FLASH FX

Having not seen it in years, I settled down the other evening to watch the Dino De Laurentiis version of “Flash Gordon” made back in the days when “Star Wars” was a recent unexpected hit and every other studio wanted a piece of that particular action.

I decided that it might be one of those movies that was so awful it was probably quite brilliant but, watching it again, it turned out that it was just brilliantly awful and, despite the fact that it might very well be a camp classic, the truly godawful script (witness any scene with the pilots at the start of the film) and some terrible performances and wretched dubbing, I managed about twenty minutes of it before regretfully hitting the channel changer just after the “football fight” scene which did at least feature a spectacularly funny and well judged performance from Brian Blessed as the King of the Hawkmen.

But if Brian Blessed’s performance is the best thing you can find in something, well…

Perhaps sometimes things are just best left to your memory.

Actually, that’s desperately unfair of me. BB is utterly brilliant in “I Claudius” and is a damned fine actor even if he seems to have since built a brand new personality based solely upon the public’s perception of his character in this one high-profile performance.

Despite being a rather dreadful movie, “Flash Gordon” retains its profile thanks to a soundtrack provided by the rock band “Queen” and, in many ways, that is quite possibly the best thing about the movie. However, watching the opening credits without the soundtrack samples which were added for the hit single, and without the benefit of full stereo surround sound, even that sounded a little disappointing as it bleated tinnily out of our television.

Still, I did feel rather sad about having grown out of “Flash Gordon”, because I really remember enjoying it a lot when I was whatever age I was when it first came out. It may only have been the sheerness of the costumes of Ornella Muti, but the film definitely had something…

The design work is, to say the least, unusual, but it is, at least, trying to look not unlike its comic strip inspiration, but I remember the film as being a lot more “murky” and “smeary” and atmospheric way back in the days of domestic video recorders. On television this week it was presented in glorious High Definition which meant that the picture had been cleaned up so much that the formerly “lavish” and “huge” seeming sets looked positively tiny, as if the whole thing had been filmed in the corner of a public convenience and the pictures had a flat “straight to video” cheapness about them that really didn’t help it.

This did set me thinking, however, about the earlier versions of "Flash Gordon", the ones with were shown on TV in the mornings during the Christmas holidays alongside "Holiday Star Trek" when I must have been about ten years old.

At the time I thought they were great. Not brilliant, but great nevertheless. Even then we could tell that the rocket ships looked a bit ropey with their fizzing sparks, fairly obvious strings, and set against a version of outer space which was all clouds and backcloths.

But, do you know what?

We really didn't care about all that.

Forty years after they'd been made, those adventure serials still grabbed us and took us along with them and, whilst we might have tittered at the dodginess of the model work, we still avidly tuned in the next day even if it was, perhaps, to only laugh and point - as well as find out how exactly they got out of that last cliff-hanger ending, of course...

Special effects can be funny like that. Nothing seems to date faster apart from, perhaps, a vision of the future. Even "cutting edge" C.G.I. can look laughably primitive even a few short years later. They are always of their time and seldom timeless. Even the magnificence of the effects in "Star Wars" have had to be tweaked and polished for a more discerning audience in recent years although I maintain that the model work created by Brian Johnston for both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Alien" still looks astonishing even to this day.

Was cinema more like the theatre back in the old days? Were audiences just more prepared to suspend their disbelief over those dodgy model ships seen through the periscope in all of those submarine movies, or the models of the Lancaster bombers in "The Dambusters", or the flying saucers of the 1950s science-fiction films, or Flash Gordon's rocket ships…?

Or did they genuinely look "real" to them…?

Was "Flash Gordon" in the 1930s as convincing to 1930s kids as "Star Wars" was to those in the 1970s…? It really is difficult to be certain because the memory does cheat and you can only compare what you're seeing to other things which you might already have seen. If that's what the silver screen tells you a spaceship will look like, then that's what you will see. Plus, of course, the adventure serials were seen in a cinema crowded with excitable children with vivid imaginations and it was not ever possible to view these things over and over again. Those young minds filled in the blanks and their imagination did the rest and, before they knew it, they'd most probably seen the most exciting thing they'd ever seen.

Now, as a cynical old fart living in the 21st century, albeit without a jet-pack, hover-car and bacofoil suit, I maintain that you can pretty much always spot C.G.I., no matter how good it is, because on some subliminal level it will always look artificial somehow. People tend to disagree with me about this, but there you go. However, I have begun to wonder whether, because of all this "hyper-realism" (or perhaps "super-realism") in modern movies, we have become more aware of the shortcomings of the effects work in old films and television programmes in a way that we previously did not.

Is it, perhaps, that modern-day hyper realism which is why old "special effects" in these shows start to look a little shoddy to modern audiences and, furthermore, does this ultimately mean that we cannot suspend our disbelief in quite the same way any more…?

In the end, does this mean that our imaginations are diminished because of the brilliant and convincing work that is being done for us, so that we no longer feel that we have to fill in the gaps…?

Perhaps this is why more and more people are returning to the crafts, and the home-made when it comes to things like film-making; To exercise their imagination muscles...

Food for thought, eh…?