July 8, 1967: Buck Rogers Stops Here

1967: After almost 40 years in various published forms, the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comic strip runs for the final time. Calvin Coolidge was president when Rogers first blasted off. By the time the comic strip sailed into the great beyond, Twilight Zone had already been off the air for three years, and […]

Classic sci-fi hero inspired countless kids to create the big and small screen productions of recent decades.

__1____967: __After almost 40 years in various published forms, the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comic strip runs for the final time.

Calvin Coolidge was president when Rogers first blasted off. By the time the comic strip sailed into the great beyond, Twilight Zone had already been off the air for three years, and the original Star Trek had a season under its Starfleet utility belt. In the real world, Soviet cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts had been performing spacesuited, Earth-orbit spacewalks for more than two years.

The seminal space hero Anthony "Buck" Rogers first appeared in a short story in the August 1928 edition of Amazing Stories Magazine. The narrative earned creator Philip Nowlan a contract for a science fiction comic strip with artist Richard Calkins.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century would be the first sci-fi strip in history, at its apogee appearing globally in more than 400 newspapers and in 18 languages. Rogers predates fellow stellar swashbuckler Flash Gordon by six years.

According to Nowlan's background for the character, Rogers was an Army Air Service support pilot serving in France during World War I. After the war, he worked as a surveyor in Pennsylvania. After being trapped in a collapsed mine shaft, Rogers encountered a radioactive gas that put him in suspended animation for 500 years.

This concept of radiation playing a part in a pop sci-fi adventure was a novel one, considering that the rush of post Hiroshima-fiction that blamed radioactivity for everything from mutant humans to giant grasshoppers was still decades away.

Five centuries after getting irradiated, Rogers emerges from his Rip Van Winkle routine to meet the heroic Wilma Deering as she battles interstellar outlaws. After he helps Deering take down the bad guys, Rogers learns about his new world full of ray guns, jet belts, synthetic food and glass cities.

Since the natural thing to do with a 500-year-old man is immediately induct him into Earth's new military, Rogers is soon a full-fledged captain, spy and head of the Rocket Rangers.

Kids tuning into franchise's eventual radio show could join Buck's Junior Rocket Rangers for the standard membership kit, badge, decoder ring, etc. In fact, Rogers was the first sci-fi hero to take off into mass marketing, and his image would adorn toys, games, lunch boxes and clothing.

As Flash Gordon had Ming the Merciless, Rogers' archenemies and archvillains were Killer Kane, the beautiful temptress Ardala and their Mongol hordes. Political correctness was also in suspended animation.

As new media emerged, Rogers tackled his own weekly radio serial, sponsored by Popsicles, Dreamsicles and Fudgsicles. The character also jumped from radio to the big screen with Buster Crabbe starring in a weekly cliffhanger serial. Crabbe had played Flash Gordon in a similar serial just years prior.

Most sci-fi fans born in the 1960s know Rogers from the NBC-TV series (and one-off feature film) starringGil Gerard and the puberty-inspiring Erin Gray. While the show suffered from too much cheesy 1980s sensibility, it stayed more or less true to the spirit and characters of the original story line.

The franchise also inspired a role-playing game from TSR (creators of Dungeons and Dragons). Most recently, team members behind Star Trek: Pha**se II* *announced plans to produce similar fan films of Buck Rogers.

With Hollywood consistently remake-crazy, it's only a matter of time before Rogers resurfaces yet again with a big screen revival — akin to the Flash Gordon flick that G.I. Joe's Stephen Sommers tried to launch a couple years ago.

Source: Various

Image courtesy Buck-Rogers.com

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