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The Beer Meister: Here are a few off-the-beaten-path Irish beers to help you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day

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Rain predicted for the Wyoming Valley into the midweek

<p>Slowly, unstoppably the walls studded with horrible spikes begin to close in around our hero.</p><p>He pushes with his arms, he braces himself with his legs, he tries to climb.</p><p>Is he doomed? The theater audience sits rapt. Will the evil gangsters or space aliens or cattle rustlers he&#8217;s been pursuing win out?</p><p>Of course not. You know the guy will somehow escape. He has to; he&#8217;s the hero. But you&#8217;ll have to come back next week and see how he did it. So you come back next week and, fortified with popcorn and Mason Dots, learn that &#8230; well, you know, he&#8217;s all set for another go-round.</p><p>Welcome to the long-vanished world of movie serials. Once they were a mainstay of neighborhood theater bills. These days, those of us who even remember them are a vanishing species.</p><p>When it was too cold to play baseball or too dry to go sledding or too wet to do much of anything, and TV and video games were so far in the future they hardly even qualified as science fiction, there was always the local movie house.</p><p>A lot of old-time theater fare has vanished: the newsreel, the sing-a-long, the animated cartoon, the travelogue, the race reel, the slapstick comedy, the second feature (a short movie that filled out a double bill).</p><p>Then there was my favorite, the serial &#8211; a 15-minute epic that continued for 12 weeks or so. Each episode, except for the last, ended in a truly desperate situation for the hero, but one from which, courtesy of some clever script writing, he would emerge a week later.</p><p>The settings were generally exotic, at least to someone from Wilkes-Barre&#8217;s Rolling Mill Hill. The opening chapter firmly set the story in the wild frontier, a backstabbing foreign capital, the jungle, the high seas. Despite the setting, they were all basically cowboys vs. bad guys, following a cliff-hanger formula developed generations earlier.</p><p>My preference, and I don&#8217;t know why, was for stories about space aliens whose goal was inevitably getting their hands on some secret formula or machine that would enable them to take over Earth. To this end they would capture Professor So-and-so, who had the formula or the machine, and also probably a beautiful daughter who was his lab assistant. It was the hero&#8217;s job to save the planet, win the girl &#8211; though they were never allowed to touch one another - and of course sell us a lot of popcorn and Mason Dots.</p><p>To that end, a 12-episode space serial meant the hero had to get out of 11 scrapes, one of which involved a bear hug by a clunky seven-foot robot named Gork.</p><p>But, in retrospect, here was the real belief strainer. How was it that the planet Zooligon, where the Zooligonians had hidden the professor and his daughter, had air that earthlings could breathe perfectly well and the aliens all dressed like ancient Persian soldiers and drove around in streamlined cars?</p><p>Well, who cared? I don&#8217;t care even now. The old serials were &#8211; and still are &#8211; great fun. They&#8217;re also still with us. You can catch them online, and you can order some of them complete. Go ahead! Ride with &#8220;The Ghost of Zorro.&#8221; Patrol the skies with &#8220;Blackhawk.&#8221; Fight Nazi saboteurs with &#8220;The Secret Code.&#8221;</p><p>So lay in a supply of Good and Plenty, lock the door, douse the lights, and turn off the cell phone. And party like it&#8217;s 1949.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Remember When </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/web1_TOM_MOONEY-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Remember When </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Tom Mooney</p><p>Remember When</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Take a trip back to the 1949 movie theaters and remember the double-features