First, the BAIT : a weird genre pick, and why we're exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE : a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, "Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?"
So, a caveat to start this one out. Ali messaged me on Thursday about doing an After Dark, and picking something that was short. Maybe even a short . She's put out a couple of really incredible reported pieces this week. I have been on Emmy Watch all week . It's been a long week. Could I think of something easy, and fun, and short, as a treat? Related Stories Why 'The End of Oak Street' Deserved Better at the Box Office 'Niu Lai,' the $200 Chinese Animated Film Taking Social Media by Storm, Might Be 'The Room' for a New Generation
Well, you shall have to decide for yourself how much fun it is, dear reader, but I can always think of a technicality . I proposed we watch the first episode of the 12-part film serial, " The Phantom Empire ," from 1935. Taken together, the whole thing runs about four hours. There's also a 1940, 70-minute film that cuts down the series into the barest bones of the thing — I guess because who wants to have like 24 reels of "The Phantom Empire" in storage in 1940?
But the first episode, which is only 30 minutes, is both bonkers enough to satisfy the After Dark remit, and kind of Missing Link-enough to talk about how some of the best TV shows and films of 2026 play with genre, serialization, and dramatic formula in the same way that this Mascot Pictures adventure lark did, nearly 100 years ago.
The plot… look, I don't want to summarize the plot and you don't want to read a summary. You are going to get through the first five minutes — wherein an apparent stage coach robbery turns into a bunch of cowboys singing "Uncle Noah's Ark" into a radio show about some trick-ridin' kids (who did their own stunts !!), into a flashback about escaping a cadre of robot-y guys riding horses into direct address to camera into more radio show into fancy science lads on an airplane who are scheming to steal Radium (?) from the ground beneath Radio Ranch — and… and either you will be grinning ear-to-ear about the irrepressible ridiculousness of this story, or you will have a headache. And if you have a headache, you should turn it off.
Suffice to say that "The Phantom Empire" is considered to be among the first science-fiction Westerns on film; it instigated a tendency to combine the expansiveness of the American frontier with the wonders and dangers of technology in such a way that still impacts both science-fiction and Westerns — not to mention the playthrough of "Jedi Survivor" that I finished a week ago.
Parallels to the original "Star Wars" film are easy to spot in the details, and, although I can't find Lucas talking about sound serials anywhere, there's no way he and Spielberg weren't influenced by them. There are some crazy laser rays, goofy wipe transitions, robots who are menaces to society, to be sure. But the visual inventiveness and the outlandish plot taken earnestly (if not always seriously) are as much reference points for blockbuster actioners like "A New Hope" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" is.
"The Phantom Empire" represents a whole bunch of storytelling ideas we take for granted now, but were, at one point, really scrappy, unashamedly childish and unabashedly bonkers alternatives to The Feature Film™. 1935 is when Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" came out. It's the year of Astaire and Rogers in "Top Hat." "Mutiny on the Bounty" won the Oscar. And yet, on the margins, you had something theaters could play in the morning for kids that was like a cross between "Silo" and "Outer Range," with musical interludes thrown in; plus the kind of warm assurance that every chapter would end on some impossible cliffhanger, and next week you could be delighted by how Gene Autry and pals got out of trouble this time.
Sound serials were high-concept TV before high-concept TV, fandom before Comic Con, cinematic universes that iterated and expanded before anybody had ever heard of "Phase 2." If nothing else, "The Phantom Empire" shows that whatever the popular Hollywood consensus is about what cinema should be — be it feature length and self-contained in a 1935 Picture Palace or the latest eight hour limited series on Netflix — that consensus will evolve; and that the flicks made on the margins can often show us ways for cinema to evolve.
I was first introduced to "The Phantom Empire" in a college class called "The Cinema of Action and Adventure." It was taught by Professor Scott Higgins, who's also written a book called " Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial " that has some promotional art from "The Phantom Empire" on its cover — a sign of both the enduring appeal of this particular story, and of how much this particular professor loves robots in hats. And I think one of the reasons he showed it to us (the robots in hats were a bonus) is that once you've seen "The Phantom Empire," you can kind of see its influence all over.
I see "The Phantom Empire" in the way that "Widow's Bay" swings between tones; I see it in big action films that noneth...
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