Avon would have kicked Ming's arse

I saw both Flash Gordon and Blake's 7 at a very young age, and god bless my parents for letting me, but I'm not sure this was a very good idea, because they both had some very serious ideas floating about, and were both very, very sexy things to watch.

Crucially, I saw them at a time just before home video recorders became a thing, so after seeing them at that young age, I didn't see them again for another six or seven years, which is half of my damn childhood. By the time they were repeated on television, I was a teenager, and was able to clear up some misconceptions - including the fact that I always thought they took place in the same universe.

Basically, I thought General Kala, one of Ming The Merciless' top henchpeople, was a mutoid, one of the soulless soldiers of the evil Federation in Blake's 7. The mutoids only appeared in a couple of episodes, but I never forgot them, largely because of an intense dream I once had about falling through the universe with them.

But they were dressed in black uniforms, with a weird and ornate headpiece covering much of their skull, and my childhood memories confused the two, and the only way I could reconcile them is that they took place in the same universe.

When I saw the film and TV show again, and got to read some comic adaptions of the properties, one of the first things I noticed is that they don't look anything alike at all, other than they wore tight black  uniforms and were generally evil.

(I'll leave the psychology about my youngest self's small obsession with these evil women to the Freud fans, but it's all still kinda obvious. See also: Women, El)

So I know there is no connection between the two - although with Flash filmed in Britain, they undoubtedly shared some of the same movie craftspeople and SFX gurus - but I still think of them as connected, deep down in my soul. And while the cynical and ruthless crew of the Liberator might have ultimately failed to bring down the vast bureaucracy of the Federation, they could have booted Ming's ass back to Mongo.