User Reviews

OK i just watched the pilot for FLASH GORDON. Oy. This was bad TV. Problems.... SPOILERS AHEAD not that I think anyone will care...

OK so now Flash is Stephen Gordon aka "Flash" because he runs marathons and wins medals for it. Medals he hangs on his fathers grave, medals which are still there 2 years later (it was the 3rd annual marathon he won in a row)... Dumb on 2 counts, obviously the leaving the medals and having them stay there for years is dumb but it shows that even 13 years after his father died, Flash has yet to move on. Don't get me wrong its good to honor the memory of lost parents and all, but I think our hero needs some counseling.

So then we get dimension rips or wormholes or whatever and out steps a heavily armored cyborg who is hunting the for something. He's able to understand our postal address system well enough to find the Gordon house using papa Gordon's drivers license and goes hunting for this Imex thing (which i kept thinking god why does it sound like I-Max). Hes got the ability to mind control Flash's mom but loses the fight to a reporter with a power cord and a big meat fork. At this point I figured out the missing thingamabob is in dad's old watch the one Flash has worn since his dad died, so much for secrecy.

Our reporter turns out to be smart enough to use power cords to create a dandy electrocution kit without causing massive damage to the house electrical system but doesn't understand the simple premise of a tracking device that beeps when pointed the right direction. GAH.

So now we track down goofy science guy living in the micro-Winnebago by looking up his college yearbook online..... WHAT? They just happened to have the address where he parks his van (down by the river?) and it's available online....

OK so now creepy science guy explains that ripping holes in the fabric of space-time is bad... But makes to effort to stop Flash and Dale from doing just that.

Boom! Hi there welcome to Mongo. A planet that should be a hotbed of tectonic activity with not just 2 moons but a whole other planet right next door in orbit. Mongo is a great place if you are the Emperor... You are the hero with the only source of clean water on the planet. Everyone else is just there to be serfs I guess.

Ming is no longer a deviant Chinese man who destroys whole worlds for fun, now hes a Tyrant who worries about public opinion and has trouble tracking down a missing watch on another planet despite the fact that he has the address of where it is located.

Cut to torture time with Flash, now they were going to map his brain to learn everything he knows.... But wait just then a woman bursts in and saves flash by shooting his torturer. Great she's obviously just a simple palace slave who wants to escape. A simple well dressed slave with excellent skin tone and makeup, forget that she has access to the torture room... oh and a gun... oh and she knows the layout and guard patrols.. oh and she knows all about the water purification area under the castle (which for something so massively important to planetary survival has no security or guards)... She also knows how the patrol craft operate and how to use a dimension ripper. FLASH YOU IDIOT!

So back home, yay! Lets rip some more holes... Bounty hunter time, another rip and look the bounty hunter is a hottie too.. no armor... one gun... ummm yeah, oh and she can drive stick, she can also find people with her vast psychic powers too i guess.. the same psychic powers that let the princess find her way from Dale's place to Flash's mother's home on pure instinct. I mean bad enough everyone speaks perfect English but they can also find one house out of a city without a map or a learner's permit.

Hey Flash the princess is here, shes got a gun and can recognize the I-mex immediately, even though its disguised and she doesn't know what a TV remote is or what the I-mex looks like. I mean she should have at least taken his cellphone too just in case IT was the I-mex.

You know if I had lost the sum of all knowledge in the universe I wouldn't wait 13 years to reclaim it. I also wouldn't send 1 guy with dubious combat skills. But thats just me.

Hey time to rip even MORE holes.. this was a bad thing right? Anyway the evil princess gets fooled into thinking the I-mex is destroyed, although your average street magician could have been more convincing, and we find out daddy is alive (DUH) and is hooked up to some computer... maybe the one that maps your brain and would have told the bad guys not only where to locate it but also which pizza places would have delivered to the house while you were there...

You know some shows have plot holes, some have major ones (Professor stop making radios out of coconuts and fix the 2 foot hole in the boat) and some just say "We didn't actually care enough to hire writers, we just strung together a series of scenes and called it a pilot, we figure sci-fi viewer are dumb enough to watch anything"

Sigh. I had hoped it would be good.

