“…Dad
never bought the Sunday Sun. He used to buy the Truth and Sportsman, and so
that - and since we only got one weekend paper in our house, you know economy
was everything; I never got to see Flash Gordon. They didn't call it Flash Gordon in Australia.
That was an odd thing, they called it Speed Gordon. I tried to trace that down
and find out what the reason for that was but nobody seemed to know. It may be just simple that Australians in
those days didn't like the idea, flash word, you know, because I remember
mothers used to think he's too flashy. You'd hear some men gigging another man,
you know, that's too flash, Jack. So,
you know, that probably had something to do with them calling it Speed.” – Stan Pitt interviewed by Ros Bowden (Pitt, S. J. & Bowden, Ros. (1995))
|
May 5th, 1935 |
For
an entire generation of Australian artists the name Flash Gordon meant nothing
to them, but the name Speed Gordon did.
Same strip, exquisitely drawn by Alex Raymond, but with a different
name. But why was Flash Gordon given a
new name here Down Under?
That question is easier to answer than people might think. There's no real conspiracy or anything sinister involved - it all comes down to simple Australian slang. At the turn of the
20th century, to call someone 'flash' in Australia was to imply that they were a bit of what
was called a 'mug lair'. Someone who was
'flash' dressed up a lot and was both vulgar and obnoxious while being very
forward and generally uncouth. You'd
hear people say, "He's a flash b@stard," and indeed I used to hear
that even when I was a kid in the 1970s.
To be 'flash' wasn't a compliment by any stretch of the imagination. As such a comic strip where the main character was called 'Flash' Gordon might not have actually survived for as long as it
did, if it even saw print in the first place.
|
May 5th, 1935 |
This
meant that, throughout the 1930s, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon strips were renamed
and re-lettered by local artists at the syndicate that imported the strip (I suspect it was the Yaffa Syndicate, but I will happily stand corrected). Sometimes the letterers did a better job than others, as can be seen in the examples posted here. Alex Raymond's art
was still as ground-breaking as it always was, and Raymond, via his Speed
Gordon strips, managed to influence a wide range of Australian artists
including Stanley Pitt (the Raymond influences being very apparent on Gully Foyle) to Keith Chatto and many more.
|
19361106 The West Australian, 6th November, 1936 |
|
The West Australian, 11th November, 1935 |
Even
the motion picture serials, produced by Universal Studios and starring Buster Crabbe, were named Speed Gordon, complete with the title cards changed. I'm not entirely sure if Flash's name was dubbed to Speed in the actual dialogue though. Once the serials took
hold in the 1940s, the name was quietly changed back to Flash Gordon from Speed
Gordon and all was well.
|
June 23rd, 1935 |
Finding complete examples of Speed Gordon strips from Australian newspapers isn't easy at
all. As they've not been properly digitalised by libraries yet (sadly this is all too common with Australian strips, such as Fatty Finn) strips exist unseen and largely forgotten in private collections and library
vaults. My hope is that all of Speed Gordon strips, along with the vast trove of Australian produced strips and cartoons from the 19th
and 20th centuries, can be scanned in full colour and preserved for all to see for
generations to come. Currently the National Library, via it's Trove site, is doing it's best, but it can be better. Fingers crossed!
|
The Sunday Sun Guardian, 25th November, 1934 |
|
The Sunday Sun Guardian 10th September, 1939 |
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