Captain Video and His Video Rangers
Captain Video & his Video Rangers
As the unofficial Baby-Boomer( Ira Gallen) Guru of my Television Collecting Generation I knew it was the right time to create a Video Network for Baby-Boomers Only. http://www.tvdays.com
Captain Video and His Video Rangers: Science fiction
is an American science fiction television series, which was aired on the DuMont Television Network, and was the first series of its kind on American television.
The series aired between June 27, 1949 and April 1, 1955, originally Monday through Saturday at 7pm ET, and then Monday through Friday at 7pm ET. A separate 30-minute spinoff series, The Secret Files of Captain Video, aired Saturday mornings, alternating with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, from September 5, 1953 to May 29, 1954 for a total of 20 episodes.
Overview
Don Hastings (left) and Al Hodge (right)
Set in the distant future, the series followed the adventures of a group of fighters for truth and justice, the Video Rangers, led by Captain Video. The Rangers operated from a secret base on a mountain top. Their uniforms resembled US Army surplus with lightning bolts sewn on.
The Captain had a teen-age companion who was known only as the Video Ranger. Captain Video received his orders from the Commissioner of Public Safety, whose responsibilities took in the entire solar system as well as human colonies on planets around other stars. Captain Video was the first adventure hero explicitly designed (by DuMont’s idea-man Larry Menkin) for early live television. “I TOBOR” the robot was an important, semi-regular character on the program, and represents the first appearance of a robot in live televised science fiction; the character’s name was actually supposed to be “ROBOT I,” but the stencil with its name was applied to its costume backwards.
The show was broadcast live five to six days a week and was extremely popular with both children and adults. Because of the large adult audience, the usual network broadcast time of the daily series was 7 to 7:30 p.m. EST, leading off the “prime evening” time-block. For the last two seasons the show still aired at 7pm ET but was 15 minutes long. The production was hampered by a very low budget, and the Captain did not originally have a space ship of his own.
Until 1953, Captain Video’s live adventures occupied 20 minutes of each day’s 30-minute program time. About 10 minutes into each episode, a Video Ranger communications officer showed about 7 minutes of old cowboy movies. These were described by the communications officer, Ranger Rogers, as the adventures of Captain Video’s “undercover agents” on Earth.
During the 1953-1954 broadcast season, there was a spinoff series, The Secret Files of Captain Video (5 September 1953 to 29 May 1954) shown alternate Saturdays with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Each of these 30-minute Saturday broadcasts, a total of 20 episodes, told a complete story.
Captain Video’s early opponent was Dr. Pauli, an inventor who wore gangster-style pinstripe suits but spoke with the snarl of a movie Nazi or Soviet. Like the last few theatrical serials, the TV series’ plots often involved inventions created by Captain Video or the evil genius Dr. Pauli, but obviously made from hardware store odds and ends, with much double-talk regarding their fantastic properties. The series was originally broadcast from a studio in the building occupied by Wanamaker’s department store, and the production crew would simply go downstairs for props, often just a few minutes before air-time. Originally, only three Rangers were seen on camera: The Video Ranger; Ranger Rogers, the communications officer; and Ranger Gallagher. (These were also the only Rangers seen in the 1951 film serial version of the series.) As the budget increased, a larger roster of Rangers was briefly seen on TV.
Captain Video eventually had the use of three different space ships. In the first ship, the X-9 (later replaced briefly by the X-10), the crew at takeoff lay upon tilted bunk beds on their elbows, a posture based upon space-travel theories of the time. Later, the V-2 rocket-like Galaxy had an aircraft-style cockpit with reclining seats. The Captain’s final spacecraft, after early 1953, was the Galaxy II.
The other space-adventure series of the period were Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (DuMont), also broadcast live from New York City, and Space Patrol (ABC), broadcast live from Los Angeles. There were some suspicious plot similarities between the three — at times, Space Patrol seemed to be doing a West-Coast recreation of Captain Video’s latest adventure.
Al Hodge, who had created the role of Britt Reid, The Green Hornet on radio, is the Captain Video most original viewers of the series remember (1950–55). However, the original Captain Video was Richard Coogan, who played the role for 17 months. The Video Ranger was played during the entire run by teen-aged Don Hastings, who later became a soap opera star.
During commercial breaks, DuMont aired special “Video Ranger messages”. These ranged from public service spots on morality and civics to advertisements for Video Ranger merchandise. Many premiums were offered by sponsors of the show, including space helmets, secret code guns, flying saucer rings, decoder badges, photo-printing rings, and Viking rockets complete with launchers. A clip of in-show advertising can been seen on YouTube.
