Cliffhanger serials — from “The Perils of Pauline” to “The Adventures of Captain Marvel” — were once as much a movie-theater staple as double features, newsreels, Three Stooges shorts, Lowell Thomas travelogues and Mickey Mouse cartoons.
For the uninitiated, serials were long-form movies broken into 12 to 15 “chapters” 20 minutes long, each ending with the hero in a precarious situation, such as hanging from a cliff — hence the “cliffhanger” nickname.
The idea was that you’d be eager to return to the theater the next week to see how the good guy escaped his predicament and to carry on with the story.
Today there’s another name for serials. They’re called “movies.”
Check out “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1” or last year’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”
These films don’t end. They just stop.
It’s one thing to have to wait a week to catch up with a 20-minute chapter, but a two- or two-and-a-half hour movie that won’t resolve its cliffhanger for a year? Good grief.
Of course, “Mockingjay” and “Smaug” are just the latest examples. This kind of thing has been around for much longer.
Movie franchises are nothing new. Before television, major studios offered many film series with popular literary or comic-strip or original characters — The Thin Man, Charlie Chan, Tarzan, Dr. Kildare, Blondie, Andy Hardy, etc.
Actually, sequels date back to the silent era, the first being the 1916 epic “The Fall of a Nation,” which followed the previous year’s “The Birth of a Nation.” And at the end of the silent cycle, “The Iron Mask” (1929) was a follow-up to “The Three Musketeers” (1921), with Douglas Fairbanks reprising his role as D’Artagnan.
More recently, one could make the case that the earliest James Bond stories started the current trend of movies that leave you in a state of anticipation.
True, the 007 films did not have cliffhanger conclusions, but each one announced the next entry in the series. And like the Hunger Games and Hobbit films, the first four Bond movies were annual events.
Watch the end credits of those early pictures and you’ll see “James Bond Will Return in Goldfinger” … or whatever the next one was. And later these bumpers became simply, “James Bond Will Return.”
On the other hand, perhaps Bond simply provides the model for the sequel-itis that afflicts modern moviemaking — but it was something new in the 1960s to see a pitch for a planned franchise follow-up. It was a real vote of confidence that the film you just watched would be a hit.
In more modern terms, think “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), the second of the original Star Wars trilogy. At the end of that film the fate of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is uncertain, and it was another three years before “Return of the Jedi” wrapped things up.
Then there was “Back to the Future II,” which had an open ending and a tacked-on teaser with scenes from “Back to the Future III,” which would follow six months later.
But where “The Empire Strikes Back” is a fine film in its own right, the second “Back to the Future” entry does not stand up on its own. In my 1989 review, I wrote that it “may be the first feature-length segue.”
Although last year’s Hobbit held its own pretty well, right up to that “stop” ending, I wasn’t as satisfied with the latest Hunger Games. In fact, I kind of wish I had waited until next year and just watched “Mockingjay 1” and “Mockingjay 2” back to back.
Except for the fact that these movie sequels are being released a year apart and serial chapters came just one week later, the only major difference between them is their budgets.
While the Hobbit and Hunger Games “chapters” are major big-budget razzle-dazzle features, theatrical serials were low-budget B-movies, basement-status programmers, often relegated to Saturday matinees for kids.
And yet, like today’s most popular franchises, they also were often based on comic books/strips — Flash Gordon, Brenda Starr, Dick Tracy, Superman, Batman, Captain America, the Phantom, Spy Smasher, etc.
I’m not sure what it says about pop culture that we’ve come full circle in the 21st century, but back in the 1930s and ’40s, serials/comic book adaptations were just another cog in a movie wheel that churned out dozens of films in every genre.
Today, these fantasies seem to dominate the wheel so that there’s not nearly as much room for the other spokes.
Chris Hicks is the author of "Has Hollywood Lost Its Mind? A Parent’s Guide to Movie Ratings." He also writes at www.hicksflicks.com and can be contacted at hicks@deseretnews.com.