Flash Gordon: Zeitgeist #8

[superboyprime]

Comments

:)

[blue_bolt]

*Claps for Hans Zarkov*

[kamino_neko]

I've never thought about it before, but the Soviet aspect of this brings it to mind. I wonder how Zarkov ended up with a German forename. (Actually, I'm not entirely sure I ever actually knew his first name...) Does anybody a little more into Flash Gordon know if that has ever been addressed?

(Hans is a derivative of Johannes, thus the Russian form would be Ivan.)

[espanolbot]

I think that it's just a product of the time he was originally created, and they just put random foreign names together. Might be an explanation within the series though, somewhere.

[kamino_neko]

Oh, yes...that's almost certainly the real-world explanation. I'm wondering if the rather unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) situation has ever been given an in-universe explanation.

[arilou_skiff]

Well, there were tons of germans in Russia at the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_germans

[kamino_neko]

Hmm. Possible, but I would expect a German surname, if he were one.

[richardak]

In the
live-action film from 1980, he was pretty clearly Jewish. It's possible that his family had at some point spoken Yiddish, and since Yiddish is mainly a dialect of German with some Hebrew, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian (among other tongues) mixed in, that could theoretically explain the hybrid name.

[icon_uk]

With apologies to Frank Shannon from the old black and white serials (which were always shown during school holidays in my childhood), I confess I reflexively read Zarkof in Topol's voice.

[lieut_kettch]

Maybe his father was ethnic Russian married to a German?

[donnblake]

Even if his father doesn't have German ancestry, he might have been named after a maternal ancestor, a family friend, etc.

[greenmask]

I really like Zarkov.