Fox Wants To Make A Flash Gordon Animated Movie
FLASH! AAAA-OOOOOH! Remember that? Queen’s cheesy anthem to the 1980 feature film may be the only Flash Gordon-themed piece of work that has survived in the public consciousness. It’s been a long, long time since Flash’s heyday in the 1930s, when he and fellow competitor Buck Rogers (Buck came first) thrilled a nation with their serialized sci-fi adventures.
Eventually, interest died down and the public mostly forgot about Flash and his kind, until George Lucas took elements from the old serials he’d loved and gave the science fiction genre a permanent booster shot with Star Wars. Several Star Warsian knockoffs followed in its wake, one of them being an actual revival of Flash Gordon. That was in 1980. The character hasn’t seen much action since.
For a long time now, 20th Century Fox has been trying to get a new Flash Gordon project off the ground. We still can’t say for certain if it’s going to result in a finished product THIS time, but they’ve hired Taika Waititi, director of Thor: Ragnarok, to put something together. Taking this project meant Waititi had to abandon the movie he was directing for Netflix — Bubbles, the stop-motion story of Michael Jackson’s pet chimp. Was it a trade up? You decide.
We’re going to assume that this is meant to be a less than serious comeback for Flash. America doesn’t produce “serious” animated movies, and the way Thor: Ragnarok went should give you an idea of what Fox has in mind for its own adventure hero. Don’t count on seeing his racially insensitive archenemy ever again, though.