As I was doing research for the book, I came across this scene from the 1936 Flash Gordon serial. In Chapter Four, “Battling the Sea Beast”, we see Charles Middleton vamping it up as Ming the Merciless on the staircase descending into the dungeon laboratory where he keeps Dr. Zarkov prisoner. Then he seems to receive a rising spark of interest in what is going on. The clip is only 15 seconds long, hilarious, and possibly scandalous.
If all that cinematic laboratory equipment looks familiar, that’s because it was also used in Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Ray. An electrical engineer named Kenneth Strickfaden built all the tall, sparking, buzzing, clacking, discharging, flashing things as well as the Jacob’s ladders, those vertical glass tubes with continuous rising electrical arcs that climb upward in a steady, flickering spark trail. One of them is at the center of this scene, with Ming poised strategically behind it.
You can watch the full series on YouTube here. At his point in the story, Ming is forcing Zarkov to build “radioactive rays” and “solarite” for interplanetary conquest. It is an abstract pop fiction action thriller, with plenty of voluptuous feminine presence but zero actual nudity or even a sexual reference. In fact, the Hayes Office, which acted as Hollywood’s regulatory censor in the 1930s, did object to the revealing costumes worn by Dale Arden and Princess Aura, so Universal switched to more modest costuming.
But there was no one at the studio actually watching out for the odd visual sex joke in those days. Putting Ming behind a rising electrical spark just so, creating a cheeky visual moment, was possible when nudity was not. Ironically, the costumes in the 1980 Flash Gordon film showed more skin, but studio and TV network managers would have caught this and likely cut it. If it is a sex joke, then it is one that probably only could have happened in its own time.
