I have been reading Fangoria close to the beginning. Not exactly all the way back (I would murder just about anyone for a Godzilla cover #1), but at least back to the fifth issue. Without belaboring things too much, I recently unleashed the oldest box of Fangoria issues in my collection for the first time in about a decade (I had the box taped shut from my move down from Alaska to California), and it was with extreme giddiness that I encountered some old friends again. Meet the family...
#5, April 1980
#7, August 1980
#8, October 1980
#9, November 1980
#10, December 1980
I saw many a copy of Fangoria confiscated by the teachers and narcs at school in my time. Myself, I had at least three copies snagged from me in my high school days. I had buddies that had them confiscated regularly. While Fangoria was not officially an "adult" magazine, or even close to pornographic in any means, the gore and violence displayed in the magazine (along with occasional slips of nudity) meant that the book was not considered proper material for the youth haunting the hallways of America's schools. Some stores refused to carry it, and of those that did, some did classify it as an adult magazine, and would refuse to sell it to minors. The trick in obtaining Fangoria at the time – as well as National Lampoon, another magazine that walked the "adult" line that was a must in those days – was finding the stores that would sell it to you. I had a couple of ringers where most, if not all, of the clerks were pretty open to just making a buck as long as they didn't get hassled about it.
#11, February 1981
#13, June 1981
#15, October 1981
#18, April 1982
#21, August 1982
After school, I started working for a news agency that supplied most of Alaska (and that had a couple of stores in Hawaii at the time) with magazines and books. Having an apartment meant bills and more bills, and since I had a pretty big comic and baseball card habit at the time, some things had to go by the wayside. Working for the agency made it a little easier in one way: we were allowed to take a certain number of magazines home each week after all open orders had been pulled, as long as we tore the covers off of them. For an older teenage guy, it was a great way to get dirty magazines for free, but I also discovered that I didn't have to pay for Fangoria anymore. I regret the decision now, because while I still have the issues from those days and I continued to read the magazine faithfully, they don't have any covers.
#25, February 1983
#33, February 1984
These last two issues are the odd ones out, issues that I did buy with covers within that "cover tearing" span, probably because I had some extra cash at the time, or in the case of Videodrome, wanted to have one with a cover. When I started making more money a few years later after being promoted, I started buying Fango again properly, but I still have big chunks in my collection that are coverless. Still, while covers might give certain issues some very modest resale value, it's the material inside that counts. And I don't plan to sell my old Fangos anyway...
RTJ
[Note: The photos in this article are fresh scans of my own covers in my collection. If you want to snag them and post them, that's fine. I don't care.]
So, did you get everything that you wanted for Christmas? What I wanted was a little reconciliation with a holiday with which I have increasingly lost touch, and perhaps to hide myself a bit from the rest of this truly substandard year. So I decided to dig into some old holiday Christmas cartoon "classics," some which I love, and some for which I run hot and cold depending on when I watch them. In getting my animation blog, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, restarted over the past three months (at the same time as The Cinema 4 Pylon, my main site), part of the reason was for me to really dive back into getting reacquainted with many of these cartoons after concentrating so deeply on feature films for the past few years. Cinematically, animation -- especially the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons of Warner Bros. and Donald Duck shorts -- was my first love, not surprisingly, since cartoons are how many kids first get a notion of popular entertainment. And honestly, when I was a kid, I thought Bugs Bunny cartoons were just made for seeing on television, until my parents explained to me that they used to see them in theatres when they were kids.
