She played Dale on television nearly two decades later.) Producer Himan Brown oversaw the Hearst production.
For the eastern run, almost nothing is known. Some sources credit James Meighan as Flash Gordon, but the rest of the cast and crew have gone unidentified.
How the Hearst Serial Ended
The Hearst serial wrapped things up in a way that was more practical than dramatic. The final episode, on October 26, 1935, married Flash and Dale — an event that never happened in Raymond's strip. Two days after that wedding, the daily Further Interplanetary Adventures debuted in the East, and the Hearst weekly slot needed a successor of its own. The handoff came in the form of a jungle crash: Flash and his companions went down, and the man who pulled them out of the wreckage was Jungle Jim. The rescue was the transition. Flash Gordon's Hearst serial ended, and Jungle Jim — also an Alex Raymond comic strip property — picked up as the new weekly adventure, a role it held for years afterward.
It was a tidy piece of programming strategy. Flash Gordon had served its purpose as a companion to the comic strip, and Jungle Jim was ready to take the slot.
Where Flash Gordon Already Lived
Flash Gordon was not an unknown quantity when the radio shows launched. Alex Raymond's comic strip had appeared in newspapers since January 7, 1934 — created for King Features Syndicate after the company failed to acquire the rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, and meant to compete with the already-popular Buck Rogers. By the late 1930s the strip ran in 130 papers and reached something like 50 million readers. The character's reach extended further still in 1936, when Universal released its 13-chapter film serial directed by Frederick Stephani, starring Larry (Buster) Crabbe as Flash, Jean Rogers as Dale, Charles Middleton as Ming the Merciless, and Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov. It became Universal's second-highest-grossing film of the year, behind only Three Smart Girls. Two sequels followed, both with Crabbe in the lead: Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars in 1938 and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe in 1940. In 1996, the Library of Congress selected the 1936 serial for preservation in the National Film Registry. The same year, the pulp publisher Harold Hersey put out a single issue of Flash Gordon Strange Adventure Magazine, featuring a novel called "The Master of Mars" loosely adapted from Raymond's storylines.
The character kept finding new platforms long after the radio runs ended. A television series aired from October 1, 1954, to July 15, 1955 — a West German, French, and American co-production that ran on the DuMont network and in syndication. It was filmed primarily in West Berlin on a three-day-per-episode schedule at $15,000 an episode, with an abandoned beer hall in Spandau serving as the principal set. Steve Holland — a former male model later famous as artist James Bama's reference for the Doc Savage paperback covers, called by Bama "the world's greatest male model" — played Flash. Irene Champlin, finally old enough, took the role of Dale, with Joseph Nash as Dr. Hans Zarkov. The series reset the timeline to the year 3203 and reframed the heroes as agents of the Galactic Bureau of Investigation, leaving Mongo behind. Two decades later, George Lucas tried to acquire the film rights from Dino De Laurentiis and was turned down — a refusal that pushed him toward writing Star Wars instead. De Laurentiis eventually made his own Flash Gordon picture in 1980, directed by Mike Hodges with a Queen soundtrack, starring Sam Jones, Melody Anderson, and Max von Sydow.
That context probably explains why the radio run was as brief as it was. Flash Gordon didn't need radio to build an audience, and once the Hearst papers found a new serial to promote, the radio version had served its purpose. Both productions together spanned less than a year. The character survived and thrived elsewhere, but as a radio property, Flash Gordon's run was short and, by most measures, modest.