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Easter Weekend 40 Years Ago

2011-04-22T08:00:00.001-04:00

With Easter approaching, I've become nostalgic over my favorite Easter weekend which occurred 40 years ago. In fact, Easter 1971 is the only Easter I can remember with any clarity. Many Christmases are emblazoned on my cranium, but for some reason, I don't remember much about Easters past except one.

The holiday break from school that year started on Good Friday. I was in first grade and not yet familiar with the predictable ebb and flow of school vacations, so this 10-day escape from reading and arithmetic was a real treat. I was also jazzed because this would be the day I got my new kitty cat. Our last cat, a ginger tabby named Sassy, had been hit by a car a couple months earlier and, since our dog Patty was not the most exciting pet in the world, I was eager to get a new cat. A lady around the corner had a female cat who had just delivered a litter, but we had to wait six weeks for the kittens to be weened. To a six-year-old, that's like a decade. Almost everyday, I nagged my mother about getting the new cat, but she patiently told me we had to wait. Well, Good Friday was the day!

When we got to the lady's house, she had her cat and the kittens out on the front lawn. Several kids and their mothers were already there to nab a kitten for themselves. They were all gray tabbies, which meant they all looked basically alike. I noticed, however, that one of the females had some orange running through its fur and an orange streak across her belly. She was special, so that was the one I chose.

She was such a tiny thing, I marveled at how dwarfed she was by the furniture as she scampered across the living room carpet. My mom was more concerned about how the cat and the dog would get along, but the little kitten walked right up to Patty who was snoozing in the kitchen and rubbed herself against the dog's muzzle. Patty looked up at us as if to say, "Do I have to put up with this?" Yes, she did.

Since the kitten was born in March, my mom said we should call her "Windy." Of course, that eventually evolved into Wendy, and she lived for over 18 years. I was well into adulthood before the old girl finally had had enough.

The weekend also stood out in my mind because it was the premiere weekend for the first independent television channel in Baltimore, WBFF-TV 45. It's hard to believe that there was once a time when you only had three or four TV channels to choose from. In 1971, Baltimore had the three network affiliates and a public television station. An independent channel opened up a whole new world of television options, mainly syndicated kid shows and old black-and-white movies, but that was pretty exciting in 1971.

The main attraction for me, of course, were the kid shows. Suddenly, I was exposed to all manner of Japanese fare (Astro Boy, Marine Boy, Ultra-Man, and Speed Racer), along with the Supermarionation fun from Gerry Anderson's Century 21 Productions (Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet). There was also a lot of old stuff I had never seen before like The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, and Ruff and Reddy (I still have the theme song stuck in my head). All this juvenile goodness was brought to us courtesy of Channel 45's new kiddie show host, Captain Chesapeake. Here was his intro:

After running teaser shows Friday and Saturday, WBFF-TV officially began broadcasting on Easter morning. I remember turning the TV on first thing so I could watch the new (to me) programming while I dug into my Easter basket. And this year was really special because, in addition to the candy and eggs that we had dyed a few days earlier with Paas egg dyes, my mom included some small toys for my brother and I. The ones that stand out the most in my mind were the Wizzer tops from Mattel. Wizzer tops had been around for a couple of years by then, but these new tops were shaped like soda cans. I got the Seven-Up can version while my brother got the Coca-Cola can. Below is a picture of the box it came in:

As you can see by the picture on the box, what made Wizzer tops special was that, unlike a regular top where you had to wind a string around it and pull the string off really fast to get the top to spin, Wizzer tops had a rubber tip on the bottom that you rolled along the ground really fast to get the tip spinning. Then you set it on the floor and let it fly. Great stuff for a six-year-old.

Of course, all good things must come to an end (at least temporarily), and we had to go to church for Easter service. Mom crammed me into one of my brother's hand-me-down suits, snapped the clip-on tie to my collar, and off we went. Church was always dead boring for me, so I just studied everyone in the church, wondering how old they were or how much they weighed or if that sinister looking guy was a criminal. Fortunately, it was only an hour and I could get back home to my half-eaten bunny and my top.

The weather was unusually warm for Baltimore in April, and I recall us going to a nearby park in the afternoon. I enjoyed being in the warm sun and swinging on the swings, but I really wanted to get back home so I could watch Ultra-Man. The next day, I woke up and turned on WBFF-TV right away to see what they were showing. Unfortunately, it was a test pattern. They wouldn't start their weekday programming until three in the afternoon when Captain Chesapeake would begin. Oh well, can't all be gravy.

At least my mom got us some new breakfast cereal we had seen on TV: Count Chocula and Frankenberry. The commercials were so much fun, the cereal had to taste great, right? Nope. Even to my underdeveloped palate, the fake chocolate flavoring on the Count Chocula was really horrible, like stale Nestle's Quik. The strawberry flavor on the Frankenberry was better, but there was just something crappy about it. I kinda regretted asking for it. Now I was stuck eating both boxes or risk the ire of my mom.

Despite the cereal fiasco, the rest of the week was so much fun. Easter break was a new experience for me, so I guess the newness of it made it so special. Once I was back in school, I could see light at the end of the tunnel. First grade would be over in about eight weeks. That wasn't much longer than the time it took to get a new kitty cat. If I could survive that wait, I could make it to summer. The rhythms of life were beginning to dawn on me.

Elisabeth Sladen Dies at 63

2011-04-20T10:31:00.000-04:00

I was crushed to read the news this morning that Elisabeth Sladen, best known as Sarah Jane Smith from Doctor Who, has died at age 63. Doctor Who became a favorite of mine even before the show was aired in the United States. In 1977, I found a copy of The Making of Doctor Who in my local comic book store and read about this remarkable show which was a pop culture fixture in the UK but barely known about in the states. Since Elisabeth Sladen was the Doctor's companion at the time the book was written, it was full of photographs and references to Sarah Jane Smith. My little 13-year-old heart was instantly captivated by the brunette with the the big smile.

Intrigued by this initial taste of Dr. Who, I told the comic store owner to be on the look out for any more Dr. Who material he might come across. I also scoured comic shows for the numerous novel adaptations of the show. Soon, I had a pile of Dr. Who novels, magazines, and annuals before I ever watched a single episode of the show, and I was particularly interested in anything related to Sarah Jane.

In the fall of 1979, the first four seasons of the Tom Baker era were broadcast in the United States and most of those episodes featured Elisabeth Sladen as his companion. Now I was really smitten. She had a certain playfulness which worked well with Tom Baker's naughty boy approach to the Doctor. It was as if she was the understanding elementary school teacher to her precocious student. Most of the other Dr. Who companions were simply there to follow orders and ask the questions that the audience might be thinking as the story unfolded. Sarah Jane seemed to have a more equal partnership with Tom Baker's Doctor, at least on an emotional level. She was the first companion, in my opinion, whom you actually thought could have a serious relationship with him.

I was sad to see her run on the show end. None of the companions after her measured up. I also found it interesting to see her first season on the show with Jon Pertwee when those older episodes were made available in the late 80s. The previous companion, Jo Grant (played by Katy Manning), was perfectly suited to Jon Pertwee's style while Sladen's Sarah Jane was far too independent and cheeky to mesh with the fatherly Pertwee. They didn't have any chemistry at all. It's a good thing Pertwee left after her first season or I suspect Sarah Jane would not have hung around the Tardis for quite as long.

