Well I saved the program to my DVR but the local cable company was shifting the channels changing their numbers around that night so early in part two the dvr ended up recording the program on the channel that had taken the place of Scy Fy at that number.
I'm not that displeased since though I was looking for whatever good points I could find in this pilot, I simply wasn't finding any.
Though I must admit, I never really cottened to the old Phantom costume. Through I'm really glad it didn't have a cape.
Cape and cowl worked for the Batman, and a very few others, but on most it just looked silly.
The purple Phantom costume just never looked right to me. I'd seen the costume as gray in the B&W newspaper strips long before ever seeing the comic books with color.
As gray and black it looked more menacing and workmanlike.
The Scy Fy body armor outfit did not look very realistic to me, more like it was cobbled together from sports protective equipment. I've seen some very elaborate ultralight body armor worn by those who like to kayak down white water gorges, those outfits looked better than the SF costume armor.
In studying the early ballistic armor I found that there were effective concealable body armors available in the early 20th century.
The best I found used a thick layer silk vest with a thin nickel steel or Hadon Manganese steel breast plate over the front.
The Russians had bought thousands of the silk vests and added the breastplates of nickel steel to provide protection for front line officers during the Russo-Japanese war before WW1. These apparently worked very well in stopping revolver bullets at point blank range, and rifle bullets at a distance.
The US Army tested the silk vest by itself and found it would stop buckshot and most pocket pistol bullets at anything but point blank range, and the .45 pistol bullet at ranges great enough that velocity dropped to around 40 feet per second.
No where near as good as Kevlar of course.
The "Motorized Bandits" like Dilinger, Floyd, and Nelson often wore body armor, which prompted police to buy up WW1 surplus Browning Automatic Rifles and Colts Firearms produced a special Law Enforcement version called the "Monitor" to engage armored gunmen on equal terms.
Dilinger and several others used cutdown BARs to counter FBI body armor and lightly armored police vans.
The .38 Super Auto cartridge and the .357 Revolver were marketed to LEO as necessary in defeating concealed body armor at close ranges.
Black Widow Spider "dragline" silk webbing is aproximately as strong as Kevlar, perhaps a bit stronger.
Were I working on a hero character set in the 20's or 30's I'd have him discover that all those spider webs blocking off portions of the cave under his mansion could be put to use. He could set his trusty butler to gathering the webs and processing them into thread for weaving a light concealable vest to wear under the costume, and maybe some thin strong rope for swinging in from roof tops and such.
Spider Silk was once used to make the crosshairs of telescopic sights, nothing else that thin was anywhere near as strong.
