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When we discuss the decline of serials, it seems to me that we are strictly thinking of the theatrical motion picture serial such as Flash Gordon. However, has it ever occured to anyone that the motion picture serial, like the theatrical animated short, comedy short, or B-Western or B-Crime didn't really go extinct but simply evolved into a different form on television? Honestly, let's examine this for a moment.

At the end of the day, what is a show such as The Honeymooners, Friends, Seinfeld, etc? Aren't they, at the end of the day, really just a weekly version of the comedy short subject?

Isn't The Simpsons, The Flintstones, The Tick, Smurfs, or Scooby Doo an extension of the animated short subject? Come to it, if you've seen the newer cartoons on MTV, Nick, or Cartoon Network, their half hour shows are comprised of two episodes each, which typically run just about ten minutes.

Isn't Bonanza or Perry Mason really just another version of a programmer b-feature that would run about 60 minutes and feature the same character(s) and come out several times a year?

And at the end of the day, what exactly is the daytime soap opera if not a serial? Oh, sure, it doesn't have the fistfights and car chases of a Republic, but the format isn't that far removed. There's still cliffhangers at the end of every episode and there's still the attempt to draw the audience back again and again. And I'm not the only person who took the time to think so. No less a serial expert than Raymond Willaim Stedman makes a case that the TV soap is an extension of the serial in his landmark book THE SERIALS. And certainly today, we have shows such as 24 which is as clearly a serial as SPY SMASHER ever was. Yes, we don't have Kay Aldridge tied up and about to be dropped into a flaming pit or Charles Quigley trying to outrun a flooded tunnel, but the format is still with us in one way or another and it has been for decades.

Now, why did the theatrical serial die out? Beyond the concept of television itself, which is where all these other forms ended up on eventually, the theatrical serial also refused to evolve beyond what it was. I say that in reference to storylines, as well as technical. The central storylines remained as simplistic in 1955 as they were in 1935. Movies in general were evolving in the 1950s, in terms of the type of characters that appeared on the screen. This evolution, or revolution, was brought about by guys like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Serials didn't have anti-heroes while regular movies did. The world of movies was a lot less black and white cardboard cut-out in the 1950s which made vanilla heroes like Myron Healy pretty passe. It didn't help that most of the good serial actors were out of the genre by the early 1950s and their replacements had the personality of wet cardboard.

But I think the single biggest strike against serials in the 1950s were their refusal to evolve technologically. At a time when many, if not most, movies were being done in color, widescreen or 3-D, and/or sterephonic sound, serials were still being done in black and white, mono, and 1:33. The live action short and the animated short survived longer than serials because they DID evolve with the technology. There WERE color shorts and cartoons. There WERE 3-D or widescreen shorts and cartoons. There WERE stereophonic shorts and cartoons. True, television spelled the final doom for these things eventually, but a lot of things survived until the early 1970s while serials faded away from movie screens in 1956. I think that this is the biggest contributing factor to the demise of the movie serial.

But, as I said, all these things did eventually morph into TV programs and are even with us to this day.