Customer Reviews

Valley of the Cliffhangers Supplement

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This book is a very valuable addition to Jack Mathis's Valley of the Cliffhangers (now a collector's item). No other studio even remotely approached Republic pictures when it came to making serials. Not only did they approach the subject matter with respect, they assembled the finest team of directors and stuntmen in the business--including the legendary Dave Sharp.
It is both fitting and proper that the gifted filmmakers, Steven Spielburg and George Lucas, created the remarkable "Indiana Jones" series as a loving tribute to the Republic series that they saw as children.
If this book had been available in the 1940s when I was a boy, it would have been passed around the neighborhood until the covers fell off.
This review is by my husband...a real lover of these serials.

There are HISTORIES of the ancient world, in which one is carried on through paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, often volume after volume of burgeoning narrative in consecutive prose. There are ENCYCLOPEDIAS of the ancient world, in which distinct topics are dealt with discretely, mostly in short essays that are limited in scope to a few paragraphs. Then there are DICTIONARIES of the ancient world, in which those same distinct topics are dealt with discretely in a just few terse sentences. Jack Mathis's "Supplement" to his massive "Valley of the Cliffhangers" is a reference work most akin to the third of these kinds of writing. If you want your memory and imagination to have the space to ramp freely through evocative and grippingly-paced prose recreations of the entire corpus of Republic serials, this is not the book you are looking for (though no doubt it is better than nothing). If you want terse chapter-by-chapter encapsulations of what happened in every one of the chapters of every one of the sixty-six Republic serials, Mathis's writing, though designedly curt, is almost unfailingly clear, accurate, and to the point. If you want to track down a particular dire peril you remember without being able to pinpoint which serial (or chapter of a serial) it came from, and just don't have time to view your entire VHS or DVD Republic serial library again, you will want to consult this book.

This book contains a synopsis of every chapter of every Republic Studios Serial ever made, along with photos depicting every cliffhanger ending. 2 pages are allocated for each of Republic's 66 serials, and in addition to the photos, 1 or 2 pieces of advertising material per serial are also reproduced. Unfortunately, the synopses are poorly written to the point of being almost illiterate. Unless you have actually seen the serial, it's close to impossible to make sense out of the writing. There are at least some nice production photos from various serials in the front. As a big fan of these serials, I bought this hoping it would be a readable and enjoyable way to revisit my favorite serials and get some sense of those I hadn't seen. Sadly, I wasted my money. Jack Mathis, the late author, was clearly a huge devotee of Republic Pictures and had an extensive collection of memorabilia. What he didn't have was any writing ability, nor the good sense to get a collaborator who did.