by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The final three Rocky
Jones: Space Ranger episodes we watched last
night picked up on the story threat of Ophicius, Queen Cleolanta and her
determined attempts to rule the universe. It was called Silver Needle in the
Sky, which seems more than
anything else to be a reference to the shape of Rocky’s spacecraft (and though
its launches seem to have been done by animating either a cartoon drawing or a
silhouette of it and double-printing them onto a process-screen background,
there’s a quite cool effect of the ship landing on a space station — the
station has a stand-up key in the middle that looks like the sort of thing
you’d wind on a toy, and the spaceship inserts its long needle-nose into the
hole of this pipe-like object and docks). Hollingsworth Morse was the director
again, but this time the writer was someone named Fritz Blocki, though like
Wilson he included obvious Cold War parallels into his script that actually
gave the story a sense of weight and power it wouldn’t have had without them.
This time Rocky Jones and crew are supposed to ferry the assembled diplomats of
the federation that runs the Space Rangers onto the space station, which
because it’s in neutral territory has been chosen as the site of the federation’s
latest meeting. Only wicked ol’ Queen Cleolanta (who’s played by the finest
actor of either gender in this piece, by far — as a portrait of implacable evil
in a science-fiction woman monarch she certainly rivals Dorothy Christy as
Queen Tika in Republic’s 1935 serial The Phantom Empire, which for sheer eclectic weirdness — a
science-fiction Western musical featuring Gene Autry joining the battle for
control of a high-tech underground metropolis called “The Scientific City of
Murania” — deserves to be seen) is upset that she wasn’t invited to this
conference and thereby sets out to sabotage it.
She does this by sending an
armed crew to take over the space station and hold the ambassadors as captives,
making the demand that she will let them go only if the federation will
exchange the two Ophician prisoners that are being held on Earth, awaiting
trial for the crimes dramatized in Beyond the Moon. Secretary Drake (Charles Meredith) reluctantly
agrees to the exchange provided it occurs on the space station rather than on
Ophician soil, and that neither party is armed when the exchange occurs. The
exchange goes forth as planned, only, wouldn’t you know it, those damned
Russkies — oops, I mean Ophicians — double-cross Our Heroes by bringing guns
and drawing them after the
exchange is completed. They lock the diplomats into a room and set a three-hour
time lock, only one of the Ophicians is determined not only to inconvenience
those pesky federation guys but to kill them. He shuts off the control that
generates air for the space station’s inhabitants to breathe, and it turns out
that while the room where the air control is can be reached through an air
vent, the vent is too small for an adult to go through it. Well, even if you’re
not a graduate of Clichéd Screenwriting 101 you can guess what happens next:
Bobby the bratty kid agrees to go and finds the room, turning the control for
the space station’s air just in time — after Rocky got the vent open in the
first place by fashioning a D.I.Y. screwdriver out of Vena’s lipstick (so the
girl and the kid saved the day!). Cleolanta’s other big plan — to kidnap the
scientist Dr. Hillary Tyson (Dayton Lummis) and bring him to Ophicius, presumably to brainwash him and get
him to work on designing and building infernal machines for them to use in
conquering Earth — only Dr. Tyson outsmarts them by taking a capsule out of his
mouth, swallowing it and thereby committing suicide … except he hasn’t really committed suicide: the pill was just a knockout
drug that put him in suspended animation for a few hours, thereby fooling the
Ophicians into leaving him at the space station instead of taking him with them
(one gets the impression that somehow he knew they were going to do that).
Rocky Jones, Space
Ranger would be just another disposable
piece of 1950’s cheap science-fiction TV except that executive producer Roland
Reed had the good sense to shoot it on film instead of doing it live — thereby
a lot more episodes of it survive — and also Reed hired writers who gave at
least a little weight and gravitas to their scripts by invoking Cold War parallels.
It also helps that they got Patsy Parsons to play the lead villain, Queen
Cleolanta: every time she appears, the power and authority she projects
establish her as by far the best actor in the piece, of either gender or on
either side. Around this time there were quite a few really good villainesses
in superhero stories (including Carol Forman’s magnificent “Spider Lady” in the
1948 Columbia Superman serial,
his debut in live action even though Columbia’s almost nonexistent
special-effects budget had to turn Superman, played by Kirk Alyn, back into a
cartoon whenever the scripts called on him to fly), but Patsy Parsons’ Queen
Cleolanta is right there among the best of them. And in case you’re not yet
tired of reading about Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, here’s what I had to say when Charles and I
screened a few episodes in a sequence called “Crash of Moons” a few years ago (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=crash+of+moons).
