|
Flying Aces: Part II
It was the late '30s: the height of a worldwide obsession with flight. And what began with The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen (see last week's Scoop) was only perpetuated with the mysterious Captain Midnight. Born of the same creators as Jimmie Allen, World War I pilots Bob Burtt and Bill Moore, Captain Midnight premiered in 1939. Also like Jimmie Allen, Captain Midnight began with sponsorship from Skelly Oil. But unlike Jimmie, Captain Midnight wasn't a wee 16-year old. He was the shadowy WWI hero Captain Red Albright, dubbed Captain Midnight because midnight was the hour in which he returned from a most dangerous flying mission. His past was shrouded in mystery, but listeners did learn that from his WWI adventures came a sinister foe: the wretched Ivan Shark, a mastermind bent on world-domination. The Captain's on-going rivalry with Shark took him to distant lands and put him constantly in the face of danger, and kids were enraptured. Especially in the early Skelly days, when the Captain had two young cohorts helping him, Chuck Ramsey and Patsy Donovan. It wasn't long before a club was formed, the Captain Midnight "Flight Patrol." Premiums - including buttons, patches, rings, mugs and maps - abounded. Members of the club (and there were over a million by 1940) received an "official junior pilot's application card" and a "burnished bronze medal of membership" that featured the faces of the heroes and a secret password. The flip side of this medal featured a three-blade airplane propeller and a "Mystic Midnight Clock" which also revealed secret messages. Once the show moved to Mutual and sponsorship was turned over to Ovaltine in 1940, however, the show became even more popular. This was before America entered WWII, but American interest in what was already happening overseas was high, and speculation as to the future captured the imagination. Suddenly, people didn't see aviation as simply a fantastic escape from the doldrums of everyday life as they did in the '30s. Rather, they saw it as a very real tool they may need in order to win a war. And this is reflected in the reorganization of Captain Midnight. The "Flight Patrol" became the "Secret Squadron." Captain Midnight was given the code name of SS-1, characters such as Captain's second-in-command Kelly (SS-11) and the Mechanic Ichabod Mudd (SS-4), as well as villains such as Shark's daughter Fury and an Asian scoundrel known as "the Barracuda" came to be, and the enemies were now Nazis and the Japanese. Secrecy and codes were still the hallmark of the show, and with code messages being worked into storylines that only members could figure out, decoders soon became all the rage. One such decoder was the 1945 "Magni-Magic Code-O-Graph," which for all intents and purposes looked like a Secret Squadron Identification Badge. Kids would listen to the program for a Master Code Combination, set their dials accordingly, and then keep track of each code number given by the announcer. Then, they could find the code numbers on their badge, and write down the corresponding letters. Pretty soon, the message would be revealed. With "golly," "gee," "boy-oh-boy" and "swell" peppering the characters' speech as they zoomed through both land, sea and sky in pursuit of the enemy, Captain Midnight embodied a nostalgic time of heroism and innocence - that lasted through the war years and beyond. The program lasted until 1949, and a Captain Midnight T.V. series even aired for four years in the '50s.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
