Flash Gordon
Akim the Terrible Part I
Before I give you the rundown of what the show Flash Gordon : "Akim the
terrible" (pronounced 'Ah-keem') is about, I'd first have to throw in some
Trivia:
- Steve Holland plays Flash
- Irene Champlin is Dale Arden
- No, I didn't just steal that from the opening credits.
The show opens with a description of the planet Karen, which
is the stronghold of Akim the Terrible (who later will be called Akim the
Moderately Irritating). He is a horrible man who, if the intro is to be trusted,
rules a marble floating in space. This may not be entirely
true, as the world resembles a nut as well. It could go either way.
With the narrator droning on about the despicable person Akim
is, the camera fades in on a destroyed city on this horrible
planet, represented by a very lost cat and bunch of paper. Nothing screams
horrible ruler more than a bad sanitation department. The narrator informs us
that on this particular planet "Robbers and cutthroats lurk around every corner"
while showing us an old guy trying to escape the planet with everything in his
possession: his physics lecture notes, his lunch, and a his Monopoly money. The
man is quite serious about his Hasbro games.
As the pre-escapee walks down the street, he is assaulted by
(1) Robber and (1) Cutthroat, who both are dressed in unitards. They wear
unitards because they are in the future. In the future people have advanced
beyond the need for fashion sense, but not the need for briefcases. At this
point the old guy struggles to keep his lunch while the two men tickle him.
Then, out of somewhere off-screen a Vatican priest shows up and attempts to
defend the old man by giving the Cutthroat (the bald one) a noogie. This works
relatively well seeing as how no one knows how to fight on this planet. Akim
somehow turned the entirety of Karen into a bunch of fourth graders. That's not
really Terrible, that's just kind of weird.
On this planet that King Akim rules it seems like train
conductors are policemen as well, but only if they're wearing a cummerbund. I
say this with a great degree of certainty because when the priest, the robbers
and the old man are roughhousing, a conductor comes out of nowhere and breaks up
the fight. Saying he comes out of nowhere is kind of a lie. He clearly sees the
fighting from a train station downtown and uses his superpowers to run all the
way to the fight in a matter of seconds. He quickly breaks up violent pushing
and shoving that has erupted and arrests the
priest for being a nice guy on a planet that is supposed to be Terrible. Vatican
guy didn't get to go to the "How to be Bad" seminar like everyone else and for
that he will be put in a spring powered bathtub, but more on that later..
The show then cuts to Akim in his throne room where it is
apparently laundry day. Everywhere hanging from the ceiling and walls are
clothes drying. The throne room is ridiculous, but it's Akim's clothing that
take the show. King Akim's headdress is a cloth reproduction of a cherry pie
accented by Fruit Rollups that are hanging from it. His gown is made of fishing
net. Not fishnet, it's fishing net, like the kind you use to catch
dolphins.
Of course, his assistant is no better dressed. This poor guy
is donning an British policeman's cap and a shellacked kimono. He looks like
he's either late for his Legend of Kung Fu audition, or he's wearing 50 ponchos
at once.
I took quite a bit of time checking out the background of
this throne room as well as Akim and his assistant's clothing since I haven't
the faintest idea what Akim is saying most of the time. The man has an accent
heavier than the box of porn under my bed.
[Movie Clip 1.7 MB]. In case you are on Dial-up and 1.7 Meg is too big for
you to download (Welcome to the new millennium, get with the program), here is a
brief synopsis of the dialogue:
King Freshly-Baked: Der haff been improovmen.
Assistant Poncho: Bootifool Bootifool
King Freshly-Baked: Is goo to haff you bag [something] Ow goez
hour campin?
Assistant Poncho: Sumsvay vey well you magisty. Buh as long as the galazy have
[something] We canno make happy de sire.
King Freshly-Baked: But their leeders have a prize. Everyman haf
a prize.
What I gather from this conversation is that they want to go camping, but Akim
has set up some galaxy wide raffle and he can't go. I didn't see raffle ticket
one through the entire rest of the episode, so my translation is probably wrong.
It's probably better that there wasn't a raffle since he's so terrible it would
probably be rigged anyway. Luckily for us English speakers, it doesn't seem to matter
what the hell Akim is talking about as long as one comes away from the conversation with the impression that Akim is
bad, and he wants to destroy Flash Gordon. Which is a plot twist that surprises
only one-celled creatures and a few really dumb plants.
After the wonderful banter about the raffle and destroying
humanity as we don't know it, the priest from before is brought in to be put on
trial. He is introduced as John, which with a name like that solidifies him as
definitely being an alien. John the alien is sentenced by Akim to "have his mind
changed". According to the owner's manual you need to do this once about
every 80,000 miles.
John is then grabbed by two guards, whose uniforms are made
out of Glad trash bags, and tied into a hot tub with springs all around the
inside and a bunch of floodlights at the bottom. At first I thought this was the
raffle item they were talking about earlier but it turns out that this
retrofitted tub is actually a brain scrambler. This device gives the subject a
good massage and then turns them into a bad person. John, who's name suddenly
gets changed to Jorgo, is given a hippy-style headband, turned bad and released
back into the planet of stray cats, lines of trashcans, and 8.5x11 sheets of paper.
[Movie Clip 800K]
After Jorgo/John is led out of the throne room, another man
in a shiny duct tape hat enters to report that a spaceship from GBI is on its
way to Karen. GBI or the Galactic Bureau of Investigation is never clearly
explained in any of the episodes I've seen. As my guess, which is always
accurate, they're a collection of 20 or so humans that go around the galaxy
aggravating aspiring dictators, destroying robots, and getting captured. They do
that last thing extremely well. And I think King Akim summed it up the GBI's
function when he so
succinctly said to his funny-hatted messenger: "Ah Geebee eye mahn fum earf. Ery
vell owl dahs is a peasent sopize." You can't argue with that.