Movie serials were the best action films of any kind ever made. "

That's the way Donald F. Glut (author of The Empire Strikes Back novelization) and Jim Harmon put it in their book, The Great Movie Serials (Doubleday and Co., 1972), and they aren't the only ones who feel that way, either.

"I wanted to make an action/adventure kind of serial film," George Lucas said recently. "This idea came to me about the same time I had the idea for Star Wars. But I got more interested in Star Wars, so I put [it] on the shelf, figured I'd get to it someday."

Someday arrived and so did Steven Spielberg. The result of their collaborative effort is Raiders of the Lost Ark, an exotic, archeological fantasy.

The story centers on a quest for the ancient Ark of the Covenant, within which are secreted the broken tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Ark was supposedly seized by the Egyptian Pharoah Shishak in 926 B.C. and buried underneath the Tunisian desert in a chamber of unknown location called the Well of Souls. The Ark is rumored to have mysterious, yet destructive powers.

In 1936 A.D., Fuehrer Adolf Hitler wants to recover the Ark, thus legitimizing himself as the Messiah—in accordance with Biblical prophecy. To this end he sends his agent Dietrich (Wolf Kahler) and a crafty French archeologist, Belloq (Paul Freeman) to find the Well of Souls.

They key to the location of the lost Ark is the Staff of Ra, which has been broken up and scattered to different points of the globe.

Racing to find the location before the Nazis do is Belloq's arch-rival, American archeologist Indiana Joncs (Harrison Ford), hired by U.S. Army Intelligence to prevent the force from falling into evil clutches.

The careening chases, hairbreath escapes and exciting f ights that ensue are reminiscent of the serials of the 1930s and 1940s.

Says director Spielberg: " . . . I've always wanted to bring a serial to life that blends Lash LaRue, Spy Smasher, Masked Marvel and Tailspin Tommy with elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs and George's [Lucas] great imagination.... [Raiders] found its own fantastic elements in a genre that sadly has been dormant far decades in American cinema."

The 1942 serial Spy Smasher can be seen on TV these days as Spy Smasher Returns and The Masked Marvel of 1943 is now Sakima and the Masked Marvel. Both serials were produced by Republic Pictures, known for its furiously paced adventures and skilled special effects. In fact, one of Republic's chief special effects artists, Howard Lydecker, went on to create the miniatures for television's Lost in Space and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea.

Spy Smasher and The Masked Marvel were costumed do-gooders in the Batman mold—battling Axis agents during World War 11. Wolf Kahler would be just as in character playing Spy Smasher's Nazi nemesis "The Mask" as he is Indiana Jones' foe, Captain Dietrich.

And like "The Mask", Dietrich has a fondness for submarine transportation. Spy Smasher had to endure a watery cliffhanger inside a flooded U-boat. In Raiders, "Indy" Jones faces a similar predicament when he's forced to cling to the conning tower of Dietrich's sinking U-boat, in an attempt to recover the Ark and rescue his girlfriend, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen).

Raider's wild slugfests in the Nepal bar and under the slashing propellers of the Nazi Flying Wing in the Tunisian desert are thrillingly evocative of the bread and butter donny-brooks of the Republic serials.

Such fight sequences were almost fantasy films in their own right, with crazy somersaults and wrecked furniture everywhere, but were executed with such flair and expertise that audiences were on the edge of their seats.

Tom Steele, who played the Masked | Marvel, was considered an artist of his feisty trade as were other Republic stuntmen David Sharpe and Dale Van Sickel. Van Sickel also worked in another of Spielberg's film, Duel (1971).

Flying Wings figured in several Republic serials: King of the Mounties (1942) with more Nazi treachery; Dick Tracy's C-Men (1939) and Fighting Devil Dogs ( 1938) featuring a Darth Vaderish villain called "The Lightning "

Because of its experimental nature, the Flying Wing was considered to be science fiction by many audiences of the time. And it was a Flying Wing that was used to drop the hydrogen bomb on the Martians in George Pal's War of the Worlds.

Villainous menaces aside, Harrison Ford's rugged and resourceful hero, Indy Jones, could have been culled from the ranks of the soldiers of fortune who were featured in many of the approximately 200 serials made during the 1930s and 1940s.

Indy never appears without his long, leather bullwhip which does double-duty as a weapon and lie-saving rope. Republic produced many whip-cracking adventures, most of them featuring the famous Zorro or Zorro-like characters: Zorro Rides Again (1937), Zorro 's Fighting Legion ( 1939), Zorro's Black While (1944) and Man With the Steel Whip ( 1954) .

But perhaps Raiders' greatest parallel with the serials is in its "weenie."

Weenie?

"Weenie" is the term silent serial star Pearl White used for a serial's plot. Every serial, from White's classic Perils of Pauline (1914) to Captain Video ( 1951), had to have a "weenie" to motivate thc good guys to perform their daring stunts and the bad guys to wreak havoc.

The "weenie" of Raiders, of course, is the contest for the Staff of Ra and the location of the ancient Ark.

In the Perils of Nyoka (Republic, 1942) the 15-chapter struggle centered around the Golden Tablets of Hippocrates, upon which is inscribed the cure for cancer(?!?). That time the ancient Romans stole the goody from the Egyptians and hid it in the Arabian desert.

Nyoka, an Edgar Rice Burroughs-type "jungle queen," competed with the villainess Vultura for the treasure's location. Among the various perils which she faced was a descending spike-ridden wall. Indy Jones must deal with a similar trap in an ancient Mayan temple.

Archeology is again the "weenie" of the 1941 Republic opus, Adventures of Captain Marvel - considered by many film buffs to be the finest serial ever made. Here, an ancient golden idol in the shape of a scorpion was the object of contention . Each leg of the scorpion had lenses which, when combined, released weird forces. Captain Marvel was originally a Fawcett Comics character and now appears in D.C. Comics.

Another serial based on one of the earliest costumed crusaders, The Phantom (Columbia, 1943), featured a quest for the lost jungle city of Zoloz. Seven ivory keys would reveal its location and the Phantom had to beat the Axis powers (they wanted Zoloz as a base) to them.

All the various dangers of Raiders: hidden darts, falling boulders, burning buildings, et al, were at various times cliffhangers in many of the old serials. But for fans, they never seem to wear out.

If your local television stations do not run any of these old thrillmakers, edited or otherwise, you can rent or buy some chapterplays like "Adventures of Captain Marvel" or "The Batman" (Columbia, 1943) from film mail order houses or your local camera or video equipment store.

There were earlier revivals of the form on television: Batman, Lost an Space, The Time Tunnel, and most recently, Kenneth ( The Incredible Hulk) Johnson's Cliffhangers on NBC in 1978.

With the advent of Raiders of the Lost Ark the serial chapterplay may finally receive the wide "Welcome Back" it deserves.

Or perhaps it already has. Star Wars, the box-office champ of all time, was inspired in part by the classic serial: Flash Gordon.