Rock Men speaking normally; Flash Gordon serial 1940.

The Rock Men, as older people will will know (and hopefully some younger ones!) appeared in the third Flash Gordon cinema serial, usually known as 'Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe', 1940. These Rock Men spoke backwards, though it has long been known that they generally spoke the correct lines from the script. Their utterances were then extracted & most likely recorded on lacquer discs. These were then played in reverse and dubbed back into the sound track. An enormous amount of work must have gone into this! A couple of years ago I put on my website a short audio sample of their speech the right way round, and today have gone a step further by contriving a short video which has the speech of the Rock Men coming out the right way round. Ah well: it was a dull early Winter's day and I couldn't think of anything better to do!

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Flash Gordon
• Rock Men
• reversed speech
• sound track

[FlashKW1]

I for one am glad you did this! I think you did a great job and you have saved me years worth of tuition fees and travel miles (studying the ancient languages of the lost tribes of the Gobi desert on Earth!) Seriously though, thanks! I loved the Buster Crabbe trilogy of Flash Gordon. The best hero of all.

[bixanorak]

Hi there to you both. Am really glad you liked the experiment! Like you, I was mesmerised as an 8 or 9 year old kid by the Flash Gordon serials, and to this day believe that upright space ships based on the V2 somehow aren't quite right... Space ships - or more correctly - 'rocket ships', definitely should take off as in Flash Gordon. That is, in a slow spiral, rocking slightly, and emitting a sound like a giant Tesla coil - or as somebody once said, 'a demented blender'! Hopefully, more later!

[feverdeanmg]

I love this stuff and grew up on it on cable, I'm 44. Seeing these old serials was one of the highlights of my childhood and gave me a life long appreciation of Sci-fi. Thanks for the effort and check out my channel, I am making a post-apocalyptic web series,