It's Andy Fish!

Republic Pictures negotiated with National Comics to bring SUPERMAN to the motion picture screen in the form of a 15 Chapter Movie Serial– the script was about halfway written, casting choices had been made, and then the deal fell through–National (now known as DC Comics) didn’t like the script or the changes Republic wanted to make to the character. To be fair, Republic might have made some of the best serials, but they were never overly faithful to the source material.

With SUPERMAN off the table– the planned flying effects were used in ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL (1941) while the robot army (they only got around to making one) was retained and a new lead hero was created in the form of The Copperhead.

The cast included Edward Ciannelli as the dastardly Dr Satan and Robert Wilcox as Bob Wayne/The Copperhead with Ella Neil as Lois Scott, the love interest and girl friday for Wayne.

I’ll say this- director William Whitney discussed his plans for SUPERMAN and at the time he indicated they might cast one actor as Clark Kent and another actor who was bigger and more muscular but who still had some resemblance to the Kent actor as Superman. If Bob Wilcox was cast as Clark Kent- I can almost see that work. He’s quiet to the point of catatonic at times, but if he was their choice for Superman we dodged a real bullet because he is so flat as The Copperhead it’s hard to pay any attention to him when he’s on the screen.
The filming is suitably dark and creepy at times and the action scenes are unmatched which is why this serial is held in such high regard– but I don’t share the sentiment.

Here’s JERRY BLAKE’S REVIEW (I think this is a rare case of he and I not agreeing):

A sinister scientific genius called Dr. Satan (Eduardo Ciannelli) is determined to create an army of mechanical men with which to seize the “wealth and power of the nation”–but he needs a remote-control device invented by Professor Scott (C. Montague Shaw) in order to perfect his prototypical robot. Standing in Dr. Satan’s way is the “Copperhead,” a notorious outlaw from the Old West returned to life; this masked man is actually Bob Wayne (Robert Wilcox), who is determined to avenge Dr. Satan’s murder of his foster-father, the state governor–and also bent on rehabilitating the name of his actual father, the original Copperhead. Can this new Copperhead protect Scott, Scott’s daughter Lois (Ella Neal), and the world at large from the devilish mad doctor’s schemes?

Mysterious Doctor Satan stands as one of the finest examples of Republic Pictures’ serial-making craftsmanship during the Golden Age of 1937-1942. The studio’s writers and directors took a half-completed script for a proposed Superman serial (torpedoed by the objections of Superman’s owners at National Comics Publications) and reworked it into a new chapterplay…

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MY RATING: 6.5