The Monster's on the Loose!!!: Non-Chaney, Pt. 1: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad... Something?

"Werewolf, werewolf, come and get me!"

Those were the words I chanted in complete darkness one evening as my school chum Mark Kiehl and I were each tucked tight in our sleeping bags on the floor of the downstairs family room area in my parents' house in Eagle River, Alaska. Mark was staying for a sleepover with myself and my brothers, and after a day of rambunctious play in the woods surrounding our home and most likely watching something goofy on television that evening, we were too wound up for bedtime but were, of course, under the then-usual parental orders to keep it down. But the late evening was filled with whispered jokes and rampant giggling, and because we were kids, and because I was, as I am now, ME, the darkness always brought about talk of monsters.

And thus, while we continued our course of giggling and joking, a discussion about werewolves ensued. I had to show my pal that I was not afraid of werewolves in the least, when the truth was, living in the woods in Alaska in a winter where sunlight was only seen for a few rare hours a day, I was completely petrified of them. And so, to prove my worth, I created the chant, "Werewolf, werewolf, come and get me!" Following my earnest repeating of my brave incantation, in which Mark joined me, there was a pause... a long silent pause... and then...

Following that pause, there were different paws. The kind that came bearing tiny, sharp kitten claws needling into my youthful chest. There was a small thunk on my body and then instant pain. I had completely forgotten the newest addition to our family, a kitten that was now occupying our house, a cute little tortoiseshell that we had named, inventively, Tort. AND I SCREAMED! And then Mark screamed. Not yells, not manly noises of desperate fear like "Arrgghh!" or "Awwww!" but a pair of full girly style screams, high-pitched and ear-shattering. 

Tort the kitten, of course, went flying. Then, there was the sound of hurried footsteps from upstairs where my parents slept, and then those same footsteps down the stairs, and then there was a light coming on in the hallway adjacent to the open family room where the two of us were camping out for the evening. There were some grunted words of disapproval from my father -- possibly betraying that the speaker was close to being on his own trip to Sleepy-town -- a stern warning that my dad had no intent of actually following through with but boy did he mean it, and then the clicking of the light switch to the off position followed by the sound of footsteps out of the basement area and up the stairs, across the upstairs hallway, and back to the master bedroom. Fully reprimanded, we didn't care. We had been giggling the entire time. We continued giggling and saying stupid, meaningless, childish jokes to each other – illuminated like a medieval text by more monster stuff, most likely – until we finally drifted off to sleep for the night.

Of all the classic horror monsters, the one with whom I have perhaps the deepest personal history – aside from Bigfoot, whom I consider more of a by-product of the modern age despite having old roots himself in native cultures – is the werewolf. Before the creatures created by various mad scientists, the vampires and their attendant bats, assorted aliens of all shapes and sizes, and Godzilla and his kaiju lot, and especially King Kong took over my life, I had rather a close relationship with werewolves. Or at least I imagined that I did.

Growing up in Eagle River, Alaska in the mid-1970s, we lived in a neighborhood largely unencumbered by such fancy, modern niceties as street lighting or even paved roads in much of our area (in our neighborhood, at least; don't even get me started on when they oiled the gravel roads to keep the dust down and we had to ride our bikes through it). Our neighborhood was more woods than housing development, with the thick spruce and birch forest of the Chugach Mountains threatening to grow in around us on all sides. There were often a couple or three acres between homes, and sometimes much larger swaths between homes, though we had good friends as neighbors to our right and also across the street. But since we played in these woods all day long, sometimes at night, and especially in the long Alaskan winters, werewolves turned safety concerns on their ear. The thought of creatures borne of claw and fang or one turned to such a fate by a potentially rabid bite from another such creature was constantly in my mind, if not the minds of my friends. 

Apart from the moose that came through quite often and the bears that we saw maybe once a year or so, one imagined all manner of things out in those woods. By "one," I mean me, specifically. I can't speak for all of my friends, but I know several of them were as swept up in this madness as I was, but I am speaking here of my personal fears and demons. The problem for me was not only werewolves; Bigfoot or Sasquatch or Yeti or whatever you wanted to call him (except for Skunk-Ape, which I still maintain is a stupid name), I was already beset on all sides by giant, furry humanoids, spawned in my mind, like most horrors, by the appearance of such creatures in any number of cheap horror films, but especially from episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. But let's save the Bigfoot variety for another future installment of The Monster's on the Loose, because there are definitely a couple or three about Bigfoot on their way. Besides, out of all of the monsters (not counting dinosaurs, which I don't consider to be monsters because they were real living creatures), werewolves really got to me full force first.

But the way that werewolves took over my life for this period that now seems so brief in retrospect wasn't what you would think. The source was a far more innocent spring than a outwardly fiendish horror flick.

The Three Little Pigs (1933, Walt Disney)

Technically, it was regular ol' ordinary cartoon wolves that first got me to the werewolf stage. One particular wolf, in fact: The Big Bad Wolf. I would maintain that he was far from ordinary, of course. He talked, he wore a top hat, and he also wore patched-up pants with green suspenders. Regular wolves did not dress like that. No, this is not just any Big Bad Wolf from the fairy tale books. This was Walt Disney's version of The Big Bad Wolf. At numerous points in my childhood, I had occasion to see the Walt Disney cartoon from 1933 of The Three Little Pigs, the Oscar-winning short that had the world singing along to Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? The song, of course, is sung in laughing derision at the wolf in the story by the titular pigs, or at least two of them, who learn a hard lesson and have to be saved by Practical Pig, the smartest and only industrious one of the trio.

And somewhere between watching that cartoon and reading the book version, I created my own answer to "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" I was. Despite all the logic that I could muster, I was the one who was afraid. If the image of a sneering, snarling God had not gotten into my psyche first, haunting my dreams in my early childhood by continuously grinding me to a pulp within the cruel gears of the machineries he used to control the universe, then Disney's Big Bad Wolf would truly represent Ground Zero of my Fears and Neuroses. I created my own monster from a mere cartoon character who, yes, was supposed to be big and scary, but only in an early 1930s, Great Depression sort of way. In fact, the cartoon and song were so popular at the time of their release they were seen as a tonic towards boosting the spirits of the millions of Americans (and others) caught in the wake of economic disaster. The Depression itself became "the Big Bad Wolf".

