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OUR OPINION: KICKING CORRUPTION State sticks up for whistle-blowers

First Posted: 6/25/2014 A pair of villains in business suits toss the heroic but unconscious Agent X27 (whom they cravenly ambushed) into a car and &#8211; with evil smirks on their pusses &#8211; shove the vehicle over a cliff. Down, down it rolls over rocks and around trees, ending in a pile of smoking, twisted metal hundreds of feet below.
&#8220;Wow, how&#8217;s he ever going to get out of this pickle?&#8221; you wonder, popping another Good and Plenty from the five-cent pack in your hand.
Of course, you know our hero somehow will get out of it. He has to, because this is just chapter five of a 12-part movie serial, circa 1952, and he&#8217;s got to smash the ring of baddies trying to find a gamma-ray weapon or empty Fort Knox or steal a professor&#8217;s secret of invisibility.
Welcome to the world of old-time &#8220;chapters,&#8221; as the kids used to call the serials back in their Hollywood heyday.
Why bring up these hoary relics?
This year of 2014 is a cultural milestone moment. It was exactly a century ago that the most famous serial in the history of the motion picture industry premiered. The 1914 silent epic &#8220;The Perils of Pauline&#8221; opened the floodgates and out poured decades of thriller-dillers designed to lure you back to the same movie house at the same time next week.
Other types of short-subjects that once filled theater bills have disappeared as well. Has anyone under 50 ever seen a newsreel, or a 15-minute Joe McDoakes comedy, or a singalong with a bouncing ball on the screen?
It&#8217;s the serials that I most fondly recall. Their setting could be anything: the old west, the high seas, foreign capitals, creepy mansions. Whatever the milieu, the plot structure was pretty much the same. The bad guys want something &#8211; boy do they ever want it. And the good guy, maybe with an assistant, has to try to stop them before civilization as we know it gets hijacked.
There are 12 to 15 episodes, and each one (except for the last one, of course) ends with a &#8220;cliffhanger&#8221; &#8211; a desperate situation that looks like doom for the hero but from which (in next week&#8217;s chapter) he will be shown to have escaped.
Serials found a following early on, and it wasn&#8217;t long until nearly everyone who could afford a director&#8217;s chair was making them. There was even a silent-movie serial (1920) called &#8220;The Woman in Grey&#8221; filmed in Wilkes-Barre. (You can buy it at the Historical Society.)
Nearly all the popular action figures of the 1930s-1950s got into the act. There were serials featuring the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Blackhawk, King of the Royal Mounted, Superman and almost anyone else who ever chased down a bad guy.
My favorites, though, were the outer space serials. To appreciate them, though, you had to be so high on Jujubes or Clark bars that factual gaps the width of a lunar crater didn&#8217;t trouble your young brain.
I never questioned why Flash Gordon and others on faraway planets had no trouble breathing, or why the interstellar villains all looked like Iowans and spoke the King&#8217;s English, but with the appropriate sneers and rasps.
When they tore down the Hart Theater years ago I went by and snatched a lone brick, which I keep to remind me of my cliffhanger days. You never get over serial junky-hood.
Hey, want to know how Agent X27 survived the car being pushed over the cliff? What he did was&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.

REMEMBER WHEN Serial cliffhangers left young and old scurrying back to the theater