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Page
1: The Flash Gordon serial of 1938 diverged
greatly from the
Sunday pages
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Azura,
Witch Queen of Mongo, was Flash Gordon's first
major femme fatale after Princess Aura
in the comic strip.
She starred in her own episode, but never appeared
again during Raymond's tenure. Azura
was a supremely-confident sexily-drawn monarch,
with an unfortunate cruel streak. Former
beauty queen Beatrice Roberts, who had been Miss
New York in
1923, co-starred as Azura,
Queen of Magic in the movies. She did mostly bit
parts in Hollywood until 1949. |
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Azura, Queen of Magic, in the Universal serial
of 1938 was mostly arrogant, mean, and often covered
by a fur-lined cape. The Hayes Office was very
powerful then, and the Flash Gordon serials
were intended to be adolescent entertainment,
so there was almost no sensuality allowed, and
only occasional initiative was shown on the part
of woman characters. |
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The
following two sequences (below) from Raymond's
original Witch Queen of Mongo and Flash
Gordon's Trip to Mars are somewhat parallel.
Both queens used chemistry to further their
nefarious plans, and exercised additional powers.
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It
is somewhat challenging to find direct comparisons
between the Sunday strip and Flash Gordon's
Trip to Mars. A couple of plot lines from
Raymond's Witch Queen of Mongo had already
been borrowed in the first serial. The Earthlings
kept encountering grotesque
alien montrosities in both media, though. Sparkling
hardware, ingenious inventions, and various
beaming rays were as important as characters
and actors in the second film.
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| The
bleak Martian forest resembled the scene of a
brief episode by Alex Raymond -- featuring a tribe
of Brown Dwarves, preceding his epic City
of the Hawkmen adventure, where the classic
design of Flash Gordon was fully established. |
| A
near-fatal Martian forest fire recalled a similar
conflagation when the Earth People fled to the
jungles of Mongo in 1936. |
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