SPACE INTERVIEWS
Michael and Kit Menkin (1-2/2000)
Michael Menkin: Captain
Video was created by my father, Larry Menkin. He is still
alive with Alzheimer's disease. James Caddigan was the
program director of DuMont at that time, 1949, and requested
Larry Menkin to come up with a program concept.
RR: Do you remember
the wording of the memo that James Caddigan sent your
father, asking him to create the Captain Video program?
MM: I will try to find the
memo again but I couldn't find it with all of his stuff. I
remember reading the memo and Caddigan asked him to create a
children's science fiction show with action. That was the
main message of the memo.
RR: I found fragments
of an interview with Caddigan and Menkin in which Menkin is
quoted as saying the inspiration was the relation between
Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, who were transformed
into Captain Video and Dr. Pauli battling centuries in the
future.
MM: The format was not
just a futuristic Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty,
having a real villain was standard serial milieu, not just
in Sherlock Holmes. What made it a successful format was
the concept of the Video Rangers. Don Hastings was 14 when
he started. The show promoted the Ranger - Space Boy Scout
concept. You could buy a rocket ring and you could be a
Video Ranger too. We all identified with Don Hastings. We
wanted to be right there with Captain Video in his
adventures. We as kids could live the adventures, that is
what made the show. They sold plastic space helmets in
1952, I remember walking down the block in Port Chester New
York, where we lived, and I was very proud to wear one while
doing so!
Pauli as a villain was not the key to the format, it was
action, adventure, the Captain with his Video Rangers - and
we could be Video Rangers. That's what made us glue
ourselves to the TV set every night for a half an hour.
It was sponsored by Powerhouse Candy Bar. You could get a
1/4 pound bar for ten cents in 1950! If you sent in
something like ten wrappers and a quarter you could get a
glow-in-the-dark rocket ring with a secret compartment for
messages!! We thought that was neat. I had one too. I
also had a Time for Beanie propeller ring.
RR: What other shows
was your father involved with before or during Captain
Video's run? And did he ever write for Captain Video?
MM: I don't remember him writing any Captain Video scripts.
He had several other shows on at the same time, one was
The Magic Cottage,
staring Pat Michaels, another was
Hands Of Murder, which became
Hands Of Destiny later, and which was
featured in Life Magazine, I don't have copies, sorry, and
among his other shows were
Mono-Drama Theatre, for which he
won the Variety Showmanagement Award for putting classics on
the air... Irving Robbin was involved in that. My father
won the Canada Lee Foundation award for
Harlem Detective,
the first mixed cast, integrated TV show in American which
went from 1953 to 1954 or 55.
RR: Are you sure he
didn't contribute a few Captain Video story lines?
Five-a-week shows ate up scripts so rapidly that even the
actors were sometimes writing.
MM: Actually, thinking
back, he probably did write some episodes. And since he
hired Al Hodge, it would make sense that he was also the
producer at times. He knew Al Hodge from the
Green
Hornet radio
show. My father wrote for Green Hornet and met Al in the late 40s.
He know Al was good and that's why he hired him.
I'm sorry I haven't gone all through my father's stuff to
answer your questions. I was six years old in 1949 and only
remember seeing the show on TV, playing on the set at
Wannamaker and being in the control room when it was on the
air.
There were some funny things in the production: to make an
explosion more realistic the camermen moved their cameras up
and down to simulate action. They had "bombs" of white
powder that would explode so viewers would believe an
explosion occurred.
In those days TV was very real to the viewers. The guy who
played Dr. Pauli was actually stoned by kids when he went
home. They waited for him when he got off the subway and
threw stones at him. He had a hard time going home.
My father said the standard rehearsal scenario was to
rehearse until all of the actors stopped laughing, then they
knew they had it.
RR: I am told that on
all children's shows, there was as much cutting up in
rehearsal as possible, so that "all the laughs drained out
of the material." Otherwise someone was certain to break
up on camera during the broadcast, and that sometimes
happened anyway.
MM: I remember the actors
running down the hallways in chase sceens. They had wooden
props that looked like steel girders which made the hallways
look like the inside of a fortress or something.
