How NOT to remake a high-spirited, swash-buckling action serial:

A) Have 80% of it take place on Earth in a boring small town

B) Set Mongo in a basement somewhere (with railings!) The dimmer the lighting, the better!

C) Have the first 45 minutes be a slow, lame X-Files knock-off, up to and including making Zarkoff a Lone Gunmen

D) Have the first alien we see be a frakkin' Borg rip-off, and then have him do a T2 ripoff with Mom on the phone, WITH THE EXACT SAME TIP-OFF THE T1000 GAVE JOHN CONNER!!)

E) Have Ming be a boring ass businessman...controlling Mongo with hauling fees for water?!?! That's J.R. Ewing, not Ming the Merciless

F) Have our "hero" do nothing particularly heroic the whole movie

G) DON'T HAVE A BLOODY HAWKMAN IN THE WHOLE THING!!

H) Keep using the Queen music the in commercials but not in the actual show

I) Hire lots of Canadian actors who say "aboot"

J) Make all your female leads look exactly alike, so you can't even tell when they pull the old concubine switch

K) Make the whole thing stupider than the stupidest stupid thing in Stupidsylvania

Check the Angular Vector of the Moon!!

At last, my life is complete.

This goes beyond guilty pleasure. Flash Gordon is perhaps my favortist film ever. Not the best, by any means. But my favoritist.

By rough estimations, I have seen this movie more times than I have seen any other movie...at least 35 times completely through, probably more. Nah, probably more like 40.

For reasons lost to the mists of time, this movie became the absolute favorite of the Portage Northern High School Debate team (man, my nerd flags are flying high today). We turned it into our personal Rocky Horror Picture Show. We learned it so well we would jump up in the theater and shout out the lines along with the cast: "No, not the bore-worms!!" Note: this behavior resulted in our being asked to leave the theater more than once as we were "scaring" the normal patrons.

Then, when the movie came out on HBO, well, I tested out how many times a movie taped off cable could be watched before it faded/broke (not to mention giving a great shakedown to my parents' new-fangled VCR).

And now it's out on a "special edition" DVD. And I have it. And I'm gonna see how high I can run my numbers of viewings up to.

Join me...go out and rent it--hell, buy it--and join Sam Jones, Melody Anderson, Ornella Muti, Max Von Sydow, Timothy Dalton, Brian Blessed and Topol, and wallow in the camp happiness.