First, sorry you had to suffer through that film before reading the novel. Second, if you want recommendations for additional Heinlein reading, I would suggest The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, Citizen of the Galaxy, and the short story collection The Past Through Tomorrow. Also of interest is Variable Star which Spider Robinson finished from an outline found in Heinlein's papers some years after his death.
I'm 57 and in the same boat as you per se. I remember hearing about these shows as I got into Star Trek back in the day; but they weren't being reshown on TV or even talked about when I was growing up in the '60s.
I'm 58 myself and do not recall seeing Tom Corbett (or his contemporaries like Captain Video) being aired back then. I do seem to recall a local station in the Seattle area aired some of the older Buster Crabbe Buck Rogers serials, though.
When I read the TC books in the '70s I thought it was just a book series. I had no idea it had been a television show till much later. The illustrations don't look much like the show, especially the costumes.
I saw the Buster Crabbe serials on a UHF station in the late 1960ies (along with Speed Racer, Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion too). I wish they would have shown the Tom Corbett and other serials too, but yeah they didn't where I was.
I don't think anybody did. Though they were recorded on kinescope, those live shows had pretty low production values and I think weren't considered rerun material like filmed programs. The 16mm kines did not look great and were not well taken care of, often lost, thrown away or recycled for the silver in the film.
We had a local show called "Creature Features" and part of the format included old movie serials. So I saw some Flash Gordon and Zombies of the Stratosphere featuring a young Leonard Nimoy as a Martian.
They have some old kines(kinos?) of Tom Corbett on Youtube but I gotta say they're more entertaining from a purely historical perspective than from their actual entertainiment value. Interesting to see Wolf in the Fold's John Fiedler as a cadet.
Somehow I can't see him as ever being that young. Must be the (lack of) hair. I guess I'll have to work on that prejudice.
Another 57-year-old here. I bought my first Tom Corbett novel around 1973-74 at a favourite used bookstore. It was a few years before I realized Tom Corbett had been a multimedia phenomenon. TV and radio shows, comics, newspaper comic strips, toys, and of course the books. And. later, new comics that had pretty horrible art and completely changed the series concept, background, and characters' personalities. Maybe it's because I discovered the books first, but they're still by far my favourite version of the show, and arguably the most mature. Well, in the way that a twelve-year-old is more mature than a nine-year-old. But I still enjoyed them when I reread them about 20 years ago, having found the one book I'd been missing. The TV show and other formats are a bit harder to get through. The thing about bringing Corbett back is that the world has changed so much since the 1950s, and our knowledge of the solar system has changed so much, that a new series would either have to be so different as to make people wonder why someone bothered to do it as a revival rather than a new series, or else a pure nostalgia play, setting it in that old-fashioned future of boys with crewcuts exploring the jungle planet of Venus and all that. And if there's anything Hollywood has demonstrated over the years, if they took the latter route, they'd play it for laughs and be confused if they found out anyone had hoped for a respectful take on it. Now, if we ever get a Starfleet Academy series, and it happened to have a cadet training ship called the Polaris, and maybe a character named Corbett or Manning, well, I wouldn't object.
This, or something like it, may be the only workable way to bring back the character. Much like the Saturday morning series Space Academy, the TV movie of the same name that was unrelated, or the series Space Cases, setting the concept in a more distant future would lend it a verisimilitude that a series or series of films set closer to our time couldn't match.
This reminds me: In the great science fiction boom of the late '70s, Boy's Life, the US Boy Scouting magazine, ran a serialized comic of Robert Heinlein's 1951 Between Planets. The original had parts on Venus and Mars, each with its own alien life. But that wouldn't work in the '70s so they set it in a fictional solar system and changed the names: the hero was Dhon instead of Don, New Chicago was Nu Shikako etc. I thought this was extremely odd at the time. It seems like "boys'" stories, where young men find themselves having grown-up adventures, cut off from the adult world in some way, were hugely popular in the early 20th century but died off pretty sharply later on. Maybe the rise of youth culture with its own music and TV and social world was just as appealing, or more so, to young people? As opposed to the idea that you just couldn't wait to get into the much more interesting adult world.
I remember about 10 years ago when they were trying to launch a new version of Flash Gordon. I had only seen some of the 1950’s TV show because I had bought a few of those $1 envelope DVD’s that theY used to get in at department stores (that claimed to be “Digitally Remastered/Sound Enhanced”). Anyway, was I disappointed when I got the DVD set and it didn’t even resemble the 50’s version. Instead it was trying to be an update of the 1930’s serials. Suffice it to say, I only made it about 1/4 of the way through before I finally saw why the series was cancelled!
Why are you surprised that it tried to be faithful to the iconic serial which was pretty faithful to the comic strip it was based on instead of a version that wasn’t , is largely forgotten and from most accounts bad?
Before I saw the 50’s TV series on DVD, I had only heard of “Flash Gordon” in passing or as a footnote in a few books. I wasn’t even aware of the serials or the comic strip. I had simply picked up the DVD’s because they sounded interesting and at $1 were cheap entertainment.
I suspected that might be the case. How many of the 50's show have you managed to see? I'd still like to see more of that series.
Not even the 1980 movie? Is the series you were talking about giving a shot the one that aired on Syfy a while back? That one was definitely an odd duck with a shoestring budget and no spaceships but by the end it did manage to incorporate a lot of the classic Flash elements and story of uniting the peoples of Mongo to rise up against Ming the Merciless. The 1954 series which I'm not too familiar with is interesting. It looks like it takes a different tack and is more Flash and crew flying their ship into different adventures kind of like Trek did later. I'm checking it out on Youtube and it seems better than expected, it's certainly less studio and budget bound that the usual "Space Patrol" type shows of the era and the plots sound a bit more ambitious.
In terms of the 50’s show, I think I’ve been able to see about 30 of the 39 produced episodes. A few years ago I found a box set by Mill Creek of “Classic Sci-Fi” which had a lot of old sci-fi shows that had fallen into the public domain. For Flash Gordon they had 14 episodes including all 3 episodes of the Witch of Neptune trilogy, which most other DVD’s would only have part 2 (of course the video quality varies from what looks like dirty 35mm scans down to 3 or 4th generation VHS copies that have very little contrast. https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Sci-Fi-TV-Episodes-Superman/dp/B001LQQJ66 Nope. . I have no idea what you are talking about, unless it’s one of the 30’s serials. It would be nice if someone found some good film copies and scanned them in HD or did just a good quality 480p scaN. As I said up above, what’s out there now in terms of quality is quite the mix (especially when compared to how well Rocky Jones Space Ranger (1954) looks, where it looks like all the episodes out there come from Betacam SP or another broadcast quality video tape format).
I thought you were saying that you were disappointed that the series from 10 years ago didn't resemble the 1954 series. I'm assuming you are familiar with Ming the Merciless in regards to Flash Gordon and I was saying that the series from 10 years ago did indeed end up hitting the storybeats of the 30's serials and comics with Ming if in a sideways fashion.