In 1919 Johnston McCulley, a 36 year old police reporter wrote an action adventure serial that was published in All-Story Weekly.  This story, The Curse Of Capistrano, told the tale of Don Diego de la Vega, a the son of a Spanish landowner in 19th Century California.  Don Diego was idle and foppish by day, but at night he fought the injustice and corruption as the masked hero Zorro.

Douglas Fairbanks was the first to adapt this story to the screen in his 1920 film The Mark of Zorro.  It was so successful that he made a sequel, 1925's Don Q, Son of Zorro.  (Read a review of both fims here.)  After this sequel, the franchise lay dormant for a dozen years until Republic turned the action story into a rip-roaring movie serial in 1937, Zorro Rides Again.  This serial not only had Zorro talking for the first time, it also was the first serial that John English and William Witney co-directed.  This team would go on the helm some of the greatest serials created in Hollywood's golden age, including three Dick Tracy serials, the exciting Jungle Girl, and arguable the best serial ever made, The Adventures of Captain Marvel.  This famous team hit the ground running with Zorro Rides Again, making an incredibly fun and action packed series that is definitely one of the better chapter plays.

Fairbanks already made a movie showing Zorro's exploits, and those of his son, so English and Witney needed to come up with another person to masquerade as the Spanish hero.  They decided to skip a generation and had the great grandson of the original Zorro, James Vega (played admirably by John Carroll,) don the mantel of Zorro.  The problem is that a greedy financier J. A. Marsden, is trying to take over the California-Yucutan Railroad.  Operating from behind the scenes, Marsden sends his henchmen out to wreak havoc on the RR and Zorro tries time and time again to stop their nefarious schemes.

Most of the serials that Republic released in the late 30's and early 40's were pretty good, and this one is better than most.  The plot sounds simplistic, and it is, but English and Witney manage to keep it exciting and interesting for all 12 chapters. They accomplished that by filling each chapter with a lot of adventure and suspense.  The action was very dynamic with high speed horse chases, roaring locomotives, fancy (and not so fancy) whip flourishes, airplane attacks, dramatic gunfights, fires, avalanches, and just about every type of disaster that you can think of.  One of the reasons the action scenes were so exciting is because every time James Vega donned Zorro's mask, he transformed from actor John Carroll to stunt man extraordinaire Yakima Canutt.  Canutt was one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived, if not the greatest.  He invented many of the stunts that are standard in the industry nowadays, and was the person who figured out how to block a fight scene so that actors could throw punches with out hitting each other but give the illusion of contact.  Yakima's skill is easy to see in this serial, especially the horse chases.  In one scene he transfers from a horse galloping full out onto a moving train.  Not only did he succeed in performing the stunt, but he makes it look easy.  A lot of this serial's success belongs to him.

This serial isn't all adventure and chases though.  Taking a cue from the B-westerns of the time, Zorro breaks out into song.  Carroll has a good singing voice, so it wasn't the quality of the performance, but it is hard to keep a straight face when Zorro enters his lair singing "Zorro rides again into the night..."

If you've never seen a serial before, this is a great serial to start with.  There is plenty of action and cliffhanger endings that the serials were famous for, and the story doesn't start to drag in the middle like so many chapter plays do.  The acting is very good, and the stunt work is first rate.  There is a lot of entertainment packed into this DVD.

Roan has put all twelve chapters of this serial on a single sided DVD.  The chapters will all play one after another, but for some strange reason you get kicked back to the main menu after chapters 4 and 8.

Audio:

The two channel mono sound was fairly flat, but that is to be expected with a serial from the 30's.  The explosions didn't have a lot of impact, but the dialog was clear and easy to understand.  Only a small amount of hiss was present and it wasn't a distraction.  There were no subtitles available.

Video:

The video quality was pretty good overall.  Unfortunately I don't have the other releases of this serial to compare with this Roan release, but this DVD is worth owning.  The image is soft, but there is still a fair amount of detail and the contrast is very good.  All twelve episodes are included on one side of one DVD, so there are some encoding issues, but they are not as noticeable as I thought they would be.  There is some aliasing but macroblocking was a bigger issue.  Neither of these were distracting though.

Extras:

Troma has included an episode of the animated children's show Toxic Crusaders, based on Troma's flagship character The Toxic Crusader.  The 23 minute episode included is "This Spud's for You," where the Crusaders decide that they need to get jobs and run into Dr. Killemoff's latest plan to take over Tromaville.  I wasn't too impressed with the cartoon, and didn't really think that it went with the serial, but what the heck, it's free.

There was also a short text piece on the background of the show.

Final Thoughts:

This serial is a fun adventure, and a historically  interesting one too.   Not only is it the first time the legendary team of John English and William Witney directed a serial, but it also features the great Yakima Canutt as Zorro's double.   The action is fast and frantic and the story is well paced.  A good choice if you've never seen a serial before, this serial will give you a good idea of what brought kids back to the theater week after week back during the depression.  I only wish that Roan had made this a two sided DVD to reduce some of the compression artifacts. Even so, with the very reasonable MSRP, it is easy to give this disc a Recommended rating.