March 31, 1914: "The Perils of Pauline" Premieres

Pearl White, 1916. I don't know why

she's holding a pig on a car's hood.

March 31, 1914: The Perils of Pauline premieres, one of the earliest film serials, starring Pearl White, one of the top film stars of the era.

It set the tone for serials to come: Every 2 weeks (eventually serials would be cut to every week), a hero would be put into a seemingly impossible situation, and, there, the installment would end, and you would have to come back and see the next installment to see how he -- or, in this case, she -- would get out of it.

White played Pauline, an ambitious young heiress with an independent nature and a desire for adventure. Her wealthy guardian had left her inheritance in the care of his secretary, Raymond Owen, who was legally obligated to release it as soon as she was married. Of course, if she should die before getting married, then the money would go to Owen. So he continually sets her up for calamity. There were 20 chapters, averaging 20 1/2 minutes apiece.

The complete serial, 6 hours and 50 minutes, has been lost: The only known version is a condensed 9-chapter version, running about 3 hours and 34 minutes, that was released for the European market.

Pearl Fay White was born on March 4, 1889 in Green Ridge, Missouri, and grew up in Springfield, Missouri. An accomplished bareback rider in a circus by the time she was 13, she did most of her own stunts in her films, becoming known as the Queen of the Serials. She married and divorced twice, and had no children.

She retired from films in 1924, moved to Paris, owned a nightclub there and a hotel-casino in Biarritz in southwestern France, and also owned racehorses. But injuries from her stunts caught up with her, and she drank to ease the pain, and died of liver failure in 1938, only 49 years old.

The alliterative title of her best-known serial, and the serial's style, was quickly copied by the even more adventurous Helen Holmes in The Hazards of Helen, which ran in a massive 119 chapters, from November 7, 1914 to February 24, 1917. Holmes would be the 1st film heroine put in danger by being tied to a railroad track.

But because White's films were more popular, people mistakenly thought she was the "damsel in distress" who had to be saved by a dashing hero as a steam locomotive came ever closer. She didn't, but she did inspire the term "cliffhanger ending," by actually having one where she was hanging off a cliff.

In 1921, William S. Hart starred in O'Malley of the Mounted, as an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This character would be parodied as Dudley Do-Right in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the early 1960s, with the villain, the black-suited, top-hatted, mustachoied Snidely Whiplash often tying a young woman to railroad tracks. But Whiplash was a stereotype that never appeared in The Perils of Pauline.

Another homage to Pauline was the 1969 Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, a companion cartoon to The Wacky Races, itself a parody of the 1965 film The Great Race, which was set in 1908. Janet Waldo voiced heiress Penelope as a Southern belle (often yelling "Help!" -- or, more accurately, "Hay-elp!"), whose inheritance was placed with lawyer Sylvester Sneekly, voiced by Paul Lynde.

Wanting to get his hands on that loot without restrictions, since Penelope had no heirs, Sylvester adopted the villainous identity of the Hooded Claw, and set elaborate traps for her. Sometimes, he would break the fourth wall, and banter with the narrator, the Los Angeles disc jockey Gary Owens, better known as the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and voice of the cartoon superheroes Space Ghost on the show of the same title, and later the Blue Falcon on Dynomutt, Dog Wonder.

Sometimes, she got out of the Claw's traps on her own. Sometimes, she needed help from a bunch of dwarf gangsters, the Ant Hill Mob, who had been villains on Wacky Races but had turned heroes for this series. Sometimes, in trying to rescue her, the Mob, complete with their talking Model T, Chuggaboom, would need help themselves; and Penelope, having gotten out of her own jam, would get them out of theirs. She turned out to be pretty ingenious, always foiling the Claw, who would yell, "Blast!" (with his henchmen mumbling, "Right."), but she never seemed to figure out that Sylvester was the Claw.

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March 31, 1914 was a Tuesday. Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born on this day.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And the hockey season had ended 12 days earlier, with the NHA Champion Toronto Blue shirts beating the PCHA Champion Victoria Aristocrats for the Stanley Cup. So there were no scores on this historic day.