My crush on Elisabeth Sladen was long forgotten when I saw her appear once again as Sarah Jane in the new Dr. Who. It didn't take long, however, for those fond feelings to return. I thought the new team did a wonderful job of fleshing out Sarah Jane's character and exploring all those emotional bonds she had with the Doctor which the original series never dared touch on. It was a great episode and I thought how fun it would be to see her come back in a new series. Apparently, the BBC felt the same way and introduced The Sarah Jane Adventures the following year. Aimed primarily at children, I was less than thrilled with the results, but it was nice to see her back on TV.

Just a few days ago, I watched Genesis of the Daleks on DVD and listened to the audio commentary featuring Tom Baker, director David Maloney, and Elisabeth Sladen. I couldn't help but laugh at her child-like enthusiasm for everything that was happening in the story. While Tom Baker said very little, only chiming in occasion to make a well-timed witticism, Sladen rattled off constant details about the production and seemed to be able to name everyone, including the extras. It was so much fun to have her in my home, so to speak. And now she's gone. I lament that I will never hear her cry out "Doctor! Doctor!" ever again.

The Space Race that Never Was

2011-02-02T11:03:00.000-05:00

The other day, I was watching Gerry Anderson's 1969 movie Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, and I found myself dozing off during the middle part of the film. It starts off well enough with some spy plot which is never fully explained, and the last third of the movie introduces an intriguing concept, but the middle is totally devoted to the development of a manned space flight to a planet on the other side of the sun. We see astronauts training, a giant rocket being built, and pudgy, sweating bureaucrats huffing about the cost and international politics. It's painfully slow and could never be done in a modern movie, but it illustrates how strong the fascination was with space exploration during the 1960s.

Having just missed space-mania (I turned 5 years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon), I was always fascinated by the residual artifacts of this period which were still around during the 1970s. One of the names that surfaces fairly frequently was Willy Ley (1906-1969). Ley spent much of his adult life popularizing the idea of space exploration. He wrote several books on rocketry and outer space, first in Germany and later in the U.S. It was during the 50s and 60s, when he teamed with such people as Wernher Von Braun and artist Chesley Bonestell on books about space, that a popular public image of space travel was created.

The spaceships that these men envisioned were sometimes sleek and aerodynamic, other times clunky and utilitarian, but all were imaginative and fun. During the late 50s, Ley worked with the Monogram model company to create a series of conceptual space vehicle models. I was not aware of these models until they were re-released by Monogram in the late 1990s. Just getting back into model building after a long hiatus, the sight of these model kits on the hobby shop shelves took me back to those days of my childhood when I was teased by the images in Ley's books.

The first of these models that I built was the Space Taxi. I assume the purpose of the vehicle was to shuttle people and provisions to space stations or even the moon. It's an awkward sort of thing, but it has a certain charm. My favorite part of the design was having the wire tethers for the astronauts so they appear to be hanging in freefall.

The second Willy Ley model I built was called the Passenger Rocket. I don't have it anymore because it was destroyed when I moved from my old house to my current home, but it was a chunky red ship similar to Thunderbird 2 from the show Thunderbirds. A smaller, streamlined ship looking like a 50s-style jet fighter rides piggyback on top of the larger craft. According to the illustration on the box, the larger ship was designed to carry the smaller ship out of Earth's atmosphere and launch it once it was in space.

The variety of designs showed that Willy Ley put a great deal of thought into what an extraterrestrial society would need to function, and the fantasy that such a thriving community could exist within our solar system is exciting to ponder. I'm sure in the 1950s, with the start of the space program, it also seemed within reach.

As a teenager, long before I even knew of the Willy Ley models, I stumbled onto a spaceship model called Mars Probe. It's origins are unclear to me. It certainly was not tied into any merchandising campaign for a movie or TV show. However, the look of the craft is reminiscent of the ships Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell envisioned. Based on what we know about the requirements for a manned flight to Mars, this rocket looks completely impractical, but it looks way cooler than the Lunar Module or the Space Shuttle.

More recently, while browsing through a hobby shop, I came across a curiosity called Apollo 27. Put out by Pegasus Hobbies, the model appears to be a fantasy vision of where NASA could have gone had they not stopped with Apollo 17. The copy on the side of the model box conjures up the hyperbolic language of the early space race: Blast off into the unknown and explore the furthest reaches of the Cosmos with the new Apollo 27 Rocket! Designed to safely transport its two man crew to wherever their mission takes them, it also provides then with an all around view was never been available to the other astronauts who traveled before them. Hyper-dynamo-tension rocket engines give the Apollo 27 an acceleration rate that staggers the mind, and yet completely protects the crew from the massive amount of G's that would normally crush them! This makes far journeys possible in just a few short months, not decades. Mars is just a hop away now!

I get a chill from that sort of thing! It's the kind of "why not?" enthusiasm that faded away after the Apollo astronauts hit a couple of golf balls around the lunar surface. With the end of the Apollo program and the appearance of Star Wars a few years later, space adventure shifted from what could actually happen to pure fantasy in a galaxy far, far away. The general public doesn't cares about making it a reality anymore. In a way, space exploration seems just as distant to us now as it did to the early readers of science fiction pulps almost a century ago. It makes me sad.

Sci-Fi Drought After Star Wars

2010-02-01T12:46:00.004-05:00

Pop culture history implies that the popularity of the first Star Wars movie opened the floodgates for all things science fiction during the late 70s and early 80s. While it's true that science fiction and fantasy became an economically viable genre after Star Wars, the truth of the matter was that Hollywood was caught completely off guard by the wild success of the film. It took almost two years for the studios to pump out anything close to that level of production quality.

I was a pre-teen kid who became a science fiction junkie long before Star Wars ever arrived, so I was used to scrounging around for any movies, comics, or TV shows that might feed my sci-fi fix. Unfortunately, before Star Wars, there was damn little and what there was around was of damn poor quality. Outside of Star Trek, Forbidden Planet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the rest was pretty terrible. After Star Wars, I was rubbing my hands together in anticipation, now certain that I would have more science fiction movies and TV shows to watch than I could handle. It was a frustrating wait, though, and I spent most of the time grasping at whatever rare bits of space fantasy I could find.

One early bit of science fiction that I found oddly intriguing came along in July 1977. While I was in a convenience store with my dad, I noticed a comic book on the spinner rack titled Richie Rich Meets Timmy Time. I was not much of a Harvey Comics fan at the time, but because the comic had a science fiction theme, I had to have it. In those days, my dad was in real estate and I would often drive around with him as he ran various errands (e.g., dropping off a contract, picking up a contract, putting a "for sale" sign in a yard, etc.). Anyway, my dad stopped off at a house to do some business and I sat in the car reading my new comic. I can still remember sitting in my dad's 1973 Mazda RX-3 with the windows down. The sultry night air blew through the cabin and an ad played on the radio for the movie Kingdom of the Spiders starring William Shatner.

The comic starts out with Richie Rich and his friend Gloria playing on one of his private beaches when he thinks he discovers gold. Out of thin air, Timmy Time and his robot companion Traveler appear. Timmy wears a space suit and has prematurely white hair while Traveler looks like a vertically stretched green fedora with arms. The "gold" that Richie discovered is actually a mineral known as igneous tholerine and is used to power space ships in the far off year of 2019. Timmy goes on to explain that his robot can help him travel through time, which is how they came to end up in 1977. To illustrate his point, Traveler takes Timmy, Richie, and Gloria to 1883 just as Krakatoa is erupting. Fortunately, Traveler can also put a force field around them to protect the gang from the lava. Returning back to present day 1977, Timmy and Traveler relate their origin.

