Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere

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Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere is a 15-chapter serial released by Columbia Pictures in 1951. It was directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Wallace A. Grissel with a screenplay by Royal G. Cole, Sherman I. Lowe and Joseph F. Poland, based on a treatment by George H. Plympton. The serial is unique for several reasons--- in particular, it is the first and last film serial ever based on a television program, Captain Video and his Video Rangers.

As produced by the infamous Sam Katzman, the serial has a production budget seemingly not much larger than the famously tiny budget of the DuMont Television Network's live daily teleseries. Judd Holdren, in what was only his second starring screen role, plays Captain Video, the leader of a group of crime-fighters known as the Video Rangers. He faces an interplanetary menace, as the evil dictator of the planet Atoma, Vultura (Gene Roth) and his lackey, the traitorous earth scientist Dr. Tobor (George Eldredge) are planning to conquer the earth. Republic Studios used and reused the same basic plot in Radar Men from the Moon, Zombies of the Stratosphere and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe in 1951 - 1953, and borrowed Holdren himself for the latter two serials. The Captain Video chapterplay is a bit more satisfying to science-fiction fans, because it does make an effort to keep the action interplanetary, instead of earthbound. Captain Video and his teenaged sidekick, the otherwise nameless "Video Ranger" (Larry Stewart), must make frequent visits both to Atoma and to another distant planet, Theros. Both Atoma and Theros are impersonated by Bronson Canyon, so to distinguish the two, the Atoma footage is tinted pink and the Theros footage is tinted green in the original release prints. These colored scenes were processed by Cinecolor.

In the Captain Video teleseries, "Tobor" is the name of a large robot, who was one of the series' most popular characters. Calling a villain "Dr. Tobor" may have been intended to fool young theater-goers into thinking they would see the robot in the serial. In fact, the only robots on view are the ludicrous cardboard, fedora-wearing robots earlier seen in the Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire.

A later Columbia serial, The Lost Planet (1953), may have been planned as a second adventure for Captain Video, because the slaves of that serial's evil extraterrestrial dictator Reckov (also Gene Roth) inexplicably all wear uniforms that look like those of the Video Rangers of 1952. In any case, the hero in the serial as released is a newspaper reporter named Rex Barrow, also played by Judd Holdren. As in the Captain Video serial, there is also an evil earth scientist, Dr. Grood (Michael Fox) in cahoots with Reckov of the Lost Planet.