It wasn't until I started discovering, mostly under my own volition, the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, Ray Harryhausen, Orson Welles, and Hammer and Universal horror flicks (for example) that I really started getting a sense of the true expanse of the history of cinema. And in gaining that sense, I began to learn more about animation, and how so many of the characters that I was seeing on Saturday morning television, as a wee child in the late '60s and through my true growing up period in the '70s, had their roots in movie theatres. I always kind of knew that about the Disney films. since some of my earliest movie-going experiences were Pinocchio and The Jungle Book, and in watching episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney (a mainstay of my youth) where they often had old intros by Walt himself, I was able to ascertain the connection between his film work and the television world into which he expanded his empire. But apart from Disney, so many of the characters that I knew only from TV: Bugs, Daffy, the Road Runner, Popeye, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Woody Woodpecker, Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, the Pink Panther, Tom and Jerry, Droopy, etc., had all been created initially to be seen on the big screen, not just by children in a ghettoized set of hours on a single day on the weekend, but in theatres on any day, with any showing, and by adults as well as children. I found books on animation at the local library and even in my school library, and also read biographies on Walt Disney (a book by Bob Thomas, which I know now was a suck-up job to the Disney family, but loved then) and Tex Avery (Joe Adamson's Tex Avery: King of Cartoons... find one). I was drawing a lot then, and made my own stupid attempts at animation, though not with using a camera. Finding flip animation too dull and having limited resources (i.e., no movie camera), I did have a very beloved and well-used typewriter at my disposal, and I got deep into writing screenplays for cartoons that would never get made. And that was pretty much the deepest I got into animation as my teens came along. I became a bit of a lost cause to most people, my studies suffered greatly, and I concentrated more on the history of film in general rather than solely on animation. Through the early VHS years, I became a horror fanatic, though I still purchased nearly any cartoon collection that came along. Years later, with a massive stack of cartoons at my disposal, I would organize a couple of animation marathon sleepovers, where a passel of friends would crash on my living room floor and attempt to stay up all night watching hours and hours of cartoons. The fact that Anchorage, Alaska at that time had the world's first 24-hour cartoon channel on UHF also played a large part in the resurgence of animation in my life. And through all of this, I always had a bit of a fascination -- almost like a sub-genre of fascination -- with cartoons that had a Christmas theme. There weren't a lot of them, surprisingly; most of what we tend to consider as the classics of Christmas animation, justifiably, were specials created directly for television, such as the Rankin-Bass multitude of shows, and the Charlie Brown special. But as for theatrical cartoons with holiday themes, they mostly tended to just get mixed in with the rest of the cartoons. Take the Warner Bros.' output as an example. With over a thousand theatrical released from 1930 through the late '60s when they ceased production, there are only a handful of Warner Bros. shorts that have a holiday theme, even in a light way. You'd think that with such a long run and success, that there would be annual Christmas shorts from their studio, but such was not the case. (Were they operating as such capacity today, they would undoubtedly do such a thing; the holidays are just too, too big a business now.) VHS was a good place to find a concentration of these cartoons, as I mentioned in one of my posts this month (the one on Snow Foolin'). However, these tapes were usually rather cheap and contained often terrible prints of the same public domain cartoons over and over again. But as the only way to see many of these shorts consistently, you took what you could get. (The same situation with cheap PD cartoons continues on DVD today; they are all over the Amazon site. Anyone can put one out and sell it.) As for the cartoons that I selected for this month of Christmas/winter celebration, I tried to mix things up a bit, and not go too heavy on one studio or director. I also tried to mix a bit of the more obscure in here as well. Did I succeed in allaying my blues of the past year, and in reconnecting with Christmas? A bit of both, I suppose. Posting these articles allowed me to lose myself in the creative process as I prepared myself for the coming year. I got to put each of these cartoons under my microscope and get to know them more fully. The ones that I loved going in I now probably love a little more, and the ones that were on the fence mostly got off it in either direction, but I at least have a more definite opinion as to how I feel about each one. Most of all, I came out of the experience still loving the holiday. And still loving cartoons. So if that is the best present that I will get this year (though the 50" Smart TV Jen's mom surprised us with last night is definitely in the running), then that is just fine. Here are the holiday cartoons that I reviewed over the past month as part of this theme. Each photo and title are linked to the article for that cartoon:
And finally, here is a Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse cartoon without a Christmas or winter theme, but has a pretty good Santa Claus gag right smack in the middle of it:
[To read Pt. 1 of this series, click here, and for Pt. 2, click here.] Having established the importance of the late night horror movie programs, The World's Most Terrible Movies and Son of Terrible Movies, in my personal development as a movie fanatic, I still have some unfinished business to impart to you. Namely, I have just a few more promos from these programs that I have not shared yet, and a couple of them tie rather coincidentally to both the time of year and to a recent major release currently in movie theatres at this moment.
Promos for local television tend to be rather bland, but every once in a while, you see something different and special. In the late '70s, Richard Gay and his fellow staffers at KIMO-TV were clearly having fun with a phenomenon that was still pretty fresh back then, but which is having a massive, worldwide resurgence right now: Star Wars. Perhaps you have heard of it. In the promo above, film reels have a laser battle in space with a microphone or a stack of dixie cups on top of a microphone, or something like that. Sure, it is about as cheap as cheap can be, and is all the more wonderful for it. Seeing something like this on late night TV was what utter joy was all about for a kid, especially one who was already stoked from dreams of joining the rebellion thanks to Star Wars mania.