Production
Even for its time, the quality of the show is often considered crude or low-budget, owing much to the fact that the show was done live and DuMont had a meager budget to work with. A laudatory review by Dave Barry referenced the Captain Video Rocket Ring, a promotional tie-in piece of merchandise that was distributed via Power House candy bars, saying that the ring “seemed to have a higher production value than the actual TV show.”
In the early days of the series, the show featured often incoherent and nonsensical scripts, along with jarring plot shifts to old cowboy movies. This led to derision of the show by the critics of the day. This improved after 1952when scripts were written by majorscience fiction writers active at the time, including Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke. These late scripts displayed more intelligence, discipline and imagination than most of the other children’s sci-fi series scripts of the era. Other well-known authors who occasionally wrote for the program included Isaac Asimov, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Milt Lesser, Walter M. Miller, Jr.,Robert Sheckley, J. T. McIntosh and Dr. Robert S. Richardson. One of the more prolific writers for the show was Maurice C. Brachhausen, who wrote under the name M.C. Brock, and later had his own production company, Brock Video Productions.
Few special effects were seen on the series until the team of Russell and Haberstroh was hired in September 1952. For the rest of the program’s episodes, they provided surprisingly effective model and effects work, prefilmed in 16 mm format and cut into the live broadcast as needed.
The show’s theme song was Richard Wagner‘s “Overture to The Flying Dutchman.”
The TV series is mentioned in the first of the 39 independent episodes of The Honeymooners, “TV or Not TV”. Honeymoonerscharacter Ed Norton was supposedly a fan of the show.
The TV series is also prominently mentioned in Barbara Kingsolver‘s novel The Lacuna (2009). After the protagonist, author Harrison William Shepherd, is persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his stenographer and friend, Violet Brown, observes: “After the hearing he’d stopped writing, for good he said. Instead he bought a television set and let its nonsense rule his days. Mook the Moon Man comes on at four, and so on.” She adds: “He was so changed by then, even his looks. Whatever used to show up for its workaday there inside him, it had shut off the lights and gone on home. He was fagged out in the chair as usual, in his old gray flannels, smoking, never taking his eyes off the set. Captain Video was on, some underwater band of thieves fighting. They had Al Hodge by the neck, fixing to drown him.” The scene Violet describes portends later developments in the novel.
Other media
Columbia Pictures made a movie serial, starring Judd Holdren, under the name Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere (1951). However, it displayed only marginally better sets and props than its TV inspiration. Some special effects were accomplished with cel animation, inspired by earlier use in another, successful serial from the same studio, Superman (1948).
Six issues of a Captain Video comic book were published by Fawcett Comics in 1951. The rival space adventure programs Tom Corbett and Space Patrol shortly thereafter had their own comic books as well. Some of these comics were used as the basis for a British TV Annual, a hardcover collection produced in time for Christmas, which also made the claim that man would venture into space in 1970 and would reach the moon by 2000.
In addition, Tom Corbett had a syndicated daily newspaper strip, and a set of juvenile series books published by Grosset and Dunlap. Columbia made a theatrical film serial, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere, the only time a movie serial was based on a television program. Tom Corbett and Space Patrol were also heard on the ABC Radio Network. However, since DuMont had no affiliated radio network, DuMont never provided a radio version of Captain Video’s adventures.
Legacy
A screen shot of Captain Video in progress
Captain Video comes close to being a lost series. Only five 30-minute episodes, three featuring Richard Coogan and two featuring Al Hodge, have been available to the public on home video.
DuMont’s film archive, consisting of kinescope (16 mm) and Electronicam (35 mm), was destroyed in the 1970s by Metromedia, the broadcast conglomerate that was the successor company to DuMont, thus nearly dooming nearly all of its pioneering TV series to oblivion. To date, the person or persons responsible for ordering the destruction of the kinescopes and other recordings remains unknown.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive has 24 episodes of Captain Video; some prints also contain an episode of Marge and Jeff, a weekday sitcom which aired after Captain Video during the 1953-1954 TV season. As with all of the rest of the archive’s holdings, the episodes are only viewable as part of a showing within the archives building.
Alpha Home Entertainment released a DVD containing four of the publicly viewable episodes on November 25, 2008. This marked the first release of a Captain Video and His Video Rangers retail DVD .
As a result of there being so few surviving episodes, it is not clear what time period the series is set in. The Fawcett comic adventures are supposed to take place during the time of publication, in 1951. However, the stories in the surviving kinescopes could take place in 1950, as when Dr. Pauli plots to rob a bank in Shanghai, or centuries into the future, as when Captain Video seeks to establish a reliable mail service for far-flung interstellar (or at least interplanetary) colonies (depicted in a surviving episode generally called “Chauncey Everett”) — or struggles to prevent the many space stations circling Pluto from being destroyed by an approaching comet. Later episodes’ television listings would seem to indicate that Captain Video and other characters on the show were indeed capable of routine interstellar travel.
