COLUMN: Where are you now, Captain Midnight?

A Christmas gift from my brother Jeff reminded me of Saturday mornings 50 or more years ago. He gave me a set of DVDs containing Volumes 1 to 4 of "Captain Midnight," a TV show we watched on Saturday mornings. Saturday morning TV belonged to kids from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Some have referred to this period as "The Golden Age of Television." I remember getting out of bed on Saturday mornings, donning a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt, downing a bowl of cereal and watching cartoon shows and action/adventure programs from 8 o'clock 'til almost time for lunch, provided Dad didn't decide the yard needed mowing.

“Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion,” the “Sealtest Big Top,” “Mighty Mouse,” “Heckel and Jeckel,” “Sky King” and “The Roy Rogers Show,” were all favorites. Many of these programs were sponsored by cereal companies.

Perhaps my favorite program, after “The Adventures of Superman,” was "Captain Midnight," which was sponsored by Ovaltine, a chocolaty milk supplement. “Captain Midnight” was produced by Screen Gems and starred Richard Webb as the dashing pilot Captain. Veteran actor Sid Melton played the Captain's chief mechanic and partner, Ichabod "Ikky" or "Icky" Mudd, who furnished a bit of comic relief, and the Captain's science adviser, Aristotle "Tut" Jones, was portrayed by another veteran character actor, Olan Soule, who always appeared wearing glasses, a white lab coat and a pocket protector, a proto-geek if there ever was one.

The other "character" I looked for was Captain Midnight's customized Douglas "Skyrocket" aircraft, nicknamed "The Silver Dart." The Captain, "Icky" and "Tut" were always walking around their secret headquarters sipping on mugs of Ovaltine and preparing to deal with evil-doers. They also each had hand-held radios used to communicate with each other. These radios looked a lot like old electric shavers with car radio antennas attached to them. This was decades before the invention of the cell phone.

I went to the Internet to find out more about this boyhood hero of the small screen.

The Captain was initially a radio series broadcast from 1938 to 1949 and its first sponsor was the Skelly Oil Company. The radio series was authored by Willfred G. Moore and Robert M. Burtt, who were both pilots.

According to the Captain Midnight website, "Both Burtt and Moore had been flying aces in World War I and wanted to bring the thrill of aviation to young people just as they too had felt the thrills in their years just before the Great War. Moore was even a holder of the air speed and altitude records in an Inland Sport Plane." Skelly Oil was a Midwest organization and it produced a good number of Captain Midnight items for young listeners. In 1940 Ovaltine, a product of the Wander Company, became the program's sponsor, and remained so on radio until December 1949. The show was first broadcast on the Mutual Radio Network, then on NBC and then back on the Mutual Network.

The Captain's real name was Jim "Red" Albright, a World War I Army pilot, "who helped people." The radio show changed as World War II loomed on the horizon as the Captain, who once returned from a secret mission on the stroke of 12, hence "Captain Midnight," became the head of an organization dedicated to fighting enemy saboteurs and spies before Pearl Harbor.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor — 70 years ago last month — the Captain and other members of his elite unit, the Secret Squadron, fought Axis masterminds. After World War II ended, the series continued with the gang fighting master criminals such as Ivan Shark, Fang and The Barracuda, head of the Tiger Tong, and other evil-doers.

One student of the radio series has remarked that the program was ahead of its time in treating women as equal to the men in the Secret Squadron, and not just damsels-in-distress to be rescued. I have an old hardback book, "Joyce of the Secret Squadron: A Captain Midnight Adventure," Racine, Wisconsin: Whitman Publishing Company, 1942, that bears this out.

It is the “Captain Midnight” TV show that Jeff and I remember. It ran for 39 30-minute black and white episodes, airing on Sept. 9, 1954 and the series concluded on Jan. 21, 1956.

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Quite a number of Captain Midnight promotional items can be found for sale on eBay: comic books, a novel, recordings of the radio shows, DVDs of the 15-chapter 1942 movie cliffhanger serial starring Dave O'Brien and DVDs of the 1954 to 1956 TV show. The prices are, well, pricey. For instance, a red plastic Ovaltine shake-up mug (no top) with a drawing of the Capt. saying, "Ovaltine, the Heart of a Hearty Breakfast!" goes for $68, reduced from $80; a Captain Midnight Secret Squadron (iron-on) Insignia Patch, still in the original plastic envelope, will set you back $49.99; an Ovaltine cup like the shake-up mug can be found for $49 and another for $80.75; the blue plastic top for the Ovaltine shake-up mug can be bought separately from another dealer for $7.96. Another website offers the shake-up mug, with the blue top, for a reasonable $19.99.

My brother and I dutifully drank Ovaltine, saved the inner jar seals and sent them, along with a dollar or two, to the Ovaltine folks and got the mugs, cups and cloth insignia. We once had all of the above, plus the golden Secret Squadron decoder pin. I believe our mother decided to give all of this treasure to our two younger boy cousins when she unilaterally decided we were too old for such things. Had she only wrapped up the lot in a plastic bag and put it away in the top of a closet!

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You may have noticed the number of big screen movies that have been and are being made around characters that began as radio shows and or were first comic book heroes, such as Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, and more recently, the shield-wielding Captain America. Perhaps it is time to bring back the Captain, "Icky," "Tut" and "The Silver Dart." and the Secret Squadron. "Justice through Strength and Courage" was the motto of the Squadron, and we could all use more of those qualities.

By the way, Jeff thoughtfully gave me a large jar of chocolaty Ovaltine to enjoy while watching the DVDs.