Pretty Good

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I used to correspond with Carole Mathews who plays Babs Arnold and she once told a cute story at one of the film festivals she attended. She had two nieces, who were probably 6 or 7 years old, when the serial was released in 1945. They came home from the Saturday matinée crying about how "Aunt Carole" was going to die. When their mother calmed them down, they told her that they have seen the chapter where Carole is tied to a chair and put on the conveyor belt leading to a roaring furnace. She told them that Aunt Carole was an actress and that it was just a movie. If I'm not mistaken, I think she even had them talk to Carole on the phone to convince that she was not in any real danger. Cute story considering the fact that an actress's young nieces would really believe what they saw on the screen

When I was thirteen years old, I doted on this serial, waiting anxiously for Saturday afternoon to devour the next episode, and playing out the episodes with my friends. I am now 69,but I remember the excellent acting of Ralph Morgan and George Macready. The plot and adventures were fun. The monster is a robot. Macready is a king of crime who wants to use the robot for evil. The cliffhangers were mostly laughable cheats. In one episode you see a stunned Robert Lowery on a moving track go through the doors of a crematorium furnace. In the next, he jumps off before he gets to the doors. Aside from that, lots of fun.