Lancoor A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Alistair Olson After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

udragon2010 A must see for any fan of retro-futurism or of Buster Crabbe. This serial epic is truly one of the best examples from an era when people went to the movies on Saturday afternoon,spending only a dime for a day of cartoons, movies and adventure serials based on popular comics strips and funny books.This serial, based on the 30s comic strip of the same name, pulls out all the stops to entertain and wow it's audience. Although the FX will seem dated by todays Hollywood standards, they were state of the art when the serial debuted in the 30s.This is a good family film to watch, and far more culturally significant than another Saturday morning with spongebob. Parents note that the film is spread out into chapters, or episodes, so an episode a day will keep your kids entertained. It's also fun for the parent who is fed up with the schlock kids are forced to watch now... any parents wishing Thundercats were still around? Ever wonder where George Lucas got his ideas for Star Wars? Well look no farther, this Buck Rogers serial was one of at least two inspirations for the galaxy, far, far away (the other being Flash Gordon Conqures the Universe, another comic based sci fi serial starring the immortal Buster Crabbe.) For fans of the original comic hero, it's a little disappointing to see some minor changes to the story. Like Bucks sidekick Buddy not being Col. Wilma Deerings little brother, or Wilma, Bucks main love interest, demoted to a lieutenant, darn Hollywood making women all helpless again, not to mention the fact that she is barely in the serial at all.Don't expect Buck to be a frozen fish like the 70s TV version, Buck Rogers was a WW1 pilot who was preserved in a caved in mine who awoke 500 years into the future. In this serial he's still a pilot, only now he is preserved in an Airship along with Buddy.The cliffhangers are still fun to this day and the space ships Buck rides around in are pretty cool. This serial stands the test of time, much like it's hero.

W K Buck Rogers as rendered in this serial is a far cry from the comic strip. Somehow, the producers & director managed to create what amounts to a pale shadow of the original strip. The sets used in the 1939 Buck Rogers series are painfully and obviously recycled from the prior Flash Gordon series. Not only that, but some of the film sequences seem to be recycled shamelessly (e.g. the sequences of the underground subways).For anyone who wonders about the genesis of the homo-erotic themes of Batman, though, look no further! Buck and Buddy do seem to be the prototypes of the now common comic book stereotypes. I am not certain whether this was intentional or not. Possibly the director merely had in mind an appeal to the pre-adolescent social constructs of a bygone age? Buddy still looks like he's the "boy wonder" of this series, though, while the Buck Rogers films date back to 1934 or so, several years before the Batman debut (1939). There must be a master's thesis waiting to be written here.

esteban1747 This was the first TV serial I saw in my childhood, and I still remembers it as a jewel. Buck Rogers (Linden or Larry `Buster' Crabbe) and Buddy (Jackie Moran) had an air crash in 1940, hopefully they survived and were discovered under heavy snow and ice layers 80 years later. Both were conducted to a hidden city, a headquarters of revolutionaries fighting against the injustice of Killer Kane (Anthony Wade), who ruled a very modern city. The adventures had plenty of fiction, with a lot of action, air-spaceship fighting, modern parachutes, visits to far Saturn planet and others. The only disappointment of the serial was that there was no a single kiss between Buck and his eternal female colleague Wilma (Constance Moore). The soundtrack (of Hajos &Waxman), although it was used in other serials of Flash Gordon and Tim Tyler's luck, its introductory part is really nice and difficult to find out in any shop at present. It is pity not to see DVD and/or VHS video available with subtitles in Spanish.

Shield-3 It strikes me that "Buck Rogers" is almost like a male fantasy come to life. Think about it: Buck gets to take a nice, long five-hundred-year nap! I'm ecstatic if I can get a fifteen-minute nap on a weekend! When he wakes up, Buck is the smartest, most dynamic guy around. Never mind that in real life you would treat someone five centuries behind the times like something that escaped from the zoo. Everyone needs Buck to go on exciting missions, fight the bad guys, test exotic equipment and fly rocketships (and crash them -- I think out of five or six flights Buck makes in the serial, he only lands successfully once).Now that that's out of the way..."Buck Rogers," the serial, is merely average: better than some serials, not as good as others. It's inevitable to compare it to the "Flash Gordon" serials, and in that contest, "Buck Rogers" comes in second. Buster Crabbe essentially plays the same character as Buck and Flash, but he had more style and dash (okay, more "flash") in "Flash Gordon." Constance Moore's Wilma tries to be a more proactive character than Jean Rogers' Dale, but Rogers just seems to inhabit her character more (and those belly-baring costumes from the first "Flash" serial weren't hard on the eyes, either). You can't even begin to compare Anthony Warde's Killer Kane to Charles Middleton's Ming: Warde could have been any gangster from any generic crime movie, but Ming was an archetype of evil right up there with Fu Manchu."Buck Rogers" does provide the requisite thrills and generates its share of excitement, although the rocketship crashes get repetitive after a while (as I said before, almost every time Buck goes near a rocket, he crashes it). It's a decent enough story on its own merits, I suppose, but it does pale in comparison to the "Flash Gordon" trilogy.