The World's Most Terrible Movies programs weren't always relegated to late night, however. They also sometimes moved around on the KIMO-TV Channel 13 schedule depending on the situation; for example, Christmas. The promo above for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was for an afternoon showing on Christmas Day. I was introduced to this film on a similar showing, though not the one being promoted, a few years earlier on one of the local channels (my memory has it as Channel 2, the NBC affiliate, KTUU). It was probably the first truly awful film that I saw where I realized it was awful but was enjoying it tremendously at the same time. For kids, you either love or hate something, and watching something purposefully because you are aware that it is bad really wasn't a thing back then for the junior set. I'm still not sure it is, though as an adult, I do it almost weekly.
Some films that were shown on the programs didn't really stick with me, at least in my accessible memory. The promo above for 1974's The Night of the Sorcerers, from Tombs of the Blind Dead auteur Amando de Ossorio, is one that I do not remember seeing, though it is likely that I may have. If I had seen it on one of the Terrible Movies shows, however, I can't imagine I would have forgotten it for a very certain reason. If you watch the promo about two-thirds of the way through, there is what is popularly known as a "nipslip," in this case, it seems that when they were editing the promo, they either accidentally (or purposely) left in a quick shot of a nipple. Since one of the reasons I loved to stay up to watch the early Hammers and other '60s and '70s horrors was for the ladies, I am mad that I can't remember this one. I wonder if they showed the film unedited as well?
Going in the opposite direction, they also occasionally showed much older classic horror films too. The promo above for 1932's The Mystery of the Wax Museum is an example. By no means a "terrible" movie, unless you just outright hate horror films, Mystery would be remade in 1953 in 3D as House of Wax with Vincent Price. I love both versions, but this one has its stamp on history as well. A daring picture that has "pre-code" elements such as drug use and language, Mystery was one of two Warners' pictures released (Doctor X being the other) that were the last narrative films made using the two-strip Technicolor process. Definitely worth a visit for a variety of reasons, but my main one is the lovely Fay Wray. I can never get enough of her.
One more bit for this go-around. The promo I remember most from The World's Most Terrible Movies show was the one above where a long-haired guy goes fishing in what I believe is Ship Creek in Anchorage and catches a movie reel. He even clubs it after catching it, and then has another passing fisherman take a picture of him with his catch. This clip definitely has the most Alaskan flair to it out of all the promos, not something I normally take pride in, but I will say this particular one always stuck with me the most. It may be that now I am down in Southern California that I have became more protective of my Alaskan status. I have never cared for the thought of belonging to a particular culture or group, but I will admit that growing up in a certain environment does color how you approach or perceive every other thing you encounter in your life. I hope you enjoyed the third part of my ongoing feature on The World's Most Terrible Movies program. I would once again like to thank Richard Gay, who created and produced the show, for contacting me a few years ago and allowing me to use his catalog of clips online. And if you have not read the first two parts, links to each article are at the top of this post. You can also watch all of the clips on The Cinema 4 Pylon YouTube channel. [Note: The fourth and final part of this series will be posted in October 2016.]
Harbinger Down(2015) Dir: Alec Gillis TC4P Rating: 5/9 You would be forgiven if you thought from the rating that I gave to Harbinger Down, a new monster picture release from the Oscar-winning special effects team of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., that I didn't like it. My "5" rating is what I use for an number of things: outright product with no real soul or purpose apart from crass monetary gain, the most rote or trite of projects that probably bored me to tears with their unoriginality, and anything middle of the road that didn't really strike me as good or bad either way so I have no place else to put it. I liked Harbinger Down. I just didn't like Harbinger Down as much as the makers of Harbinger Down would like me to like it. Harbinger Down has purpose, so it definitely does not belong in the category in which I placed it for that reason alone. And its purpose is one that is close to my heart: bringing back the use of (mostly) practical special effects to the monster picture. This gets the film as close to soulful as it can get for me. I am not going to launch into a diatribe against the ever increasing use of CGI effects, because that territory has been far too well trod by fanboys and geeks of all stripes for eons. It has become a cliche in its own rite to rail against CGI, and I do not disdain their use as another tool in the filmmakers' bag of tricks. I have the same gripes as many a grumpy old man about how everything feels dark and muddy onscreen these days, but computers are used in so many different areas these days that it just becomes downright quixotic to tilt against the subject