That was an excellent one.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

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.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

..say Star Wars. Comparing a 1950s serial with what many think is THE movie ? Think about it-how scientifically correct is Star Wars ? How many familiar images does it use ? The bad guys wearing black or gray uniforms, they have "Storm Troopers" do their dirty work? Where have we seen THAT before ? it In both cases the producers were trying to tell a story and sell tickets. And remember, 1952. The space programs were just getting started, the USSR orbited Sputnik in 1957, the US sent up Vanguard in 1958, 1961 when Gagarin orbited the Earth is still nine years away. I remember watching the Commando Cody series on TV in the 1950s, those special effects looked pretty believable, the scenes where the rocket takes off and you see the car and the building that you saw when the actors arrived-the Lydecker Brothers did that all long before CGI. Roy Barcroft, Republic's Villain in residence as Retik. I read that Barcroft took his work in the serials very seriously because he knew how much they meant to the kids, he insisted the other actors do so as well-it shows.

The movie theater serial "Radar Men from the Moon" is a 12 episode action series, each episode of which lasts about 10 minutes I think. The basic plot is that a dying civilization on the moon wishes to take over the Earth, so they begin their preparations by sending a small advance guard to cause mayhem on our planet before the full-scale invasion. The US government assigns Captain Cody and his rocket pack to stop the evil henchmen before they can proceed further.The dialog is kept to a minimum since this is an action series intended for the 7 to 13 year old crowd (those children are in their late 60s to early 70s now - scary thought) and it is pretty much one action scene after another. The cliffhangers at the end of each episode are miraculously resolved at the beginning of the next episode as the hero Commander Cody works a plan to outwit the moonmen and their evil earthling co-conspirators. Overall not a bad adventure series actually in my opinion, considering the limited budget and the limits on special effects at the time... they certainly didn't have computer graphics to insert back then.But why "Radarmen" in the title? I don't remember seeing any radars. There are some ray guns and moonmen and spaceships and rocketpacks, but no radars. Hmmm... go figure.

*Spoiler/plot- 1952, Earth is attacked by a series of strange unexplained atomic explosions. The U.S. Government gets the help of scientist, Commando Cody. He traces the explosion origins to Moon terrorists. Cody and his crew fly to the Moon in their rocket ship where they confront Radik, the Moon's evil ruler, who is bend on conquering Earth by using his atomic weapons.*Special Stars- George Wallace and Clayton Moore. ATTN: Bit actor- Leonard Nimoy *Theme- America defends the Earth.*Based on- 50's Atomic scares and Cold War issues.*Trivia/location/goofs- Colorized, The complete Serial of all 12 week chapters as Commando Cody and his crew defend the Earth from impeding invasion from the Moon. Commando Cody and his flying suit along with his scientific friends battle the Moon men and their gangster allies. Leonard Nimoy's earliest film roles. Location shot in California's Chatsworth famous, Iverson Film Ranch and at Republic Studios (CBS Radford), Studio City, CA.*Emotion- Great theater serial chapter film to enjoy. You can see were today's blockbuster science fiction directors got their youthful starts. These films are full of real cliffhangers and amazing escapes and they will keep you on the edge of your seat.

When I was a young child in the mid-Fifties, I saw episodes from a number of serials and they made a stronger impression on me than any of the feature films I saw at that time. Certain images have been imprinted on my memory ever since: the whining spaceships spiralling to earth, the Clay Men oozing from the cave walls and the pointy-headed Rock Men in Flash Gordon; the golden scorpion with its crystal lenses being aligned to melt rock in The Adventures of Captain Marvell; and the rocket ships, space suits, robots and ray guns in Captain Video. As a result, I look on these serials with an affection that cannot be justified by any objective critical analysis.Radar Men from the Moon was not one I saw as a child and it isn't regarded as one of the best because it recycled too much material from earlier Republic serials. However, it has survived in an almost pristine print so it captures the look and feel of the classic serial better than most of the others that are still available today. What you see now is what it looked like then.Like other serials, it was intended primarily for young children and was made on a tight budget to a very strict formula. All the main plot elements are introduced in the first episode and the story then just chases round in circles for another 11 weeks. Each episode is essentially the same. It starts with the resolution of the previous week's cliff-hanger (usually an outrageous cheat) has five minutes of plot to set up this week's action and invariably features a fist fight, a chase and a new cliff-hanger. As was often the case with these serials, there is one chapter towards the end that merely re-caps previous events and reuses old footage.I don't want to pretend it is any better than it really is and I understand the negative responses of younger IMDb reviewers, but I must challenge some of their criticisms.Within the constraints of its budget and its formula it is not badly acted, it is not badly written and it is not badly directed. On the contrary, it is a highly efficient piece of film-making and many contemporary producers, actors, screenwriters and directors could benefit from studying its economy of means.Because it is intended for children, the characters are inevitably one-dimensional (the goodies are good and the baddies are bad) so all that is required of the actors is that they avoid the furniture and say the lines needed to set up the action sequences its young audiences had come to see. The acting in Radar Men may be minimal, but it is not bad: it is appropriate.Actors today feel they have to imbue every line in every dumb movie with maximum emotion: they glower and snarl; pause and hesitate; smoulder with barely-contained rage; their voices quiver with suppressed passion or drip with treacly sincerity. Unfortunately, people are so used to this scenery-chewing that if it isn't there they think nothing is happening on the screen at all.Because this type of acting is so common, we can no longer see how stylised and unreal it is. Show it to an audience from the Forties and they would probably howl with derision. Sometimes, the best thing an actor can do is just say the lines and let the situation supply the emotion. Less really is more.Nor is the dialogue in Radar Men bad. On the contrary, it is beautifully crafted to convey the maximum information in the minimum words. Few writers today could set up plot developments as economically as this.It is the same with the action sequences. Cars roar along roads and skid around corners and generate plenty of excitement. All that is required is to choose the right camera angles, cut in a few studio close ups, and speed up the film slightly. The fist fights just have good stunt men charging around the set, throwing punches and smashing chairs over each others' heads, while the camera sits there watching it. Today, sequences that Republic could knock off in an hour would take days to shoot. Every scene would require a dozen camera set ups and weeks of preparation by a stunt coordinator.I would also commend the special effects. The miniatures in Radar Men are generally pretty good (although the tabletop Lunar city is far too small), the full scale props are well constructed and highly evocative and the flying effects were not surpassed for decades.Today, CGI and animatronics enable producers to do things that Republic couldn't even dream of, but effects are often over-elaborate and over-used. We have lost sight of the simple truth that special effects are there to support the story, not dictate it.I am not proposing that movies should revert to the low ambitions or the poverty row budgets of these old serials. However, I do believe that the big action movies of today are often over-long, over-blown and over-the-top. Actors and directors take their simplistic characters too seriously. For example, comic book superheroes, designed for the amusement of eight-year-old boys, are treated as if they were characters in Greek tragedy. Every special effect, every action sequence, every stunt and every explosion has to be bigger and better than anything that has gone before, but to rapidly diminishing effect.Seeing how much Republic could achieve with minimal resources, in a serial like Radar Men, would be a useful corrective for many of today's film-makers who seem to think it's impossible to make an exciting action picture for under a hundred million dollars.In fact, I suspect the reverse is true. If budgets were routinely cut in half we would probably get better movies.