I liked the TSR Role Playing Game version of it, but not the later 1930s recreation of it that was dumbed down.
Okay, what are you talking about? What "later 1930s recreation?" You mean something that came out after the late-'80s/early-'90s TSR incarnation but set in a retro, '30s-style world? Are you talking about the next role-playing game that TSR did based on Buck Rogers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers#High-Adventure_Cliffhangers
In 1995, TSR created a new and unrelated Buck Rogers role-playing game called High-Adventure Cliffhangers. This was a return to the themes of the original Buck Rogers comic strips. This game included biplanes and interracial warfare, as opposed to the space combat of the earlier game. There were only a few expansion modules created for High-Adventure Cliffhangers. Shortly afterward, the game was discontinued, and the production of Buck Rogers RPGs and games came to an end. This game was neither widely advertised nor very popular. There were only two published products: the box set, and "War Against the Han".
(And I find it rather shocking that any company could've thought it was a good idea in 1995 to publish a game built around the themes of '30s Yellow-Peril racial warfare.)
The only other thing that even remotely resembles your description was James Cawley's planned webseries which would've portrayed Buck as a WWI-era figure, but that was never actually produced, except for
one teaser scene that was released online in 2010. But there's nothing about that scene that resembles '30s adventure serials, and it has no SF elements at all; the whole thing is a scene of Gil Gerard and Erin Gray trying to talk their son "Lucas" (Buck's real name?) out of enlisting in the war in Europe.
How would ole Buck get is astronaut wings if all he was interested in was chasing after girls? Most Nerds don't get to be astronauts, so when we start out with Buck, we need to remember he's an astronaut first,m and somebody who spends all night in his basement with a computer is not astronaut material.
As I keep saying, it's a mistake to assume that the 1979 show's version of the characters is the definitive one. The character debuted in 19
29, so obviously he wasn't originally an astronaut. In the original book and comic, he was a former WWI pilot who was working as a mine surveyor when he was exposed to a radioactive gas that put him in suspended animation. In the 1939 serial, he was a dirigible pilot. In the long-lost live TV series from 1950, he was described simply as "an ordinary American" who got to the 25th century through unspecified means.