The leotards and filament-suspended spaceships may be gone, but intergalactic comic-book hero Flash Gordon is back in a new series premiering tonight (Aug. 10) at 9/8 Central on SCI FI Channel. The show promises to deliver an updated version of the pop-culture staple for a new generation, while holding onto the sense of fun and adventure that made the early serials so enjoyable.
Created by Alex Raymond, the Flash Gordon comics debuted in 1934 to provide some competition for the popular Buck Rogers series. Flash soon made his way to movie theaters in a string of serials and later got his own live-action television series in the 1960s. The New Animated Adventures of Flash Gordon hit the airwaves in 1979, followed shortly by the corny but enjoyable 1980 feature film starring Sam Jones as Flash and Max von Sydow as Emperor Ming.
The new series from RHI Ent. stars Smallville‘s Eric Johnson as an athlete who discovers a portal to another world while investigating his father’s disappearance. Along with Dale Arden (Gina Holden), Flash travels to the planet Mongo and attempts to foil the evil plans of Ming (John Ralston), who comes off as more of a misguided genius than an evil dictator in this incarnation.
Most of the digital visual effects work for the show went into building Mongo’s capital city, an Oz-like metropolis built with Autodesk Maya and e-on software’s Vue, and composited in Adobe After Effects and Combustion. Vfx supervisor Bruce Turner (Stargate SG1) tells us we can look forward to some character animation as we meet a tribe of flying people known as the Dactyl in episode five. Read more about the vfx and the show itself as we get the inside scoop from Turner and exec producer Peter Hume in the latest issue of Animation Magazine.
