"GORDON'S ALIIIIVVVVEEE!" LOOKING BACK AT THE 1980 SCI-FI CULT CLASSIC FLASH GORDON

New Year's Eve 1980 and my ten-year-old self is sitting in the dark of the Embassy cinema in Waltham Cross awaiting the screening of Flash Gordon.
I'd been excited about seeing this film all through the autumn and into the winter for three reasons.
Firstly, my dad was in it! He was playing one of Vultan's Hawkmen and had been telling me about working alongside Sam Jones and Brian Blessed.
Secondly, I'd been a fan of Flash Gordon since I was seven or so, thanks to the BBC's showing of the 30s chapterplay serials every Christmas holiday and thirdly, Starlog magazine - my then bible of SF facts and knowledge since discovering it on the shelves of my local newsagent that summer - had been covering the film throughout its autumn issues.
Christmas 1980 had been my SF Christmas. I'd received a wad of Star Wars figures and playsets, the action-packed Japanese cartoon show Battle Of The Planets exploded from BBC-1 every morning of the holidays and I'd been plunged into the incredible world of Great Space Battles, a book that showcased sci-fi art by artists such as Angus McKie and Pete Elson tied to a narrative by Stewart Cowley and Charles Herridge that related mankind's future in deep space.
I never noticed that the book had authors back then. I bought into the fact that it was subtitled a Terran Trade Authority Handbook - I truly wanted it to have come from the future and not the mundanity of everyday reality.
Although when you're a child Christmas is never mundane. It has its own magic and when coupled to SF especially in the form of the gaudy bauble that was the big screen version of Flash Gordon, well, things can't get much better.
The wait in the cinema although exciting seemed to last forever. Once the bombastic yet yearning theme by Queen blasted out of the screen and panels of Alex Raymond artwork  flickered into life, I was transported out of the cinema and was dashing across the stars...
Sam Jones as Flash had the right mix of heroism and can-do attitude, Melody Andeson glowed as Dale Arden with a nice New Yorker feisty riff on Princess Leia, Topol simply was Dr Zarkov just as Max Von Sydow was the personification of Ming.
Brian Blessed boomed and roared as Vultan, clearly having a ball in his panto Hawkman togs. Timothy Dalton was noble and searing as Prince Barin of Aboria. Ornella Muti as Aura, Ming's daughter, was all pout and sizzled with a feline sensuality. Not that I noticed this as a kid, I just wanted to be Flash Gordon.
I was there with Flash every step of his perilous quest to save the Earth in just 14 hours, battling his way across the outre realms of Mongo, from Ming's ornate and Art Deco goes cosmic palace-city; the towering trees, shadowy glades and dangerous swamps of Aboria where former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan dies, to the grand sky-palace of the Hawkmen, where Flash and Barin fight on a dangerously tilting disc that protrudes spikes at random intervals, all under a constantly shifting skyscape of vivid colours - LSD-infused clouds and blancmange-like horizons.
From a script loaded with knowing and risque dialogue by former Batman scribe Lorenzo Semple Jr and directed by Mike Hodges, who had helmed brutal 70s crime classic Get Carter and ponderous SF film The Terminal Man, this new Flash Gordon was the perfect antidote to 1980's other sci-fi offering, The Empire Strikes Back.
Whereas Empire was dark and downbeat Flash Gordon was bravura and bold with an abundance of camp.
Flash Gordon flopped at the box office, however. Director Mike Hodges, looking back, said: "The film got terrific reviews in America and we had amazing previews but they really screwed up on how to sell it."
Due to a falling out between star Sam Jones and the film's always larger than life producer Dino De Laurentiis, the film was marketed around Max Von Sydow's Ming even though it was called Flash Gordon.
Mike Hodges, who had not been first choice as director for the film, that honour had gone to Nic Roeg, recounts: "Without their main star (Sam Jones) doing press rounds they decided to focus on Max as Ming.
"So he was all over the posters and everything - but the film is called Flash Gordon not Ming!"
Hodges enjoyed making the film and sincerely hoped there would be a sequel.
Now with the character being revived by Breck Eisner and a Blu-Ray version of the 1980 version released to coincide with the 30th anniversary, it's time to return to Mongo.
Just wish I still had the Hawkman ray-bazooka prop that my dad got for me from the studio. Unfortunately, I smashed it over the head of a kid during a rather vigourous game of Battlestar Wars Flash Rogers or somesuch...

COMING SOON - FEEL THE HYPE, BUT DO IT ANYWAY!!!

COMING SOON: Despatches is proud to present THE CHAMPION OF FOREVER - sprawling all-out space opera.
THE QUEST FOR THE OBSIDIAN PRINCESS will also continue in a meta-textural/meta-temporal stylee real soon!
And they'll be more stuff too. In the meantime, let's get all 2004 and sing The Corrs' Summer Sunshine!!! Yeah, The Corrs! Cutting edge, me? No way!!!