CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT

(vt Jet Jackson, Flying Commando) US tv series (1954-6)

   Screen Gems/CBS. Prod George Bilson. Pilot episode dir D. Ross Lederman, written Dana Slade. 25 mins per episode. B/w.

   Richard Webb played Captain Midnight (or Jet Jackson, depending on where the series was shown) in this early children's tv series; Sid Melton played his bumbling assistant, Ikky; Olan Soule played his scientist friend Tut. Midnight was a super-scientific crime-fighter who each week would zoom in his sleek jetplane from his mountaintop HQ to combat a new evil. The first episode concerned the theft of a powerful radioactive element by foreign agents; they are spotted by a member of Midnight's network of juvenile helpers, the Secret Squadron, and he tracks them down using a Geiger counter. The scripts were poor even by the juvenile standards of the mid-1950s, and CM was visually ludicrous. Storylines often featured atomic weapons and radioactivity, this being very much a product of the Cold-War period. CM is not to be confused with the 15-episode 1942 Columbia film serial (based on a RADIO serial) of the same name; this too had sf elements.

   JB