7 M.P.S; Zero 3

Du Mont, one of the oldest of the four TV networks, concentrates its heaviest fire on the youngest televiewers. Each weekday evening it tries to blanket the bubble-gum trade with Small Fry Club (6 p.m., E.S.T.), for three-to seven-year-olds; with Magic Cottage (6:30 p.m.), for the eight-to-twelve set; and with enormously successful Captain Video (7 p.m.), aimed at teenagers.

Small Fry and Magic Cottage lean toward whimsy and traditional fairy tales. Captain Video plunges the adolescent into the science-fiction world of interplanetary travel and electronic marvels. It features epic, if inconclusive struggles between the forces of Good, headed by humorless Captain Video, and Evil, personified by a hand-rubbing eccentric named Doctor Pauli who, as president of the Astrodial Society, pettishly wants to destroy the earth.

This atomic-age potboiler appears to make sense to its adolescent audience. Many adult viewers are soon lost in its trackless, pseudo-technical doubletalk ("Forty-seven degrees inclination, speed seven miles per second; temperature calibrated at zero three; interior pressure stable at nine oh nine"), or by the sudden mid-program appearance on Captain Video's "Scanner" of a five-minute stretch of western movie. Du Mont's Vice President James L. Caddigan, who created Captain Video in 1949, explains: "The western is there to give us the pace and action that we can't get in a live studio production. The hero of the western is always supposed to be an agent of Captain Video's--that sort of ties it together."

Caddigan solemnly avers that Captain Video, sponsored by Power House Candy Bar and Skippy Peanut Butter, has an educational bent: "It sets up in a child's mind the idea of what electronics can do."

Scripter M. C. Brock, a graduate of radio's Dick Tracy, tries to keep his plot abreast of the news. Captain Video began his interstellar travels during the excitement about flying saucers, and he was helping out in the front lines during the first months of the Korean war. Currently, the captain (aided by invisible planetary friends) is fending off an all-out invasion of the U.S. by the "combined forces of the Near East, the Far East and Eastern Europe."

Though developed on TV, Captain Video's influence is not limited to its round-eyed televiewers. Last month Fawcett Publications put the captain between the covers of a comic book. Last week Columbia Pictures announced the filming of a 15-episode movie serial based on the captain's adventures. Says Caddigan proudly: "I guess we've arrived."

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