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Flash Gordon episode from the 1950's


I saw an episode where Flash, Dale, and Dr. Zarkov have to travel back in time(this Flash Gordon TV show took some liberties from Alex Raymond's comic strip and took place many years in the future) to the 1950's in order to find a bomb that could destroy the entire Earth.. They land in West Germany(where a bunch of episodes where produced); I am glad the producers and writers where open about the Germanic locations and they didn't try to pass off West Germany as...say...Wisconsin or something like that. For some reason, the crew made the actors playing cops speak English instead of German. The actors playing the cops speak broken English with thick Germanic accents(is English a language with Germanic roots?). Quite interesting. I wonder if this episode was inspiration for 'Star Trek IV'(1986); where the protagonists have to go back in time to save Earth in the present(it might be a co-incidence).

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Yes, it is. That is, English is of West Germanic origin...

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The villain in "Deadline at Noon" (one of the better of the Flash TV shows I've seen so far) would've been the ultimate suicide bomber. He would've perished along with the Earth from the bomb he planted, and that was all right in his warped mind. He was so looking forward to the big explosion that would wipe out the enemies of his people.

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As I've mentioned in another thread for this television series, it was produced by a German television company for the U.S. market. Germany, along with most of the "West" was being rebuilt at the time under the Marshall plan and so the Germans were out to please their American benefactors and try to destroy the idea that Germans were the enemies. This particular episode had some serious flaws in it, since the bomb was planted in rubble still left over from World War II, which would eventually be cleared away.

Trek has played with time travel from the original series. The "Save the Whales" movie is a social statement and nothing more and used the time travel device to demonstrate a future (as Roddenberry often viewed it) devoid of today's greed and destructive tendancies. You can read into that what you will, but I found the Trek film to be a little on the thick side, despite its wonderful humor. The book was even worse in its preachy approach to ecology.

This is one case where I see no connection between the Flash Gordon episode and the Trek film. Even the approach is different (in terms of what had to be done to save the future). In my opinion, the Trek film was badly flawed in a number of ways, but it was still a lot of fun and is part of my DVD library.

Getting back to the Flash Gordon show, another Trek Episode, from the third season used war footage of fires destroying buildings, and in that context, the shows were not that much different (I had seen the same footage used in Trek as a kid).

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It was weird , Flash and the gang was worried about the bomb going off
in the future. So the bomb blows up, they are still in the past and
have 100s of years to find it. They could deactive it anytime then the time-line
would adjust it self and the Earth be as nothing happened to it?

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