Encyclopedia of American Film Serials Available to Purchase

When I was a kid in the early 1980s, I used to get home from school and tune in episodes of various old film shorts, such as The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and The Lone Ranger. What I did not know then was that this last title had in its past an incarnation known as a film serial. As defined by Geoff Mayer’s Encyclopedia of American Film Serials, this distinctive genre is characterized by stock characters, simple plots, and very clearly demarcated distinctions between good and evil. These are defining elements of melodrama, as originally developed...