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A movie serial, film serial or chapter play, was a short subject originally shown in movie theaters in conjunction with a feature film, and derived from pulp magazine serialized fiction. Also known as "chapter plays," they were extended motion pictures broken into a number of segments or parts. Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and ended with a ''cliffhanger,'' in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape. Viewers had to return each week to see the cliffhangers resolved and to follow the continuing story. Movie serials were especially popular with children, and for many youths in the first half of the 20th century a typical Saturday at the movies included at least one chapter of a serial, along with animated cartoons, newsreels, and two feature films. ==Popularity and decline== Many serials were Westerns, since those were the least expensive to film. Besides Westerns, though, there were films covering many genres, including crime fiction, espionage, comic book or comic strip characters, science fiction, and jungle adventures. Although most serials were filmed economically, some were made at significant expense. The ''Flash Gordon'' serial and its sequels, for instance, were major productions in their times. Serials were a popular form of movie entertainment dating back to Edison's ''What Happened to Mary?'' of 1912. There appear to be older serials, however, such as the 1910 Deutsche Vitaskop 5 episode ''Arsene Lupin Contra Sherlock Holmes'', based upon the Maurice LeBlanc novel,〔(''Lupin/Holmes'' at Silent Era )〕 and a possible but unconfirmed ''Raffles'' serial in 1911.〔(Raffles serial at Silent Era )〕 Usually filmed with low budgets, serials were action-packed stories that usually involved a hero (or heroes) battling an evil villain and rescuing a damsel in distress. The villain would continually place the hero into inescapable deathtraps, or the heroine would be placed into a deathtrap and the hero would bravely come to her rescue, usually pulling her away from certain death only moments before she met her doom. The hero and heroine would face one trap after another, battling countless thugs and lackeys, before finally defeating the villain. Many famous clichés of action-adventure movies had their origins in the serials. The popular term cliffhanger was developed as a plot device in film serials (though its origins have been traced by some historians to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle or the earlier A pair of blue eyes by Thomas Hardy from 1873), and it comes from the many times that the hero or heroine would end up hanging over a cliff, usually as the villain gloated above and waited for them to plummet thousands of feet to their deaths. Other popular clichés included the heroine or hero trapped in a burning building, being trampled by horses, knocked unconscious in a car as it goes over a cliff, crashing in an airplane, and watching as the burning fuse of a nearby bundle of dynamite sparked and sputtered its way towards the deadly explosive (at the beginning of the next chapter the endangered character usually simply got up and walked away with only minor scrapes). The popular Indiana Jones movies are a well-known, romantic pastiche of the serials' clichéd plot elements and devices. The silent era was the zenith of the movie serial and serial stars from this period were major stars such as Pearl White, who starred in the quintessential silent serial ''The Perils of Pauline,'' which still ranks among the best known silent films. Ruth Roland, Marin Sais, Ann Little, and Helen Holmes were also early leading serial queens. Most of these serials put beautiful young women in jeopardy week after week. The serials starring women were the most popular during the silent period but in the sound era few serials had a female character in the major role. Years after their first release, serials gained new life at "Saturday Matinees," theatrical showings on Saturday mornings aimed directly at children. For that reason, serials are sometimes called "Saturday Matinee Serials," even though they were originally shown with feature films. In the early days of television in the United States, movie serials were often broadcast, one chapter a day, and in the late 1970s and 1980s, they were often revived on BBC television in the United Kingdom.〔See for example BBC Genome listings for 'Undersea Kingdom' (1936): http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?adv=0&q=Undersea+Kingdom&media=all&yf=1923&yt=2009&mf=1&mt=12&tf=00%3A00&tt=00%3A00#search〕 Many have been released in home video formats. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「serial film」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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