Spoiler-lite. 13 years before the series begins, Flash Gordon's scientist father vanishes in a lab fire. Now grown, marathon runner Flash encounters Dr. Gordon's jittery lab partner, Hans Zarkov, who clues him in to "rifts," which are portals to other universes -- on the other side of the rifts is planet Mongo, ravaged by drought and ruled by debonair but greedy and sadistic Ming, who plans to steal Earth's water. Soon Flash and ex- girlfriend/reporter Dale find themselves traveling back and forth to Mongo to search for Dr. Gordon, along with alien hunter Baylin, who sought refuge from Ming on Earth. Quickly Flash earns a word-of-mouth reputation in the foreign land for his bravery and willingness to fight for what's right, and he becomes a key player in a planet-wide movement to collapse Ming's corrupt empire.

The majority of the countless negative IMDb comments about this show were penned in August 2007, shortly after a butchered 1-part SciFi Channel edit of the longer 2-part pilot aired (seems the network wanted to sabotage it from the start). Thing is, this update is a series that plays better on DVD than it did over 6 months on the TV. Yes, there were some major problems in the beginning -- mainly cheap effects and an overtly comedic tone which permeated the first half of the series -- but they ironed out a lot of wrinkles as the season progressed and were well on their way to a great second year when the show was unceremoniously canceled. And aside from some major surface deviations with Ming (who's no longer an inhuman, politically incorrect Asian slur), they took the essences of the earlier incarnations and injected them into modern characters. (And yes, I'm a lifelong Flash fan, from Buster Crabbe to the porn spoof; from the Filmation cartoons to the campy 1980 DeLaurentis flick.)

The biggest problems were budgetary constraints which forced them to set the bulk of each of the early episodes on Earth with the gang having to fend off the alien-of-the-week. "Sliders" and "Stargate" comparisons were rampant and the backlash against the show was LOUD and immediate, which forced the network to give them some more money to work with. Unfortunately, the CGI team clearly wasn't given more funds but eventually they shifted the bulk of the episodes to Mongo (with plans to keep the characters stranded there for season 2) and phased out the characters of Joe, Dale's cop boyfriend (a character which was a bad decision from the get-go), and Nick, Flash's best friend. The alien-of-the-week had been tedious on a week-to-week basis, but it ultimately served as good framework, since it slowly established most of the characters who would go on to be pivotal in the overall season storyline.

Matter of fact, this was a character-driven show with a lot of development and character arcs. Eric Johnson exuded charisma as Flash, who went from being dumb jock to defender of the universe (or of Mongo, anyway). The prim and proper Dale got to kick ass a few times -- and even be slutty once when a evil witch stole her body. Ming, who showed some signs of real humanity when the show began, became more "merciless" as he found his empire drawing nearer to ruin. And Ming's daughter Aura, who began the show as a spoiled, bratty princess probably went through the biggest character arc of all. Also worth noting are the show's two original characters -- warrior Baylen and creepy, droid-ish scientist Rankol -- as both seemed to get more layered and intriguing with each passing episode.

It's a shame this show never recovered from the backlash against initial episodes (or from the childish, mob-like mentality of Sci-Fi viewers who trolled all of the message boards, making civilized discussion utterly impossible), but I commend the crew for getting it on track and telling a complete story by the finale - so few serialized shows get closure. If only fans and the network had stuck with it, the 2007 "Flash" could've gone on to become a show that was truly great. As is, it falls short of that, but it's a show with a lot of heart, humor, action and lovable characters. If you're willing to stick with it through the first 12 episodes, or if you like light, family-friendly "Xena" and "Hercules" type of fare, it's worth the $5 at Walmart for Mill Creek's complete series DVD release.

Flash Gordon 90 minute Pilot: OK so the story so far is that when Flash is 10 years old, his father gets sucked into a vortex never to be seen or heard from again, the cover story is that Flash's father died in a fire but there was no body found.

Now, fifteen years later, Flash is 25 and there's a hint that his father didn't die in a fire, that he was "lost" in one of his experiments gone haywire.

through a series of events, Flash opens a portal to Mongo and jumps head first with Dale Arden to try to rescue his father from Ming the Merciless... OK.

Dale fights with Ming's daughter, who's fighting with a bounty hunter chick, who's fighting with Flash... OK.

Ming's daughter wants "the Imex" a secret thing that Flash's father had. OK.

"the Imex" is the Timex watch that Flashes father gave to him at age 10. It unlocks the secrets of Mongo or the universe... we're not quite sure.

