For me, as for many, the COVID-19 Lockdown has meant more time watching streamed TV. The question in my title occurred to me after watching the complete serial of Flash Gordon: The Rocketship (1936)¹. Flash, played by Buster Crabbe, is captured by Ming The Merciless on the planet Mongo. While Ming has high-tech rocketships and ray guns, his minions are more like extras from a Cecil B. DeMille swords and sandals epic. Costume recycling perhaps, but a ray gun is only used once to save Flash from a giant lizard. Mostly, when he’s more evenly matched, he has to cope with a sword, a spear, or bare hands, often with the loss of his shirt.

This raises my first digression: Was Crabbe the first action hero to lose his shirt on film? Here I will disregard his earlier role as Tarzan (1933) because he didn’t have a shirt to lose. But Crabbe had been an Olympic medallist in swimming for the USA, with a physique to match, so it’s understandable that producers wanted to leverage that. At least the audience could see why Princess Aura fancied him; in fight after fight his shirt seems to be the first thing to go. If he wasn’t the first, he was at least an early exponent of a venerable tradition. An extreme example was Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984). Travelling back in time, he arrives naked in 1984, and we see a full rear nude shot that shows clearly how much work Arnie put in at the gym. He looks formidable, with or without a metal endoskeleton. William Shatner, as Captain Kirk in Star Trek TOS, removed his shirt with less effect but often enough to be parodied by Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest (1999). Allen put in some work with his wife, a personal trainer, before baring his torso² and Shatner³ saw the funny side.

Anyway, regarding our main question, it would be unsporting for the hero to vaporise the villain with a ray gun, from a distance and with little effort. Much better a nail-biting duel with swords, like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), where Robin (Flynn) finally bests Gisbourne (Rathbone) and dispatches him with a deft thrust. Basil always put up a good fight and died splendidly. It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well had Robin simply shot him with an arrow from a distance.

Small wonder then that Star Wars gave us the lightsabre, a luminescent blade of magnetically contained plasma, about a metre long. It can cut, burn, and melt through most substances with little resistance, yet it can be parried by a similar blade, giving off a loud crackling noise. A lightsabre is easier to carry than a sword – you just turn it off – and it comes in various colours. Apart from the merch, it’s there, of course, to bring back the duel!

A second digression occurred to me: Space opera really needs space to be noisy. Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968), was noted for its scientific realism, portraying the vacuum of space as entirely silent. We know that, ‘In space no one can hear you scream.’⁴ There is no air or other medium to support the vibrations of sound waves. Kubrick uses this chillingly, when HAL activates a remote-controlled pod to murder an astronaut on a space walk. Generally though, the silence of space is an inconvenience to film makers. Mark Hamill commented⁵ in an interview with Seth Meyers: ‘2001 is a stone-cold classic, a laugh riot it ain’t.’

We want to hear the low rumble of the star destroyer pursuing Princess Leia’s ship in the opening of Star Wars – A New Hope (1977), or the blast of a photon torpedo⁶ as the USS Enterprise battles a Klingon warbird.

In the film Independence Day (1996), the arrival of a rumbling alien mothership vibrates the dust on the moon’s surface, erasing the footprints left by Apollo astronauts. A stunning image that presages the imminent destruction of humankind’s greatest achievements – in reality it’s physically impossible – yet we willingly suspend disbelief.

Yes, I know there’s air inside spaceships which enables their crew to hear, but not outside. I majored in physics, so maybe it’s just me and most people don’t care. We want to hear the scream of TIE fighters dogfighting X-wings, the blast of turbolasers and ion canons firing from the surface of the Death Star etc. In film space must be noisy!

So phasers on ‘stun’ everyone. What are your favourite anomalies and plot quirks in sci-fi?