IT IS DONE...

Just finished the footage for EMPIRE OF PLANET X!

It finishes on a surprisingly grownup note, with Dale and Flash together but their wedding still frustrated, and Dale plaintively having the last word... Then a final preview of evil and the credits roll...

The film has been a lot of fun even though I have managed some days to do no more than ten minutes work on it. As I said in a previous post given the controversy surrounding my documentary projects and related book publishing EMPIRE OF PLANET X is a welcome diversion and a nice reminder of where I used to be focused...

The Secret Sun: Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre, pt. VI: Transmission

Flash Gordon as solar phallus, with the goddesses (aristocratic fantasy women) of Mongo (the dark "gypsy" planet, Planet X) craving his light-seed?

Flash Gordon as Mithras, Ming as..? Typhon? Storm Bull?

The Secret Sun: Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre, pt. VI: Transmission

Flash Gordon: Ultimate Stud Ape of the Planet Mongo...

What made Flash Gordon completely irresistible to Mongovian females??? All the females Flash encountered immediately lusted after him. And it WAS lust- love doesn't even enter into the Mongo humanoid's mind according to their own testimony...

In the original somewhat cheerfully racist comicbook the yellow Mongo people had apparently never seen a "white youth" like Flash... But in more recent versions (other than the SciFi abomination, we'll forget that one forever henceforth) he is still El Studdo. It's a bit like the many romances of Clark Kent on SMALLVILLE.

It definitely plugs into some monomythic trope somewhere but I haven't really delved into the exactitudes of it yet. More on this when I have. :)

Animated hottie: Azura Filmation-style from 1979

Flash Gordon

So with a heavy heart I come to the last main segments of the EMPIRE OF PLANET X feature film... It seems very likely it will get a deal straight up, and hopefully at some point will then run on SciFi Channel, to function as the mouthwash to get rid of the awful halitosis of the SciFi Channel's own unforgiveable live action attempt. :)

The first film is finishing strong, with a climactic (in every sense) sequence culminating in a battle between mad scientists, sorcerors, hawkmen, robots, zombies and blue magic men.

Fellini's got nothing on me once I get Blendering! :)

Azura the Witch Queen and Dale Arden

Nearing the 60 minute mark of the film and it's all hypnotic mind control potions, steamy dream sex, catfights and shootouts between Hawkmen and Blue Magic Men...

IT'S A MAD HOUSE! A MAD HOUSE!

Whoops, wrong "franchise". :)

FLash... of boobies... :)

Flash Gordon pushed the envelope a little bit like Liberty Meadows in recent times. Alex Raymond's original strip was amazingly risque, and one of its major preoccupations in its original trumphant series in 1934-1936 was the sexual -yes, sexual, more than romantic- triangles on the Planet Mongo. Ming the Merciless had it bad for Dale Arden, and pretty much any scantily clad aristocratic female on Mongo had the hots for the "white man from Earth", the "fair youth", Flash Gordon.

So in keeping with that tradition my EMPIRE OF PLANET X film is heading into MA territory a little bit, but only to honour the source material. :)