In this recent post, I mentioned the 1952 Blackhawk movie serial starring Kirk Alyn and I said I've never seen it. Well, our video link today is the 1952 Blackhawk movie serial — all fifteen chapters of it. I made it through about a third of the first one so far.
Interesting to see the credits I freeze-framed above. George H. Plympton wrote tons of serials for Columbia including Tarzan the Fearless (1933), Flash Gordon (1936), The Spider's Web (1938), The Phantom Creeps (1939), The Green Hornet (1940), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), The Masked Marvel (1943), Chick Carter, Detective (1946), Brick Bradford (1947), Superman (1948), Batman and Robin (1949), and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950). I copied that info off his Wikipedia page.
Royal K. Cole was a cartoonist turned screenwriter who sometimes was credited as Royal B. Cole and sometimes as Royal King Cole. He worked on the Ace Drummond newspaper strip and the Winnie Winkle strip and in the fifties, he wrote the Hopalong Cassidy TV show and that led to him being hired to write the Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip which was drawn by Dan Spiegle, the man who drew the Blackhawk comic book when I wrote it. Cole also had lots of credits on serials (including the 1944 Captain America one and several of the above he worked on with Mr. Plympton) and on adventure-type TV shows of the fifties.
Sherman Lowe was also an accomplished writer of movie serials and later a writer for TV shows like Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid and Ramar of the Jungle.
It was odd to see Reed Crandall get a credit on the serial. He was a fine artist and he had much do with the success of Blackhawk but you'd think there'd be a mention of Quality Comics, its publisher in that space. Or maybe they could have acknowledged the writers and certain other artists who had created characters and story points that appeared in the serial.
And it was really odd for them to give Crandall that credit at a time when he was leaving Quality Comics and Blackhawk. The following year, he did his last work for them and began drawing horror and crime comics for E.C. Maybe Quality arranged for the credit to butter him up and try to entice him to stay.
Anyway, thanks to Michael Kilgore and a couple of other folks who told me the serial was on archive.org. It's not a bad print. See how far you get in it…