"Attack and blow that plane to space dust!" This 1952 Milton Bradley board game capitalized on the immense popularity of the "Captain Video" TV Series. "The champion of justice, truth, and freedom," Captain Video defends the Free World from his arch rival, Dr. Pauli, and such evil villains as Hing Foo Sung and Queen Karola. Attracting kids with catchy graphics and a detailed spaceship control panel, the Milton Bradley game pitted competing Video Rangers against each other in a race to eliminate Dr. Pauli.
The DuMont TV network originally developed Captain Video, the world's first television space hero, in 1949 to spotlight clips from movie Westerns. Airing nightly from 1949-1955, Captain Video and his trusty companion, the Video Ranger, battled the forces of evil throughout the universe, interrupted by brief episodes from Westerns shown on the captain's video monitor. In spite of the series' outlandish plot, the producers did their best to keep the show connected to contemporary life. Captain Video battled UFOs just as Americans first began seeing them in the skies, and he joined the front lines of the Korean war, fending off an all-out invasion of the United States by its Cold War adversaries.