Here we meet Timmy's dad who is the captain of a space ship. The ship is about to be bombarded with meteors, so the crew gets into the escape pod, only to be struck directly by a meteor. Timmy decides the only way to protect the escape pod is to fly back to the main ship in a space suit and put the ship directly in the path of the meteors. As soon as he reaches the ship, another meteor tears through the hull (although it apparently does not suck out all the air). From the meteor emerges Traveler who almost immediately whisks Timmy away even before we can learn why he was trapped in a meteor to begin with. Traveler takes Timmy back to caveman days where we're treated to some friendly hi-jinks with some dim-witted cavemen. They then return to the space ship at the same time when they left so Timmy can do exactly what Timmy set out to do in the first place, which was block the meteors and save the escape pod. Although Traveler did nothing but get in the way and provide some feeble comic relief, Timmy befriends the robot and we are set up for what will undoubtedly be many more adventures to come.

Although the story doesn't sound like much now, I was pretty impressed at the time with the adventure elements of the story, especially since it was essentially a Richie Rich comic. The artwork was done by Ernie Colon, who walked a fine line between cartoony and serious comic art styles. It reminded me of the Walt Disney comic adaptations made of their theatrical releases.

Inside the comic was a survey form you could send in to tell Harvey Comics whether you thought Timmy Time was "great, okay, or not so hot." My guess is that no one even bothered to send in the forms because Timmy Time never appeared in another comic book again. I kept waiting, but it never happened.

Another bit of science fiction fun I remember during this lean period was the TV show Quark starring Richard Benjamin as the captain of an intergalactic garbage ship. Created by Buck Henry, the idea was to do to science fiction what Get Smart! did to the spy genre. Besides Benjamin as Adam Quark, the ship was populated by a transmute (half-man, half-woman) named Gene/Jean (Tim Thomerson), a young blonde and her clone both named Betty (Cyb and Patricia Barnstable), a humanoid plant with no emotions named Ficus (Richard Kelton), and a clunky robot called Andy (Bobby Porter). Quark took his orders from a spineless bureaucrat named Palindrome (Conrad Janis) who in turn took his orders from a giant, disembodied head aptly called Head (Alan Caillou). Although Quark's primary responsibility was picking up meteor-sized Hefty bags of trash from spaceships in the galaxy, he was always angling for bigger missions, which usually led him into big trouble.

The ultimate problem for a show satirizing science fiction films and TV in 1978 was that, since there was so little science fiction out there that the general public would recognize, the story options were limited. The first episode, a one-hour special which premiered on February 24, 1978, was a Star Wars parody called "May the Source be with You." The following week, the story was a parody of the Star Trek episode "The Deadly Years." The week after that, another Star Trek parody, this one based on the episode "Mirror, Mirror." Other episodes spoofed 2001: A Space Odyssey, Flash Gordon, and - oh yes - more Star Trek episodes. Only seven episodes in and the limitations of the format were already beginning to show.

Nevertheless, I loved the show, not only because it made clever references to the shows I loved, but the premise itself was quite amusing for a 13-year-old. During that long, cold winter, Quark was a lone bright spot on a Friday night. In fact, I remember walking home from school with my friend Vince and he said that watching Quark was the only thing he had to look forward to. He would soon have to find something new to sustain his existence.

Quark finished its run on NBC with the airing of the pilot episode as its eighth and final installment. The night it aired, I was once again out with my dad going to someone's home. A small girl was in the living room watching the pilot episode and I was trying to catch some of it from my vantage point in the foyer. The show looked different somehow. The sets were darker. The girl's brother walked in and asked stupidly, "Are you watching Quark?" She replied, "Yes, but it's different. Palindrome's office had changed and Ficus isn't in the show." Before I could learn more, my dad was finished with his business and led me out of the house. I was wondering about the changes in the show, but I figured I could catch up next week, or watch the reruns during the summer.

Of course, none of this came to pass. The show had been canceled and never saw the light of day for decades to come. I only recently saw the pilot episode on DVD, where instead of Ficus there was a crotchety old scientist named Dr. O.B. Mudd (Douglas Fowley), another obvious Star Trek reference. It's difficult to watch these episodes now. Although amiable enough, they aren't very funny and the humor is rather broad. All you have to do is look at Futurama to see how far our awareness of science fiction pop culture as progressed along with the speed and snarkiness of our humor.

The science fiction drought continued through the summer of 1978, and I contented myself with Flash Gordon serials and reading old Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Hollywood finally got on the ball when Battlestar Galactica hit the air waves. The stories were pretty bad, but the special effects and production values were on par with Star Wars. By the spring, Alien would arrive in theatres and the drought was officially over.

A Very MTV Christmas

2009-12-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

After seeing some of MTV's newest train wreck Jersey Shore, I couldn't help but lament the sad turn that cable television has taken. I recognize that showing music videos 24/7 was a novelty which lost its luster by the mid-80s, and there are still some all music channels if you are willing to buy into some of the premium packages, but the charm of the old MTV went beyond just music with pictures.

The Video Jockeys, or VJs as they were called, provided a homey sort of connection between the viewer and the pop music world. Because they came into your home every day, and because they were talking directly to you like a radio personality, you felt as though they were a part of the family. As MTV became more popular and rock stars scurried to get air time, not only through their videos but in person, the VJs were the people who provided the conduit to our favorite musicians. Since the VJs felt like family, and they brought the musicians into our homes, I think the audience felt closer to the rock stars as well. And I don't mean in the sleazy paparazzi way of today where we see them stumbling out of clubs at 3 a.m., but in the way they wanted to be presented and the way we wanted to see them: as musicians.

This homey connection to MTV was never more strongly felt than at Christmas time when MTV would put together a special Christmas video featuring a musical performer and the MTV VJs and crew. The first such video appeared in 1981 (their first year of operation) and featured Billy Squier. As you watch, you'll see Tim Kazurinsky who was a new member of SNL at the time. Nowadays, both Billy Squier and Tim Kazurinsky are probably not very well known to the general public, but they were hip stars at the time:

The following Christmas, the MTV Christmas video featured Joe "King" Carrasco. Again, not well known today, but at the time he was a hot property thanks to his song Party Weekend. The video is a Christmas variation of that song, incorporating his musical style with well known Christmas songs.

In 1985, Pee Wee Herman and Bryan Adams did a little Reggae Christmas video.

The one that sticks out in my mind the most was in 1986 when the Monkees provided a Christmas medley. There's a bit at the end that was a pretty big surprise at the time.

During 1986, the Monkees were having a huge comeback with a new single and a tour. Unfortunately, Michael Nesmith claimed that he was too busy to participate. I think it had more to do with the fact that he didn't want to participate if he didn't have complete control over the project, but whatever. His appearance in this Christmas video was quite a shock at the time and made it all the more special for us Monkees fans out there.

You'll notice also that some of the VJs had changed by 1986. Nina Blackwood and J.J. Jackson had been replaced by Grace Slick's daughter China and the ever annoying Downtown Julie Brown. This was the beginning of the end for the old MTV. Soon they would be running compartmentalized segments like Yo! MTV Raps and Headbanger's Ball with specific hosts for each show. The original free-wheeling format gave way to a tighter, more network-like structure, forever killing the special charm of the channel.

