The Phantom Empire (1935)

Otto Brower, Gene Autry, B. Reeves Eason, Frankie Darro, Betsy King Ross · 1935 · 245 min

Gene Autry plays Gene Autry, a singing cowboy who has to broadcast his radio show from Radio Ranch every day at two o'clock or lose his contract — which becomes difficult when he keeps being abducted to Murania, a scientific civilisation twenty thousand feet beneath his own pasture. The genre collision is total and nobody involved appears remotely troubled by it: yodelling, robots, ray guns and Thunder Riders across twelve chapters. There is nothing else quite like it, and there was never going to be.

Chosen print (2026-08-23): Archive.org item chapter-01-the-singing-cowboy — all 12 chapters, 240 min total, 1.92 GB, ~1.1 Mbps.

Ships as a single multi-file torrent containing all 12 chapters in order, which is how a serial was actually shown — a chapter a week. Chapter files are zero-padded so their running order is their sort order.

Found by a serial-aware sweep, which sums every video file in an item rather than judging one file at a time; the ordinary print sweep could not see serials at all, because it compared a single 20-minute chapter against a multi-hour listing and discarded the item. The chapter sequence was checked for gaps — a missing chapter is the usual failure and is invisible unless counted — and the release total was verified against Archive.org's published sizes before hashing.

Watch-through done (2026-08-25): every chapter plays, none missing, none duplicated.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1935 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1962–64 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.