anymore. Like any other area of expertise, I feel that when the proper talent and attention are applied in that area, the results can be truly astounding. Of course, this often means the proper amount of money as well, and that is where things get sticky. In this age of the Sharknado, where you can sell the audience on a fake-looking tornado teaming up with an even more fake-looking shark to do ridiculous things that sharks and weather would never do together as long as you have a graphics guy who wants to make a few bucks and is not concerned about artistic reputation, it has become really hard to knock a success that turned out exactly the way that its creators intended. They won't make them if you guys don't keep coming to them. (And I will admit that I watch the really crappy stuff just as much as I watch the primo stuff, so I am at fault as well. But how you can not want to watch something called Sharknado, Sharktopus, or Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark?) Gillis and Woodruff want to, as much as possible, return us to the not actually bygone days of practical effects. After their elaborate effects work for the 2011 remake of John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing was rejected and replaced with mostly CGI work (and the film landed with a thud), they launched a Kickstarter campaign to create their own practical effects film. They wanted us to take a trip back to the late '80s, when computers hadn't chiefly taken over the monster game (or even our lives in such a total way), and when puppeteers, makeup experts, and live effects teams still held sway in making incredible visions come to life on the movie screen. A large cross-section of fannies ranting about CGI now probably weren't alive when a half-assed effect attempt back then would get kicked around just as much as today, but of course, we didn't have online boards on which people could overly obsess about these things back then. The backlash wasn't as immediate, was far more localized in its impact, and sometimes took months to travel around. In 1989, there were a spate of underwater-themed action/sci-fi flicks released (generally with monsters), and I saw three of those in the movie theatre: DeepStar Six, Leviathan, and The Abyss. The last one, of course, is the classic and we responded to it appropriately. It was yet another film that my friends and I saw a zillion times but the film was reported to be disappointing at the box office. (Apparently, money and tickets gathered in Alaskan theatres is not counted the same.) But we saw DeepStar Six first, and then the Peter Weller-starring Leviathan. Back then, I had an Apple IIe, and while the internet, in an extremely embryonic form, was just getting started, I wouldn't have access to the WWW for a few more years. The planet was just on the verge of bursting fully flowered into a magical new age of information access, but at that moment, trying to learn something was still mostly based in practicality. Seeing it for yourself or using resources at hand to find the information you needed. Did you have the time to look it up and read through it? You may have to write everything down so be sure to have a notebook at hand. If I wanted immediate information on those then-current underwater films, I had to rely on whatever newspapers might have been laying around or saved in the house, and a few months later, microfiche at the library to look at -- you got it -- more newspapers. We relied on movie credits and what we remembered from them, and then books in the library or bookstore about cinema to fit info together. (And it was fine... and we liked it!) And as each succeeding underwater flick came out in 1989, if you wanted to discuss how much more cheesy the monster in DeepStar Six looked in comparison with the creature you saw in Leviathan when it came out a few months later, you went afterwards with your pals to a Denny's and stayed up until three a.m. while you shoved down a chili size cheeseburger with fries and a Dr. Pepper, and pretty much left it at that. And once in a while, I might go home and sit at my Apple IIe and pound out a couple thousand words about the movie I just watched. Then maybe I might have printed it up slowly on my dot matrix printer. Maybe I would show what I wrote to my brother or a friend. That was the extent of it, until the next film came out, and the cycle began again. Your friends would share their responses to a film, friends of friends and family members might be influenced by these opinions, but that would be largely it. The majority of the world didn't hear it, didn't see it, and certainly, our responses were never gauged or collected online by studios or filmmakers to tell them immediately of our displeasure in or our fangirl squees over their efforts. So, now it is just a handful of hours since I have watched Harbinger Down -- online, of course, and streaming -- but it's now 26 years later from the caveman days. I am ready to use several modern forms of popular social media to tell the world -- or at least my meager slice of that audience -- how I felt about a relatively simple monster effects movie that would have garnered not much more than a few minutes of discussion at that old Denny's table while we shot our soda straw wrappers across the table at one another. But we have websites now where I can swiftly gather any technical detail I wish about the making of Harbinger Down, where I might have to wait years for it to be published before. I can find full bios and filmographies of