Harry Houdini stars in this 1918 science fiction adventure serial about a criminal organization and a rampaging cyborg. It was filmed several years before the word Robot was first uttered, and more than 100 years ago. This is one of several film serials Houdini starred in, and this one was Savaged by censors in NY and around the country. The version presented here is built from the most complete known sources, but some original materials are still missing.
Folks tend to think of silent films as these kind of slow stodgy stuffy things. This series is anything but! It is silly, it is suspenseful, in rockets along as Houdini gets in to fights and is thrown in to rivers and is beaten over the head and has to escape locked rooms with his feet.
We’re re-scoring and restoring an episode every week until they’re all finished, you can see the episodes we’ve released so far here:
It’s every bit the kind of scifi adventure that would dominate the early days of television. It’s only a few short steps away from The Avengers or some other super hero blockbuster (Houdini is treated like a 1910s Spiderman in a very real sense!)
