Faded Thrills

There are times when I sit through something, constantly asking myself ''why are you subjecting yourself to this?', yet can't seem to switch away from it.  Today, for instance, when I found a streaming channel I recently discovered screening all twelve episodes of the obscure 1931 movie serial King of the Wild back-to-back.  I actually did switch away to other channels several times, but found myself drawn back to this crackly sound tracked, monochrome oddity.  The trouble with such showings of serials in one sitting is that not only do they seem interminable, but that they highlight their repetitiveness and overly convoluted story lines.  King of the Wild, for instance, was virtually impossible to follow so complex did it make its plots and sub-polts, yet their execution involved the same scenarios being repeated over and over.  In their one episode a week format, of course, they don't feel this way - the odds are that the audience will barely remember what happened in the previous episode, let alone three or four episodes ago.  Moreover, a straightforward plot would never be able to sustain four plus hours of total screen time.  As far as I could make out, King of the Wild started with a plot about a white guy having to impersonate a dead Maharaja, (at the Maharaja's request, in order to stop some evil prince from seizing the realm before his brother, the rightful heir, turned up), being framed for the Maharaja's murder, jailed, then escaping to Africa (disguised as an Arab) in search of a letter that would clear his name.  Which sounds like a lot of plot, but that's just the first couple of episodes, as our hero then gets involved in a plot involving a girl searching for her lost brother who knows something about some shenanigans involving diamonds, while opposed by a villainous big game hunter who has some kind of ape man as a henchman and a nefarious Arab played by Boris Karloff.  Oh, and there's this guy in drag wandering around who is also some kind of villain.

All of which might sound exciting, but unfortunately isn't.  It drags along at a deathly pace, with far too many talky scenes of exposition padding out the episodes, poor production values and California making a poor stand in for Africa.  The whole thing quickly becomes tediously repetitive, with the cliffhangers seemingly involving the brother being found, then lost and captured by a villain again, or his sister being repeatedly kidnapped, imprisoned and otherwise imperiled.  So why did I keep going back to it?  Well, I can't deny that I have a weakness for those old serials.  They could often be surprisingly good, especially those produced by Republic in the late thirties a forties, which featured excellent special effects, courtesy of some sophisticated miniatures work by the Lydecker brothers, and some of the best choreographed fight and action sequences of their era.  King of the Wild, however, was a somewhat earlier production, produced by Mascot, (who were later subsumed into Republic), a poverty row studio that, nonetheless, turned out some enjoyable serials.  While King of the Wild certainly had enough bizarre elements - the ape man, Boris Karloff and all those characters in disguise - they never really gel into anything compelling that might lift the serial out of the ordinary.  Maybe if I had watched it an episode at a time on a weekly or even daily basis, it might have felt pacier and less repetitive.  (I actually did this once, watching all twelve episodes of Republic's The Masked Marvel (1943) this way and found it hugely entertaining at only twenty minutes, or so, a day).  Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that, despite it exerting a certain dreadful fascination over me, watching King of the Wild (or any other serial) in a single sitting like this isn't an experience I'm likely to repeat in a hurry.  If nothing else, it made me appreciate those feature versions of serials they released to TV in the sixties, cut down to a hundred, or sometimes even seventy to seventy five minutes running time, excising most of the padding and repetition.