But I was living forty years later, and I had somehow brought the Big Bad Wolf to full life in my own mind. This Big Bad Wolf didn't have a care for mere little piggies; he was instead a ravenous monster set upon my own destruction and devouring. On our property in Eagle River, we had a house that was built pretty much into the side of a carved-out hill, where the top floor, which wasn't completed until a couple years after the basement was finished, sat a few feet above where our front yard was on the other side, and the original basement had its own separate entrance on the original side facing out from the hill. We had a long, gravel driveway in the front of the basement entrance side of the house, and our entire property was composed of woods whose mostly birch trees, in the winter, displayed threadbare branches that seemed rather haunting in the moonlight to me. Meanwhile, the other primary tree in the forests there, the spruce, could hide any mystery fully behind it due to because they never lost their needles due to a changing of season. Spruce were curtains of portent waiting for a thousand phantoms to make their grand entrance onto the stage of my demise. And behind those spruce were also creatures like the Big Bad Wolf.

To get up to our house from our lower driveway, you had to climb a long, wooden set of stairs. (The upper driveway, whose horrors were unceasing for me, will become a major player and villain in the second part of this article, so just you wait and see.) The lower driveway that ran from the then (and still, having just visited the place freshly) almost entirely unpopulated and hilly street behind us, sat far below the basement level of our house, enough so that there was a fairly high area beneath the porch for storage or many other purposes, though we mainly used it as a handy pirate or monster cave in various fantasy adventures.

We played all over our property, in every possible corner of the woods surrounding us and in the small fireweed field in the back lower part, and even off the sandy cliff behind our house, where we used to see how far down the hill we could jump before we reached the street. (That hill seems so tiny now.) When we weren't playing all over our own property, we were extending our adventures to our neighbors' property, the Wachsmuths, who were our friends and neighbors in Anchorage and moved to Eagle River and had a house built next door to us at the same time. And in the name of American imperialism, when we weren't playing on our property and the Wachsmuths, we were running through acres and acres of the mostly wooded, sparsely populated areas surrounding us, claiming those lands for ourselves.

It is amazing we never killed ourselves or anyone else in those days. We were fairly reckless about climbing high into spruce trees and bounding down the steepest of hills. And of sledding down impossible angles, and even down a good portion of the mountain behind us at some points. We ran into moose rather often, and learned the ins and outs of dealing with those creatures safely; black bears, we saw quite rarely, but they happened onto our street only a couple of times. But somewhere in the midst of all this actual danger – even though we never had a run-in with real wolves, just foxes – I developed a fear that the Big Bad Wolf was right behind me anytime that I went up those steps that extended from the lower driveway.

I don't know how the notion got into my head of being scared of the Big Bad Wolf on a personal level. I had seen the character on The Wonderful World of Disney, of course, and we had a Little Golden Book that told the Disney version of The Three Little Pigs. Naturally, my brothers and I were entranced by the artwork, so all three of us read that book many, many times in our youth. But I don't remember being scared of of the BBW when I was really, really small. It took a gymnasium showing at Eagle River Elementary one night to do the trick. In a town where there were no local movie theatres, mind you, having a local school host a movie night was a big deal. Especially for me, who was already figuring out at an early age that I had a more than normal connection to and perception of the movies. This particular night, the school showed a feature called Namu, the Killer Whale, a fictional film with a semi-nature documentary feel to it, the subject matter of which stuck in my mind (quite obviously, if you know of my love for ocean life as well). On the program with Namu were a few selected short films, including a couple of cartoons. Among them was Disney's The Three Little Pigs.

Seeing TTLP on an actual screen (I would not say "big screen" in the usual terms, because it was a standard pull-down screen that any school multi-purpose room had, though certainly far bigger than our comparatively tiny television set at home), and hearing the constant churning click of the film projector, was a revelation to me in what must have been either second or third grade for me. (Just before fourth grade, we moved to another school, Homestead, where one night I remember seeing a different set of Disney films, like The Shaggy Dog, which also has a semi-werewolf theme to a certain comic extent.) The sensory overload of attending these movie nights with the series of films and shorts, and the smell of fresh buttered popcorn, were nirvana to my young mind, and since I perceive my movie fandom as being composed of a series of "Aha!" moments, these nights were some of the earliest of those. The sensation of seeing films like Namu has never been out of my mind (nor has the next feature we saw in that gymnasium: The Man Called Flintstone, along with a Canadian cartoon called The Great Toy Robbery), but something weird clicked for me with The Three Little Pigs. The Big Bad Wolf truly came to life.

Seeing the creature on the screen, drooling and licking his chops with a leering grin and a fast but loping walk throughout the cartoon registered in my brain, and the brief sideways glances the wolf would make at the camera whenever he strode onto the screen were aimed directly at me, more and more each time he did it. It was also his penchant for using disguises, for employing phony voices and accents, the sneaky way he hid behind trees and cornrows, and did anything he could to get at the pigs, including displaying his awe-inspiring power of blowing down buildings (except those entirely made of brick and stone), that made him a formidable opponent in my young mind. (He is even shown as a "carpetbagger" for a few seconds, a reference that I did not understand as a child.) All of these aspects combined to make this BBW a monster to be feared. No matter that he is handled by cartoon's end with a major dose of appropriately dispensed comic justice that leaves him naked (by wolf terms, left only in his fur, dragging his burnt rear on the ground) only meant we could be back for revenge and dinner later.

And somehow, I became convinced he had followed me home, and was lurking about the woods surrounding our abode. I also connected him only to moments when I was alone, even in the daytime, or if I was the last in line in the darkness. I had no fear of him (or even thought of him) except for in those particular moments. Before we built the top half of our house, we most often parked in the lower driveway that came off the nearly empty and wood-filled street behind our house. Those long wooden steps at a relatively steep angle were not exactly built for speeding up them with smaller, stubbier legs (I would have no problem now in the leg department), and if it were the middle of the day and I were playing with my friends and brothers, I had no worries at all about moving up and down them. But left on my own, even in the daytime? Turning my back on the woods and the small fireweed patch where the wolf could be lying in wait to climb the stairs? Heaven forbid...

I had two options. The first was becoming very practiced in carefully going up the stairs backwards so I could watch behind me, though there was always a lot of stumbling and scraping of elbows, hands, and shins on the rough wood of the sides of the steps. And a lot of splinters. The other problem with this method was that it was not very efficient. The second option was to actually go with the run up the stairs, and when I got to those moments, I had a procedure. Exceedingly fearful each time, I took a first step onto the stairs, almost like testing the water, while I would look carefully around in every direction. And then -- I would bolt! Bolt as fast as my scrawny legs could carry me up each step. This meant, of course, that I could never go fast enough. I invariably felt like my feet were stuck in quicksand and so I would often stumble when trying to speed up even more, because I could feel the hot, panting breath of the Big Bad Wolf on my neck and hair, as he slathered his wet tongue up and around his razor sharp canines in preparation of making me his next meal.

