The Adventures Of The Flying Cadets (Serial)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D Chapters: C+
One way
to see how bad B-movies with A budgets fail is to compare similar material from
years ago. This surfaced again when I
watched The Adventures of the Flying
Cadets (1938), a Universal Pictures serial in a semi-lucky 13 chapters that
tells the story of how four trainees in the U.S. Air Corps battle a Nazi spy
ring. The recent film in question is
Tony Scott’s 1986 propaganda/Music Video hootfest Top Gun. You know, the film
where the cadets sort of party and fly all the time, then because no other unit
of fighter plane pilots are available, fight then-Soviet MiG jets.
Back
then, everyone laughed at the idea that no team would be nearby if such a thing
occurred, after the events of 9/11/01, the propaganda is exposed in the
ugliest possible way. No one will ever
laugh at that moment again, knowing the new truth it holds. The Flying
Cadets waste no time here, especially having many more hours than Tom Cruise,
Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and Rick Rossovich have to fill. When a series of murders can be traced to
agents of The Third Reich, this older “fab four” picks up the clues and follows
up on them, discovering the Nazi-supported terrorism. Faster than you can say The Hardy Boys, they
are hot on the trail of the Fifth Column-types, all of which the adults are
oblivious to. The chapters are as
follows:
1)
The Black Hangman Strikes
2)
Menaced By Murderers
3)
Into The Flames
4)
Doorway Of Death
5)
Crashed In A Crater
6)
Rendezvous With Doom
7)
Gestapo Execution
8)
Master Of Treachery
9)
Wings Of Destruction
10) Caught In The Caves Of
An-Kar-Ban
11) Hostages For Treason
12) The Black Hangman Strikes Again
13) The Toll Of Treason
This is
not the outright propaganda it could have been, but the results are mixed. The cliffhangers are not as suspenseful or as
well executed as Universal’s better chapter plays and the fight scenes are also
tamer. I wonder if kids being involved
are one of the reasons. If it is, that
was a mistake. This also does not look
like it had the biggest budget, even for its time, so the result is a curio
that is not offensive or effective. It
is above average and fun for some laughs.
The full
frame black and white images are on the grainy side with the darker scenes suffering
detail problems, but this seems to do more with the material used than the
actual DVD transfer. It is old at worse
and watchable at best. The Dolby Digital
2.0 Mono has the usual background hiss and for-its-age distortion, but it also
occurrently has additional distortion in spots that was distracting, but again
from the original source, not the transfer or digital mastering. The only extras are four trailers for other
serials VCI has available or is about to issue on DVD.
Of
course, this serial was made before Pearl Harbor and most people did not realize
what was really ahead. The naïveté is
somewhat charming and sad at the same time.
There are more exciting serials than The Adventures of the Flying Cadets, but there have been much
worse, and it certainly is not as condescending as Top Gun so we can give it that credit.
- Nicholas Sheffo
