A serial film, film serial (or just serial), movie serial, or chapter play, is a motion picture form popular during the first half of the 20th century, consisting of a series of short subjects exhibited in consecutive order at one theater, generally advancing weekly, until the series is completed. Usually, each serial involves a single set of characters, protagonistic and antagonistic, involved in a single story. The film is edited into chapters, after the fashion of serial fiction, and the episodes should not be shown out of order, as individual chapters, or as part of a random collection of short subjects.
Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and typically ended with a cliffhanger, in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape. Viewers had to return each week to see the cliffhangers resolved and to follow the continuing story. Movie serials were especially popular with children, and for many youths in the first half of the 20th century a typical Saturday matinée at the movies included at least one chapter of a serial, along with animated cartoons, newsreels, and two feature films.
There were films covering many genres, including crime fiction, espionage, comic book or comic strip characters, science fiction, and jungle adventures. Many serials were Westerns, since those were the least expensive to film. Although most serials were filmed economically, some were made at significant expense. The Flash Gordon serial and its sequels, for instance, were major productions in their times. Serials were action-packed stories that usually involved a hero (or heroes) battling an evil villain and rescuing a damsel in distress. The villain would continually place the hero into inescapable death traps, or the heroine would be placed into a lethal peril and the hero would come to her rescue. The hero and heroine would face one trap after another, battling countless thugs and henchmen, before finally defeating the villain.
History List of film serials by year
Birth of the form Movie serials began in Europe. In France Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset launched his series of Nick Carter films in 1908, and the idea of the episodic crime adventure was developed particularly by Louis Feuillade in Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915), and Judex (1916); in Germany, Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert, was a six-part horror serial about an artificial creature.
There were also the 1910 Deutsche Vitaskop five-episode Arsene Lupin Contra Sherlock Holmes, based upon the Maurice LeBlanc novel, and a possible but unconfirmed Raffles serial in 1911.
American serials Serials in the United States first came about in 1912, as extensions of magazine and newspaper stories. Publishers realized they could build interest (and boost circulation) by sponsoring live-action adventures of the printed characters, serialized like the printed counterparts. The first screen adaptation was What Happened to Mary. produced by the Edison studio and coinciding with the adventure stories published in The Ladies' World. It may be significant that the early American serials were aimed at the feminine audience who wanted thrills, not the masculine audience who preferred more extreme, blood-and-thunder action. By the 1930s and the advent of sound films, both markets ultimately devolved to the juvenile audience, although serials continued to command a certain adult following.
The most famous American serial of the silent era is The Perils of Pauline, made by Pathé Frères and starring Pearl White, who became "the serial queen" on the strength of this one production. The outstanding success of Pauline inspired a flurry of imitations. Ruth Roland, Marin Sais, Grace Cunard, and Ann Little were also early leading serial queens. White herself starred in a follow-up, The Exploits of Elaine. The first major company to challenge Pathé was Universal, which began serial production in 1914 under producer Henry MacRae.
Other major studios of the silent era, such as Vitagraph and Essanay Studios, produced serials, as did Warner Bros. and Fox. Several independent companies (for example, Mascot Pictures) made Western serials. Four silent Tarzan serials were also made.
The Hazards of Helen, produced by Kalem Studios, was a railroad-themed adventure starring Helen Holmes for the first 48 episodes, then Helen Gibson for the remainder. Unlike serials, which left the leading player in jeopardy with the action unresolved until the next chapter, The Hazards of Helen was actually a series with self-contained stories -- much like television episodes of today -- and ran for 119 episodes, an amazing run for a silent-film series.
Pearl White remained the pre-eminent serial queen until she began making feature films in 1919. The serial king of the silent era was Walter Miller, a veteran of D. W. Griffith's stock company who became a serial star, and would continue playing starring or featured roles in serials until his death in 1940.
Sound era
Expensive feature films were offered by exhibitors for a percentage of the theaters' admissions. Serials, however, were rented by exhibitors for a much lower, flat fee. The arrival of sound technology made it costlier to produce serials, so that they were no longer as profitable on a flat rental basis. Further, the stock market crash of 1929 and the added expense of sound equipment made it impossible for many of the smaller companies that produced serials to upgrade to sound, and they went out of business. Mascot Pictures, which specialized in serials, made the transition from silent to sound and produced the first "talking" serial (actually a silent serial with occasional talking sequences), King of the Kongo (1929). Universal Pictures also kept its serial unit alive through the transition.