Damn it, I am scaring myself all over again...

There was a third option that I employed very rarely, and it made no logical sense to me whatsoever, but I would sometimes choose to simply ride my bicycle all the way around to the end of the block – by myself, through longer stretches of woods on either side – and then around to the more populated street that led to our other driveway, which I would then ride to safety to the top of our basement and walk down to your porch from there. So, I would spend more time getting to our house with exposure to the monsters of the forest to avoid going twenty feet up some steps because an imaginary cartoon wolf might sneak up behind me.

As long as we lived in that house, I never got over that fear of The Big Bad Wolf, but it totally went away once we moved elsewhere in town following my parents' divorce (I was thirteen). But before we moved, I shifted my attentions beyond a mere everyday-style cartoon wolf and began obsessing about an even greater threat to my being: the lycanthrope.

There are two particular werewolf moments – one literary in its source, and one cinematic (and it is not the one you might be thinking) – that influenced my werewolf obsession to the largest degree, but first, I want to get into a little bit of background in my lycanthrope experience. There were smaller influences, but they were no less notable for their repeated intrusion onto my boyish psyche.

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? (October 24, 1970)

Many kids of that time, since we were in an age just before the video/VCR revolution, got their first exposure to classic monster archetypes through shows like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? We were no different. We watch Shaggy and Scooby on TV every Saturday morning of our childhoods without fail, and to say that we were in some ways raised by the Mystery Machine team is not to exaggerate. There was an out, however, with Scooby-Doo. There was an eternal escape hatch, that allowed kids to release their fears by episode's end: the revelation that the monster was nothing more than a man in a costume.

"And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!" was a refrain we knew full well, and while I definitely voiced my displeasure from time to time that the monsters were never real (even today; the notion goes against my rules for horror films), I secretly liked finding out that a mask could be pulled off, and what seemed so frighteningly real a few minutes before was nothing more than the scariest monster in all creation: man himself. In some ways, I guess you could say it was part of why I grew to accept fantasy creatures as friends more readily than I did human beings from that point forward.

In the second and last of the original seasons of Scooby-Doo, Where are You?, in October of 1970, there was an episode called Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf?. I am fairly certain I probably saw it when it premiered, as I was already fully baptized in the ritual of Saturday mornings – rising with the dawn to crackle the TV to life; Sundays, too – but naturally, I can't be sure I saw the actual premiere. Regardless, I loved Scooby-Doo so much as a kid, even with the monsters turning out to be fake, because fake or not, the show still had monsters and ghosts and all manner of ghouls roaming around at night tormenting a funny teenager and his talking dog, both of them 'fraidy cats who still seemed to capture the monster by the end of the episode. (Sorry, but Shaggy didn't register with me as a stoner when I was a kid, because I didn't know what that was. Nor was he actually meant to be, no matter how it is seen now in the Age of Irony.)

The werewolf in Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? is actually more of a wolfman (yes, I know it is a guy in a mask) type than werewolf. Across the board, most people (myself included) tend to use the term "werewolf" for shape-shifters with lupine characteristics, but there is sometimes a further breakdown into smaller subdivisions: werewolves vs. wolfmen. The first acts and looks more like a wolf, a man who has turned into a wolf but maintains most of the physical nature of the wolf, including shedding all human costuming and chiefly running about on all fours. The second is more like the Lawrence Talbot character played by Lon Chaney, Jr, in 1941's The Wolf Man, where he may get all furry in the face and body, but still mostly moves about as a man would in a bipedal fashion, and wears human clothing.

So, the Scooby-Doo lycanthrope has a full suit of clothes, though his feet are not shod and are open to reveal large canine feet with claws and fur, and he only runs about on two legs and opens doors and throws things at the other characters (such as barrels) using his hands. Of course, it is quite obvious he would considering he actually is just a man underneath a disguise, but the look is rather apparently based on the popular Chaney mold. Why the wolfman/werewolf is green is a question for whomever built the costume for the villain underneath the mask, because that is something I have wondered since I was a kid. still, the look works and it is far more effective than the werewolf in the other similar episode in the original two seasons (A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts, where they meet Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman, who is not really scary at all).

I had, as a kid, a modicum of fear built around some of the monsters on the Scooby-Doo show. The mummy episode with his chanting of "Coin! Coin...!" was a favorite in our house, and especially with our mother, who delighted in repeating it, in the same way that I loved saying, "Igua! Igua!" from Jonny Quest. The design of the ghost figures was always pretty frightening to me, and along with other villains like the Spooky Space Kook, the glowing sea diver, the Funland robot, the Creeper, Mr. Hyde, and the Ghost Clown, they remain some of the more evocative images from my youth.

Jonny Quest: Werewolf of the Timberland (January 7, 1965)

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, Jonny Quest, was a wonderland of thrills for me since I first discovered it as a child, and I was so very frightened of many of its episodes. Robotic spy devices that were built in the shape of a spider, giant crabs, sea monsters, snow monsters, pterodactyls, creepy gargoyles, komodo dragons, and that really horrendous invisible monster that is revealed to have one big eye!! Argh!!!

Quite the opposite of Scooby-Doo's outcomes (and predating that other Hanna-Barbera production by about a half-decade), Doug Wildey's exquisitely designed Jonny Quest usually let most of its horrors and terrors be exactly what you thought they were. It was not a show for skeptics like Scooby-Doo was. (There is a bit of an irony to the fact that in real life I try to approach almost everything, from the news to rumor to urban legend to religion, with a skeptical eye, but when presented with entertainment, I am pissed off if you ruin my supernatural fun with logic.) A few episodes of Jonny Quest played about with initial impressions and pulled the rug out slightly from you (as this episode under brief discussion here does), but for the most part, Jonny and his non-traditional family were supposed to actually be encountering the various beasties within these stories.

Believe it or not, the original series of Jonny Quest was only produced for a single season in 1964-1965, and then it ran for eons after that. Much like Scooby-Doo, it always seemed like Jonny Quest was on, year to year, on Saturday mornings, but there were only a scant 26 episodes from that first season. (Later episodes and TV movies were produced after the characters were updated for the '80s and '90s, but they had nowhere near the impact of the original show.)

