For our Film at 11 podcast this week, I made my 11-year-old son watch the 1980 Flash Gordon for the first time, and he seems to have come away totally baffled by the movie. I think I may have broken his brain a little with this one.

To be fair to Thomas, I may not have adequately prepared him for the experience. Is it even possible to fully explain a movie like this to a modern kid who has little context for camp and no nostalgia for the hokey old sci-fi movies that came out before or just after Star Wars? Compounding the problem, Flash Gordon itself was built as a nostalgia vehicle for the even-older comic strips and movie serials of the 1930s and ’40s, for which my son has practically zero awareness.

All that being the case, Thomas was a good sport, as always, and has a lot of tolerance for the crazy movies I ask him to watch.

Title:	Flash Gordon
Years of Release:	1980
Directors:	Mike Hodges
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

The Blu-ray

Flash Gordon first came to Blu-ray in 2010 on a disc from Universal that I criticized at the time for having an overly-processed and DNR-ridden appearance. When the movie was remastered for 4K Ultra HD in 2020, I was thrilled by the announcement and immediately ordered a copy. Unfortunately, the specific copy I bought was the SteelBook edition released by StudioCanal in the UK, even though Arrow Video released its own comparable 4K disc (presumably from the same video master) in North America. I really wanted that SteelBook on my shelf and was willing to pay a little extra for it.

On my shelf is exactly where the SteelBook sat for the next few years, until I pulled it out for this viewing, only to discover that the 4K disc inside is totally dead. My player won’t recognize it at all, and just stalls out with an “Unknown Disc” error message on screen. I had to switch to watching the accompanying standard Blu-ray in the case instead. While that disc is technically locked to Region B, my player is multi-region capable and can easily get around that.

As such, I can’t evaluate the 4K quality. For its part, the StudioCanal Blu-ray is itself an improvement over the older edition from Universal. The 2.35:1 image has less (possibly no) noticeable DNR, artificial sharpening, or contrast boosting. As a result, grain texture is visible and facial features are free of the waxy appearance they suffered on the Universal disc. I’m pleased with that. (Expand the following images to full size using the links in the caption.)

The new transfer is also decidedly brighter than the old one, which was sometimes too dark and crushed shadow detail. The downside to this is that the StudioCanal Blu-ray has very flat contrast that often looks washed-out and fades colors. I’d be very interested to see if HDR grading on the 4K disc improves upon that aspect, but as it is, I won’t know until I invest some money into another copy. (I expect I’ll buy the Arrow disc next time.)

One of the reasons that Universal tried to fiddle with so many processing settings on the old Blu-ray is that Flash Gordon has always been a very soft and grainy movie. In addition to all the optical effects that inherently reduce image quality, the photography utilizes a lot of annoying diffusion filters and is just plain out of focus on occasion. Some of this may have been done intentionally to hide wires and matte lines, but other scenes frankly look like sloppy camerawork. I tend to doubt the original film negative ever actually had 4K worth of detail on it, so I’m not overly hopeful that the 4K edition will gain much on that front.

The Blu-ray has two audio options for the English-language soundtrack, either DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 or 5.1. The disc defaults to the 2.0 track, which led me to assume it was meant to be faithful to the film’s original 1980 Dolby Stereo mix. I’m not sure that’s actually correct. It may just be a downmix from the 5.1. Whichever the case, I wasn’t much impressed with it. The 2.0 track sounds hollow and thin, has murky dialogue and virtually no bass. I gave up on it after a few minutes and switched to the 5.1 option, which is marginally better. If still generally weak, it has slightly more depth to the music, which is pretty important for this movie.

With that said, in my Blu-ray review from 2010, it seems I was disappointed with audio on the Universal disc as well. It’s possible this track was ported over directly from that. Or maybe Flash Gordon just always had a crappy sound mix? I can’t answer that for certain.

Extras on the first StudioCanal disc (whether 4K or Blu-ray) start with two audio commentaries by director Mike Hodges and actor Brian Blessed, respectively, that both date back to the DVD era. A half-hour featurette about an aborted adaptation of Flash Gordon by The Man Who Fell to Earth director Nicolas Roeg is fascinating. That’s followed by a vintage 14-minute behind-the-scenes promo, still image and storyboard galleries, and a trailer.

The dedicated supplement disc contains a half-hour interview with director Hodges, an episode of the 1979 Flash Gordon cartoon series, plus further interviews (much shorter) from stars Sam Jones, Brian Blessed, and Melody Anderson, Queen guitarist Brian May, film composer Howard Blake, and poster artist Renato Casaro. Those are interspersed with some 35th Anniversary reunion footage from 2015, brief discussion about deleted scenes (the footage long lost, apparently), and a plug for some collector’s merchandise from toymaker Bif Bang Pow! and retailer Entertainment Earth.

Related

• Flash Gordon
  • Flash Gordon 2010 Blu-ray Review
• Dino De Laurentiis (producer)
  • Barbarella (1968)
  • Conan the Barbarian (1982)
  • Dune (1984)

Note: Except where otherwise noted, screenshots on this page were taken from the 2020 Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.