ALL SCI-FI

[orzel-w]

Tim Tyler's Luck was a jungle adventure serial, featuring a young Frankie Thomas in the title role. Thomas would later star as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet in the 1951-1955 TV series.

The special "hardware" of Tim Tyler's Luck was the Jungle Cruiser, a vehicle redesigned from its earlier appearance in the 1936 serial Undersea Kingdom.





Now anybody who's familiar with my postings on this site knows I like to make CAD drawings of vehicles from sci-fi movies and TV. I've been working on this puppy for some time; it's been difficult due to the poor image quality of the DVD I own (a transfer from a slow speed VHS tape recording).

One puzzlement I ran into was the operation of the doors. The vehicle is surrounded on three sides by a guard rail (presumably to brush aside jungle foliage). This rail runs right across the two doors on the sides of the Cruiser, so it had to be cut for the doors to open.

Here's a view of my work-in-progress drawing showing the top and side views. I've colored certain features to illustrate what I'm talking about. The guard rail is the gold color and the door is magenta (that's sorta purplish for the color-challenged readers).



The gray parts are mounting brackets and supports for the guard rail and the overhead sawtooth. Looking at a close-up of the top view in the area of the door, we get this:



The two lines across the guard rail show where the rail is cut to allow the door to open. But there's a problem here if the rail is rigidly attached to the door. The door section of guard rail gets jammed into the stationary rail ahead of it.



In trying to puzzle out how they got around this on the actual vehicle, I started noticing that when the door was opened, the rail protruded past the rear edge of the door, as shown below:



Furthermore, the door section of the rail was mounted to the door not with struts, but by a box-like mount. I finally came to the conclusion that the door section of rail was mounted so it could slide back and forth on the door to allow the door to open. The following series shows how the rail slides back as the door opens.











I've ordered a new DVD of TTL that is supposedly a better quality image, so I should be able to fill in more details on the drawing soon and confirm or correct what I've already drawn.
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...or not...

WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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Hey, this is one of the serials they showed on TV in Atlanta on Saturday mornings in the mid-fifties when I was knee-high to a Pygmy!

I remember the scenes of the eco-friendly, environmentally responsible Jungle Cruiser, making it's way gently through the fragile forest, taking great pains not to harm the flora and fauna.

Unless any of it got in the way . . .

This YouTube promo shows how terrific this serial was. Take a look!


____________Tim Tyler's Luck (1937) - Trailer


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They almost showed the open door in this quick scene, but the men blocked the view for all three seconds it was on screen.



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

Allow me, Bud. Here's the same scene a few seconds later, with the actors' butts out of the way:


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...or not...

WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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Ah, shucks, you cheated! The trailer cuts before that shot is shown. You got that from your copy of the complete serial.

But I'm glad you were able to get a shot of what I was trying for. The DVD set of this serial is on Amazon for about $20, and I'm tempted. Very tempted . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

[orzel-w]

Well, the DVD I received today wasn't as big an improvement as I was hoping for. It's not an order of magnitude better, but there's less haloing, lower contrast with better shadow detail, and less jpeg artifact. Here are a few comparison screen grabs.

New transfer



Old transfer



New transfer



Old transfer



I also noticed while single-framing through various scenes that double frames are alternated with triple frames. That is to say, each frame repeats twice alternating with three times. Or a sequence of 25 frames consists of only 10 different sequential images repeated in the following pattern: 1-1-2-2-2-3-3-4-4-4-5-5-6-6-6-7-7-8-8-8-9-9-10-10-10... and so on.
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...or not...

WayneO
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[orzel-w]

At last! I'm done with this monster. (That's an entirely provisional statement. I keep finding things that need further work or details I've left out.)

I wouldn't mind not drawing another rivet for the rest of my life.


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...or not...

WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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A remarkable job, Wayne!

By the way, I counted the rivets, and you're one short. Please fix that.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Robert (Butch) Day]

Leave it alone. I counted one rivet too many.
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Common Sense ISN'T Common

[orzel-w]

I've been working all afternoon fixing "a few anomalies" I noticed since my original posting today (image has been reposted). This is work that never ends. (As Sam Kinison used to say, "Oh, it never ends, it never ends! Oh! OHHH!")
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...or not...

WayneO
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