every person involved in creating the film, and I can also find scores of fellow reviewers giving their varied opinions on the film's success or otherwise. I can know so much more information in seconds about the film than I ever could before at any point in time. Immediacy is everything. But the ultimate question at the end of all the gathering and collating and searching remains the same as when one would leave a theatre, bundle up for the cold weather outside, pile into your buddy's car, and drive to that still appealing after-film gab session at a popular dining establishment. Did you like the movie? I am the precise audience for whom Gillis and Woodruff created Harbinger Down. I am a monster movie fanatic, and yes, the purveyor of fine, fanged fiends is certainly targeted by this film. And while I said that I won't use this as a forum to rail against CGI, I will admit without reservation that I feel a special kind of glee when someone even attempts practical and/or live effects in a film these days. So, mark me down for #2. And then there is the intangible third, which I have not mentioned thus far: Harbinger Down takes place in Alaska, off Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, to be precise. While I have never gotten even within a thousand miles of that outpost from old apartment in Alaska's biggest city, the fact that it takes place in my home state pretty much ensured that I would see it eventually (even if I am fairly certain that little if any of it was actually filmed there). And finally a fourth point: Lance Henriksen. As I said, I am the audience... precisely. First, a brief synopsis. The film opens on June 25, 1982, the date Carpenter's version of The Thing was released, which is not coincidental, but whether such an in-joke pays off depends on how the film delivers. A Soviet space capsule comes hurtling to earth, while a cosmonaut is desperately trying to fend off some form of attack by a dripping liquid... something. Cut to the present, in Dutch Harbor, where a college professor and a pair of female students are driving a rented vehicle to the docks to take a boat out into the Bering Sea to study beluga whale activity. Up until the title of the film appears, the action is being captured on a camera by one of the students, though this conceit goes away completely (and thankfully) after the title. Captain Graff of the fishing ship Harbinger is played by Lance Henriksen, and it turns out one of the college students is his granddaughter, Sadie. We meet the crew, there is some bickering as happens between a lot of people in small quarters, but all seems fine. When Sadie goes to collect data on belugas, she locates a faint signal, and notices a flashing light inside some ice. She convinces the captain to pull the ice chunk out of the water, and pulls the remains of the capsule onto the deck. The ice melts, the alien evil drippy thing is released, and the games begin. The creature will take over the first body, make a lot of mess, shock the population of the craft, and then run amok for the remainder of the picture. Nearly everyone will be wary of everyone else, and everyone will be a suspect. Who is the creature now? What forms will it take? Why has everyone stopped worrying about fishing or beluga whales? The film will continue to build in gore and violence on the route to its inevitable, foreshadowed conclusion. (The goddamned ship is named Harbinger and we are told in the title it is "down".) And I just sort of liked it. The pace is fairly brisk, and Harbinger Down doesn't get bogged down in anything too philosophical or in strained, personal dramas. There is enough mystery planted about a couple of characters to paint them as possible wild cards later in the action, and the truly annoying characters that you can't wait to see killed (mainly because they yell at everyone else, sometimes for no reason whatsoever) are set up pretty quickly so that you can enjoy it when their fate is ultimately revealed. For his part, Henriksen is far more committed here than he often is when he signs up for these quickie sci-fi roles, where he usually plays a sheriff, a farmer, or a corporate baddie. He shows enough fire here to remind me (not that I needed it) as to why I fell in love with him onscreen in the first place. The film is efficient enough where I felt it probably could have used another ten minutes to flesh out some details, but damn if it doesn't just keep moving solidly to its destination. And that destination -- in fact, its stated purpose, and the reason I showed up as well -- is those effects. And for the most part, they play pretty well, even if some of the editing lets them down in places. The first transformation scene is held a little too long and there is a shot or two that not only reminds you too much of the puppetry at work, but also that Carpenter's team did it so much better. After that, we get several scenes of flashing lights and briefer glimpses at the creature that, for me, were too brief as I really wanted a chance to take it in longer. (I know that I have just wished for the thing that didn't work right in the first creature scene, but so be it.) I really enjoyed the way the creature would still be wearing (really, dangling) the skinned face of its previous host from its ever-growing body while it attacked the crew. It was a solidly gruesome touch. The finale is the best part of the film, and where I feel the creature effects really shine. But I don't want to say anything more about that lest I spoil the result.