When I was young, I never wanted to be one of those old fogeys who always talked about how things were better in the olden days, and I don't believe I am since I don't subscribe to that notion...entirely. But around Christmas time, it's nice to look back at things that were so special in their time and can never happen again.

Vincent Price Narrates A Christmas Carol

2009-12-14T13:47:00.003-05:00

When cable television first hit Baltimore County in the early 80s, I was fascinated by all the old, obscure stuff the fledgling cable channels would dig up to fill air time. Each Christmas, The Christian Broadcasting Network (which later became The Family Channel) would air an extremely old television version of A Christmas Carol narrated by Vincent Price. The production budget must have been under $10 and the story is hopelessly truncated, but the sheer cheesiness of the whole thing made me fall in love with it. I especially like how Vincent Price is pretending to read directly from Dickens' text, but much of what he is saying does not appear in the book. It's just exposition created to fill in the bits of the story they didn't have time for or couldn't afford to shoot. The whole thing feels like you're watching a local church group production.

Each year, I would seek out this little treasure, but by the mid-80s, CBN had become too sophisticated to run such an old, rickety gem. I was certain I would never see it again, but thanks to the wonders of teh internets, here it is again. It certainly won't put Robert Zemeckis out of business, but it's kinda fun:

1970's Batman

2009-10-30T10:38:00.000-04:00

Recently, I was reading Michael Eury's terrific book The Batcave Companion, which covers Batman's history from the beginning of the "New Look" era in 1964, through the Batmania of the TV series, and into the bronze age period when Batman returned to being a dark and mysterious avenger of the night. This is my favorite period of Batman history because I was born in 1964 and Batman was the first super hero I was aware of thanks to the TV show. By the time I was old enough to read comics (or at least look at the pictures), Batman was already morphing into a character 180 degrees different from the goofy guy on television.

The first Batman comic I talked my father into buying for me was Batman #220 with a cover date of March 1970, which means it probably came out in January 1970. This was only three months after Dick Grayson had gone off to college to deal with war protesters, acid droppers, and hippies while Bruce Wayne ditched Wayne Manor for a penthouse at Wayne Enterprises and started chasing after drug dealers and corporate criminals rather than the Joker and the Penguin. The story for issue #220 dealt with a crusading journalist named Marla Manning whose series of articles under the title "Victims Anonymous" were not going down well with the corporate fat cats she was skewering. Someone was out to kill Ms. Manning and Batman scrambled to track down the guilty party before it was too late. Quite a long way from the silly capers I was used to seeing on the TV show and a more serious story than a five-year-old was used to, but I still loved it.

I was always ambivalent about the bronze age because, by this time, the new generation of comic book writers and artists were baby boomers who had grown up reading comic books. The comic books they read as kids were written for their reading level and their understanding of the world. When they grew up and got the chance to write for comics, they were creating stories for people of their own age group (i.e., teenagers and young adults). That was fine for the baby boomers, but for those of us who were cutting their teeth on Where the Wild Things Are and Encyclopedia Brown, the comic book writers of the 1970s seemed to be thumbing their noses at the new generation of readers. On the other hand, perhaps these more complex stories challenged us to read at a higher level and absorb concepts us younger readers may not have encountered until later in life. Maybe I wouldn't have read Jaws at the age of 10 if I hadn't already been reading these nuanced, character-driven Batman stories in the early 70s.

Anyway, as a kid, there were always two Batmans: the Adam West version on TV and the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams version in the comics. Both were equally great in my mind, but for different reasons. The duality extended to the toy industry where all Batman-related merchandise in the 70s tended to reflect the Silver Age version of Batman rather than the one I was reading in the comics. For example, the Mego 8-inch Batman action figure sported stubby ears on the cowl and a friendly, smiling face even though the artwork on the box showed the grimacing, tall-eared version. Also, Mego always presented the Batman figure with Robin despite the fact that, in the comics, both characters were solo acts at this point. I guess Mego figured that more kids were familiar with the TV show than the comic and the TV version created a friendlier tone. I didn't agree, and during my whole childhood, I longed for a Batman action figure that looked like the Batman in the comics.

Last Christmas, my wife Kathy gave me a 1970s Batman costume made by Rauty, so that sort of put the pressure on me to create the figure I had been longing to have. The costume consisted of the unitard, the cape, and the bat symbol for his chest. That left the cowl, gloves, belt, and boots to create. The boots were relatively easy since Captain Action's boots are shaped in a similar way to Batman's, and I had plenty of those on hand. I just needed to paint them the right color. The belt could be made from yellow, foam-rubber sheeting with the tubes and buckle fabricated in some way. The big challenge was the gloves and the cowl. Classic Plastick makes Captain Action-style gloves which look basically like mittens. That wasn't the way I wanted to go. Most modern super hero figures have painted hands with cuffs on the wrists to simulate gloves. That seemed a better route, so I decided to fabricate finned cuffs out of polyvinyl clay.

While I was at it, I made small tube shapes out of clay which could be painted and glued to the belt. I also made a buckle out of PVC, but I didn't like the result, so I opted for a plastic buckle I cut off another action figure belt. It didn't glue on exactly the way I wanted it to, but it worked okay.

Next came the major issue: the cowl. I thought about making a cowl from PVC, but as with my Iron Man custom, I was afraid it would be too big and unwieldy. Then one day, while I was working on a different custom, I accidentally snapped the head off one of my figures. Kathy witnessed the event and said, "Now you have an excuse to try and fabricate an entire head out of PVC." If I was going to do that, I thought, why not make a head that had a mask on it so I wouldn't have to fill in all the facial details. At that moment, I committed myself to making a Batman headsculpt for my 1970s Batman custom.

I started with a wadded up ball of aluminum foil over which I layered PVC to make an oval head shape roughly 1/6th scale. I later discovered that this was a mistake because, as I layered on more pieces of clay to build up the face and mask, I found the head was growing slightly larger than what I wanted. Still, I was surprised that the head actually looked pretty life-like.

After baking the finished headsculpt, I painted it, trying hard to match the color of the cowl with the cape. The gloves and boots I painted a slightly darker shade of blue since I figured, in reality, they would be made of leather and have a deeper shade.

I think I'll take another shot at the headsculpt at a later date when I am feeling more confident. While it's far from perfect, it does bring to mind the caped crusader of my youth.

Rack Toys From Space

2009-10-22T13:18:00.007-04:00

I'm sure everyone has heard the story about the child who gets a big, fancy toy for Christmas and then spends the entire morning playing with the box it came in. Sometimes the simplest toys evoke the most excitement and playful activity. That's probably true because many simple toys are fairly generic, allowing the child to impose whatever storyline he or she wants and encouraging full use of the child's imagination. That's what I always loved about the much maligned rack toys. You know, the cheap items on metal hooks in that one row of the drug store or convenience store devoted to children. They're colorful enough to get a kid's attention and inexpensive enough that a parent will buy it if the kid whines enough. These are certainly not "wait until Christmas" items, but they can often be more loved and played with than any of the high ticket items at the Toys 'R Us.

While digging through a box of old stuff the other day, I came across three tiny spaceships. I didn't even realize I had saved them, but given how much fun I had with them, I'm not surprised. One was a stubby red ship with a clear plastic top, exposing its engine room. The other two were long, slender ships somewhat akin to jet aircraft. One was blue with silver wings along the back; the other was yellow with silver turbine engines mounted on the rear.

