International Influence of Cliffhanger Serial Films: Beyond the USA

[Stephen Tashi]

Cliffhanger serial films were once popular in the USA. Was this genre popular in other countries?

The current Wikipedia page lists very few foreign serial films ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_serials ). Of those it lists, I don't know how many are in the cliffhanger format.

 

[andrewkirk]

I am not aware of any such film series outside the USA. But the BBC's Doctor Who, prior to its reboot in 2005, followed the same sort of idea only on television rather than in cinemas. Stories were typically of four to eight half-hour episodes, shown with one episode per week, with each episode except the last in a story ending in a cliffhanger. They even had a special sound-effect they used to signal the cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Next week, they'd usually start with the previous episode's scene in which the cliffhanger occurred (ie a little earlier than the cutoff point).

Based on following your link, it sounds like the Doctor Who cliffhanger paradigm may have been influenced by those earlier cinema serials.