This material is Copyright 2006 by Kenneth Johnson and may be reprinted with his permission.

Come Fly With Me: A Memorial Tribute

Flying – without the aid of an airplane – just imagine. Flying was something I always wanted to do. When I was ten I read an exciting magazine article. It described how, through careful mental preparation, meditative concentration and earnest endeavor certain yogis in remote Nepal had actually achieved levitation and ultimately flight. The author said he’d witnessed the phenomenon and described the lotus style position one should take, the mantra that helped the mind focus, and finally, the exact way the hands should be flapped rapidly from the wrists like tiny wings. He guaranteed it would work.

I have often envisioned him chuckling at his typewriter, enjoying his little joke, knowing that some idiot somewhere out there would actually bite and try flapping away. He was right. But I just couldn’t get airborne.

I certainly wasn’t alone in that dream, however. Kids have always yearned to take wing. That’s why stories about flying people have become classics. Superman, obviously, but it goes back way further to the Greek legend of Daedalus and his son Icarus who fashioned wings from feathers and hot wax then slipped them onto their arms so they could fly away from Crete and wicked King Minos. It worked! But unfortunately Icarus got too cocky, flew a tad too close to the sun, his wax melted and he had no parachute. I can easily imagine little ancient Greek kids wanting to emulate him. Playing games and shouting, “Look! Up in the sky! It’ s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Icarus!” (Okay, I know they didn’t have planes, but you get the idea.)

Flying is a persistent dream. My good friend Steve Cannell, creator of The Rockford Files and The A-Team actually put on his Superman cape when he was a kid and leaped off the roof of his garage, convinced he would sail like the Man of Steel. Steve broke his less-than-steel arm, but obviously didn’t damage his creative imagination -- he later created The Greatest American Hero (about a guy who could fly, sort of).

I, too, envied the birds. And then I made a wonderful discovery among The Republic Serials. Many of them were science fiction, which always captured my interest immediately. They had been made (on the very cheap) in the 1940’s and early ’50’s to play in theaters, one chapter a week. They always ended with an outrageous cliffhanger and the idea of course was to keep audiences in suspense and coming back for more.

I saw them on Saturday afternoon TV in Washington, D.C. where I grew up. That’ s where I first encountered a real guy (not some superhero in tights) but a real guy who could really fly: Commando Cody. Sky Marshal of the Universe.

Portrayed first by George Wallace (not the governor of Louisiana) in Radar Men from The Moon and later by Judd Holdren in Zombies of The Stratosphere, Commando Cody had this killer rig: a black leather jacket with a pair of silver rockets on the back and the coolest control panel on his chest. He wore a sensational silver helmet that made his head look just like a bullet. When he had to beat the traffic and get somewhere in a hurry, he’d don his gear, run out on the lawn, twist the dials on his chest, take a good run and spronnng – launch himself into the air!

Then they’d cut to a shot of him actually flying across a real landscape! You could absolutely discern that it was real. It wasn’t some cheesy matte painting or guy on wires or some other cheat (even at 10 I had a keen eye for such things.) Commando Cody really flew! -- Thanks, I discovered much later when I began paying attention to credits, to the special effects wizardry of Howard and Theodore Lydecker.

It was so inspiring! I rushed out to the garage to make my own rig from an old jacket, a bunch of coffee cans and about ten thousand dollars worth of duct tape. The control panel was also carefully reproduced and affixed to the chest of my jacket with a few more miles of tape.

The helmet presented more of a problem. My garage lacked metal working equipment, no lathe or forge, etc. Then I remembered. My gas mask. Every kid in the Washington suburbs had a gas mask, right? I have no idea where I acquired it, but it was a World War II vintage rig that slipped over my entire head with room to spare since it had been designed to fit someone with a head the size of a basketball. It had two pieces of badly-scratched, oval plexiglass for viewing and a gray canister in front the size of a paint can which I guess was the filter that saved me from all the mustard gas that was continually blowing down my street. When I put it on, with its long canister drooping in front, I looked rather less like cool Commando Cody and rather more like a bug-eyed armadillo. But from the inside looking out I was Commando Cody. I was ready to rock. Being smart enough not to simply jump off a roof, I stretched a heavy wire fifty yards between two trees in the woods by my house, rigged an old pully to hang from and took off flying. It was exhilarating! Until I encountered the tree on the lower end.

I had forgotten (or repressed) much of this until I began screening the old serials for my daughter Katie when she was about 10. She became an instant fan of Commando Cody, which thrilled me. Katie’s enthusiasm proved that a desire to fly and an appreciation for extraordinary drama such as Zombies of The Stratosphere wasn’t just a boy thing.

Katie did ask some probing questions that hadn’t occurred to me when I was her age. Such as, “If the rockets are on his back, why doesn’t his butt get burned off?” We spent many hours considering this conundrum, and finally decided that he must have fire-resistant pants that could tolerate two or three thousand degrees.

Katie also commented on the communications between airborne Commando Cody and his compatriots in their cheap set at Republic’s Studios (the old Mack Sennett lot on whose stages I was later privileged to film parts of my mini-series V.) Katie noted that rather than saying things like, “Red Dog One, this is Blue Leader, do you copy?” The Commando Cody exchanges usually went something like:

“Larry calling Sue. Larry calling Sue.”

“This is Sue, go ahead Larry.”

Katie and I figured they were so casual because they knew no one else was using their frequency. Katie was also fascinated by the extremely high-tech nature of the control panel on Commando Cody’s chest. Thanks to numerous close-ups we were able to get a good reading of the various complicated controls. Actually, there were only two: Up-Down and Fast-Slow. Ah, the brilliant simplicity. So what if he couldn’t take digital pictures with it or send text messaging? -- The son of a gun could fly!

And he could land pretty well, too. Coming to earth he would always drop down from somewhere just over the camera, shut down his pack (apparently if he twisted the Fast-Slow knob far enough toward Slow the rockets shut down.) Then he would dash off and get into a fist fight with a Zombie -- one of whom, incidentally, was Leonard Nimoy.

Commando Cody also had another mainstay of sci-fi: a big rocket he could fly inside of, sometimes piloted by full-service Sue. It looked like a long, narrow football with teensy little wings on the back. Sometimes he would fly up to join his rocket when it was already aloft. His landings on it were not as graceful as when he dropped gingerly onto the earth. His rendezvous with the rocket were best described as splllaaaaat. He’d come sailing in from off camera (doubtless leaping from a ladder) and flatten himself spread eagle like a bug on a windshield against the side of the rocket with a resounding hollow thud that made me think the rocket might for some reason be made of wood. But that didn’t matter, because Commando Cody could fly!

Judd Holdren died in 1974 and George Wallace took his final flight on September 26, 2005 at age 88. It pleases me to know they both lived to see a real rocket pack come into use and be shown off in a James Bond film. I’ve envisioned them smiling and remembering how they had done it long before. I will never forget how their flights stirred my young imagination when they soared above the earth with unlimited freedom. And took me with them. Gas mask and all.