DVD Serialbum #1: Dick Tracy & Friends

Here In The Balcony, we continue to field a lot of questions and requests regarding vintage movie serials. Sony adding random chapters of such serials as Mysterious Island and The Great Adventures of Captain Kidd, King of Pirates to its boxed sets has inspired new interest in classic cliffhangers. One of the questions we've heard the most over the past few years has been, "When in th' heckfire is VCI gonna release the rest of the Dick Tracy serials?!?" (Yeah, most Balconeers talk like that, and usually spray saliva when they say it.) Well, calm yourselves, Tracy fans:all four Dick Tracy serials are now available on DVD, and as if that's not enough, VCI also offers the four Dick Tracy features from RKO, too. How much pointy-chinned action can you stand?

Chester Gould's Dick Tracy (the comic strip) made its newspaper debut on October 12, 1931. That first strip featured Dick picking up his best girl, Tess Trueheart, for a date while Mama Trueheart read about all those awful gangsters in the paper. Little did those gangsters know, of course, there their nemesis was now on the job, and Tracy soon became one of the most popular strips in the country. Republic Studios had watched Universal snap up the serial rights to many popular comic strips of the day, including Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, and Ace Drummond, so the studio made Dick Tracy its first-ever licensed character for chapterplay production, releasing Dick Tracy to theatres in the spring of 1937 (ironically, Tracy was beaten to the screen by his comic strip imitator, Secret Agent X-9, released by Universal a month earlier). Directors Ray Taylor and Alan James pitted Tracy, played by Ralph Byrd (who looked a great deal like the comic strip character, and who was associated with the character for the rest of his life) against a weird villain known alternately as the Spider and the Lame One. Dick Tracy (the serial) has since fallen into the public domain, and is available from a variety of sources, although nobody seems to have a great print of it. VCI Entertainment has it on DVD, and it's the best you'll find.

The initial 15-chapter Tracy serial was a huge success for Republic, and three more would follow, all starring Byrd. Dick Tracy Returns (released in the fall of 1938) is a big improvement over the first one, not least of all because the studio's new crack cliffhanger team, William Witney and John English, were in the directors' chairs. In a tale loosely inspired by the real-life Ma Barker and her killer brood, Tracy matches wits with Pa Stark, patriarch of a family of five rotten sons, murderers, extortionists, and all stuff like that. (There probably wasn't a decent report card in the bunch.) Tracy peels the layers of this rotten onion of a family back, one by one, until the Pa Stark stands alone in the final episode.

The VCI serial is a big improvement over the old VHS tape I had, with the 15 chapters spread over 2 discs. The only bonus features are an interesting introduction by scribe Max Allan Collins and a few trailers.

The third serial in the quartet, Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939), pits Tracy against Dr. Zarnoff (Irving Pichel), who's dead but won't lay down. The cast is enlivened by the presence of Phyllis Isley, who would soon change her name to Jennifer Jones and have a nice career. Finally, Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. (1941) features Tracy battling a nutty gangster who can turn invisible. Both of 'em rank with Republic's best.

Also available from VCI is Dick Tracy: RKO Classic Collection ($14.99). RKO obtained the rights to the character in 1945 and planned a long series, but for some reason (the low, low budgets didn't help) the series never caught on and was cancelled after only four films. Morgan Conway plays the lead in the first two, Dick Tracy (sometimes called Dick Tracy, Detective) and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, and then Byrd returned to the role for the next two, Dick Tracy's Dilemma and Dick Tracy vs. Gruesome. The VCI 2-disc set looks terrific, and features an RKO lobby card gallery, chapters of Republic Tracy serials, and Max Allan Collins again. I really liked Dick Tracy vs. Gruesome (which has the added benefit of the great Boris Karloff as Gruesome), and the other three swing between deadly dull (the first one in particular) and okay entertainment for a rainy afternoon. And hey, as long as we've gotten off the serial track over here, let's also mention that VCI offers a 2-disc set ($19.99) with all six of the Mr. Wong detective series from Monogram, and while we love Monogram pictures and we love Mr. Karloff (who plays the Wong man in five of the six films), we have to admit, these are for hardcore detective movie fans only.The best of the bunch may be The Phantom of Chinatown, last in the series, with Keye Luke substituting for Boris, possibly the only example of an Asian movie detective of the time actually being PLAYED by an Asian.

Shall we get back to discussing cliffhanger serials, d'yer think? I mean, this IS the serial section of In The Balcony, innit? Sure it is. So first, we'll mention that our pals at Restored Serials (restoredserials.com) offers an upgraded new-and-improved uberspiffy version of The Green Archer, one o' those wacky James W. Horne serials. The 2008 upgrade ($19.95) features additional frame-by-frame restoration to bring this 1940 chapterplay starring Victor Jory back to its original luster. And the 2-disc set is jammed with an impressive array of unusual extras, too, including a full script for the lost serial Terrible People in PDF.

Kino International recently released a boxed set called Houdini: The Movie Star ($39.95) that gathers together all the films and fragments that exist from the legendary magician/escape artist, including The Master Mystery (1920, 15 episodes) a wonderfully nutty serial with a robot with goo-goo-googly eyes. Great fun, and the serial looks terrific. I wish it had a better score, though.

Finally, we'll wrap up by mentioning a few other recent VCI releases. Jungle Queen ($19.99) starring Ruth Roman was one of the final Universal serials (1945). Nazis are in the jungle, and an American adventurer is trying to thwart the German High Command's plans to locate an ancient artifact with supernatural powers. Yes, really. The VCI print is okay but nothing particularly special; trailers are included. Tailspin Tommy (1934) and Tailspin Tommy and the Great Air Mystery (1935) are both available from VCI; the former stars Clark Williams as Tommy and Noah Beery, Jr. as his dimwitted mechanic, and it's a very good print of a very pedestrian serial. The sequel, which dumped Williams in favor Maurice Murphy but kept Beery and added the gorgeous Jean "Dale Arden" Rogers, is much better, one of the better serials of the 1930s. Unfortunately, VCI's offering is arguably their weakest DVD serial release; the previous Serial Squadron version is better (see below).

Serial Squadron Tailspin Tommy in the Great Air Mystery	VCI Tailspin Tommy in the Great Air Mystery

That'll wrap it up for now, but remember... ONE CHAPTER A WEEK PER SERIAL or you're NOT WATCHIN' THE DAMN THINGS RIGHT.