Aura lacks Dale’s fragile beauty and that’s what makes her so appealing: she’s strong, forceful, uninhibited. And in case the sexual energy behind the eyeline matches was missed by some of the younger boys (no doubt, the film’s largest constituency), Stephani sets up a second, less subtle triangle. Ming, rising from his Shell-Oil-shaped chair, approaches Dale and openly confesses his desires: "Your eyes, your hair, your skin. I’ve never seen one like you before. Ahh, you are beautiful." He stretches twisted, gnarled fingers toward her, but before he can touch her purity, Flash leans in and intervenes. "Keep your slimy hands off her," he shouts, underlining the text’s fear of race-mixing and the privileging of the white body as status symbol and power.

Later, in Chapter Eight, a third triangle is added to the mix, as the portly Prince Barin (Richard Alexander), the rightful heir to Mongo—his father was killed by Ming and he himself banished—admits his love for Aura to Flash! It all happens during a crazy sword duel: Ming had guaranteed freedom and the choice of a bride to the victor, and Barin, disguised under a black hood, fights his best friend in order to win the woman he loves, or, should he lose, to meet his own death wish and be put out of his "misery." Aura further troubles the triangle by surreptitiously helping Flash fight a dreaded Orangopoid (another one of Ming’s tests—actually, a guy in a monkey suit with a rhinoceros horn on his head). Disobeying her father’s wishes, Aura attacks the creature, launching a spear into the all-too-vulnerable white spot along its neck. This subtle form of patricide—going against the law of the father—will play out in the rest of the narrative as Aura will move from loving Flash to finally loving Barin and reforming her bad-girl ways.

Finally, Ralph Berger’s art direction is stunning, an appealing blend of styles: the interiors to Ming’s fortress are a combination of Asian and Egyptian architecture. The exteriors are borrowed from James Whale’s Frankenstein. The spaceships burst from the pages of Buck Rogers and Universal’s earlier SF flop Just Imagine (1930). The Atom Furnace room, where Thun, Flash, and Barin are held work as slaves, modifies the urban angst and alienation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1925). And all of the various monarchs are amalgams of literary history. King Kala, ruler of the shark people, resembles a New York gangster in Caligula robes. Prince Barin, with his chiseled breast plate and gleaming headgear captures the glow of a Roman warrior, and the laughing, lustful King Vultan strikes a pose somewhere between a winged Friar Tuck and the gluttony of Henry the Eighth. Flash Gordon benefits greatly from foregoing other serials’ reliance on location shooting (where overuse of the same terrain frequently resulted in visual monotony). The use of Universal’s soundstages combined with Berger’s art direction created a unique comic-book reality that still, sixty years later, looks great, hot, and very sexy.