If anything, the film serves as a metaphor for the perils of constructing a non-direct remake out of references to another film or films. Stan Winston, who created the dog creature in the 1982 The Thing (though Rob Bottin and his team did the bulk of the effects), was the mentor for both Gillis and Woodruff, and they have built Harbinger Down from the top down with echoes from that earlier film (and also from the original film, 1951's The Thing from Another World). Apart from the aforementioned date in-joke, there is the way the crew stands in a circle staring in awe around the found object. There are the transformation scenes that do nothing but directly recall Carpenter's superior effort. There is the paranoia that runs rampant among the crew as they try to determine in any others or all of them have been taking over by the creature. There is the isolation of the icy locale of the film (above the Arctic Circle in the 1951 film; Antarctica in the 1982). If anything, the fact there are even more than a couple of references to another specific film pinpoints Harbinger Down as not just an homage to a better work, but also creates so much weight on its shoulders that it cannot possibly ever lift itself up. Which brings me to why I could not like this film any more that I did, which is just below my calling it a good film. Were it mere homage to The Thing, and then went off wildly in a new direction, I might be more willing to drop to my knees and begin servicing the film without pause. But Harbinger Down, despite its good intentions to bring monster and effects fans something for which they have been clamoring greatly over the past couple of decades (though we have had other films), is entirely too slavish to the concept of being a new example of The Thing. I will stop short of calling it a parasite upon the host body of Carpenter's film, sucking out its essence and replacing it with a carbon copy, because Harbinger Down has just enough of its own nerve to make things interesting. But I will say that Gillis and Woodruff could have used the opportunity to do something more original with the money they raised and then married their wonderful effects knowledge to that.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of the Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout, I had basically cut my eyeteeth on the catalogue of films that aired after midnight on The World's Most Terrible Movies and its followup, Son of Terrible Movies, in Anchorage, Alaska back in the late '70s. And, as such things tend to go, it would have been relegated to a dim but delightful memory for the rest of my life had I not written about in a passing way on The Cinema 4 Pylon a decade ago.
When I first created The Cinema 4 Pylon in 2005, I naturally started writing about the things that had influenced me the most in my youth, and chief amongst them was The World's Most Terrible Movies. A couple of years later after posting that reference, it was found online by Richard Gay, who turned out to not only be the fellow in charge of promoting the The World's Most Terrible Movies when he lived in Anchorage in those days, but he was also the one responsible for the concept and content of the show.
Richard (who had relocated to Seattle in the intervening years) emailed me and we struck up a wonderful conversation, filled with his reminisces of those bygone days. The conversation eventually led to Richard sending me a disc filled with the old promotional clips and intros used for the show when it aired.
Some of the clips were separate, but most were included in a huge hour-plus block of clips and short films Richard had produced in his time at KIMO-TV. Not all of them were useful for my purposes (though interesting to anyone who grew up watching television in Alaska in those times), so I went through the block and edited out the pieces I needed for the website. Richard had given me permission to use them as I might online, since I had the particular obsession with the show.
I initially threw a few of The World's Most Terrible Movies promos up on Vimeo (though most of the individual film promos themselves were actually for Son of Terrible Movies), but somewhere in the midst of completing the project, that old demon Depression took hold of me and I stopped working on the blog almost totally for the next few years.
It's 1973 and my brother Mark and I are on a Halloween spree. It's dark, cold, and snowy in our mountainside neighborhood in Eagle River, Alaska, and we have largely completed our October 31st rounds, collecting as much free candy as we can from the houses of our neighbors. I am nine years old, and already a veteran of several Halloween campaigns; my brother Mark is still two months away from turning five, and this may or may not have been his first trip around the neighborhood. What is important is that it is the oldest Halloween memory I still possess.
Because it is small town Alaska in the winter, our Halloween route is completed by motorized vehicle instead of foot, especially in a neighborhood where the houses are spaced at least one or two acres apart, if not more. Practically every kid celebrating the holiday used his parents in this way to collect their Halloween tribute as they wound around the gravel roads covered in snow and ice. The upside is that there is considerably less wear and tear on costumes when you only have to climb out of the car and back into it, instead of wandering about from house to house getting into all kinds of residual Halloween mischief with your friends. The downside is that you miss out on that residual Halloween mischief, which is why I always wished I grew up in a regular town with normal, paved streets.
I don't recall what Ben Nye-branded costumes we were wearing that year. The truth is that I don't remember any of my costumes when I was a kid, just that they were the kind you got in a box, had a plastic face mask of a cartoon or comic strip character, had a rubber-band stapled to the sides of the face mask to hold it on your head, and a flame-retardant outfit that was often more of a theme design featuring the character rather than the character's outfit itself. What I remember most solidly, however, is the moment that I discovered monster trading cards.
I was not yet the avid baseball card collector I would become. That would start up in two summers, though it would only be one more year before I watched the World Series with any interest (the A's versus the Dodgers in 1974) and actually became a baseball fan. And that was only after playing it miserably in Little League for the first time. I would also play it miserably the rest of the time. I am not a natural athlete. Or an athlete at all.
