by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi film screening (http://sdvsf.org/) selections were seven episodes
of a short-lived (1954) TV series called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, which despite the expected flaws of cheap
black-and-white TV shows of the time — sets that look like they were made of
cardboard, props that look like plastic, substandard acting and special effects
that are something of a joke — turned out to have a surprising level of appeal.
Part of the appeal of Rocky Jones
today is as camp, but thanks to director Hollingsworth Morse and writers
William Wilson and Fritz Blocki the shows at least hold one’s interest: they’re
suspenseful and, thanks to the half-hour format, they’re action-packed and they
move. Rocky Jones:
Space Ranger is ahead of its time in at
least one respect: most of its episodes were parts of longer stories,
anticipating the Great God Serial
that seems to rule most episodic television today. I remember being startled
when I heard a fan at one of the ConDor conventions say he didn’t like the
original late-1960’s Star Trek
because there were no continuing stories, no serial endings, no “story arcs” —
instead each individual episode was a discrete unit and only the characters
continued over from one episode to the next. That’s one of the things I like about the original Star Trek and other TV shows of its vintage: that one can
watch an individual episode no matter where it fits in the sequence, and it
will still make sense; also, one can miss an episode without having to worry
that when you return to the show the story lines will have moved so much it
won’t make sense anymore. The seven episodes shown last night were the opening
three, a sequence originally called “Beyond the Curtain of Space” but
eventually edited to form a feature-length film for theatrical distribution
called Beyond the Moon (though
how much theatrical distribution
they got from what was obviously three TV series episodes spliced together I
have no idea).
These introduced the central characters of Rocky
Jones, Space Ranger: Rocky Jones himself
(Richard Crane), intrepid and fearless commander of the Orbit Lab spacecraft; his second-in-command, Winky (Scotty
Beckett), the seemingly obligatory stupid comic-relief character who seems like
puberty has just cut in on him (in one sequence he uses the Orbit Lab’s video system to spy on various women taking
showers — I wondered if he’d grow up to run for whatever they called the head
of state in the Rocky Jones
universe and explain his mistreatment of women by saying, “When you’re a Space
Ranger, they’ll let you do anything”); a woman navigator and translator, Vena
Ray (Sally Mansfield), whose outfit — a chiffon mini-skirt and matching top
with straps across her chest and a cape that hangs over her back — looks like
it would have come from Victoria’s Secret if it had existed yet — and a
typically obnoxious movie 10-year-old brat named Bobby (Robert Lyden), who’s so
tall that in his two-shots with Vena he comes up at least to her neck.
Fortunately, Bobby isn’t in much of Beyond the Moon because he’s been captured by the soldiers of the
planet Ophicius along with his uncle, Professor Newton (Maurice Cass). Rocky
and his crew work for a federation of planets that supposedly spans the entire
universe, but when we finally got to see a meeting of the federation’s
ambassadors all of them came from planets in our familiar solar system (I spotted signs reading
“Mercury,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” “Saturn” and “Neptune”) and Ophicius is its sworn
enemy. Ophicius is ruled by a “suzereine” or whatever the female spelling is by
Queen Cleolanta (Patsy Parsons), a take-no-nonsense baddie who seems to have
been mashed up from equal parts Margaret Dumont and Margaret Hamilton — though
considerably younger and hotter than either. Writer Wilson seems to have got
her character largely from Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson) in the Flash
Gordon serials, the evil but also horny
woman who seemed undecided whether she wanted to fuck the hunky Earthling hero
or kill him. (I’m also amused that Cleolanta’s name seems itself to be a mashup
of Cleopatra and the medicine Mylanta.)
Most of the first third of Beyond
the Moon is taken up with a lot of sexist
insults thrown by Rocky in Vena’s direction — I kept wanting to see her slap
his silly face in and then report him to whatever council the federation has to
deal with sexual harassment (this being the 1950’s, probably none) — along with
a heavy dose of Cold War propaganda that actually gives this story much of its
interest. Rocky Jones and his crew are going to Ophicius to rescue Professor
Newton, who’s been brainwashed and forced to work on developing infernal
machines for the bad guys to use in conquering Earth (didn’t the Flash
Gordon writers pull that one, too?), as
well as creepy little Bobby. To get away with landing on Ophicius, they’re
going to pretend that their spacecraft has a disabled engine and under the
interplanetary treaties the Ophicians will have to give them permission to land and stay there long
enough to make the repairs. Only the Ophicians know all the real plans of the good guys because they have an agent
spying on Space Ranger Central and relaying all their plans to Cleolanta. The
agent is Space Ranger Griff (Leonard Penn), and he works directly under the
head of the Space Rangers, Secretary Drake (Charles Meredith), from whose
office he periodically calls Ophicius on a radio using a microphone that, like
all the good guys’ mikes, looks like a cucumber (or, if you’re kinky, a butt
plug). Obviously we’re supposed
to think of Ophicius as the Soviet Union (or the Communist world in general)
and Griff as a counterpart to all the Soviet espionage agents, both real and
framed, regularly being exposed in the American media at the time.
When Our
Heroes get to Ophicius, Cleolanta rejects the advice of her courtiers that they
just kill Rocky Jones; instead she invites him to her office and subjects him
to the brainwashing machine — a set of lights on her wall that looks like a
modernistic lamp — and nearly brings him under her spell. She does succeed in brainwashing Bobby, at least briefly — as
obnoxious as I generally find movie kids, particularly the ones from the 1930’s
to the 1990’s (when the horrid cutesie-poo example of Shirley Temple finally started to wear off and filmmakers eked out more
freedom in the way they depicted children), Robert Lyden turns in some
surprisingly good acting when he physically and morally wrestles with himself
as the Ophician brainwashing and his real nature fight it out in his consciousness.
(It seems he might have modeled his performance under Ophician influence on
Skippy Homeier’s playing in the 1944 film Tomorrow, the World!, about a German-American kid who comes to the U.S.
at 11 after having been raised as a Nazi, and the professor — played by Fredric
March — who tries to get him back to the decent side of his character he showed
in the U.S. before he went back to Germany and grew up under the Nazis.) Of
course it all ends as we expect it to — the good guys shoot down the Ophician
spacecraft that try to shoot them
down, and they make it back to Earth with one of Cleolanta’s men as captive,
while the dastardly Ophician spy Griff gets arrested and he and the Ophician
are bound over for trial. Though Rocky Jones, Space Ranger has its moments of silliness (more than “moments,”
if you asked most of the Vintage Sci-Fi attendees), the topical Cold War
references actually gave it a bit of dramatic depth even though they don’t
reflect my politics at all.