I first laid eyes on these little ships at my friend's house. He told me he got them as a "five-fingered discount" from the local department store. I think the fact that they were obtained through illicit means made them even more appealing to me. He had paint racing stripes on the ships with model paint and added the Roman numeral II to the red ship and the numeral III to the blue one. Although I never asked, my assumption was that he had been playing with the ships as if they were like the rescue ships from Thunderbirds, each bearing a number designation.

Every time I went over to my friend's house, I would dig out these little ships and fly them around the room. Finally, he told me I could have them. I guess he was bored with them and could see that I enjoyed them more than he did. There was no argument from me, and I quickly squirreled them away in my pocket.

Originally, each ship had landing gear, but I thought that detracted from their sleek looks, so I broke off the tiny wheels. The more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of the ships in the old Flash Gordon movie serials. In the old cliffhangers, Dr. Zarkov's ship was short and stubby while Ming the Merciless's ships were long and sleek. Soon, I found myself playing Flash Gordon with these ships.

Of course, in my imagination, it was never as simple as just playing. I had an imaginary television network, and the ships lead me to produce a Flash Gordon summer replacement series during the summer of 1977 (what it was replacing, I have no idea). Every weeknight at 7 p.m., I went into the basement to act out a new episode. Playing the role of Flash and reacting to imaginary characters around me, I made use of whatever was available to perform the story, so a car antenna became my sword, my brother's grease gun became my ray gun, and an old floor-model radio from the 1920s served as the controls of my space ship. When it came to the point in the show where special effects shots of the space ships were needed, I would pick up my tiny plastic craft and zip them around the basement in epic dog fights.

Influenced by the chapter structure of old serials, I planned for the series to end at a specific point, which I believe was around the end of July, if memory serves. I can still recall bouncing around on the day beds in our "club" basement area during the climatic sword fight between Flash and Ming. Just like in the serials, Ming met with some inconclusive fate (fell into a pit or something), thus leaving an opening for Ming to return for future battles with Flash. Unfortunately, the series was never renewed. I guess I lost interest in playing the blonde adventurer.

A few months later, I started a new series called Aurora, and used the blue spaceship as the eponymous interstellar craft. Since most of my TV show ideas were rip offs of other shows or movies that I liked, Aurora was a variation on Star Trek. More specifically, I was influenced by the early Star Trek comic books produced by Gold Key where the gadgets and interior design of The Enterprise were much cruder in appearance than the show itself. My idea for Aurora was to have a ship exploring the galaxy which was of an earlier era when the technology was less advanced and the characters more fallable. It actually bore a striking resemblance to the Enterprise TV show which aired a few years ago.

After acting out a full season of the series in that format, I decided it needed a radical change, so I brought on board an entirely new crew. At this time, I was really digging M*A*S*H, so I based the characters vaguely on the personnel at the 4077th. The captain was a Frank Burns-type and the helmsman was a Hawkeye-type, so they were constantly clashing on how to best resolve that week's crisis. The yeoman was like Radar, the first officer was sort of like B.J. Hunnicutt, and on and on. I enjoyed this mash up (pardon the pun) so much that I wrote a novel based on this idea when I was 14 years old. I still have the hand-written story in a composition book somewhere, but I don't have the nerve to read it.

Like most toys, the little spaceships eventually lost their appeal and they were shuffled from one storage box to another. I had lost track of them until the other day, when they brought back a flood of memories. Pretty amazing what a trio of shoplifted rack toys can do for a kid's imagination.

Captain Action Gets No Respect...

2009-10-13T10:41:00.002-04:00

but this is funny as hell!

Catch more adventures with Joe, Hamish, and Cappy on YouTube.

Lucky Buck is Back!

2009-09-04T13:52:00.008-04:00

There seems to be a serious effort to revive the future man of the past, Buck Rogers, judging by this Web site. Just the name "Buck Rogers" remains a catchphrase for all things new and futuristic. Even those who never read the comic strips, watched the old movie serial, or saw the 80's TV show know that there is something bright and positive and forward-thinking in the concept. He lives, after all, in the 25th century and, even though its closer to us now than it was when he was originally conceived in 1928, his time is just far enough away to give us hope that by then we will get it right. Or maybe that's not even a concern anymore, and we just like to speculate about all the cool toys they will have in the far-flung future.

For the uninitiated, Buck Rogers started out as Anthony Rogers in a novel called Armageddon 2419 AD. 20th century man Anthony Rogers becomes trapped in a cave, but a mysterious gas in the cave preserves him until he is reawakened in the year 2419. By this time, the Earth has been divided into general regions and the Mongols (i.e., Asian people) are trying to gain absolute rule over the other regions. Since Rogers is discovered by American resistance fighter Wilma Deering, he becomes a part of their cause and eventually the Mongol forces are defeated.

The novel was quickly turned into a comic strip and it spun off in its own direction, replacing the world war scenario with an outer space battle between Earth and the interplanetary gangster Killer Kane. With a real world war looming in Europe, a futuristic Al Capone, using ray guns instead of machine guns, was probably more palatable to the American readers at the time. Once Rogers, now nicknamed "Buck," was plunged into outer space, the gadgetry of the series really took off. The art style of the strip evolved as well, becoming more cartoonish and providing a real "gee-whiz" quality to this view of the future. In the Depression-era world, no wondered the gleaming rockets and gizmos of Buck Rogers seemed so appealing.

Buck Rogers continued to find an audience even as the world moved into the jet age. The storylines and overall look of the comic strip changed, reflecting the more realistic (but no less optimistic) mood of the 50s where atomic power and rockets pointed to a space age that was right around the corner.

When I was a pre-teen, Buck Rogers held a special place in my heart, although I'm not sure why. There were no comic strips, comic books, TV shows, or movies at the time that would thrust him into my consciousness. The only reference material I had was a coverless book which contained the early run of the comic strip from the 1930s, and a scratchy recording of the first radio show episode. This was enough, however, to trigger my interest in the man with the rocket pack on his back.

In the winter of '79, I dragged my dad into the cold night air to see a new movie version of Buck Rogers. Just like he had done a year earlier with Battlestar Galactica, producer Glen A. Larson made a feature-length TV pilot so he could release the pilot as a theatrical film before people could see it for free on television. I knew it was a rip off, but I so wanted to see what he had done with Buck Rogers. It actually seemed pretty good from my 14-year-old perspective. Gil Gerard's Buck was a flippant, cocky astronaut who reminded me of a macho version of Hawkeye Pierce. There was humor and action and pretty women in revealing outfits: all the stuff a young boy wants in a movie. I was so stoked to see the show when it premiered in the fall. Unfortunately, the series didn't live up to the promise of the movie. The episodes became increasingly more campy and relied too much on the jiggling T&A so prevalent in late 70s/early 80s TV. I didn't even bother with the second season where they traveled in space like a poor man's Star Trek. They even had a poor man's Spock in the form of Hawk, a half-man/half-bird hybrid. That cured me of any Buck Rogers interest after that.

In fact, ol' Buck didn't enter my consciousness again until I started collected Captain Action stuff about 10 years ago. In the mid-60s, when Ideal Toys was licensing every pop culture hero for its Captain Action line, a Buck Rogers suit was created for the good Captain to sport. I assume the suit was based on the way Buck Rogers appeared in the comic strip at the time because he only bears a passing resemblance to the Buck Rogers of the 1930s. The main difference is the silver lame suit. I guess once the NASA Mercury astronauts trotted out their shiny duds, everyone assumed that all space men would wear silver lame. The ubiquitous jet pack is part of the outfit, but it too has an updated, jet-age flair. Buck's helmet in the 1930s looked like a football helmet, but the Captain Action outfit provided a more toned-down head cover. The most interesting part of the suit for me was the gloves and boots. They both sported angled ends that are quite different from anything I have seen before. The boots, especially, have points going up the outer calf rather than in the front. Very forward thinking.

