I love serials. No, not cereals. I mean Buck Rogers, not Frosted Flakes.

The movie-house serials were on their way out when my generation was going to the movies on Saturday mornings. I do have recollections of serials preceding the main feature.

I’ve see all 12 parts of the Buck Rogers serial from 1939, the greatest year in film history. After all, that was the year “Gone With the Wind,” “Beau Geste” and “Stagecoach” came out. With all due respect to Clark Gable and Butterfly McQueen, to this day I’d rather watch John Wayne in “Stagecoach” or Gary Cooper and Ray Milland in “Beau Geste.”

When I was a towheaded young’un going to the movies on Saturday mornings, serials were like sprinkles on an ice-cream cone – they make the main attraction more appealing.

Each segment in a serial had one thing in common č the cliffhanger ending. It takes little imagination to understand that the word “cliffhanger” derived from some actor or actress in one of the first serials literally hanging from a cliff. One had to come back to the theater the next Saturday to find out what happened to the person hanging from the cliff.

Talk about your marketing schemes. We knew that if the person hanging from the cliff was a “good guy,” that person would be saved from a horrible death. If the person hanging from the cliff was a “bad guy,” that person would fall to a horrible death, perhaps in to a body of water filled with alligators (or crocodiles, if the action took place in Africa) or onto the jagged rocks on the desert floor below.

But there was that chance the hero or heroine could fall. So, one returned to the theater the next Saturday, just in case.

After viewing an installment of the Buck Rogers serial this past Saturday on Turner Classic Movies, my mind drifted back about 46 years to the Florida Theater in Pensacola, Fla. For less than a dollar, I could see a chapter in a serial, a couple of cartoons, a newsreel or two and two, that’s two, feature films.

In those days, parents, grandparents and aunts would drop off loads of children for several hours. As the children sat in a darkened theater, eating popcorn and watching the big screen, the adults took advantage of several hours without the children and regained their sanity, at least for several hours.

In addition to Buck Rogers, there were Flash Gordon, Captain Marvel, The Phantom and other futuristic serials. It’s fun to see, nearly 50 years later, how close those serials were in “predicting” what would happen in the future or just how far off base they were in predicting the future.

Although produced as entertainment, some serials provided some educational elements. Clyde Beatty’s “Darkest Africa” informed children about the geography and wildlife of Africa. “Undersea Kingdom” educated children about oceans and aquatic life in those oceans, with Crash Corrigan as the serial’s hero.

I wish the Turnage Theater, if only for one Saturday, would offer an opportunity to return to the thrilling days of my yesteryears. I’d pay a fair price for a ticket to see a chapter of the Flash Gordon serial, a couple of Looney Tune cartoons (at least one with Foghorn Leghorn or Taz, the Tasmanian Devil), a couple of 1930s newsreels and two Godzilla movies.

Clayton Moore would understand my yearnings. If you are wondering just who was Clayton Moore, I suggest looking up this phrase: “Hi-yo, Silver! Away!”

Mike Voss covers the city of Washington for the Washington Daily News. He passed up a chance to see the opera “Aida” while visiting friends in New York about 12 years ago. Instead, he went to a Looney Tunes festival at a theater in Greenwich Village. The theater was packed with baby-boomers.