Minimalist Thrills
THE RETURN OF CHANDU, briefly paused by a collapsing hard drive, is now in full flow again, if you can call it that, and continues to be thrill-a-minute stuff, only the pace is such that one minute takes twenty to unfold.
Episode Six, Chandu’s False Step, seemed to consist mainly of a very detailed recap of Episode Five, The Invisible Circle (said circle, being fiery, was in fact all too visible, at least to us). It ended with Chandu’s yacht being sunk. Rescuing Princess Nadji is turning out to be quite an expensive operation. I look forward to an episode entitled Negative Equity.
Episode Seven, Mysterious Magic, had no mysterious magic to speak of, but Chandu, having washed up on the lost island of Lemuria, did make a false step at the end, plunging through a trap door and belatedly fulfilling the title of the preceding episode. Maybe we’ll eventually get an invisible circle. In fact, maybe we already have, How would we know, unless someone tripped over it?
March 9, 2021 at 6:42 am
I’ve seen many serials where chapters are named for the cliffhanger at the end, so you might well end with a car crashing through a guardrail as the enticement to see “The Electronic Doom” or “Savage Fangs”.
Right now I’m working through “Jungle Girl”, based on “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Famous Novel”. Nyoka is a nice, civilized American girl who can swing from vine to vine (throwing in circus flips) and wrangle elephants. Her leading man has a mustache, very unusual in a serial (even Mandrake was clean-shaven on film). Perhaps they felt he needed visible testosterone opposite the highly capable Nyoka.
A note: The comic strip Mandrake the Magician, launched in 1934, features his long-running girlfriend Princess Narda. Coincidence?
March 9, 2021 at 1:34 pm
Is it wrong of me to yearn more keenly for Fellini’s Mandrake movie, which was never I think more than a mere notion, than for Resnais’ version, which got as far as a full script and nearly happened?
I just like the idea of Fellini making New York at Cinecitta, and Nino Rota being turned loose on a comic strip fantasy.