Gene Autry's Sci-Fi Adventure

According to Hollywood lore, screenwriter Wallace MacDonald conjured up the incredible plot for Gene Autry's starring debut while undergoing dental work. The results, truth be told, reflect the certain giddiness typical of nitrous oxide and never before or since was a serial this hilariously surreal. The idea of a radio show actually recreating entire stagecoach holdups for its listening audience, complete with real bullets fired from real guns, is loony enough and once you'd accepted a cliffhanger ending depending solely on whether Gene Autry will make it back to the ranch in time to perform the day's broadcast you will readily believe a vast, and vastly superior, underground empire, whose main concern is to prevent inferior surface people from discovering its existence. Said underground world comes complete with military officers sporting headgear resembling Catholic cardinals and amusingly top-hatted robots (courtesy of a deleted production number from M-G-M's 1933 musical Dancing Lady) who do not shy away from helpfully patting the serial's leading man on his not inconsiderable backside. In other words, the makers of Mascot's The Phantom Empire kept their tongues firmly in cheeks at all time. The mix of ordinary B-Western entertainment and science fiction melodrama is uneasy at best, however, and Queen Tika's (Dorothy Christy) droning on and on about the superiority of Murania to the surface world -- complete with newsreel footage of earthly disasters -- quickly becomes grating. But everyone involved, including youngsters Frankie Darro and champion rider Betsy King Ross, appears to be having the time of their lives and Gene Autry is not nearly as wooden and inept as legend tells us.