Book Reviews

Try explaining to someone under 30 what a movie serial is and you’re likely to produce some seriously confused stares. The last gasp of these multi-part “programmers” was on television in the late 1970s, when they would still occasionally show up on Saturday afternoon or late night timeslots, particularly after Star Wars briefly revived interest in one of its many inspirations, the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.

The 1980 Flash Gordon movie, Disney’s The Rocketeer and the Indiana Jones films stand as multi-million dollar grave markers for the serials of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s—multi-part, low-budget action adventures with titles like Mysterious Dr. Satan and Spy Smasher that would run in front of feature films or at Saturday matinees. Republic Pictures was one of the signature producers of these series, and the studio would likely never have gotten any of them off the ground without the participation of Howard and Theodore Lydecker, two hard-working and ingenious special effects men who produced countless explosions, train wrecks, dam collapses, building fires and flying superheroes between around 1935 until their retirement in the ‘60s. Although they’re probably best known among special effects aficionados for the “Lydecker rig”—their method of flying scale model aircraft, missiles and people along horizontal wires, often in outdoor settings to create a more realistic look—the Lydeckers were experts in just about every type of effect, from their mastery of “miniature” action (a term they rejected, preferring to call their reduced-size reproductions of vehicles and settings “scale models”) to photographic effects (they famously created the look of a rock wall being melted into magma by using heat to melt and distort a frame of film with the rock wall on it).

The Lydeckers are arguably as important to the history of special effects as A. Arnold Gillespie (The Wizard of Oz, Forbidden Planet), Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, or any other of the more celebrated men in the field, but apart from a few pieces in American Cinematographer and Filmfax magazine, the brothers have gotten little love, often languishing in the shadows of men like L.B. Abbott, who hired them on a number of Twentieth Century Fox projects late in their careers. Jan Alan Henderson attempts to remedy the situation with this (seemingly self-published) book available from Bud’s Art Books, but as even he admits in his introduction, he’s only partially successful.

The Legendary Lydecker Brothers provides an often breezy, chatty overview of the effects brothers’ lengthy careers, with a great deal of focus on their years working for Republic Pictures, cranking out adventure serials. The book is broken up into 23 short chapters, each tackling two or three serials—and the problem here is that it often reads more like a history of the Republic serials than a focused look at the work and careers of the Lydeckers. Henderson starts with a disadvantage in that both Lydecker brothers are long since deceased, so the recollections of co-workers, serial actors, friends and relatives form the backbone of most of the book’s detailed looks at the brothers’ work and techniques. But it’s clear that there are large holes in that pool of knowledge, and chapters often flash by with just a cursory list of effects shots the brothers produced for the serials under discussion, along with facts, recollections and gossip about the serials themselves.

With the focus resting squarely on the serials, the Lydecker’s equally vivid work on big budget movies (with the exception of John Wayne’s Flying Tigers) often gets short shrift. “Monster Kid” icon and collector Bob Burns provides what little insight there is on the Lydecker’s colorful work on Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, describing his visit to the Fox lot where he witnessed Howard Lydecker filming the Jupiter II taking off from an exploding planet for Lost in Space’s second season. The Lydeckers by all accounts were simply astute craftsmen with little awareness that their work would hold interest for later generations—hence they didn’t seem to do a lot of interviews or preserve souvenirs of their work while they were alive and seemed to spend their careers looking forward to a retirement of hunting and fishing. That said, there are some nice behind-the-scenes photos (all but one in black and white since the soft cover book includes no interior color photos) and remaining artifacts that illustrate the scale the brothers used to work on—like a reproduction of the Krakatau volcano used to create a volcanic eruption in 1953’s Fair Wind to Java, which still remains as a kind of artificial island—and tourist attraction—in Mono Lake in California. There are also some nice shots of one of the brothers’ signature creations, the “Commando Cody” rocketman character that became the inspiration for The Rocketeer. The Lydeckers rigged methods to show stuntmen taking off realistically wearing a rocket pack, but as with their earlier Captain Marvel serial, they figured out that in order to show a “full size” rocketman flying across the countryside they actually needed to suspend a larger-than-life, seven-foot rocketman dummy on their wire rig and fly the character—illegally—by suspending one end of the wire rig to an electric transformer tower and having the character soar downward from that great height.

The tail end of the book shows Theodore Lydecker’s fetching daughter Lindsey—now carrying on the family tradition with her own artwork and CG graphics—hanging with Bob Burns amidst some of the Lydecker’s remaining props. It’s a touching wrap-up, but let’s hope this isn’t the last word on these effects masters.