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Our View: Diamonds to the Joan Harris Centre for outdoor recital

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Wilkes-Barre man arrested setting up ‘sex’ date with teen

Martians to the left of him. Martians to the right of him. They&rsquo;re closing in.
				Oh, my! Is Flash Gordon the space traveler doomed?
				A few generations ago, all you had to do to get your answer was come back to the neighborhood movie house in a week. You&rsquo;d see the next chapter in the hair-raising serial.
				I read in the paper that our downtown Wilkes-Barre movie complex, the wonderful Movies 14, is near to reopening. There&rsquo;ll be comedies, romances, historical epics, adventure stories, sci-fi with wild computer graphics. They&rsquo;ll have great stuff for us seven days and nights a week.
				But Flash? Forget it!
				The days of serials with cliff-hanger endings to the episodes are long gone. Here are some other items you won&rsquo;t see in the movie house today.
				Newsreels: A couple of seconds of the secretary of state and some foreign guy with a mustache signing a peace pact used to be stirring stuff. Today, it would be week-old news, and the treaty could be broken by the time you got your popcorn.
				Shemp, Larry and Moe: Nearly every movie was accompanied by a comedy short of maybe 15 minutes. If it wasn&rsquo;t The Three Stooges it was Joe McDoakes or Colonel Stoopnagle or some other hapless soul who couldn&rsquo;t fix a fallen window shade without nearly killing himself.
				Travelogues: Why theater operators believed audiences would cheer wildly over &ldquo;Guam, Island of Your Dreams,&rdquo; was beyond me even at age 12.
				Singalongs: These little shorts where you were supposed to sing in time with a ball bouncing over lyrics looked like fun, but I never heard anyone in the movie house actually singing. They did give you a chance to run back for another box of Good and Plenty without missing anything.
				The Bowery Boys: A second feature of maybe 45 minutes often accompanied the feature film. Some of these series, like the ones about Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall and their friends from the Lower East Side were wildly funny and sometimes better than &ldquo;the big picture.&rdquo; Of course, they went out of production generations ago.
				Nightclub Acts: I guess there was some panache attached to these short films featuring the big bands and singers of our parents&rsquo; generation. The dressed-up audiences they showed at caf&#233; tables always looked big-city-ish, and probably we were supposed to feel privileged to be let into their recreations.
				Bugs Bunny: Now these cartoons I really liked. Bugs was a lovable rebel who always managed to outwit staid society in the form of Elmer Fudd and his hunting gear. The older I get, the more convinced I am that Bugs represented what every American wants to be, even if he doesn&rsquo;t like carrots.
				Lash LaRue: On Saturday there would often be a bonus of a western featuring a guy whose trademark was his skill with a bullwhip or who maybe owned a horse with a higher IQ than the math whiz in your class.
				Ah, but those serials! Whether the hero was a federal agent, a Canadian Mountie, a spaceman or an explorer of the Amazon, the structure was the same. End each of 12 to 15 episodes by putting the guy in a situation that no human could possibly get out of. Then, the next week you&rsquo;d see how he got out of it.
				So, welcome back to our beloved theaters. DVDs and pay-per-view be damned: we&rsquo;ve missed you, even if you do think &ldquo;Little Women&rdquo; is better for us than Flash Gordon battling Martians.

Remember When: Moviehouses had newsreels and cliffhangers ….