In Episode #17, Werewolf of the Timberland, Team Quest goes to Ottawa to investigate a major fossil find (a rare form of petrified wood), but there are some criminals running an illegal gold-mining operation in the forest nearby who want to run people off from the area. To frighten outsiders away, one rather large fellow – with an outrageous French-Canadian accent, as they all have in this episode – has taken to dressing boldly as a wolf-creature called the Loup-Garou. His costume is made of wolf skins, and has a headpiece through which his own face sticks out through the jaws. In the opening scene, associates of the criminals are attacked by what they believe to be a werewolf, and so they confront the one they think responsible, but he claims to have been in all night. Is there a real werewolf at large in the woods?

Soon enough, Jonny and Hadji head out on their own and bungle upon the true plan. They find out the miners are smuggling the gold in hollowed out logs from a sawmill, and then mix them those logs in with the non-altered ones that are sent down the river. The boys get caught by the crooks but are rescued by White Feather, a stiff-talking Native American who is accompanied by an abnormally large wolf, whom he calls Gray One. From there it is a battle against the phony Loup-Garou and exposing his gang, while their dog Bandit gets the worst of a run-in with a skunk.

The episode has good atmosphere at the beginning, with a marvelous title card, and an opening scene that sets up the werewolf action perfectly, even if the victims only get away with some scratches. (Keep in mind, people would meet their doom on Jonny Quest, so it wasn't all goody two-shoes behavior.) Most of the episode gets so caught up in their dog Bandit's hijinks and the surprisingly complicated plot involving the criminal gang that the horror atmosphere from the beginning dissipates pretty quickly. That said, the final showdown between the Loup-Garou and the Gray One on the cliff above the river is pretty well conceived visually (see right).

I do wish the angle they had taken was in making us believe that it was perhaps White Feather who turned into Gray One, and then have it revealed they were just friends all along, as opposed to having them side by side the entire time. Instead, the title ends up being a lie, as the werewolf is nothing more than the hoaxer in disguise, which puts us solidly into Scooby-Doo territory, though we do find out in the first five minutes what that hoax is, so there is no big reveal. That reveal is merely a casual slide into the knowledge that there will be no big monster payoff in this particular episode of Jonny Quest for once, just a tease. 

Still, it didn't matter to me then. Jonny Quest had its hooks in me, which carried enough built-in fear and excitement from week to week that even the weaker episodes such as this would have me on the edge of the couch. It was clear that first wolves, and now werewolves, were haunting the woods around me and building up their presence in my fear index. But it would take a trip to the library and then an accidental viewing of a certain film one afternoon to turn my last winter in that neighborhood into one of the most frightening periods of my life.

To be continued in Part 2... COMING SOON!

V for Voluminous: The Blob [Crestwood House, 1982]

The Blob
by Ian Thorne, based on Jack H. Harris' production of "The Blob" from the motion picture starring Steve McQueen
Crestwood House | 1982
Paperback | 48 pg.
"Monsters Series"

At some point in the late '80s, while I worked for the Book Cache in Anchorage, Alaska, I ended up with a couple of slim volumes from a series from Crestwood House called the Monsters Series. Ostensibly created to spark children's interest in the classic monsters of yore, the rather squarish books are under 50 pages in length, printed in quite large type, and have pictures entirely in black and white. A spartan affair to be sure, and one would not be faulted for believing this was just some throwaway series by a publisher that really had little in the way of importance to the world.

And yet, a brief look at the internet will find numerous tributes to the Crestwood House Monsters Series, and their influence under young minds of the late '70s and throughout the '80s in turning them into lifelong fans of the horror and science fiction genres. I am not one of those kids, for I was a twenty-something when I encountered the books, and only a handful of them, and was formed more traditionally through the usual route of Famous Monsters of Filmland fandom, TV midnight monster show worship, and then a gradual crawl into a Fangoria addict for many years once that magazine appeared in 1979, just in time for the video revolution.

However, that did not mean, as a twenty-something, that I didn't want a couple of kids books about monsters added to my collection. Besides, I had a nice discount on books due to my employment benefits, so why not? Now, I remember that we pretty much carried the full line of these books (the orange series, though; I don't ever remember the later purple series in our stores), and I am now miffed that I did not pick up more than the two books that I did: The Blob and The Phantom of the Opera.

Considering that they promoted the entire series on the back cover using the star of my very favorite film of all time, King Kong himself, it was pretty lax of me to not have saved a copy of that particular book for my library. I have been kicking my own booty for many years over that book, mainly for one very good reason: if you go on Amazon and look up the King Kong book, it goes for around $90 (for a book that was about four bucks in the first place). Even worse, the Godzilla volume, in hardcover on Amazon, goes for $100 or over, but the paperback (inexplicably, though maybe it was printed in lower quantities) goes for over $300 from several sources.

I am pretty certain "getting cute" is not about
him manhandling her face...

I do remember it was really important for me to get a copy of the Crestwood House volume of The Blob at the time. For reasons that I have never fully been able to fathom, I am unreasonably obsessed with the 1958 version of The Blob starring Steve McQueen (and also its 1988 remake by Chuck E. Russell, which still has excellent special effects), and so it seemed a naturally cool thing at the time that I should pick up the book from this series dealing with that film. While some volumes of the Crestwood House Monsters Series are more about the histories of the character or films in which they appear (such as Frankenstein or Godzilla) and less about telling the full story as it is portrayed in the film, this one is an example of the latter. The Blob as a book is many ways almost an outline – or even a highlight reel – of the original movie. The story seems to drift from major scene to major scene, stopping on the more important lines of dialogue from the screenplay, before moving forward.

This, of course, leads to an interesting crossroad when creating a book for the children's market. In the very first chapter (there are five), The Meteor, we meet the teenaged hero Steve Andrews (played by a then-28-year-old Steve McQueen in his first lead role) as he picks up his date Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut). It is refreshing in an age where parents have to explain to their kids why the angry racist orangutan running for president is talking about grabbing women by the private parts that the worst Jane is worried about on her date with Steve is about him "getting cute". But there it is in a kids book nonetheless, and it is pretty clear the reference is about him getting handsy in the car.

