Dr. Satan, played with lower East-side Little Caesar bravado by Eduardo Cianelli, is the mad scientist bent on conquering the world with his mechanical robots--narrow tin cans with square-cut shoulders and arms and legs encased in what looks like the same ventilation tubing connected to my clothes dryer. (These robots were recycled from Undersea Kingdom [1936] and they would appear again in Zombies of the Stratosphere [1952]). Cianelli brings the dark specter of ethnicity to the West’s "purity." Moreover, whereas the medical profession has often fared well in popular cultural representations from the hard work ethic of Dr. Kildare to the domestic problem solving of Marcus Welby, Dr. Satan blights that landscape. Perhaps he’s not a "real" doctor, but the opening credits—with the fallen over test tubes and noxious contrails of white vapor—suggest someone who has broken his Hippocratic oath.

But the real strength to Mysterious Dr. Satan, like all Republic serials of the golden period is its cliffhangers. In "Undersea Tomb," Bob and Lois Scott attempt, in a diving chamber, to beat Dr. Satan to a remote control cell at the bottom of a sunken yacht (Dr. Satan needs it to animate his army of robots). But they run into trouble as water rushes through the rivets on a side panel and then the chamber porthole shatters. The resolution is incredibly low key, but effective. Water floods the diving chamber, as Lois and Bob buoy above the rising ebb. Suddenly the flood stops. "We're in an air pocket," Bob Wayne says.

"Double Cross" contains the typical Witney/English charm of building cinematic surprise by restricting our range of information. In the cliffhanger, Lois is tied to a chair by the nefarious Dr. Satan. Above hangs a basket of pellets (set to a time release), below a pan of acid. If the Copperhead goes through the door to rescue Lois he’ll be electrocuted. In his attempt to rescue Lois, the Copperhead tangles with a bad guy and they fall to the street, motionless. The basket opens, pellets drop, and Lois screams as vapor fills the room! This very set-up captures the wonderfully dark pleasures of 1940s comic books: the genre’s emphasis on female bondage/male rescue combined with an admiration for devious criminality (the Moriarty-like trap).

The next-week rescue hinges on an expanded crosscut. (SPOILERS ahead.) The Copperhead wasn’t knocked unconscious by the fall. Instead, Witney/English now reveal more information to us, as they cut between the Copperhead rising, climbing the fire escape, and Lois bonded to the chair. He eventually breaks the window and rescues Lois, sliding her and the chair, toward the broken window and the fresh western breeze.

But the biggest surprise, however, is in the film’s hybridized ideology. Even though the West had closed long before 1940, The Mysterious Dr. Satan, in the face of America’s encroaching involvement in World War II and the changing landscape of Europe, attempts to secure our feelings in the past, while also looking ahead to the future (the truck on the range motif). After defending his father’s honor, the Copperhead tells Lois, "I’ve done my best to clear his name. When you write your part of the story . . . will you explain the whole truth about my father?" "Leave it to me, Bob," she says with a smile, guaranteeing that the past will live with us now, and that the values of the old West (honor, justice, open spaces and the rights of the individual) are something that we can return to despite the darkening dawn of war.