I watched this decades ago from a friend's VHS but I have very little memory of the details. I do remember enjoying the usual thrills present in a Republic serial and my recent rewatch of the feature films about Tracy made in the 1940's has made me itch to see how this version plays in 2026. There were some odd choices made in transplanting the character from comic strip to screen for the first time. Here he is an FBI agent stationed in San Francisco rather than a police detective in a nameless midwestern city. They also dropped Tess Trueheart and Dick's cop partner Pat Patton adding substitute characters for reasons that defy all explanation. Dammit! It's Dick Tracy - keep the supporting characters that add value to the mythology of the story. Still, I'm looking forward to doing a slow watch of this 15 chapter serial for dozens of reasons and if you're curious you can do the same.
1 comment:
I've got all four of these serials on DVD - they're very entertaining, and very good. The later ones increasingly rely on stock footage (often from the earlier serials), but the plots of each serial are just different enough, and sometimes outlandish enough, to maintain interest. IIRC, apart from the stunt artists, Ralph Byrd is pretty much the only one to appear in all the serials.
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