The popularity of the movie serial as a matinee staple created a demand for heroes from every quarter: from the novels of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs, from radio, and from the daily comic strips. Lower-rung in stature and frugal by nature but with its finger on the pulse of the American movie-going child, Columbia Pictures snapped up the rights to some of the biggest names in the hero trade, spinning Saturday morning chapter plays starring Batman, Superman, and Lee Falk's The Phantom. Though "The Ghost Who Walks" is less well remembered eighty years on than the still-active Caped Crusader and Man of Steel, The Phantom was a big hit with boys and girls upon its debut for the King Features Syndicate in February 1936. Columbia's 15-chapter The Phantom (1943) makes slight alterations to the mythology of Falk's "The Man Who Never Dies," latest in a long line of jungle-based custodians of justice who adopt, each in his time, the same persona: the masked and cowled (and to all outward eyes immortal) Phantom. In the opening chapter, "The Sign of the Skull," the current Phantom is assassinated by villains out to establish a secret airbase in the African interior and concerns the passing of the title to his son, international gadabout Godfrey "Jeff" Prescott (Tom Tyler, Republic's Captain Marvel). On Jeff's first day on the job, he is framed for the theft of artifacts leading to a hidden treasure and detoured into The Devil's Swamp, where he winds up chin-deep in quicksand and at the mercy of a hungry crocodile.

By Richard Harland Smith