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THE GREAT SERIAL "QUEENS" 245
serials and their film counterparts in order to lure readers away from rival sheets.
This mattered nothing at all to anyone outside of America, but film-goers reaped the benefit the world over for the serials were, for their day, better written than most two-reel dramas and better produced than the average short picture.
There now came into existence the great " queens " of the serials, the most famous being Pearl White and the second undoubtedly Mary Pickford's sister, Lottie Pickford. They had many rivals but few stayed the course as long as Pearl White and Lottie Pickford. Pearl White got away to a good start with The Perils of Pauline. Lottie Pickford, however, was no mean rival in The Diamond From the Sky. The only serial " queen " to survive on the screen to-day, and that in character roles, is Billie Burke.
Most serials ran for twenty weeks, by which time the heroine had suffered just about all the perils the scenarists and the newspaper serial writers could think up.
A technique and a jargon grew up around the making of the serials.
It was permissible to cheat a little at the end of each episode. For the sake of the thrill one could actually hurl Pearl White into a volcano, continuing next week with a shot which was not quite so advanced, merely showing the heroine being saved just before the rope to which she was clinging to an airship, and which the villain was contriving to have gnawed through by a rat, actually broke and dropped her into the boiling crater.
On the technical side it was the practice to use models fairly extensively for dams bursting and aircraft crashing, and in the dangerous high spots it was not uncommon to substitute a male circus daredevil, attired in women's clothes and wearing a blonde wig, for the heroine.
Into vogue came the trade name of cliff-hanger and the scenarists called the dangerous situation at the end of each instalment the weenie, and the rescue which started the following chapter, the take out. No one, to this day, can explain the derivation of weenie.
The Exploits of Elaine remains the most famous of all serials. Its mystery-villain, The Clutching Hand, became both a byword and a catchphrase. Pearl White, who had started modestly as a child performer in a touring version of Uncle Toms Cabin, and who hailed from the Middle West, became world-famous through this one role