When I got rolling with the hobby in the summer of 1975 (the year our local Proctors' store carried the 10-cent Topps baseball packs with the mini-cards, which are worth twice as much as the regular cards today, and I still have all of mine), it would stick with me until the mid-'90s. That was when I finally got fed up with the speculators and card shop owners that were ruining the hobby for me (part of my job at the time was as a wholesale seller of new trading cards to those same assholes), and I didn't really look at my sports cards again until a couple of months ago. But that is a story worth fleshing out at another time.
I never gave up on my monster cards, however. I also still remember the exact house we visited where Mark and I each received several packs of Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards. I don't recall who lived there (I think their daughter was a friend of mine, but I can't bring her to my mind), but I can even now get on GoogleMaps and point to precisely where their house was. They lived at the end of the same street as our babysitter, right in front of an empty lot that was used by us for years for pickup baseball games. And I also still recall being very nervous about knocking on their door, even though I had been there before. I did not like the dark of the Eagle River night in those days (with the only illumination coming from porch lights -- no street lights at all), and was always looking out for Bigfoot and werewolves in the woods that surrounded all of the houses in our neighborhood. (We weren't concerned at all about the actual bears that strolled through every now and then.)
I have a very clear memory that has never left me when I got in the car. I looked in my bag at one of the packs of cards, picked it up, and said "What are these?" In those days, like most little kids, I wanted candy. It was until I got home, when we went through our stash that I got a really good look at them. And I fell in instant love. (Didn't forget about the candy though...) The Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards set from 1973 [see accompanying pictures] was comprised of cards with white front borders framing a black and white photo from mostly old Universal horror films (with some other studios like AIP, Hammer, Toho, etc. thrown into the mix). I did not know they were old Universal horror films at the time; I had not yet begun my deep dive into the studio's offerings. That was still a few years away. In some cases, these pictures were my first encounter with many of these monsters, such as the Mole People and the Metalluna Mutant from This Island Earth. I just knew that these were the coolest things I had in my possession at the time. These had monsters all over them, and they were mine, all mine! Mwah-hah-hah-hah!!
The purple and grey backs of the cards were another story altogether. The top of each back had the words "You'll Die Laughing" emblazoned on it; for years, because I threw away the wrapper (who knew to keep them in those days?), I thought "You'll Die Laughing" was the name of the card set (and so do many other people). The bottom two-thirds of each card was made up of text relating some of the most terrible jokes ever proffered on the card buying public. "Why is it useless to send letters to Washington?" "Because he's dead." You get the picture.
The jokes on the front of the cards weren't much better, but I am very fond of many of them. My friends and I took to appropriating many of the jokes and slogans in our own stupid games, often involving monsters, regardless of whether we understood them or not. My personal favorite were the ones that involved references to actual products used in the home, because it made things easier when riffing off of them. One of my faves is the one with Oliver Reed from Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf, playing the titular monster in a ragged shirt, and who just has to be odiferous, asking desperately while raising one seemingly sweaty, fur-laden arm, "Who took my Right Guard?"
There is a very odd thing about the set that I noticed even without having seen the films yet. It was a mystery to me for years until the internet age. In several of the cards, the faces of the non-monster characters, i.e. the humans, don't exactly match the bodies and clothes of the figures on which they appear. The rumor I have seen stated in several places, esp. on many card sites, is that Topps replaced the heads of the human characters with those of employees at the Topps Trading Card Company. I don't know the reason for this, except possibly Topps had the rights to only use the monster images but not the photos of the regular actors, or maybe it was just a fun prank on the part of the card company.
I am unsure, but I think the same woman appears in the card featuring a scene from Universal's The Mole People (1956) [card #2, the third one featured in this article]. So, the same woman in photos from films 31 years apart without losing her looks? Is she a vampire? Even more lovingly egregious is the head that is several sizes too big for the woman's body in a card featuring Lon Chaney, Jr.'s famous Wolf Man. Just look at the size of her noggin!...
Or maybe his breath caused her head to puff up as he knocked her out with it? It was all good, stupid fun; no more idiotic than the goony jokes my friends and I loved in MAD Magazine or Cracked. They were actually closer to the jokes in Cracked; even as kids, we knew the difference in quality. We also understood that MAD skewed just a bit older in its humor, which had tremendous appeal to us even when, once again, we may not have gotten much of what was being mocked. Within the year, I would see my first of the latter issues of the original run of Famous Monsters of Filmland, whose wise-cracking, pun-filled pages went hand in hand with the Topps Creature Feature cards, and would also allow me to learn more about the movies featured on the cards.