In the early 1930s a handful of independent companies tried their hand at making serials. The Weiss Brothers began making serials in 1934. Independent producer Sam Katzman also made a couple, with leading players Bela Lugosi, Herman Brix, and Ralph Byrd. In 1937 Columbia Pictures, inspired by the previous year's serial blockbuster success at Universal, Flash Gordon, decided to enter the serial field and contracted with the Weiss Brothers (as Adventure Serials Inc.) to make four chapter plays. They were successful enough that Columbia canceled the agreement after three productionsHollywood Reporter, "Columbia Drops Weiss Options for Serial Pix", Apr. 6, 1938. and produced the fourth itself, using its own staff and facilities. Columbia thus forced the Weiss Brothers out of the serial field.
Mascot Pictures was absorbed by Republic Pictures, so that by 1937, serial production was now in the hands of three companies – Universal, Columbia, and Republic. Each company had its own following: Republic was known for its well staged action scenes and spectacular cliffhanger endings; Universal broadened its serials' appeal by casting stars of feature films; Columbia specialized in screen adaptations of radio, comic-book, and detective-fiction adventures.
These studios turned out four serials per year (one each season) of 12 to 15 episodes each, a pace they all kept up until the end of World War II. Universal's serials usually ran 13 chapters each, so theaters could program them regularly all year in 13-week cycles. Republic's serials ran for 12, 13, 14, or 15 chapters; Columbia's ran a standard 15 episodes (with the single exception of Mandrake the Magician, which ran 12 episodes).
By the mid-1950s, however, episodic television series and the sale of older serials to TV syndicators, together with the gradual drop in audience attendance at weekend matinées in general, made serial production a losing proposition.
Production
Peak form
The classic sound serial, particularly in its Republic format, has a first episode of three reels (approximately 30 minutes in length) and begins with reports of a masked, secret, or unsuspected villain menacing an unspecific part of the United States. This episode traditionally has the most detailed credits at the beginning, often with pictures of the actors with their names and that of the character they play. Often there follows a montage of scenes lifted from the cliffhangers of previous serials to depict the ways in which the master criminal was a serial killer with a motive. In the first episode, various suspects or "candidates" who may, in secret, be this villain are presented, and the viewer often hears the voice but does not see the face of this mastermind commanding his lieutenant (or "lead villain"), whom the viewer sees in just about every episode.
In the succeeding weeks (usually 11 to 14), an episode of two reels (approximately 20 minutes) was presented, in which the villain and his henchmen commit crimes in various places, fight the hero, and trap someone to make the ending a cliffhanger. Many of the episodes have clues, dialogue, and events leading the viewer to think that any of the candidates were the mastermind. As serials were made by writing the whole script first and then slicing it into portions filmed at various sites, often the same location would be used several times in the serial, often given different signage, or none at all, just being referred to differently. There would often be a female love interest of the male hero, or a female hero herself, but as the audience was mainly youngsters, there was no romance.
The beginning of each chapter would bring the story up to date by repeating the last few minutes of the previous chapter, and then revealing how the main character escaped. Often the reprised scene would add an element not seen in the previous episode, but unless it contradicted something shown previously, audiences accepted the explanation. On rare occasions the filmmakers would depend on the audience not remembering details of the previous week's chapter, using alternate outcomes that did not exactly match the previous episode's cliffhanger.
The last episode was sometimes a bit longer than most, for its tasks were to unmask the head villain (who usually was someone completely unsuspected), wrap up the loose ends, and end with the victorious principals relieved of their perils.
In 1936, Republic standardized the "economy episode" (or "recap chapter") in which the characters summarize or reminisce about their adventures, so as to introduce showing those scenes again (in the manner of a clip show in modern television). Serials had been including older scenes for years, as flashbacks during later parts of the narrative, but the wholesale insertion of entire sequences was introduced in the 1936 outdoor serial Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island. It was scheduled as a standard 12-chapter adventure, but when bad weather on location delayed the filming, writer Barry Shipman was forced to come up with two extra chapters to justify the added expense. Director William Witney remembered that most of the action in these chapters was duplicated from previous episodes: "The few additional scenes needed for the new episodes were shot on the last day of regular filming, so they did not cost anything."Witney, William. "In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase", McFarland, 1996, p. 53.
This was an emergency measure at the time, but Republic recognized that it did save money, so the recap chapter became standard practice in almost all of its ensuing serials. Recap chapters had lower budgets, so rather than staging an elaborate cliffhanger (a runaway vehicle, a stampede, a flooding chamber, etc.), a cheaper, simpler cliffhanger would be employed (an explosion, someone knocked unconscious, etc.). Director Witney always resented these "cheater" episodes: "In later serials there was usually one retrospect episode. They were a little improved, but not much. They still stunk."Witney, p. 53.
Production practices