The action/adventure film first became popular with weekly Saturday serials, running in installments that often had 'cliff-hanging' endings to entice viewers to return for the next show. Heroine Pearl White in the 20-episode The Perils of Pauline (1914) was the first major super-star of the silent serials. Besides Pearl White, there were other queens of the sound serials, including Kay Aldridge (as jungle Queen Nyoka in Nyoka and the Tigermen (1942)) and Linda Stirling (in the 12 part serial Zorro's Black Whip (1944) and as the "Tiger Woman" in another 12-episode serial, Perils of the Darkest Jungle (1944)).

Other action-adventure heros of B-picture adventure films included Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. 'Buster' Crabbe was the most famous of all the serial action heroes in the 1930s and 1940s, starring as both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But there were others: Kane Richmond (as the "Spy Smasher," "The Shadow," and a star in the "Cliffhanger Serials" and the "Rin-Tin-Tin" adventure serial), Tom Tyler (as "Captain Marvel" with countless episodes, and "The Phantom of the West"), and Don "Red" Barry (as "Red Ryder").

Modern-Day Homage to the Earliest Adventure Films: Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was an affectionate return and tribute to the early days of Saturday morning matinees and cinema, with comic-book archaeology hero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) battling the Nazis while searching for the sacred Ark of the Covenant - the first in a very successful trilogy of films. So were the adventure-action-romance-comedies Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel The Jewel of the Nile (1985) starring Michael Douglas as the American soldier-of-fortune, and Kathleen Turner as a romance novelist.