Faraday's Magnet (1928) - "Captain Lunaris" series

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Published 2009-04-15

Around the turn of the 20th century, Godfrey Gadsen, a Jules Verne imitator, began publishing "space fiction" in a variety of pulp magazines. His tales of female intergalactic adventurers evading the Scorpion Empire were prolific, but poorly-regarded.

In the early 1920s, Good Day Sir! Films purchased the movie rights to Gadsen's stories and characters. At least three studio writers adapted and continued the Gadsen tales, and they shared the author's apparent disregard for continuity. Unlike popular series of today, these films are usually not intended to represent chapters of one coherent story.

They do, however, share a number of common characteristics. A doctor and a captain appear in nearly every Gadsen adventure, and appear to be achetypal figures. Captains Solaris, Lunaris, and Venusian appear to be interchangable, and the doctor always seems to be the same character as well, though she too frequently changes names. However, after a memorable performance by Belinda Birch in "Trilliad" (1944), the films became known as the "Captain Lunaris" series.*

Here we present, for the first time on the Internet, the Captain Lunaris films. Second in the series is 1928's "Faraday's Magnet," starring Hilda Hazel as Dr. Nova and Fantine Fig as Captain Lunaris. Debuting as the alien is Lisa Hewitt, who would also appear in "The Brain Readers" seven years later.

*None of this is true.

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