Following Halloween, I managed to find a few more packs of the cards at the store, and also supplemented my new collection via a series of small trades with my friends and brother. There was one more trick involved in maintaining my pile of Creature Feature cards: keeping it.
Over those early years, I recall a couple of times where some of my brother's cards needed to be rescued from the trash, and also a conversation between my parents about whether the cards were appropriate for me. There is nothing gory or bloody about the set. Aside from the outright monsters, which I was already considering to be friends rather than something to be feared, the most shocking thing to the tender-hearted would be some fairly gruesome posed skeletal remains. But even those are just there to tell goofy jokes. [See the "reducing pill" skeleton below.] There are a few girls in nightgowns, so that may have been a concern, though there is nothing featuring outrageous amounts of cleavage. It is a fairly tame set overall. If anything, there is a small amount of misogyny and political incorrectness in some of the jokes, but that would not have registered much in the mid-1970s.
Whatever the conversation between my parents, I won out and got to keep my cards. I never completed the 128-card set (there were two series, one with 62 cards, and the second with 66), and to this day, I still have exactly 70 monster cards from that Halloween season kept neatly in an individual notebook that resides by my desk alongside some of my movie guides (and not with the rest of my huge card collection). The cards are fairly easy and relatively cheap to get, so perhaps I will one day make an attempt to complete it. But I still have the ones that I first loved, and that is the most important part to me. And finally, one of my favorite cards...
[All of the images of cards in this article were scanned from my personal collection. I will be posting images of numerous cards on Twitter and Facebook through the remainder of the Halloween season. Feel free to copy and use as you wish. Share in the silliness.]
In the beginning there was The World's Most Terrible Movies...
If you lived in Anchorage, Alaska and its environs in the 1970s and liked to stay up super late on Saturday nights, then you might remember the above clip. You also may well remember The World's Most Terrible Movies (and its spinoff, Son of Terrible Movies) which ran late nights on weekends on Anchorage, Alaska's ABC affiliate, KIMO-TV (Channel 13) in the 1970s. The clip above is one of the opening segments used for the show, which ran older horror and sci-fi films, including many Hammer horror classics and Ray Harryhausen adventures, when I was a teenager. While I had many influences in my youth, The World's Most Terrible Movies is probably the #1 reason I became a fan of fantastic films of all types. [To learn more about the show and how I obtained these clips, click here.]
My interest in fantastic films was already apparent when I was relatively young, but seeing those Hammer and Harryhausen flicks on Saturday evenings blew it up huge for me. The World's Most Terrible Movies is where I met Christopher Lee's Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and Fu Manchu, where I first watch cowboys attempt to snare Gwangi in their lassoes, where I saw Sinbad and Jason fight animated skeletons, and where I learned who Peter Cushing, Barbara Steele, and Paul Naschy were. Most importantly, it's also where I fell head over heels for Raquel Welch in a fur bikini.
I guess we all have those moments in our youth where the mind expands after we have discovered something that perhaps we probably shouldn't have. For some people, that might be drugs, alcohol, or adolescent sexual stirrings that get taken farther than they should at the time. And for some of us, we find the cinema of the bizarre, of cult directors, under-appreciated actors, and twisted genres. I think we are the smarter and luckier group.
Vampires, giant monsters, wolfmen, robots, go-go girls, mad scientists... they act interchangeably as our priests and our demons. Movies move far beyond a mere entertainment for our kind. We recognize early on that, when the rest of the world denies us, the movie theatre is where we can go to submerse ourselves in other worlds for comfort. (But not guidance... no, that is probably not the wisest thing.) And once we have walked through those doors, we can't go back. The mind changes immeasurably. Things cannot be unseen. Or as Pauline Kael put it, "I lost it at the movies."
More than anything, movie showcases like The World's Most Terrible Movies held open those doors for me. And I have never gone back, nor have I tried. And through horrid jobs, a bad first marriage, moves across the country, and frustration at nearly every turn in my life (like all of us have), I know that I can make the pain go away by the simple push of a button or the purchase of a ticket. And when I hear the sounds of the opening fanfare that announce the film is starting, I might just as well be back in my living room in the pitch darkness at age 12, covering every inch of my body with a giant blanket except a small slit in front of my eyes through which I can watch the television screen, waiting for The World's Most Terrible Movies to begin.