RR: I remember one of
those situations vividly myself. The Captain is exploring a
gigantic space ark, and the "sets" consist entirely of
those hallways, dimly lit, with prop girders here and there
for the actors to pass in front of or behind. I and my
brother were doing marionette shows at that time and we
wondered how we could make such girders for our own cramped
cardboard sets!
MM: I will add a little
more. I remember one episode where the Ranger and Captain
Video were using slide rules for some kind of calculations.
The Ranger said, "Captain, I think this is the answer to
our problem." The Captain replied, "Ranger, you must do
more than think that you have the answer, you must know you
have the answer." He went on to tell the Ranger the
difference between think and know. I always remember that
episode.
Kit Menkin: I am quite
amazed at some of Michael's comments here. Michael was born
in 1943. He would have been six years old in 1949. The
archives show the television show going until 1953, but I
don't think that is right... however, I am not sure as I
would have been eleven years old in 1953.
RR: The last broadcast
was April 1, 1955, a sad day for all us loyal Video Rangers.
KM: I thought my father
came up with the series on his own and wrote all the scripts
of Captain
Video. He
would wing them and I remember how he would cajole the
camera men into moving around as he was doing the first
"live" shows and camera men were used to staying in one
spot, plus the cameras were quite big and heavy and
difficult to move. As a child, I remember visiting the sets
and watching him direct them. There were three Captain
Videos as I remember.
RR: There were two.
Your father was unquestionably the creator of
Captain
Video?
KM: My father was the
creator of Captain Video. I was there. It was his
show.
RR: He retained the
copyright after DuMont folded, I assume, just as creator
Joseph Greene retained the copyright for Tom Corbett, Space
Cadet after Rockhill Productions went bankrupt.
KM: Yes. A nationwide
video rental place tried to use the name, and he sued them,
making some settlement as he still kept the name registered
and the premise. He used many of the scripts in his acting
classes years later. He typed with two fingers and was quite
fast and almost perfectly accurate.
RR: You met Al Hodge
and Don Hastings, of course.
KM: Al Hodge used to visit
my father in the Pacific Palisades all the time. He became
an alcoholic in his later years, sad to say. I also met Dr.
DuMont a few times. I used to play practical jokes on my
father, putting exploding things in his cigarettes. One time
I put it in his cigar and at a meeting he gave it to Dr.
DuMont and it exploded in his face. My father was quite
angry with me.
Rod Sterling lived next door to us. My father wrote a
number of
Twilight Zone
scripts too, including scripts for Outer
Limits.
MM: To add to my brother's
comments about the camera men, I remember my father chiding
them that they couln't get to another spot on the set in 20
seconds or so and he would make a race of it. He would
chide all of the cameramen to get them to move all over the
place, something like, "I bet you can't get to the other
side of the set in 25 seconds," and sure enought, they
would try to make it. I remember him in the control room
shouting commands to the different cameramen and shouting
takes at all of the TV screens. Those days everything was
tubes and the control room got very hot with all of the
equipment going.
They also used some kind of baking soda bomb live during the
show and when there was an explosion outside of the ship or
something the baking soda bombs would go off. It looked
convincing on the air.
RR: They also used
flash powder quite a bit. This is a gunpowder-like material
that ignites electrically with a very bright flash, and a
big cloud of #ffffff smoke. I loved it!
KM: I remember playing on
the set. They used airplane controls in the cockpit of the
Galaxy. I remember sitting in the seat and playing with the
controls. There was a set which was the outside skin of the
Galaxy and many times we saw Captain Video and the Ranger on
the skin walking on the ship with magnetic shoes which held
them to the ship. They faked a "magnetic shoe walk" It
was convincing on the air.
RR: It was what we
call the Galaxy I that had these controls, in a cylindrical
cockpit set somewhat like that of Space
Patrol's
ships. The later Galaxy II had no visible controls at all,
or even visible seats!
[Addendum from Michael Menkin:]
My father, Larry Menkin, died July 18, 2000. I thought you
might want to update your records. When my father was
alive, confined to a nursing home, I sent him home-made
cards every day. On some of the cards I wrote, "Captain
Video has one more battle to fight, and Captain Video must
win this battle." The biography section of my website
also has a photo of Larry Menkin in his later years.
