Sci-Fi Channel heats up this fall with sexy teen/twenty-something romp Flash Gordon.
In this re-imagined series based on the ’30s comic strip of the same title, Flash Gordon doesn’t use space ships to travel through the universe. He uses worm holes.
Our hero is now accompanied by not one, but two hot chics. Baylin, Flash’s new “assistant,” happens to be a busty little bounty hunter with a thing for Bo Derek’s famous corn-role hair-do. And this time around, Ming… well, he’s now an evil take on Sir Richard Branson.
Flash Gordon has a Smallville feel about it with its fresh faced six-packed studs and slim go-getter girls. And like Smallville, there is only one Black guy in Flash Gordon. While this Black guy has sex appeal and seems to help advance the plot in a meaningful way, he gets shuffled aside as soon as the action heats up. In fact, he is absent from the entire second half of the pilot. Will he disappear as quickly as Clark Kent’s Black friend did in Smallville? Will he ever find a through line, and a girl, to see him to the end of the series?
The new Flash Gordon is racy fun stuff. Our fair-haired friend is placed in a dungeon and tortured, shirtless and bloody…and propositioned…in a flash! Apparently his thin-boned effete torturer needs him shirtless to stick probes in his head. And Ming’s daughter is, not surprisingly, a vampy vixen. How will poor Flash defend against these violent sexed-out aliens? Only time will tell.
Flash Gordon airs Friday nights on the Sci Fi Channel.
UPDATE: April 3, 2008 – Sci Fi announced plans to cancel Flash Gordon for unspecified reasons.