Flash Gordon -The Next Star Trek Debuts this Summer

Smallville's Eric Johnson, will star of the upcoming Flash Gordon SciFi Channel series - debuting August 10th-- breaks new ground for a character based on the legendary 1934 comic strip.

The series will be based on the comic strip adventures of Flash Gordon and his companions Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov. In the original 1934 series, the story begins with Earth bombarded by fiery meteors. Dr. Zarkov intuits the meteors are from outer space, and invents a rocketship to locate their place of origin. Half mad, he kidnaps Flash and Dale, and the three travel to the planet Mongo, where they discover that the meteors are actually alien weapons devised by Ming (above) the Merciless, evil ruler of the planet Mongo.

After years of adventures on Mongo, with only a short break during World War II to fight the Red Sword invaders back on Earth, the three heroes begin to travel to other planets, with Earth their home base. Flash joins the World Space Council as a pilot and explorer. The long story of the Skorpii War takes Flash to other solar systems, using starships that travel faster than the speed of light, with frequent return to Mongo, where Ming has been overthrown and Prince Barin, married to Ming's daughter Princess Aura, has established a peaceful rule.

What captivates Johnson about Flash is that "he's such a unique comic hero in that he has no superpowers. He's a guy caught in extraordinary circumstances. That's what I really responded to in this. He doesn't have a trump card he can fall back on. Through sheer willpower and determination, he has to try and succeed...He's far more Indiana Jones than he is Superman."

Fash transports to the planet of Mongo through a wormhole. Flash's father was a scientist who was developing the technology. He thought he was lost in a fire, but it turns out his father was sucked through this wormhole that he created. So now after 13 years, something came back through, and that something is not so nice, and it's looking for young Flash.

If you get a kick out of alien creatures, anroids, spaceships, and ray guns, as I do, you'll probably like the series.

My hunch is that we have another Star Trek series in the making here. Posted by Casey Kazan.

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Comments

[Summer Glau]

I think there wa a typo on paragraph 5, either that or... who's Fash?!