LogFAQs > #892229042

Undersea Kingdom
What a story thisll make for my paper! Girl Reporter discovers lost civilization ten-thousand feet below the surface of the ocean!'

Strange earthquakes strike the world, so an elderly professor builds a machine to identify the source: the undersea continent of Atlantis. He builds a super submarine and assembles a group of adventurers to go check it out, including Crash Corrigan the athletic naval officer, Diana, an intrepid reporter, Billy, his son, a sass-talking parrot, and some other guys of no real importance.

They find Atlantis in a power struggle between Sharad, the high priest who desires peace and friendship, and Unga Khan, a white guy in yellowface who wants to conquer the surface world. I like how Atlantis sank during ancient times, so it has chariots, stone walls, and a Roman theme (although it should really have a Greek one), but also somehow has advanced laser guns, TV screens that spy on you from afar, and tanks. More importantly, its 1936, so the Atlantean salute is just the Nazi salute.

After a lot of shenanigans, Unga Khan mind controls the professor into helping him conquer the surface world with his advanced technology, so its up to Crash Corrigan to stop them using courage, spunk, and American know-how. Unga Khan eventually kills Sharad and takes Atlantis to the surface, but thankfully Crash contacts the US Navy. Their judicious use of stock footage of ships sailing and cannons firing is enough to save the world, but Atlantis all of its people are sadly killed. In the end, Crash and Diana get married despite never having given any indication that they cared about each other and Dianas only focus being on her work.

It goes without saying that everything in this serial is completely stupid and a huge ripoff of Flash Gordon (right down to having a white guy in yellowface), but it does have some merit. They built a lot of sets, they hired a million extras and gave them costumes and horses, they have two miniature cities, there are a bunch of characters and subplots, it has lots of neat sci-fi equipment for the scale of evil Atlantean king wants to conquer the surface world, it actually almost works. All of the props and costumes look cheap, of course, but the show doesnt skimp on the battle scenes. There are multiple epic battle sequences with volleys of arrows, tanks, flamethrowers, guys with scimitars, its great.

The biggest problem with this show is that its full of padding. A ton of subplots go nowhere, sometimes as much as twenty minutes is spent with the heroes trying to escape the villains only to be captured anyway, that kind of thing. The worst is the two sailor guys and the sassy parrot. Theyre captured early on and put into slave labor, try to escape every episode and comically fail, and then just die. None of the main characters even learn they survived reaching Atlantis. If you cut the padding, this would be like an hour shorter.

Theres also a big problem in inconsistency. Sometimes the mind control device destroys the professors mind, sometimes it just hypnotizes him, sometimes Sharad is very kind and wise, sometimes he wants to execute a guy for refusing to kill an enemy gladiator after defeating him, and so on. We also have the obvious sexism in the female lead being dumb and useless (she does nothing to help her friends unless told to by a man, which at one point includes being left alone with the enemys laboratory equipment they need to destroy the surface world and only smashing it after a small boy tells her to) and Atlantis having zero women on-screen, just men.
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Started: July 6, 2005