Of course, most of the films that are featured in solo turns in the Monsters Series were produced using black and white cinematography. Not so with The Blob, which is one of the few examples of 1950s monster movie that actually was released in color. As a result, the photos in this edition are not nearly as dynamic as others in the series, and leads to an odd result in reproduction quality upon the page in at least one example. For the climactic battle against the Blob, the cops and teens use their fire extinguishers to freeze the creature. Using a shot from the film that is spread against the expanse of two pages, the left hand page (pg. 44) is comprised almost entirely of the chiefly white exhaust from the extinguishers, save for the heads of three of the extinguisher horns sticking into the page from the middle of the spread.This means most of the page looks fairly blank, an effect which might have been mitigated had the book been published in color, with perhaps some variance in page shade (though that would have greatly added to the pricing of the book).

Boy, when is shaming like this going to go out of style?
I thought we were beyond such petty insults...

As an adult, there is not a lot to be gained from reading a straightforward, simplified rehashing of the screenplay of already pretty dumbed down storyline (and I am saying this as a bona fide fan of the film). I really am more interested in other books in the series that tried to teach kids more about the history of each character or the films, but alas, those are the not the examples in my collection. I have ones that feature straight story adaptations. (The Phantom of the Opera book does have a brief one-page introduction referencing the original novel and Universal's silent version from 1925 starring Lon Chaney, Jr., but then settles into a recap of the 1943 Universal remake featuring Claude Rains.)

I would really love to find other editions of this series, but in reviewing the pricing on Amazon.com and other book sites, the steepness of picking up a set is just too out of bounds for me now. Honestly, there are other monster-related items that would be far cooler that I would rather have for the same amount of money. It does, however, mean that I am going to become more proactive in scouring used bookstores for these titles in the future because sometimes you can get really lucky. If I can at least find the King Kong, Godzilla, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon volumes, I would be a very happy guy. I am also extremely interested in what they had to do to adapt the 1932 version of The Murders in the Rue Morgue to book form, since Robert Florey's movie starring Bela Lugosi is far more violent and kinky than most of the other stories in this series.

RTJ

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #3: “Wicked Annabella” by The Kinks (1968)

Anyone that knows me for even three seconds knows that of the British Invasion groups of the '60s, while I do have great reverence for the Beatles and an ongoing respect for the Rolling Stones (especially their incredible longevity as a live act), my favorites are always going to be the Kinks and the Who. Either one could be ahead of the other in my heart or head on any given day, though usually I am just happy that I have lived through a period of time where I got a chance to hear all of these bands and can continue to listen to them to my heart's content.

As a result, Ray Davies is pretty near the top of my fave songwriters, and has long impressed me with his attention to small details of character and setting in his pieces. For a period, Davies became known, after the band's early years tearing it with songs like You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night for crafting pastoral pop pieces based around English life, so it comes as a surprise that one of his truly darkest (and Halloween-worthy) tunes springs forth out of this time.

Wicked Annabella, which appears on the Kinks' 1968 release, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, is clearly a tale of a witch, or at least a woman suspected by locals in the town of being a witch, whose dark deeds are told from person to person in wild rumor and speculation. While the album, a concept album built around the personalities in a small English village, at times seem draped in a haze of nostalgic warmth and cotton candy, much like David Lynch's Blue Velvet, there is grime just below the surface. There are songs built around local hoodlums, drunks, and prostitutes, a pair of songs rail against the modernization of the Western world, and another discusses the indifference of nature to the plight of mankind.

Elsewhere on the album is a strange song called Phenomenal Cat, which is rather like a fairy tale or children's rhyme, which tells the tale of a very fat cat and exactly why "he gave up his diet and sat in a tree/And ate himself through eternity". It's the odd song out on Village Green, and is, by my estimation, probably the weakest track on the album (though I still like it just fine; lower bar Davies is still top-notch anyone else, in most cases). It really doesn't seem to fit, except perhaps as an example of the sort of tale the local children might sing amongst themselves, but even that doesn't sell it very well because the lyrics don't really identify such an angle.

Which brings me around to Wicked Annabella, which is of a similar bent to Phenomenal Cat in that it seems more like a fairy story, though a very horrid and frightening one, especially if you are the described target of Annabella's actions. The difference between the songs is that Wicked Annabella can more easily fit into the overall narrative of Village Green, by explanation that it is likely meant to represent someone in the village area who is untrusted by most of the locals, around whom they spin lies and increasingly bizarre tales of her adventures, leading to their use in keeping the local children in line, or otherwise, Wicked Annabella might get them... 

"In a dark and misty house,
Where no Christian man has been,
Wicked Annabella 
mixes a brew
That no one's ever seen.

Relatives have passed her by,
Too scared to even say hello.
She's in perpetual midnight,
She shuts out the day,
And goes about her sinful ways.

I, 
I've seen her hair, 
I've seen her face,
Look towards mine.

I, 
I've felt her eyes 
burning my soul,
Twisting my mind.

Little children who are good
Should always go to sleep at night,
'Cause Wicked Annabella
is up in the sky
Hopin' they will open their eyes.

Don't go into woods tonight,
'Cause underneath the sticks and stones
Are lots of little demons 
enslaved by Annabella
Waiting just to carry you home."

Written by Raymond Douglas Davies • Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

Any town, even in modern times, usually has someone that the kids, even just in fun (hell, we did) like to pretend is a witch just for the thrill of it. Such a thing is really not fair to that person, but that's the way kids operate. Hell, right now we are going through this weird, mass hysteria "clown sighting" thing, and that plays off the same emotional response and defenses to fear. Focusing back on the song, it is even possible that the character of Annabella no longer even lives in the town, but is still used by locals to instill fear in children and make them straighten up and fly right.

The song itself is a tight little rocker, dominated early on by Pete Quaife's burbling bassline (Quaife described it in an interview as "a Bach bassline"), and then the song gets increasingly frenetic as Ray's too unsung brother Dave (who takes over lead vocals) throws great reams of feedback from his guitar over the latter half of the tune. The way it rambles along, in tandem with the quite vivid lyrics, the song quite reminds me of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd (already in the distant past by this point in time, believe it or not).

I had wanted to go with a less obvious and more obscure version of the song for this mixtape. I have numerous covers of Wicked Annabella – by Jason Falkner, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, and the Ophelias, to name a few – but none have ever approached the original (thought I quite like Falkner's), and I just can't resist have the Kinks on a Halloween collection. And so it shall be...

RTJ

Monsters We've Known and Loved (1964)

Monsters We've Known and Loved (1964)
Dir.: Jack Haley, Jr.
Episode 15 of Hollywood and the Stars (1963-1964)
TC4P Rating: 7/9

There is nothing that I enjoy more than finding a piece of the past that I never realized existed, except perhaps when I happen upon such an item quite by accident. The thrill that a find like this sends through my system is nothing short of truly exhilarating. Possibly even orgasmic, if I may be so open about it.