I remember seeing the Buck Rogers costume advertised when Captain Action was in the stores, but I never saw the actual costume in the flesh until my lovely wife bought me a lot of CA odds and ends on eBay, one piece being the Buck Rogers suit and face mask. Thankfully, the chest logo was in good shape, but the silver lame had become dirty and tarnished looking. Some helpful soul on the Yahoo! Captain Action list recommended that I paint the suit with DecoArt metallic silver paint. I was skeptical, but it worked out quite well. Later on, I acquired a pair of boots, but the gloves eluded me, so I ordered a pair of repros from the great Wes McCue at Classic Plastick. The jet pack was gained years later through a heated eBay auction.

I never did find a helmet at a price I wanted to pay, so I made my own version starting with a dark blue helmet from a G.I. Joe set. I removed the visor and covered the ear holes with wheels from a jet airplane model kit. Since the original helmet had little silver balls running up the center, I looked for something that would create the same effect. I never liked how the balls on the original helmet stopped midway up the back for no particular reason, so I had mine run all the way from back to front. They're actually a set of fake pearls from a Disney's Aladdin action figure set which I glued on. After painting over them with a silver stripe, Buck looked ready for action.

The accessories, such as the ray gun and the canteen (?) seldom surface on eBay, but I don't really care. They always seemed like throwaway pieces anyway. The jet pack really made the suit.

I'm hoping that, with all this new interest in Buck Rogers, someone will put together a decent movie or TV series based on the character. Just as Superman is the prototype super hero, Buck Rogers is the prototype science fiction hero. We would never have had Captain Kirk without Buck Rogers, whether Mr. Roddenberry consciously realized it or not. Buck represents what Americans most want to be with a positive eye to the future and no challenge too great to overcome. We could use a revamped Buck Rogers right about now.

Vinyl Impressions Part III

2009-07-24T13:02:00.011-04:00

When I presented Jim Six with his custom action figure, one person who was around to witness it was my friend Kate Becker. It was Kate, in fact, who gave me the inspiration for doing the Jim Six figure in the first place when she talked about finding someone online who made custom action figures of people based on photographs. As Jim went into convulsions over his new figure, I could see a glint of envy in Kate's eyes. At that moment, I thought that if I made a figure for anyone else, it should be for Kate. Only thing was, I didn't have any ideas on how to do it.

As I related in my last post, I quickly went on to make a custom action figure for a young boy who was part of an Adopt-A-Family Christmas program. Then I kinda stopped making custom figures for awhile. I still hadn't forgotten about Kate, however, and I flogged my brain to figure out what the theme could be. I knew that she had been a life-long fan of the Baltimore Orioles, so that could be the starting point. Okay, how do I do that?

The answer came to me when I thought back to one of my early customs: a Johnny Unitas figure. The uniform for the legendary Baltimore Colt was found on eBay. Back in the 60s, there was an action figure named Johnny Hero, a rather ordinary 1/6th scale figure who wore a red track suit and matching sneakers. However, the toy line provided uniforms for the figure based on every professional baseball and football team around at the time. After buying the basic figure, you could dress him up as a member of your favorite football or baseball team. Johnny Hero was never as popular as G.I. Joe, but he did hang around for a couple of years during the mid-60s. Anyway, many of these football and baseball costumes were available on eBay, so I regularly scoped out the Johnny Hero uniforms until I found a Colts uniform at the right price. When it came time to make Kate's figure, I knew I should be able to find an Orioles uniform and quickly did.

With the Orioles uniform in hand, I next had to find a female figure to put it on. Female custom figures are difficult to put together simply because there are just not that many female figures out there to choose from. Sure, there are plenty of Barbie dolls, but their bodies are not realistic and there headsculpts are exaggerated. At the other end of the scale, you have figures like the Cy Girls who are basically male fantasy figures best used for super hero customs. I needed a middle ground. Fortunately, Old Joe Infirmary carries a female figure line called Fem'Basix which features average sized figures with different hair and eye colors. I choose a figure which best matched Kate's features and, thankfully, the Orioles uniform fit the figure reasonably well.

Given the Orioles theme of the project, accessories were not a problem. The Johnny Hero costume already came with a batter's helmet, bat, baseball, and glove. The only trouble was, there was no bird emblem on the cap and the batter's helmet featured the emblem of a different team (must've been a mix-up at the factory in Hong Kong). I decided to do a little research on the Orioles costume and it turned out that this particular uniform was only worn during the 1964 season (the year Johnny Hero was introduced). In addition, the bird emblem on the cap and helmet was distinct to that uniform. I believe the following year, they introduced the cartoon bird which became so familiar to baseball fans for a couple decades. Anyway, after finding a decent graphic of the bird emblem, I shrunk it down to proper size in Photoshop and printed it out on sitcker paper. Once cut out and applied to the cap and helmet, the uniform was official.

Next came the box. This is always a daunting task, especially for my graphic designer wife Kathy who ends up creating the box graphics for me. My technique for mocking up an action figure box is to take an existing box and cover over it with new graphics printed on regular paper, but applied with decoupage glue so that it has a glossy finish. To make our lives as simple as possible, I tried to find an action figure box that was basically rectangular with clean, straight lines. While Kathy and I were outlet shopping on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I came across a basic military action figure marked down for close-out. Not only did the figure look appealing for a different custom project, the box he came in was a simple rectangle with a rectangular cellophane window on the front. As a bonus, the backing board on which the figure was mounted featured a simple painting of grass and blue skies. Perfect for the baseball theme without the need for any alterations. Once we got it home, Kathy and I set to work.

I have to give Kathy most of the credit for the box design. Although I came up with the back story for the action figure (a fantasy about Kate being the Orioles first bat girl during the 1964 season), Kathy designed everything else. From the All-American colors and font styles to the crisp image of Memorial Stadium on the front, the box screamed baseball americana. After all the cutting and pasting, it looked great.

I presented the gift to Kate one evening after Kathy and Kate had spent the day out together. She was thrilled with the finished product, which gave me no small sense of pride and happiness. I was so glad to be able to pull off one last custom figure based on a person I knew.

Vinyl Impressions Part II

2009-07-23T13:22:00.009-04:00

After creating the custom action figure for Jim Six and seeing what a great reaction it got, I became hooked on the satisfaction of making something that made someone happy. Although I would've loved to make custom figures of all my friends and family, it just wasn't feasible to find figures, clothing, and accessories which would exactly suit everyone. I was a bit lost as to what I should make next.

This was the fall of 2004, and Christmas was fast approaching. As in years past, my wife Kathy was participating in the Adopt a Family program at work where the people in her office buy gifts for one needy family. Kathy showed me the list of family members and the suggested gifts for each person. I noticed that there was a son named Tyrone who was about 6 or 7, I can't recall exactly anymore. Other people at Kathy's office were buying him the toys he requested, but I kept thinking about how I loved my action figures at that age and how I viewed them as adult versions of myself. I kept thinking that I would grow up to become part of G.I. Joe's Adventure Team, digging up mummies in Egypt or braving the jungles of Africa. Action Jackson was another figure through whom I lived vicariously. They could do all the things I couldn't then but maybe could do as an adult. If I had those feelings as a kid, I was sure Tyrone was looking for some kind of hope and inspiration for his future. What if I turned Tyrone into a superhero?

