Buck Rogers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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An adventure series about a modern man (mining engineer in the 1920s, astronaut in [[The Seventie]) who is accidentally put into suspended animation, wakes up in the 25th century, and then spends his time as a hero in space.

Over the years it has been seen in various media -- [[Pulp Magazin], Comic Book and comic strips, film serials, role-playing games, video games, [[Buck Rogers in the 25th Century|radio, movie and TV serie] (mmmm, Erin Gray in spandex). Ultimately, these all stem from the popular 1928 novel Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan, about a time-travelling mining engineer named Anthony Rogers. John F. Dille, the head of National Newspaper Service, convinced Nowlan to turn his novel into a daily newspaper comic strip (changing the lead character's name to "Buck" in the process) and the rest, as they say, is history.

For the 1970s TV series, see [[Buck Rogers in the 25th Centur].

Tropes used in Buck Rogers include:
  • Action Girl: Wilma Deering
  • [[Alternate Continuit]: Unlike his comic page contemporary [[Flash Gordon (comic strip)|Flash Gordo], who tends to stay visually recognizable in most incarnations, Buck and his world have undergone major overhauls in almost every updated version, starting with the Disco-era aesthetic in the 1970s TV series, through TSR's hard s.f. "XXVc" role-playing game setting, to the [[Tron Line] outfits in the current comic book by Dynamite Entertainment. TSR averted this with the "Cliffhangers" version of the RPG, which was very faithful to the original comic -- perhaps to a fault, since it started at the [[Canon Discontinuity|mostly forgotte], [[Yellow Peril|politically incorrec] [[Early Installment Weirdness|beginnin] of the comic's timeline, before the iconic space opera elements had even been introduced.
  • [[Angs]: Goes with being a [[Fish Out of Temporal Wate]. Everyone Buck ever knew or loved from his old life is dead.
  • [[Artificial Gravity|Anti Gravit]: In the comic and novel, much of the technology is based around the other-dimensional substance called inertron, which reacts negatively to gravity. Strapping a weighted chunk of it to a vehicle makes it light enough to fly easily, and strapping some on your back (a "jumping belt") allows you to make giant leaps across the landscape or fly with a low-powered jet pack. Of course, if you let go of a piece, it will zip up into the sky and you'll never see it again.
  • [[Braids, Beads, and Buckskin]: the comic strip featured an enclave of Native Americans (identified as Navajo but depicted more as generic Indians common to the media at the time). The 'Navajo' fight as part of the resistance against the Han, resulting in such bizarre imagery in the strip as characters wearing buckskins and having feathers in their hair firing rayguns at the invading airships. [[Fair for Its Da] in that the Native American characters are considered full and equal partners in the resistance, have all the advanced technology of their white counterparts, and (at least at the beginning) are empowered to arrest Buck and Wilma when they go AWOL.
  • [[Casanova Wannab]: In the short-lived 1970s revival of the newspaper comic, Kane came off kind of like an evil version of Larry from [[Three's Compan]. And the funny thing is, it kinda worked.
  • [[Chosen On]
  • [[Cold Sleep, Cold Futur]
  • Cool Airship: The comic's steel airships, supported by magnetic force beams.
  • [[Cool Gat]: The stargates (No relation).
  • Dastardly Whiplash: Kane, in the comics.
  • [[Darker and Edgie]: TSR's XXVc role-playing setting, a "Harder" Sci-Fi version of the story.
  • [[Disintegrator Ra]: The [[Trope Name].
  • [[Domed Hometow]: In the comic strip, the germ-free "aeseptic cities" in Asia. The inhabitants all have enormous lifespans because of the lack of contagions.
  • [[Face Heel Tur]: In the comics, Kane started out on the good guys' side, but he turned traitor very early on.
  • [[Femme Fatal]: Ardala Valmar
  • [[Fish Out of Temporal Wate]
  • [[Follow the Leade]: [[Flash Gordon (comic strip)|Flash Gordo] was conceived as a result of Buck popularizing [[Space Oper] on the comics page. For that matter, Buck and Flash were George Lucas's primary inspiration for [[Star War], right down to the iconic [[Scrolling Tex].
  • [[The Futur]
  • [[Human Alien]
  • In a Single Bound: Jumping belts.
  • Last of His Kind
  • [[Made of Phlebotinu]: One of the earliest examples.
  • Moustache Of Evil: Killer Kane, originally.
  • [[Mythology Ga]: The [[Dynamite Entertainmen] version has several references to the TV series, along with other incarnations of the franchise.
  • [[Newspaper Comic]
  • Opening Scroll
  • [[Print Long Runner]: The newspaper comic ran for many years, although it's long gone now.
  • [[Ray Gu]: Has probably the most instantly recognizable ray pistols in all space opera, because tin versions were a popular toy back in the comic's heyday. The comic book uses the same design for them.
  • [[Real Life Writes the Plo]: [[Niagara Falls|Niagar], New York, was made the capital of Earth's government to thank and promote a newspaper in the area that ran the comic.
  • [[Recycled in Spac]: Space mummies and space vampires, among others.
  • [[The Red Plane]: The Tiger Men of Mars.
  • Rival Turned Evil: In the original stories, Killer Kane.
  • [[Scrolling Tex]: The film serials are the [[Trope Codifie].
  • [[Slept Through the Apocalyps]
  • [[Space Fighte]: The 1970s starfighters are some of the most gorgeous ships of this type ever designed.
  • [[Space Oper]
  • [[Space Pirate]: Black Barney
  • [[Techno Babbl]: Star Trek has nothing on [[Buck Roger] in this department, trust me.
  • The Vamp: Ardala -- yes, she does predate the TV show. Though she wasn't a princess in the comics.
  • [[Tron Line]: The outfits in the comic book from [[Dynamite Entertainmen].
  • Yellow Peril: The first bad guys Buck fights in the early novels are the Han Airlords, Chinese who invaded America with zeppelins and ruled it for a couple of centuries until Buck shows up and leads [[La Résistanc] against them.
    • One of the novels does note that the Han Airlords were probably the result of a meteor or probe that crashed in Mongolia. The alien object apparently took possession of the inland Chinese and Mongolians and turned them toward conquest. The Airlords of Han specifically mentions (in a throwaway paragraph at the end) that the Japanese and coastal Chinese were unaffected, although the 'gangs' of North America approached them cautiously (it also notes that the 'blacks of Africa' are now 'one of the leading races of the world'). This was a massive case of [[Fair for Its Da]. (Note also that the novels were written well before [[World War Tw].)
    • And it doesn't end there. Later comics took the Martians, who had usually been considered native to Mars, and changed them so they were the Japanese who had fled into space at the end of World War II. Then they did it again with the Monkeymen of Planet X.
  • [[Zeerus]

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