Such thrills often come to me in the form of books and comic magazines, where perhaps I run into an obscure writer or character which had evaded up until this point. Sometimes they are odd toys that I find on shelves of an antique store, sometimes things that other people might look over but that I find delightful. Most often, they arrive as feature films and cartoons, and due to my connection to those individual areas, you can imagine the impact that finding such films does to me.

As a couple of examples, a few years ago, I ran into Sh! The Octopus for the first time, a B-grade comedy from 1937 starring Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins that left me completely delighted, and just last year, the sudden re-appearance of a truly strange and slightly out of character Cecil B. DeMille film from 1930 called Madam Satan still has me struggling to pick my jaw up from the floor. 

Last week, I ran into a rather crazed 1993 Walter Lantz cartoon called King Klunk that was one of Hollywood's first responses to the King Kong craze then taking the film world by storm. While I had read about the cartoon before, which is surprisingly long for a cartoon short (over nine minutes) and follows much of the real film's plotline, I had quite forgotten about King Klunk for eons. believing that it was simply something that I would never have a chance to see. Why worry unnecessarily about such a thing? Well, I didn't worry about it at all for years, until I flipped a tab on YouTube and ran [smack!] face-first into the film.

And so it goes with a television documentary from 1964 titled Monsters We've Known and Loved. Part of a series produced by David L. Wolper about the filmmaking machine, Hollywood and the Stars, Monsters We've Known and Loved was the fifteenth episode of the short-lived series, which last one year on NBC in the 1963-1964 season. Now, it is entirely possible that I have encountered mentions of this show multiple times over the years. I have read a lot of film books, and a great many of them are horror and science-fiction film-related. So far, in backtracking through my library, it is not mentioned in David J. Skal's The Monster Show nor in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, two places where I felt that I may find reference to the show, owing to the relatively similar ages of the two authors who seem to have been influenced around that period of pop culture.

The description of the documentary on one YouTube channel that features the video, The Monsterverse Channel, gives us this information: "Classic episode of the TV documentary series "Hollywood and the Stars", from 1963 that helped to hook a generation of kids on monster movies. A brief but excellent overview of the horror film from silent classics like Nosferatu to the atomic age and beyond."

I did not find the documentary originally on YouTube. I happened upon it blindly while searching listings for "monster" on Archive.org, a regular haunt of mine for finding obscure items. I saw the title, Monsters We've Known and Loved, and my first thought was, "What a wonderful title for a kids book." Then I started to wonder if it really was a kids book that had slipped my notice, or an adaptation of said book. Nope, it was the very special described above, and within seconds I set myself to watching it, and less than 25 minutes later, I knew that I had found a new keeper for my regular rotation of Halloween (and otherwise) delights.

The documentary is directed by Jack Haley, Jr, who yes, is the son of the man who played the Tin Man in 1939's The Wizard of Oz. (Haley, Jr. was also once married to Liza Minnelli.) The episode is hosted by noted actor Joseph Cotten, who leads us into the darkness of the night (and all in glorious, haunting black and white) with what he describes as "an old Scottish prayer"...

"From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
May the Good Lord deliver us!"

With this slightly altered text, Cotten introduces us to werewolves, vampires, and other monsters. Within the first minute, we shift from film to film swiftly, starting with the werewolf from Return of the Vampire (1943), Peter Lorre being tormented by the disembodied hand in The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), the mutated title monster from Bert I. Gordon's The Cyclops (1957), a woman screaming in full closeup at the alien creatures from Invasion of the Saucer Men (also 1957), and Ray Harryhausen's six-tentacled octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). Then Cotten begs us, "Now, don't send the children to bed. We want all of you to meet Monsters We've Known and Loved, on Hollywood and the Stars!" Cue the theme music, title sequence, and opening credits, while a hand slowly claws its way from out of a grave.

When the show returns from what would have then been a commercial break, there is a flash of lightning and the house from Psycho is revealed on the screen. Cotten says, "Vampires, werewolves, and ghouls. These nightmare creatures embody the universal dread of the grave; the shadows, the unknown. They strike some deep chord within us. Through them, and with no risk to ourselves, we dabble in forbidden worlds of mystery, madness, and malevolence. And we have the dubious pleasure of being frightened out of our wits!" While all of this is said, we see a coffin open as a vampire prepares to rise, we see a werewolf transform, and a man is attacked within a tomb by a random ghoul.

With a flourish of the cape of Dr. Caligari and a closeup of Cesare's sleeping face, Cotten then announces that Germany in the 1920s is the birthplace of the horror film. OK, you can make that argument, but it's not totally accurate. Regardless, the shift is towards historical perspective instead of random scenes, which is a welcome one. Other German productions such as Nosferatu and The Golem are granted scenes before the shift jumps over to Hollywood with the original version of The Cat and the Canary (1927). Willis O'Brien's still wonderful effects in 1925's The Lost World are displayed next, but then the timeline reverts quite a bit back to 1920, giving the lie to Cotten's earlier statement, by showing a scene from John Barrymore's still remarkable dual turn as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, including the transformation done without in-camera effects.

Cotten introduces the viewer to Universal Studios, which will become the acknowledged House of Horror for decades, starting with the ascendancy of Lon Chaney, Jr. We see clips of Chaney behind the scenes preparing for his role as Quasimodo, and then a rogues gallery of his other roles, finishing his stellar performance as Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The silent screen turns to sound, and Cotten gives a full introduction to Bela Lugosi as the "King of the Vampires" but the clips we see are from Return of the Vampire, not from any of his Universal or even MGM work.

Cotten says "The sound era also makes a big to-do about mad doctors and their infernal machines" and we see the numerous actors such as Preston Foster, Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, and Lon Chaney, Jr. Cotten then gives us introduction to "the maddest doctor of them all" (and Lugosi's "rival"), Boris Karloff. At this point in the show, it is clear we are not going to be shown any clips from the classic Universal films, though with Karloff's section we do get stills from some of his famous roles, including those for Universal. (Val Lewton's productions are only name-checked by The Body Snatcher (1945) amongst these roles.) We also get a fun clip from a publicity film of the two "rivals" preparing to play chess for charity.

