Problem of Identity

The ads for Manhattan's biggest department store sirened: "Guess who's opening Macy's camp center this year? Captain Video himself." Exulted a Macy publicity man: "He has a fantastic pull with the kids. He can pack 2,000 in 400 square feet!" Nobody seems to care that Captain Video is no longer battling extraterrestrial badmen in outer galaxies. For though the show is dead, the character lives on, like a stubborn ghost, to haunt Actor Al Hodge, who portrayed the gallant captain for five years on the nation's TV screens. "I've made more personal appearances as Captain Video since I've been off the show than I ever did on it," says Hodge. "I've been at the opening of every Grand Union supermarket, every doughnut shop around New York in the past six months. How do I lick it? What do I do?"

Fact is that Hodge has been effectively unemployed as an actor ever since the show folded in 1955. For two years Captain Video himself lingered on as a hero without a show, introducing cartoons and kiddies' space films. But since last August he has been without a regular TV job. He is a victim of TV's power to create a fictive personality that neither make-believe limbo nor enduring flesh can destroy, a historic character of TV folklore uncomfortably survived by himself. Hodge has tried in vain to get dramatic parts and commercial assignments. No director will hire him, arguing that every TV viewer instantly identifies him as the captain. (Standard greeting: "Hello there, Video, what can we do for you?") His only big TV job since 1955 was a commercial in which he was a dentist boosting Dentyne chewing gum--and the kids doubtless wondered what Captain Video was doing in a white smock.

A drama and speech major at Ohio's Miami University, Al Hodge, 45, is a husky (6 ft. 2 in., 195 lbs.) airwave veteran who makes no claims to being an earth-shaking actor. He is a competent performer, a family man with two teenagers to send through college, a Long Island Sunday-school teacher and a prisoner of fate, zealously determined "to get out of that damned Video suit." As a last hope, he has resorted to disguise. He has landed a role in a forthcoming TV pilot film in which he will clap on a talcumed wig and, with his identity concealed, impersonate George Washington. Says reluctant Spaceman Hodge: "What is good enough for the Father of Our Country is certainly good enough for Captain Video--blast him!"

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