Immediately, the name Tyrone the Cyclone popped into my head. Of course, with "cyclone" in the name, he would have to have super speed. Okay, I had the basic concept, but I needed a costume. With only a few weeks to put the whole thing together, I couldn't afford to poke around on eBay. I had to rely on what I had in my boxes of action figure stuff. I settled on using a Captain Action leotard with the chest emblem removed. Kathy created a wonderful logo for the character using a "T" with a swirling cyclone pattern laid on top. From this logo, I printed a chest emblem on sticker paper and gave it extra gloss with decoupage glue. For boots, I used some flashy silver ones from a Flash Gordon costume, and the mask was made from blue electrical tape cut to shape and applied to his face.

Finally, I needed accessories. One of the disappointments I had as a kid was that both my Batman action figures, whether it be the Batman costume for my Captain Action doll or the Mego Batman doll, did not have functioning utility belts. The Batman costume for Captain Action came with accessories, but they had hooks on them which fit into holes on the belt, so the accessories hung from Batman's utility belt like he was a plumber. Mego, cheapskates that they were, didn't even include accessories with their Batman figure. There would be no half measures for Tyrone. His utility belt would have gadgets and gizmos.

I started with a belt from one of my policeman figures which had numerous pockets on it. I then created various made-up gadgets by splicing together bits and pieces of plastic from my vast collection of action figure do-dads. As I glued these little devices together, I gave each one a specific name: the flying sensor probe, the multi-tasking cosmic wrench, the hi-speed digital camera, the time travel stop watch, and the inter-dimensional communicator. Each little gadget fit neatly into the pockets on the belt. Tyrone the Cyclone was now fully armed and ready for battle.

Of course, that begged the question: Who was he to battle? I had to create an arch-enemy for Tyrone to fight. Since Tyrone the Cyclone's main power was super speed, his villain should be similarly equipped. Like Stan Lee on a deadline, I came up with the name Speed Demon and set about making a new figure.

To start, I had purchased a villainous looking figure a couple years earlier who had just the right mean look to him, but his body was rather slight, so I popped his head off the skinny body and put it on my Van Helsing figure. Not only was the Van Helsing body beefier, but it came already fitted with black gloves. I then put together an all-black outfit for him using a black leotard, funky black boots, and a pleather vest. His belt came from a G.I. Joe set, but I added little rocket jets to it and dubbed it his hover-belt. He also wielded an ornate scepter that I picked up somewhere along the way, and a spinning multi-bladed gizmo that I modified from my Van Helsing action figure. At any rate, he looked pretty bad-ass.

With the figures put together, I felt obligated to concoct a back story for these guys so that, when Tyrone opened the box on Christmas morning, he had some clue as to what the heck these goofy characters were. I wrote up the following story: Tyrone the Cyclone gained his powers when he encountered a sickly old man on a secluded street one night. The man said his name was Galdorn and he was the Supreme Guardian for his people who lived in another dimension. He had just completed his greatest achievement: banishing the worst super-criminal of his race to a nether-region between his dimension and Earth’s. Unfortunately, the super-criminal overpowered him and stole Galdorn’s magic scepter to escape to Earth. Galdorn expended all his energy to chase the super-criminal to Earth, but he was too old and weak to continue the pursuit. With all the energy left in him, Galdorn transferred his remaining powers to Tyrone. Instantly, Tyrone had the ability to travel through time and space at lightning speed. He also possessed the superior technological knowledge of Galdorn, enabling him to create amazing gadgets to hunt down and capture the escaped super-criminal. Calling himself Tyrone the Cyclone, he fashioned himself a costume impervious to the heat and friction of traveling at high speed. He also created a utility belt that carried his useful crime-fighting tools: Flying sensor probe, Multi-tasking cosmic wrench, Hi-speed digital camera, Time travel stop watch, and Inter-dimensional communicator. With his newly found powers, Tyrone the Cyclone scours the Earth to find the super-criminal - now known on Earth as Speed Demon – and return him to his prison beyond our world.

With Kathy's help, the little back story was put on a laminated card with pictures of the figures and fancy graphics. I also needed a box to put the figures in. Because of the time crunch, I couldn't create a mock-up action figure box like I had done with the Jim Six figure. Instead, I found a plain cardboard box that could hold both figures and Kathy helped me create a graphics piece that could be glued onto the front flap. It had all the usual hyperbole that toy boxes usually have and Kathy's graphics were amazing, especially how she designed a cartoon image of the spinning blade weapon that Speed Demon carried.

The whole thing was packaged and ready just in time for the people at Kathy's office to drop off the gifts to the family. I never got a chance to see Tyrone's reaction to his custom-made super hero. I'd like to think that he got a kick out of it, but he may have thought it was the lamest gift ever. I'll never know. I just think every kid should get a chance to feel like a super hero while they are still young enough to believe.

A whole mess of personal changes occurred for me during that Christmas, and I set aside my custom action figures for awhile. Still, there was one idea that kept creeping back into my brain...

Vinyl Impressions

2009-07-22T10:53:00.000-04:00

Creating custom action figures can be exhilarating or exasperating. Some come together quickly with relative ease; others can take months or years with many fits and starts. The biggest problem comes when you take on more of a challenge than you are prepared to face.

By the winter of 2004, I had several customs under my belt and was eager to expand my horizons. For Christmas, I had made a custom figure of my brother wearing fisherman's gear. I even built a diorama of a wooded lakeside to showcase the figure. Although challenging, the whole project went relatively smoothly, so I convinced myself that I could make a figure of just about anyone. Around this time, my friend Jim Six had talked about how he thought it would be cool to have an action figure in his image. Our friend Kate even found someone online who made custom action figures from people's photographs, but the cost was pretty dear. Feeling rather expansive, I quietly set about to make a Jim Six action figure and spring it on everyone as a surprise once it was completed.

One thing that gave me confidence in the project was that Jim has such a distinctive look. He has a shaved head, sports a graying beard or goatee, wears glasses, and is prone to wear Hawaiian shirts and those khaki vests with all the pockets on them. He also has very specific interests such as writing and playing music on guitar, collecting knifes, and taking photos both professionally and as a hobby. All these elements formed the direction for the project.

Trouble was, where do I get a figure that looks like Jim? Facial hair can be painted on, but most action figures are not bald, and even if I found one that was, the facial features had to be correct. Many customizers make headsculpts from polyvinyl clay, but I was not that advanced. It was a quandary until one day, I was flipping through my Cotswold Collectibles catalog and spotted these figures by DiD. They were edgy looking guys wearing hip-hop clothes and one was bald with a goatee. I thought, "If I put glasses on him and painted his beard gray, he would look just like Jim!" I was off to the races.

Or at least, I was off. The figure came with blue jeans and sneakers, which were perfect for the custom, but I needed to clothe the upper part. I already had a khaki vest left over from my brother's fisherman custom, but I needed a Hawaiian shirt. Not just any Hawaiian shirt, but one that looked like something Jim would wear. Most of the shirts I found on eBay were made for Ken dolls and looked a bit...well, alternative lifestyle, let's say. Not anything I could see Jim wearing. After months of combing eBay, I found a huge lot of Ken clothes with three Hawaiian shirts which were truly exceptional. One in particular was perfect. I bid like crazy on that lot and thought I had it locked down when some woman sniped me at the last second. I was crestfallen, but I wasn't going to give up that easily. I e-mailed the winner and diplomatically asked her if she would be willing to part with those three shirts from the collection. I offered her half what she had paid for the entire lot, and she agreed, thankfully. It turned out, she was bidding on the lot to acquire just a few specific pieces from it herself. Within a couple of weeks, I had those Hawaiian shirts in hand.

