TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" from DuMont (1949)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Vintage Fanatic'
Length - 28:42

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

"Captain Video and His Video Rangers" was one of the first science-fiction programs to appear on television. It was also produced in the late-1940s/early-1950s period of TV when production techniques and production values were still developing. And on top of all that, it aired on the marginal DuMont network, an early fourth TV network that would be gone by the mid-1950s.

Because of all these reasons, "Captain Video" can look laughably primitive to us today. But a closer analysis shows a very interesting program that did what it could under the circumstances to present a pioneering sci-fi program for kids day in and day out for several years (from 1949 until 1955). The 1949 episode above is from relatively early in the show's run, and as a serial program, it's a little indecipherable without knowing what came before.

What happens in the episode here is that a group of emissaries, presumably representing different planets, are attending some sort of council meeting. Captain Video, who has just been in some sort of fight in the opening moments of the episode, is tasked, as an emissary in his own right, with visiting an absent representative. Included in the episode are a couple of "Video Ranger Messages" that are short homilies for the young boys viewing. Bizarrely, there are also a couple of segments in the episode that are scenes from some sort of totally unrelated western story.