The documentary was also apparently unable to get (or pay for) the rights to show scenes from King Kong, so when it comes back from the midway break, we only get to see an animatronic lobby version of the creature from newsreel footage while Cotten talks about "the phenomenal success of King Kong that started a trend from which we've never recovered." Clips are then shown from Mighty Joe Young (1949), but while Cotten talks about "a primitive beast on a rampage against civilization," I had to remind myself that the rampage in the clips is Joe defending himself in the nightclub, and that he is the hero of the film, which has a happy ending with Joe saving an entire orphanage from fire and being returned to his job. Joe is not actually a monster (just an ordinary gorilla with a big heart), and Mighty Joe Young is nowhere close to being a monster movie.

"Today, the anxieties of the atomic age and the challenge of the space era open even wider vistas for the monster movie." And so begins the science fiction section of the show, with scenes from Earth vs. Flying Saucers (1956), It Came from Beneath the Sea (again), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). Roger Corman gets into the show with Attack of the Crab Monsters, and even the Three Stooges sneak in (though they are never seen) with the giant fire-breathing tarantula scene from Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959) (the individual shots in the scene, by the way, are shown completely out of sequence). There is the surprising addition of the big blob from Hammer's Enemy from Space (aka Quatermass 2, 1957).

The Thing from Another World is met in battle by the men at the arctic post, and then Harryhausen is given a little more love in this episode by the inclusion of one of my favorite of his films, 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), featuring the Ymir. Cotten, or rather the writers of the script, misidentify the Ymir as "a Martian lizard," when in fact, the creature comes directly from Venus. But no matter... [Pushes glasses back off of nose and snorts...]

Surprisingly, The Beast of Hollow Mountain's climactic scene is included, with a cowboy tricking the title dinosaur into quicksand to perish (which he probably wouldn't), and then astronauts are attacked by It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Another personal favorite sneaks in with The Monster That Challenged the World (another 1957 flick), though once more there is an identification problem when Cotten calls the creature a giant caterpillar. The creature in this film is meant to be a form of prehistoric mollusk, though were it made today, it would probably be identified as an isopod. (To be fair, the monster does look like a giant caterpillar.) Truly awful special effects are represented by the inclusion of The Giant Claw (man, 1957 was a grand year, wasn't it?), a bird flick that really is for the birds (but I still rather love it).

The show moves to its final brief section, shifting the focus to the 1960s and a type of horror film "which is meant to be funny". We see Peter Lorre and Vincent Price as they film their latest feature, Jacques Tourneur's The Comedy of Terrors, and scenes from their previous film together, Roger Corman's The Raven (both 1963). Finally, we get a clip from Ray Dennis Steckler's execrable The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, which makes Cotten cry, "Oh, where have they gone, the werewolves and the mummies, the Draculas and the Frankensteins. Perhaps if we had shown them a little more love, they would still be with us." THE END

Perhaps if you had paid Universal a little more scratch, David L. Wolper, those werewolves, mummies, Draculas, and Frankensteins would actually be in this documentary. It's hard enough to tell the history of horror films in two hours, let alone a mere 25 minutes, but even without the Universal bunch, this is a pretty fun short doc. Really, it just comes down to loving to watch scene after scene from your favorite monster movies, which is pretty much all that I like to do. To fault Joseph Cotten for a couple of errors in his narration is useless because, well, he's dead, and he didn't write the copy in the first place.

In the end, I am jealous that I didn't grow up watching this collection over and over because it would have influenced me even earlier than I already was. You don't get the basics of a horror film education from watching it (key elements are left out entirely), but really just the "basic basics," like a preschool reader. A preschool reader titled Monsters We've Known and Loved.

See, I just knew it had to be a book after all...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

You can also find it here on Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/MonstersWeHaveKnownAndLoved

More "Countdown to Halloween" Hijinks from Cinema 4...

Just a couple of quick notices to make you aware of freshly posted articles on my other sites that tie into my Countdown to Halloween theme this month:

On CINEMA 4: CEL BLOC:

Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! (1966)

The Inspector (the cartoon version of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther films) and his steadfast partner Sergeant Deaux-Deaux face off against a monstrous "mue-nster" in this takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My favorite of the Inspector series for numerous reasons, not all of them involving monsters. The second of seven Halloween-oriented cartoons that will be featured throughout the month of October on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc.

On THE SHARK FILM OFFICE:

90210 Shark Attack (2014)

A truly idiotic affair, 90210 Shark Attack would seem to have everything you need to make a cult classic: horny teenagers, sex, a magical curse, a former scream queen with major shark film credentials in need of a paycheck (Donna Wilkes from Jaws 2), and (one would hope) sharks. The man behind the camera is David DeCoteau, who gave us scream queen boobie-fests (bless his heart) in the '80s and '90s such as Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama, Nightmare Sisters, and Creepozoids. So, what the hell happened, besides way too much horridly selected stock footage? Click the link above and find out just what...

RTJ

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #2: "Ants Invasion" by Adam and the Ants (1980)

For the second pick on my new Halloween mix, a personal war of miniature but gradually expanding scale has played a crucial part in its selection.

Over the course of the past couple of months, our household has been doing battle with little black ants. We had some invade the home last year, but it was because we were trying to save up recyclable bottles and cans in containers outside. When the containers filled up, and we weren't able to get to the recycling plant in a timely fashion, we started filling up garbage bags and had them outside. We hadn't seen many ants before then, but we sure saw them after that. The ants in the garden and in the yard found the cans and went nuts. Their line to the cans then extended to the house, and up the wall, and somehow found a way into the house. They came in through the bathroom in the master bedroom where Jen and I make our home, and we then started learning about doing battle with ants on a large scale. The invasion was very brief, however, and done as quick as it had started.

Not so this year. A few weeks ago, we discovered their latest incursion onto our territory, and the war commenced anew. This time, they attacked my office bathroom, Ben's rooms, and the master bedroom in seemingly separate groupings. Jen managed to dispatch a queen, which was under my sink in the en-suite in the master, and I thought that I had stopped the minor invasion of the office bathroom. Then, a couple days later, we found out that they were in the hallways and scattered all along the outer edges of the huge library area. We attacked with poison and cleaners and thought we then had it handled... until we found out the next day that they had moved downstairs and had completely surrounded the living room and kitchen areas. Three of us tackled that project, taking out every ant we could see and trying to determine their points of ingress, blocking those by laying down ant poison.

All seemed well until three days ago, when I went into my office and found a few ants on the wall behind my desk. Just four or five, and after cutting off what I thought were there paths to the area, I discovered about a day later that they seemed to be sneaking through the electrical outlet. So, I wiped down a solid area around the base of the outlet (and the others in the room) with a poison solution and I stopped seeing them on the walls after that. I then threw down talcum powder and vacuumed up the floor to get up anything that might draw their interest (there was no food in the room otherwise). 

