From Those Were the Days:

1947 - The Abe Burrows Show premiered on CBS Radio. (Burrows later had a nighttime program called Breakfast With Burrows--he explained the show's title by remarking: "I get up late.")
11:12:26 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Trap of the Wasp

I watched Chapter 2 of Columbia’s Mandrake the Magician serial this morning, and I have to tell you—I have seen more fist fights in the first two chapters than in all of the Republic serials combined. (Okay, this is a slight exaggeration, but boy—these characters loved to fight, didn’t they?)

The evil villain The Wasp—a dude dressed in a funky costume with a mask and one of those 1930s slouch hats (I’m not making this up)—has managed to kidnap Professor Houston (Forbes Murray) and make off with his radium energy doo-hickey. Mandrake and one of the Wasp’s henchmen are duking it out in the Professor’s lab, and the henchman fires the radium machine at Mandrake, setting off a tank of hydrogen that miraculously leaves both men unscathed. In fact, the henchman beats a hasty retreat with the machine and Mandrake is revived by friends, apparently only needing a Band-Aid and some Bactene and he’s fresh as a daisy.

Later, Mandrake and Lothar (Al Kikume—who I should point out looks nothing like the comic strip guy; he resembles a headwaiter in a Moroccan restaurant) find the house where the bad guys are holed up and…get involved in another fist fight. (I will, however, state categorically that the Columbia stuntmen can’t hold a candle to the Republic crowd.) Still later, the bad guys send one poor sap back to Houston’s lab to fix a transmitter that they planted there so they can listen to conversations—Mandrake reveals that the stooge is in the closet with the help of a handy gizmo that looks through wooden doors, revealing the person’s shadow. Mandrake sets a trap for the evil doers by casually announcing that he’ll be delivering a shipment of some mineral that’s supposed to power Houston’s machine along some road—they capture him, take him to the real hideout, and then Lothar (who followed them) and he engage the bad guys in yet another fist fight.

Yes, I know—the plot for this serial seems to have been written on speed. But it’s an awful lot of fun. Tomorrow—Chapter 3, “A City of Terror”…
11:09:53 AM    comment []  trackback []