Space Babe #2

Most serial heroines are pretty, but usually virtually asexual – girl "pals" for the heroes or someone to make coffee and be rescued on occassion. Didn't want to threaten those pre-pubescent boys that made up the majority of the audience, you know. Jean Rogers, who played Dale Arden in the first two Flash Gordon serials, was one of the very few serial heroines allowed to be sexy.

And, man, she sure was!

In fact, the first Flash serial is one of the only serials I've seen that actually has any sort of romantic subplot or sexual subtext. Heck, it's one of the very few where the hero even kisses a girl!

Flash Gordon (1936) is the most overtly sexualized kid's serial of all, with scores of scantily-clad slave women, exotic dancing girls, the predatory Princess Aura, and poor, virginal Earthwoman Dale Arden – ardently pursued by the lascivious Ming and Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen and forced to forsake her conservative Earthly attire for brief, bare-midrift shifts.

Massachusetts-born Jean Rogers won a national beauty contest in 1933 and was offered a contract by a Hollywood producer. She was soon signed by Warner Bros., and a year later jumped ship to Universal. She began appearing in several of the studios' serials, including Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars and Secret Agent X-9.

Universal took her out of the serial unit and put her in a string of B pictures. Unsatisfied with the way her career was going, and the fact that the studio refused to give her a raise, she left Universal for 20th Century Fox in 1939. Two years later Rogers left Fox for the same reasons she left Universal, and signed with MGM, where she found the treatment more to her liking. She walked off the Culver City lot in 1943 when studio boss Louis B. Mayer discovered that she planned to get married, and forbade her to do so. She freelanced for a few years, and after making The Second Woman in 1951, she retired to raise her family.

She died in 1991, but will always be remembered as the interplanetary adventuress and most beautiful woman of two worlds, Dale Arden.