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This chapter considers how discourses around Italian crime films' releases developed in two specific markets: those of Italy and the USA, examining how their differing distribution patterns across these markets resulted in contrasting promotional strategies and critical discourses. Through a wide-ranging survey of newspaper film reviews and publicity campaigns, the chapter charts a marked contrast between the two reception contexts, illustrating the centrality of 'serial' repetition to an understanding of these films' significance in their place of origin. When the films were removed from the concentrated production and release patterns of the Italian filone system, their status as innately serial artefacts failed to register, rendering them laughable peculiarities rather than culturally familiar rituals.

This book explores the historiographic importance, narrative patterns, marketing, and cultural reception of the serial genre through a wider contextualization of the serial phenomenon and its fearless female heroines led by Pearl White, who plays the title character in The Perils of Pauline. It investigates the complexities of Pearl White's performance and the overall cultural power of serial queens in many markets at a critical historical juncture in the history of cinema. It examines how the serial film became part of a rethinking of production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. It also considers the American film industry's expansion on the international market, fueled in large part by the profitable serial format, along with the serial craze's international impact. The book suggests that American serial films are an illustration of both globalization and an accompanying hegemonic practice of Hollywood cinema and the vicissitudes of glocalization.

This chapter reveals the fate of each of the time vessels discussed in the earlier chapters. Despite their architects’ fantasies of glorious reception ceremonies, time vessels encountered manifold problems: from physical deterioration and the forgetting of their location (or very existence) to the indifference or condescension that spectators (and, subsequently, historians and archivists) displayed toward their contents. Yet, the chapter concludes by reiterating that these time vessels—and time capsules more generally—constitute a crucial source for historians. Read against the grain, they reveal how past groups struggled over the historicization of the present, the politics of memorialization, and the implication of new media, among other things. They also convey the various hopes and fears for the future that depositors rendered concrete through messages and artifacts addressed to specific recipients.