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Flash Gordon

Akim the Terrible Part I

Before I give you the rundown of what the show Flash Gordon : “Akim the terrible” (pronounced ‘Ah-keem’) is about, I’d first have to throw in some Trivia:

- Steve Holland plays Flash

- Irene Champlin is Dale Arden

- No, I didn’t just steal that from the opening credits.

The show opens with a description of the planet Karen, which is the stronghold of Akim the Terrible (who later will be called Akim the Moderately Irritating). He is a horrible man who, if the intro is to be trusted, rules a marble floating in space. This may not be entirely true, as the world resembles a nut as well. It could go either way.

With the narrator droning on about the despicable person Akim is, the camera fades in on a destroyed city on this horrible planet, represented by a very lost cat and bunch of paper. Nothing screams horrible ruler more than a bad sanitation department. The narrator informs us that on this particular planet “Robbers and cutthroats lurk around every corner” while showing us an old guy trying to escape the planet with everything in his possession: his physics lecture notes, his lunch, and a his Monopoly money. The man is quite serious about his Hasbro games.

As the pre-escapee walks down the street, he is assaulted by (1) Robber and (1) Cutthroat, who both are dressed in unitards. They wear unitards because they are in the future. In the future people have advanced beyond the need for fashion sense, but not the need for briefcases. At this point the old guy struggles to keep his lunch while the two men tickle him. Then, out of somewhere off-screen a Vatican priest shows up and attempts to defend the old man by giving the Cutthroat (the bald one) a noogie. This works relatively well seeing as how no one knows how to fight on this planet. Akim somehow turned the entirety of Karen into a bunch of fourth graders. That’s not really Terrible, that’s just kind of weird.

On this planet that King Akim rules it seems like train conductors are policemen as well, but only if they’re wearing a cummerbund. I say this with a great degree of certainty because when the priest, the robbers and the old man are roughhousing, a conductor comes out of nowhere and breaks up the fight. Saying he comes out of nowhere is kind of a lie. He clearly sees the fighting from a train station downtown and uses his superpowers to run all the way to the fight in a matter of seconds. He quickly breaks up violent pushing and shoving that has erupted and arrests the priest for being a nice guy on a planet that is supposed to be Terrible. Vatican guy didn’t get to go to the “How to be Bad” seminar like everyone else and for that he will be put in a spring powered bathtub, but more on that later..

The show then cuts to Akim in his throne room where it is apparently laundry day. Everywhere hanging from the ceiling and walls are clothes drying. The throne room is ridiculous, but it’s Akim’s clothing that take the show. King Akim’s headdress is a cloth reproduction of a cherry pie accented by Fruit Rollups that are hanging from it. His gown is made of fishing net. Not fishnet, it’s fishing net, like the kind you use to catch dolphins.

Of course, his assistant is no better dressed. This poor guy is donning an British policeman’s cap and a shellacked kimono. He looks like he’s either late for his Legend of Kung Fu audition, or he’s wearing 50 ponchos at once.

I took quite a bit of time checking out the background of this throne room as well as Akim and his assistant’s clothing since I haven’t the faintest idea what Akim is saying most of the time. The man has an accent heavier than the box of porn under my bed. [Movie Clip 1.7 MB]. In case you are on Dial-up and 1.7 Meg is too big for you to download (Welcome to the new millennium, get with the program), here is a brief synopsis of the dialogue:

King Freshly-Baked: Der haff been improovmen.
Assistant Poncho: Bootifool Bootifool
King Freshly-Baked: Is goo to haff you bag [something] Ow goez hour campin?
Assistant Poncho: Sumsvay vey well you magisty. Buh as long as the galazy have [something] We canno make happy de sire.
King Freshly-Baked: But their leeders have a prize. Everyman haf a prize.

What I gather from this conversation is that they want to go camping, but Akim has set up some galaxy wide raffle and he can’t go. I didn’t see raffle ticket one through the entire rest of the episode, so my translation is probably wrong. It’s probably better that there wasn’t a raffle since he’s so terrible it would probably be rigged anyway. Luckily for us English speakers, it doesn’t seem to matter what the hell Akim is talking about as long as one comes away from the conversation with the impression that Akim is bad, and he wants to destroy Flash Gordon. Which is a plot twist that surprises only one-celled creatures and a few really dumb plants.

After the wonderful banter about the raffle and destroying humanity as we don’t know it, the priest from before is brought in to be put on trial. He is introduced as John, which with a name like that solidifies him as definitely being an alien. John the alien is sentenced by Akim to “have his mind changed”. According to the owner’s manual you need to do this once about every 80,000 miles.

John is then grabbed by two guards, whose uniforms are made out of Glad trash bags, and tied into a hot tub with springs all around the inside and a bunch of floodlights at the bottom. At first I thought this was the raffle item they were talking about earlier but it turns out that this retrofitted tub is actually a brain scrambler. This device gives the subject a good massage and then turns them into a bad person. John, who’s name suddenly gets changed to Jorgo, is given a hippy-style headband, turned bad and released back into the planet of stray cats, lines of trashcans, and 8.5×11 sheets of paper. [Movie Clip 800K]

After Jorgo/John is led out of the throne room, another man in a shiny duct tape hat enters to report that a spaceship from GBI is on its way to Karen. GBI or the Galactic Bureau of Investigation is never clearly explained in any of the episodes I’ve seen. As my guess, which is always accurate, they’re a collection of 20 or so humans that go around the galaxy aggravating aspiring dictators, destroying robots, and getting captured. They do that last thing extremely well. And I think King Akim summed it up the GBI’s function when he so succinctly said to his funny-hatted messenger: “Ah Geebee eye mahn fum earf. Ery vell owl dahs is a peasent sopize.” You can’t argue with that.