10 Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Between 1936 and 1955, you didn't just go to a movie; you went to a whole evening's entertainment, with cartoons, newsreels, two features, and a serial -- a cliffhanging, 12-15 chapter adventure, Western, or science fiction series designed to fill the seats week after week as audiences wondered "How will the hero get out of this jam?"

Three main studios, Columbia, Republic, and Universal, churned out dozens of serials every year, so they needed lots of action heroes.  Some became famous later, in feature films and on tv, and others faded away quickly, but they all offered buddy-bonding and occasional glimpses of biceps and bulges.  Here are the top 10 musclemen of the movie serials:

1. Buster Crabbe may have died in 1983, but his fame -- and exceptional physique -- live on. He was a beefcake staple for 30 years, playing Tarzan and Tarzan clones (1933), cowboys Red Barry and Billy the Kid, and futuristic space heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  Lots of scripts called for him to get his shirt ripped off.

2. Herman Brix competed in the Olympics as Bruce Bennett, then gave Buster Crabbe some competition with the serials The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) and Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938).  He also stripped down to play Kioga in Hawk of the Wilderness (1938).

3. Former college athlete Charles Starrett was best known for the Durango Kid series, but he also got torn out of his clothes in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), to be tortured and turned into a zombie (left).

4. Gordon Jones (left) died in 1963, so he isn't well known to the Boomer generation, but in his day he was a well known face and physique.  Catch his exposed biceps in an early version of The Green Hornet in the 1941 serial.

5. Kane Richmond played the adult mentor/boyfriend to teenage Frankie Darro in a series of 1930s "Thrill-o-Ramas," plus some Charlie Chan mysteries, Westerns, and beefcake-heavy boxing movies.   His main serial was the superheroic Spy Smasher (1942).  He retired to open a hair salon.

6. The rugged Tom Tyler had a long career in Westerns, but flexed his muscles as two comic superheroes brought to life in movie serials: The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phanton (1943)

7. Gerald Mohr played a pulp detective named The Lone Wolf (1946, 1947) and narrated the first season of The Lone Ranger series on tv (1949-50). 

8. Speaking of The Lone Ranger, before Clayton Moore became identified with the Masked Man (1949-1957), he had a long career in movies and serials, mostly Westerns, naturally.

9. Kirk Alyn never disrobed on camera, but his muscular frame was displayed in a Superman costume in the only serials about the original superhero, Superman (1948) and Atom Man v. Superman (1950).

10. Jock Mahoney played a rather long-in-the-tooth Tarzan in Tarzan Goes to India (1962), but he also starred in some serials, such as Cody of the Pony Express (1950) and Roar of the Iron Horse (1951).  

Herman Brix: Almost the First Tarzan

The iconic Tarzan has always been Johnny Weissmuller, who took Edgar Rice Burroughs' sophisticated, multilingual Lord Greystoke and embued him with  "me Tarzan" jargon, the fake-African "Umgawa," the chimp companion, and the vine-swinging.  But for a trick of fate, Herman Brix would have become the Ape Man.

Like Weissmuller, Herman Brix was an Olympic athlete. He won a silver medal for the shot-put in 1928.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1929 and went to work in the movies.  In 1931, MGM chose him to star in the new talkie, Tarzan the Ape Man, but he broke his shoulder before filming could begin, and Johnny Weissmuller took his place.

But a few years later Brix had another opportunity to play Tarzan, in a movie serial, The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935).  

It was so popular that Brix became typecast as Tarzan, and found it difficult to get other work.

He de-Germanized his name into Bruce Bennett, and appeared in many more movie serials, Westerns, and detective movies.  After serving in the Navy during World War II, he continued to work, mostly in B-movies.

In 1961, he wrote and played the villain in The Fiend of Dope Island.  The "dope" is marijuana, which whip-wielding Charlie Davis (Bennett) forces innocent Caribbean natives to grow for him, until David (Robert Bray) shows up.

He died in 2006, at the age of 100.

Tim Tyler's Luck: Gay Boy and Pirate in the Jungle

The results of the poll are in, and there were lots of votes for 1940s and before, but not many for the 1990s and 2000s.  That doesn't really match my blog traffick:

Mae West, gay icon of the 1930s -- 33 hits
Zoey 101, Disney channel teencom of the 1990s --  330 hits

But ok, we can start with Tim Tyler's Luck.

It began in 1928 as a humorous comic strip about a young teenager living in an orphanage, where he was burdened by bad luck.  The gag-a-day humor ended when he met an older boy, Spud, and they decided to set out on the road together.  Eventually they grew into young adults and settled in Africa, where they spent many decades hunting down poachers, finding lost civilizations, being captured by cannibals, and squashing tribal rebellions, all the while ignoring the occasional savage princess or girl reporter.  They endured through 1996, the last of the old-style teenage homoromances hidden away in the comics sections of a dwindling number of small-town newspapers.    

In the movie serial version of Tim Tyler’s Luck (1937), Frankie Thomas plays Tim Tyler, but his partner Spud (Billy Benedict), is virtually absent, appearing only in the first chapter.  Instead, Tim travels through Darkest Africa alone.  He is heavily feminized by the camera, jaunting through the bush with a sweater tied around his neck as if he just stepped off a tennis court.  He is rescued more often than rescuing, participating in the vague euphemisms for sexual assault usually reserved for damsels in distress: he is carried off, kicking and screaming, twice.

When he strips down to his underwear to swim in a lagoon, a movie convention usually intended to divest young ladies of their clothes, a crocodile attacks, but lest the homoerotic implication become too obvious, a friendly panther, not Tarzan, rushes to the rescue.

There's a girl, but no hetero-romance.  Instead, the gay subtext comes when a bearded French-accented pirate, Lazarre (Earle Douglas) carries Tim off into the bush, screaming and arms-flailing like the young ladies who are always being abducted out of their bedchambers in these serials.  Tim talks Lazarre out of his dastardly plans and rehabilitates him into an ally.  For the rest of the serial, Lazarre provides comic relief with pretensions of cowardice while risking his life to save Tim over and over (the boy needs a lot of saving).

One wonders why director Ford Beebe didn’t let Spud tag along on the adventure and take charge of the comic relief instead of Lazarre.  Allowing  Tim to meet and rehabilitate the pirate certainly adds to the dramatic potential of the series; however, it also inadvertently reflects the sudden intensity of love at first sight.

The bond between the brash, working-class pirate and the fey sophisticate tennis player replicates the tough-sissy gender polarization of Freddie Bartholomew and Jimmy Lydon in Tom Brown's School Days,  but with a more overt erotic subtext.  Tim and Lazarre’s scenes are peppered with full-body hugs and sly innuendos: “We can’t leave until daybreak.  You will stay here with me tonight.”   And they do not participate in the heteronormative conclusion: evidently they plan to stay together forever.