kallis@pen.DEC (07/15/85)
< > f. <A clock face showing 12 O'clock>- Whose emblem? > Heh, heh, heh. "Captain Midnight," a comic book character from the > '30s and '40s ... As probably the last active member of Captain Midnight's Secret Squadron ( :-)) and a self-admitted expert on Vaptain Midnight, most aviators too young to know of him -- a) The emblem was a *winged* clock. The Secret Squadron (his organiza- tion used it as a flight-wings insigne. It was also used on the some of the cipher disks ("Code-O-Graphs") used to send secret messages (see my article on this in _Cryptologia_, and _Datamation_ ... forget the dates); stecfically the 1947, 1948, and 1949 models. b) The exploits of CM were first introduced on the radio. In the 1939 season, they were sponsored regionally by Skelly Oil; from 1940 through 1950, they were sponsored nationally by Ovaltine. The show was _highly_ aviation oriented, and it taught such things as how to do a loop, how to do a soft-field takeoff, etc. The scripters of the series were both pilots, and I can't remember an episode that took severe liberties with matters that were aviation related. [I have ben working on a "biographical" manu- script of the character, based on a memory and a perusal of the radio scripts, courtesy of Ovaltine, so I am not relying on 40-year-old recollections alone.] The comic-book CM (a pale imitation of the real one) was a fantasy char- acter, complete with skin-tight costume, "gliderchute" flying-squirrel mem- branes to substitute for a parachute, and a "doom beam," which was a sort of heat ray not unlike something Spider-Man is reported to use today. Also, a separate and distinct newspaper comic strip appeared, syndi- cated by the Chicago News syndicate, that was closer to the radio show. Finally, there was a terrible television spinoff. When rereleased, the name "Captain Midnight" was replaced with "Jet Jackson" throughout the sound track and in the title. Steve Kallis, Jr.