still above Ed Wood. Movie serials were aimed at an audience of kids in the first place, so it's not surprising the plots are a little thin. In the 1930s and 40s there was no television, and the serials filled the same role. In fact, when I saw "Zombies" in 1952 my folks didn't have a TV yet. When we got one a couple of years later, one of the things they ran on Saturday mornings was the old serials--sometimes one chapter each from three or four different ones in a row. There were lots of them since they had been making them since the early 1930s. Many of TV the shows for kids in the 50s were even more hokey--"Space Patrol," "Captain Video," etc.
TV eventually put the movie serials out of business, but the same format was used for cartoon shows like "Rocky and Bullwinkle," "Tom Teriffic," and "Ruff and Reddy" on into the 1960s. "Rocky and Bullwinkle" even had jokes that appealed to older age groups so kids and their parents would watch it and laugh at different jokes--or at the same jokes for different reasons. I enjoyed that one very much but gave it up in high school when even to mention such a thing was to be terminally uncool.
Republic was the king of the serial studios, and their special effects team, the Lydecker brothers, did the best work in the industry. They used large-scale models and photographed them outdoors using natural light. The Rocket Man and Captain Marvel flying dummies, and the space ship models, were two or three feet long and highly detailed. The Lydeckers also did first-rate model work for mainstream movies like "Sink the Bismarck."
Of course the serials were cheap, they recycled plots and stock footage, retitled and reissued them a few years later for a new generation of kids, etc. But they were highly entertaining to the target audience. If you missed a chapter, you went around school all the next week asking your friends and even your enemies how the hero escaped the cliffhanger. It's a long-gone part of American culture. FWIW, so are the Ed Wood movies.
IIRC, it says in IMDB that Leonard Nimoy got a grand total of $500 for his work in Zombies; not bad for a few weeks' work in 1952.
When I was a kid in the '60s, our downtown theater carried free movies for kids in the summertime one day per week. Before the feature was rolled, they would play some of the old serials and shorts. The one discussed in this thread was called "Rocketman" then. I also saw a lot of the Three Stooges, Little Rascals, and Jungle Jim. And a lot of cartoons, mostly Tom & Jerry or The Pink Panther.
And yes, the serials were hokey because they were written for kids who wanted to see adventure. The heroes, the villains, the damsels in distress. We didn't care what the plot was about as long as fun, exciting stuff happened and the good guys won in the end.
...the Martian spacecraft landing was kinda rough. You'd think that a civilization who mastered interplanetary travel could have also come up with the wheel. :-)