1) why would Flash's father give Flash the Timex watch that contains all the secrets of the universe when he was 10? Apparently he's a pretty responsible youngster and has never lost anything...ever, because 15 years later Flash is STILL wearing the Timex watch that his father gave him... uh.. OK.

2) why would Ming send a flying probe though the portal? this seemed rather lame and pointless. It was quickly decimated by a local Mexican immigrant wielding a double barrel shotgun from his truck cab. I'm also fairly certain there are laws against weapons and firearms being hidden in cars and trucks... right? I'm also fairly certain that if **I** were Ming the Merciless, my Probe Scanning Flying things wouldn't be so easily decimated by some idiot wielding a double barrel shotgun. (see robot, later on) 3) why would Ming send a single robot through the portal to get the Imex instead of launching a full or semi-full scale invasion of Earth? 4) why is the robot carrying Flash's father's drivers Licence, which is discovered in the remains of the charred exploded robot? Why would Ming the Merciless intentionally do this at all? If Flash's father planted it there (and from the show's final scene, he didn't) how would he have known that Flash would be the one to discover it? 5) why are there only four eye witnesses in a packed crowded bowling alley that report seeing an alien robot blow stuff up? The bowling alley had people at every lane... yet only four eye-witnesses saw the robot? Why did the robot blow up a bowling ball? 6) Flash believes his father died in a fire, but he didn't, he was sucked through a portal to Mongo yet when we finally see a flashback of this "fire" it only occupies about 5% of their lab and is quickly extinguished with a fire extinguisher, its clearly not a big enough fire to cause major damage yet this is the cover story that Flash's father burned to a crisp and no body was ever found? what? 7) while Dale and Flash argue outside his fathers old lab, which is now Zarkov's Lab, the door suddenly explodes outward... why? Aside from these gaps in logic, and more, it was interesting to watch and even more interesting to pick apart the show.

The portal and the device that opens the portal reminded me an Awful LOT of the FOX show Sliders

Just when I thought Sci-Fi couldn't get any worse. They proved me wrong. I didn't expect much when I heard there wasn't going to a rocket ship. Flash Gordon without a Rocketship is like Tarzan without a vine. It just doesn't make sense to make change that strays away that much from all previous Flash Gordon's. The acting is terrible and the scripts made me want to throw up. Ming has all the badness of an accountant. Charles Middleton Ming from 1930's is still listed in Hollywood 100 top villains of all time. This Ming should be Number 1 worst actor of all time. Zarkov is joke given his importance to Flash Gordon. They dig up this wimpy actor who in turn plays a wimpy Zarkov. I thought Cleoparta 2525 was bad. This makes that look like a Classic Sci-fi series. Sci-fi, do us a favor and pull the plug on this before you ruin a classic Sci-Fi hero Flash Gordon for generations to come.

i was excited for flash Gordon to becoming to the small screen so i tivoed it, well it was half and half, half good half bad the good being the actors are good the bad is that they made the story too modern so it not as believable as the cartoon series and the cheesy1980 film. (Spoiler Ahead) good special effects and MIG was not ugly and scary enough he's quite laughable to tell you the truth he looks GQ model in spandex and not as cool as the actor that played MIG in 1980 film in truth it looked like a carbon copy of battle star the 2005 version i could'nt stand watching that version either. i guess i'm an old schooler if it's not broken why i fix it? Hollywood loves to wreck old shows by turning them into something worse ugh. i think i'll stick with the old cartoon series and 1980 film.

Good god this show deviates hugely from the comic book and movie. In fact I liked this this TV show the first time round when it was called sliders.

SCI FI give the money to star gate Atlantis or for another Babylon 5 movie. But 22 episodes of a sliders rip off.

I don't even want to say its flash Gordon I mean he is just a small town athlete, nothing that great and he is trying to save his father.

OH the acting sucks as well.

They could of at least used the music from queen and tried to make it campy. But nope.

i thought the show was downright boring. i found the series premier lacked the outrages costumes and had way too many slow times that contained no substance. the set was way to earthy on mongo, in the movie you felt you were in a alien world, this ming seems much to soft and did not earn the term "the merciless". dale arderns relationship with her fiancé was almost non-existent and her desire to chase flash around showed a lack of moral character. also in the movie flash was a football hero, in the series he is a aging track athlete sponging off of his mom instead of being a man and earning his own living. i feel this show is much less a visual treat than the movie and the stars are plain than i was expecting.. i hoped for a lot more than this show delivered.