Product Details

• Actors: Buster Crabbe, Constance Moore, Jackie Moran, Jack Mulhall, Anthony Warde
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Video Communications Inc.
• VHS Release Date: March 11, 1997
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B000056ATP
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #599,261 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps The Only Movie Featuring Both Silly Hats And A Zeppelin Crash!, June 22, 2006

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Planet Outlaws [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I know that this movie (released in this form in 1953) was stitched together from the tedious Buck Rogers serials (made in 1939) but even by those standards I still have to protest the silliest headgear and special effects in movie history. The premise here is that Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers crashes his zeppelin in the mountains of the arctic around the turn of the last century. The zeppelin is buried under snow and some kind of experimental gas keeps the crew in suspended animation until they are discovered in the year 2500. Instead of investigating Buck for bad airmanship, the leaders of the future give him a spaceship to fly to Saturn with. The zeppelin crash is the least credible special effect in film history for all of about five minutes until the spaceships make their screen debut and then they easily take the title. These spaceships resemble a Rowenta iron set on "linen" to provide the maximum amount of steam. They are visibly supported on wires so obvious that Ed Wood would blanche, and the sound effect for the spacecraft most closely resembles that of a leaf blower.

Buck goes to Saturn, fights off Killer Kane and his nefarious army, and is generally wily and masculine. My favorite feature of the film are the "amnesia helmets" that Kane uses in a mind-control experiment. These helmets made me laugh out loud: they appear to be pressure cookers or perhaps commercial par boilers. They are far and away the most utterly ludicrous headgear in any film, ever.

The film is generally pretty uninspiring by modern standards, but I gave the film three stars for two reasons: first, by the standards of 1939 this was groundbreaking and state of the art (as hard as that is to imagine now); second, this movie is fun and full of high camp value. Sit back and enjoy the most ridiculous look at the future (complete with clumsily tacked on and hilarious narrated opening) you have seen in this century or last.