{"id":68397,"date":"2025-12-12T03:58:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T03:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/68397\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T03:58:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T03:58:28","slug":"how-queen-saved-the-frankly-awful-flash-gordon-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/68397\/","title":{"rendered":"How Queen Saved the Frankly Awful ‘Flash Gordon’ Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

The justly forgotten superhero film Flash Gordon premiered this week in 1980 with a goofy plot and seriously great themes from Queen. The main theme, simply called \u201cFlash,\u201d even became a UK Top 10 hit as part of a thunderingly melodic, simply unforgettable soundtrack<\/a> that couldn\u2019t have been composed and performed by any other band. <\/p>\n

Who else, really, would you call to score a movie about the fight by a football player and his friends (including a future 1980s-era James Bond named Timothy Dalton) to save Earth from the terrible machinations of a fu manchu-sporting overlord from the fluorescent world of Mongo? The included movie dialogue on \u201cFlash\u201d is all you ever need to know about the film itself, an unwatchable bit of B-movie sci-fi schlock that isn\u2019t even saved by the presence of Max Von Sydow as Ming (no kidding) the Merciless. <\/p>\n

Welcome distraction is provided by Queen, who always possessed an outsized sense of pop proportion<\/a>: Who can forget that thudding bass line, as Brian May, Roger Taylor and Freddie Mercury sing our hero\u2019s name like a spark of ozone? Their themes for Flash Gordon work seamlessly within the movie itself, creating a over-the-top aural landscape that bolsters a frankly ridiculous script. <\/p>\n

\u201cFlash\u201d is the best of them all. Composed by May, the song again incorporates the synthesized modern sound of their uneven project of the year before, The Game \u2013 because it was, in fact, recorded simultaneously. You could argue that Queen\u2019s Flash Gordon soundtrack boasts a fizzier creativity, despite the fact that all but two of the tracks are instrumentals. <\/p>\n

Paste \u201cUnder Pressure\u201d on the back of this project, as Queen did with 1982\u2019s Hot Space<\/a>, and it might be the better album \u2014 if only for the way the Flash Gordon soundtrack mirrors its subject\u2019s story arc, from the title track to Queen\u2019s heavy-metal howl on \u201cBattle Theme.\u201d Well, and the fact that it sounds like they are having a whole lot more fun. <\/p>\n

\"Jimmy<\/a> The Something Else! webzine, an accredited Google News affiliate, has been featured in The New York Times and NPR.com’s A Blog Supreme, while our writers have also been published by USA Today, Jazz.com and UltimateClassicRock.com, among others. Contact Something Else! at [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>. \"Jimmy<\/a>Latest posts by Jimmy Nelson (see all<\/a>) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The justly forgotten superhero film Flash Gordon premiered this week in 1980 with a goofy plot and seriously…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[664,11365,35500,35501,35502,9,24,63,35503,666,122,124,123,1572],"class_list":{"0":"post-68397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-brian-may","9":"tag-classic-rock","10":"tag-jimmy-nelson","11":"tag-movie","12":"tag-new-release","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-one-track-mind","17":"tag-queen","18":"tag-queens","19":"tag-queens-headlines","20":"tag-queens-news","21":"tag-rock-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}