Two mornings ago, while planning to get up bright and early for a writing session, I was greeted by about thirty ants or so all over my nice new desk area. While we have been exceedingly careful to not leave food and empty containers lying about in the house since this whole debacle started, I had left an empty soda can on the desk and, boy, they had zeroed right in and found it. 

Determining exactly where the little suckers were coming from was another matter. Looking at the floor that I had just cleaned the night before, I found that I could see parts of it moving. The ants had given up their usual line formations to their targets, and seemed to be spread out across the carpet running willy-nilly to anything that looked like a way up to whatever they perceived to be of interest to them. And so my morning was shot, as I looked everywhere I could in the room to figure out exactly where they were coming from and what they were after in the office. 

Meanwhile, Jen found ants in our walk-in closet, a room that has zero of interest to them whatsoever. No food or drink has ever been brought into there, but there they were, avoiding the areas that had been sprayed to prevent their lines and had them marching right in the middle of the floor in a guerrilla attack. To what? Who knows? But it has meant even more cleaning and more searching for a thousand points where their tiny little bodies can easily slip in to annoy us.

That's the thing: these aren't bitey ants. These are little suckers, almost cute due to their diminutive status, and if they get on you, they pretty much tickle and don't hurt you at all. It actually makes me feel bad to kill them, but honestly, you also don't want bugs crawling all over you, if you can help it. And while they don't bite, there is still a definite creepiness factor to the whole thing. Since this battle started, one song has been going through my mind... Ants Invasion by Adam and the Ants.

Here is his band's performance of the song in their heyday on The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show:

"Ten-thirty-five and I hope I've made
The right decision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Heart is beating I'm alive
But I don't call this living
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Rationalize 'til I'm blue in the face
You cannot lose if you throw the race
I'm still searching for the
Ants invasion

Ten-thirty-six and I hope I've made
The right decision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Ninety-eight point four's the bore
With twenty/twenty vision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
You want a thrill so you come and see me
A cheap line in fantasy
But I'm still searching for the
Ants invasion

If I'd the courage
I would make my way home
Too many antics in the forbidden zone

Ten-thirty-eight and I think I've made
The wrong decision
Another lifeless man with a strange incision
I hope that insect doesn't see me
He's not renowned for his courtesy
I'm not searching for the
Ants invasion"

The song kicks to life with a siren-like guitar riff that would be at home equally as the theme song to any science fiction movie, laden with an invasion of ants or otherwise. The lyrics get good mileage out of the repeated variations of quoting the advancing time and then wondering if Adam has made the right or wrong decision. The progression allows a story to build gradually, which sketches in horror story details of a man who seems to bear a Kafka-esque dread of his own nature.

While never really being very clear about what the true subject of his concern is outside of the refrain of "still searching for the ants invasion," Adam makes reference to his "heart is beating, I'm alive/but I don't call this living," and then later he describes "another lifeless man with a strange incision," which at that point, late in the game (it's 10:38 by then) he determines it to have been "the wrong decision". Before that he mentions "ninety-eight point four's the bore with twenty/twenty vision," which along with the line in the previous verse, "You cannot lose if you throw the race," might point to the source of his fear being human conformity.

I had always felt when I was younger that the "Ants Invasion" he is searching for is the success of his own tribe, those that make "antmusic" (the band is "the Ants," after all). The new subgenre of "antmusic" was supposed to be his gospel. In another song on his Kings of the Wild Frontier LP, Don't Be Square (Be There), Adam Ant cajoles his new faithful to "Get off your knees and hear the insect prayer!" (which, of course, is "Dirk Wears White Sox," the name of the very first Adam and the Ants album and a tribute reference to actor Dirk Bogarde). 

But, battling against this notion, I was always confused by the last two lines after the "incision" line in Ants Invasion: "I hope that insect doesn't see me/He's not renowned for his courtesy/I'm not searching for the ants invasion." It may rub against my theory of fear of human conformity, or maybe this story takes place before Adam is resurrected as the leader of the Ants, where he is fearful of his transformation into the force he will become.

Regardless, the horror/sci-fi trappings of the song are clear, but they were even more clear in the song's original incarnation. Once upon a time, it was even more eerie in a musical sense, though the melody was the same and the song structure still including the gimmick of counting up the time as it passed. But the song's title? Oh boy, is that a doozy (and I kid you not): The Omelette from Outer Space.

A demo version of Omelette appears on the remastered version of Kings of the Wild Frontier, but luckily, somebody took the footage from the video earlier in this post and made their own video for The Omelette from Outer Space. It's pretty sloppy and low-res, but you can at least hear the song:

"10:35 and I hope I made the right decision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Evening drawing in, so I'm forced to watch the television
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
The could-be actor, cover his face
[Pow pow pow]
I'd do the same thing in his place
[Pow pow pow]
He's so frightened of 
The omelette from outer space
[No, no, no, no, no, no]

10:36 and I hope I made the right decision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Another lifeless man with a strange incision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
The screaming stopped but the core is a waste
[Pow pow pow]
Bring out detectives to solve the case
[Pow pow pow]
And I'm still searching for
The omelette from outer space
[No, no, no, no, no, no]

If I'd the courage I would go to the gate
Another thriller or a great escape

10:38 and I think I've made the wrong decision
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
They've had complete success with their alien mission
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
The could-be actor, cover his face
[Pow pow pow]
I'd do the same thing in his place
[Pow pow pow]
They're so frightened of 
The omelette from outer space
[No, no, no, no, no, no]
Outer space
[No, no, no, no, no, no]"

Lyrically, I don't find the demo version nearly as interesting as Ants Invasion. However, the part with the omelette from outer space is actually a bit intriguing, since it is pretty apparent that Adam is referring to the actor within the film in the song and his reactions to the silly monster that probably shares a name with the title of the film, and which Adam is forced to watch on his TV. In fact, the original version keeps the song within the horror/sci-fi music subgenre, but just from a different angle, becoming more of a comment on the insipidness of pop culture than anything else. Not nearly as creepy sounding and terrific a song as Ants Invasion, but still a fun early try at such a tune.

That's all for Track #2. I will post Track #3 of Mr. Mixtape-ptlk in a few days. Until then, happy Counting Down to Halloween!

Vote Jack O'Lantern, October 31st! #takebackorange

Because it is something that simply must be done. I was silent about it all through last Halloween, but now that another one has rolled around, I must speak my mind!

RTJ