REEL RETRO CINEMA: New looks at old flicks — and their comics connections… — UPDATED 12/7/25: Flash Gordon came out 45 years ago this month! Perfect time to reprint this piece from Dec. 5, 2023! Also, check out Rob’s new REEL RETRO CINEMA banner, above. Nice, huh? Dig it. — Dan — By ROB KELLY Sometime around December 5, 1980, my Dad took my older sister and me to see Flash Gordon. Having read numerous Flash Gordon comics and watched hours of the movie serials, I was the perfect audience. Also in the audience that night? Two drunken young women, who seemed to be enjoying the movie for entirely different reasons. But more on them later. After lying somewhat fallow in the pop culture landscape for a few decades, big time movie producer Dino De Laurentiis was eager to get Flash Gordon onto the silver screen. He did the trick for Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella (both 1968), and ultimately the somewhat campy approach taken with those films would be used for Flash Gordon, just a lot more family friendly. It’s a famous story by now—one of the great What If?s in all of pop culture—that in the early 1970s, George Lucas tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon. His failure to do so led (indirectly) to the creation of Star Wars, and popular entertainment would never be the same. De Laurentiis had first wanted Federico Fellini(!) to direct, then moved onto Nicolas Roeg(!!), finally settling on journeyman director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who, besides helping develop the Batman TV series, wrote the 1976 King Kong remake for De Laurentiis). With a budget of $27 million (around $100 million today), De Laurentiis was, as usual, going big. He’s a miracle! After a magnificently exciting opening credits scene (scored to Queens’ iconic, propulsive theme music, and peppered with art from the comic strip), we jump right to the action—by the 20-minute mark we’re already on Mongo. Every sci-fi/fantasy film post-Star Wars bears its influence, visually and tonally. But De Laurentiis’ personality was still so big and forceful that Flash Gordon hits a sweet spot between what a big budget, modern sci-fi movie was supposed to feel like in 1980, and the more idiosyncratic, phantasmagorical, Pop Art feel of the 1960s. Almost everything in Flash Gordon is a...