Planet Outlaws

After a 1938 airship mishap, our handsome hero and his young pal are buried in an avalanche; but, they employ an experimental gas to put themselves safely in suspended animation. "When Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) and his sidekick Buddy (Jackie Moran) are aroused from centuries of cryogenic sleep, they are enlisted by Wilma Deering (Constance Moore) to save the world from the grasp of a tyrannical gangster named 'Killer Kane'. They travel to the planet Saturn to get some much needed help for their assignment, and then set out to deal with Kane and his villainous cohorts," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.

This re-produced feature-length version of the fondly remembered 12-part serial "Buck Rogers" (1939) must have held up well for 1950s Saturday matinée and television audiences, due to its futuristic plot and imaginatively recycled sets. Apparently, the original chapters were edited down, with (brief) new work done on the opening and closing segments. "The planet Saturn" isn't as peculiar a setting as it might seem, if you consider they may be referring to "Saturn's planet Titan." No comment on the suggestion the place is populated with helpful Asians. The end brings Buck Rogers into the then popular anti-Communist fold.

**** Planet Outlaws (1953) Ford Beebe ~ Buster Crabbe, Jackie Moran, Constance Moore, Anthony Warde

It's just over an hour long, watchable and kinda fun. Is it good? Yes and No, it depends on how much you like Buck Rogers and silly "B" Sci-Fi flicks. It's a classic example of older, fun "B" Sci-Fi that fans of the genre might enjoy. It is not what you call a good movie just silly fun.

This was originally a 1939 Buck Rogers Serial. In 1953, it was re-edited and put together to create this short feature film. I have not seen the original serial, so I'm unsure just how much was cut out for this movie but I'm sure it was all the unnecessary extra stuff.

Buck Rogers fans the film should delight, Sci-Fi fans might enjoy it while others might want to pass on this one.

3.5/10

This film is a condensed version of the 1939 serial starring Larry 'Buster' Crabbe as 'Buck Rogers'. I assume that when television came along, studios often edited down the serials into a movie-length version for viewing at home. I know they did that with one of Bela Lugosi's serials, "The Phantom Creeps". Unfortunately, this is NOT a super-successful idea, as the resulting film seems a bit choppy and episodic. Plus, by 1953, the special effects and stories of Buck Rogers seemed incredibly dated! In fact, you just have to see how incredibly awful the space ships are--they're so bad they are tough to describe in mere words--and you might find yourself laughing at it!

As for the story, in many ways it's just "Flash Gordon" (also a Crabbe serial) all over again but with a few changes in the plot. Here with Buck Rogers, he arrives in the future instead of the present day like Flash Gordon. It seems that Rogers and his sidekick were in a dirigible accident and got frozen--and just happened to successfully unfreeze 500 years in the future. Oddly, despite having no idea about this ultra-modern world, Rogers magically could out-fly and out-do everyone of the 25th century!! What a guy! Once he's no longer in Popsicle form, he joins the resistance--a group trying to overthrow the gangsters running the planet. So, for help, Rogers and his pal try appealing to the residents of Saturn--and this backfires so badly, the Saturnians offer the gangster boss (Killer Kane) their help! Oooops! Will Buck manage to fix things or will his 'help' result in the complete obliteration of the opposition?! Tune in and see for yourself.

Overall, the film is incredibly dated and manages to both be interesting as a curiosity AND dreadful and boring at the same time. I think the longer you watch it, the more dreadful it becomes, so in hindsight I think it might be good that they did distill the serial after all. A curiosity and interesting for some, but amazingly hard viewing otherwise.

Have watched many times and also the serial it came from... Love the old science fiction movies... Especially in black and white... Yet I wonder if any one has really watched this oldie... Every time I have seen it, one thing keeps bugging me about the character of Buck Rogers... Here on the IMDb site for "Planet Outlaws" the military rank of Buck is Colonel... Yet every single time I have seen this movie I distinctly hear Buck Rogers being referred to as Lieutenant ( excuse the spelling )... Not once in the movie have I ever heard Buck being referred to as Colonel Buck Rogers... Probably not the best review posted to this site but it is my first and thought I would put this to you all... I give it 5 out of 10... cheers

Someone at Universal Studios got the bright idea to edit out all the cliffhanger chapter endings and re-release an old Buck Rogers serial as a feature film in 1953. The advances in science have rendered it laughable in those Cold War years, now the film is high camp.

The original serial had the notion that a 20th century dirigible pilot and junior sidekick Buster Crabbe and Jackie Moran crash near the North Pole and their bodies are cryogenically frozen and thawed out by those who found them 500 years later which is about the same time that the Starship Enterprise was doing its thing. But this is not a Star Trek world that they've come back to. Although in the original Star Trek series in one of the comic episodes a humanoid people did take on the gangster culture from 20th century earth.

In this film because we did not deal with the Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos back in the day as we should have, they're on top now and the boss of all bosses is a guy named Killer Kane played by Anthony Warde. Fortunately Crabbe and Moran fall into the hands of the Resistance who have holed up in a Hidden City. There are some other humans on Saturn and most of the film is devoted to making an alliance with them.

Science Fiction as a film form does have a half life. Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov can write about the wonders of the future, but you can read it and use your imagination and a hundred, a thousand years from now it will adjust depending on how far humans advance. But once it's on film it stays.

The Buck Rogers films are pretty laughable and campy for today, but I wonder what Gene Roddenberry's vision will look like a hundred years from now, just how much will he have gotten right?

Tacked on is a prologue and epilogue of narration where a Cold War era message is hammered home. That too is a relic of the times.