Okay, with the figure clothed, the next step was developing the accessories. The eyeglasses were no problem since I had accumulated several different styles from my various action figure purchases. Since Jim was a newspaper man, I included a pencil and notepad that I already had in my stores along with various knives which I had gained from purchasing countless military figures. The guitar was a challenge. I wanted an acoustic guitar like the one Jim owned. While there were plenty of 1/6th scale electric guitars around, I couldn't for the life of me find an acoustic one. Then, just like with the shirts, an acoustic guitar surfaced on eBay amid another big lot of Barbie and Ken stuff. This time I would not be sniped, but I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do with all these pink high-heeled shoes and yellow make-up kits.

The guitar was your standard looking acoustic with a tan wood face and dark brown sides and back. Jim's Johnson guitar was black with white piping, so some careful painting was involved to transform the thing. Once that was done, however, I knew the only accessory left was the digital camera. I assumed his camera was one of those basic silver squares that most people carry around, but my wife Kathy informed me that he had a fancy one. Under the guise of camera shopping, Kathy asked Jim what brand and model camera he had so we could find images of it online. When I finally saw what it looked like, my heart sank. This was a complicated looking piece of equipment which I would have to fabricate from scratch. Breaking the camera down to each physical element, I scoured my collection of toy accessories and model kit extras to find bits of plastic that looked like each piece of the camera. Once I was reasonably satisfied with the pieces, I assembled the camera with model glue. The finished product was basically a caricature of the actual camera, as if it had morphed into a beefier, more stylized version of itself. Anyway, it had to do.

The final element was the box to put it in. Some customizers can fabricate original boxes that look just like the real thing but, again, I don't have the talent or the resources. Instead, I decided to create the original panels for the box on the computer, print them out on paper, and then glue the paper over an existing action figure box like decoupage. To save time and effort, I had to find an action figure box which was big enough to nicely display the figure and the accessories, but simple enough so that I didn't have to create complicated shapes to cover the dye cut of the box. I settled on a box containing Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing. To create the panels, I enlisted the help of my graphic designer wife. After describing my concept for the design and the text I wanted on the box, she set about creating the images in Photoshop.

I wanted the box to mimic the style of the G.I. Joe boxes of the time. Each member of the Joe team had some hokey origin on the back of the box, so I had to come up with a similar back story for Jim. Jim's origin said that he was found as an infant on the doorstep of a Tibetan monastery and raised by a renegade sect of monks, Jim Six learned their discipline that practiced universal harmony through music and a rare form of martial arts built around knife skills. As a teenager, the monastery was destroyed by Red Chinese soldiers. Barely escaping with his guitar and his knife collection, he ventured west to start a new life. He adopted a name based on the tag found around his neck as a child that only read "SIX." Now, as a mild-mannered columnist for a great metropolitan newspaper, he waged a private war against evil.

We had to carefully scale the panels to fit precisely over the existing box. Once everything was designed and printed out, I had to cut out the pieces and glue them on the box with decoupage glue. To provide a gloss finish to the whole box, several more layers of decoupage glue had to be painted on. The box alone took weeks to put together.

Once all the elements were finished, I had to secure the figure and the accessories in the box. I used twist ties to mount the figure to the backing board, but I wanted to create a retro feel as well by securing most of the accessories to the board with good old needle and thread. I knew, however, that the camera would never hold with just thread, so that was secured with velcro. My wife added an additional touch by creating a tiny CD case using the logo of Jim's old band.

The project was so complicated, it took far longer than I had expected. I had planned to give the figure to Jim during one of his annual music parties, but the darn thing was just not finished in time. I knew we were going to visit Jim and his wife again the following weekend, so I took a day off during the week just to assemble the finished product. By the time I was ready to present it to him, I was worried that the odd project would be met with bewilderment. When he saw it, however, he exploded with laughter and joy. He became so excited, in fact, that he began to turn purple and I feared that I would be responsible for his premature death. When Jim started breathing again, so did I. All the time and effort had indeed paid off.

Although the Jim Six action figure was a big success, I swore I never wanted to tackle another personalized action figure again. However, things changed...

Captain Stargood

2009-07-14T10:07:00.002-04:00

I really like this! Kinda like if Gerry Anderson and Seth Green had a love child:

The Ghost Who Walks!

2009-07-10T10:18:00.004-04:00

"The Ghost Who Walks!" If that tag line doesn't capture the imagination of a six year old, I don't know what will. Just as I discovered Batman at a young age because he was conveniently beamed to the TV screen in my living room, I found the Phantom conveniently in the pages of our daily newspaper. As soon as I was able to read, I started reading the comic strips, and The Phantom was there along with Steve Canyon and Beetle Bailey. Since he wasn't as highly exposed as Batman or Superman, I wasn't hooked on him the same way, but he definitely caught my interest.

In fact, one of the frustrations I had with comic strips in general was that you only got two or three panels per day. For a kid with a short attention span, having a story unfold at such a snail's pace was maddening. Fortunately, during the early 70s, Charlton Comics was publishing The Phantom in comic book form on a regular basis. I much preferred reading the comic books over the strip, even though I liked the artwork on the strip better. At least with the comic book, I got a complete story in one issue. If there had been a live-action or cartoon show based on The Phantom as well, I probably would have been a bigger fan, but alas, it was not to be back then.

The Phantom's lack of media exposure has always remained a mystery to me. Making his debut in 1936, he is one of the most enduring super heroes in pop culture history, beating out Superman and Batman by two and three years, respectively. He was also the first hero to wear a brightly colored leotard with the briefs on the outside and to sport a mask with the eyes whited out for a spooky effect. He was, for all intents and purposes, the prototype for the modern super hero. The Phantom has never gone away, with the daily strip still running in newspapers along with appearances in various comic books around the world. Currently, Moonstone Comics publishes The Phantom in comic book and graphic novel form, and separate comics have been produced in places like Scandinavia, Australia, and India. Actually, he's more popular abroad than in the States, which has always baffled me. He is, after all, a wealthy American coming to a third world country to protect them. A rather unpopular sentiment in today's world, but somehow he is still appealing.

In a nutshell, The Phantom is Kit Walker, who carries on the family business as the 21st Phantom to roam the jungles of Bengalla. Back in the 1500s, one of Kit's ancestors, Christopher Walker, was serving on his father's ship when it was attacked by pirates of the Singh Brotherhood off the coast of Bengalla. Christopher Walker saw his father murdered before he was swept off the boat. He washed ashore and was nursed back to health by a tribe of pygmies. When he sees the body of the pirate who killed his father on the shore, he swears to fight greed, cruelty, and injustice. From that point on, a Walker has defended the jungle tribes of Bengalla in the disguise of The Phantom. Since the job is past down through the generations, The Phantom never dies and is thus known as "The Ghost Who Walks." Kit assumes the mantle of the super hero when his father dies from a knife wound. Up to that point, Kit had been raised in the States and was set to marry his college sweetheart when he is called to the jungle to serve his duty.

I never thought about it as a kid, but I think the reason why I liked The Phantom was because he was so much like Batman. He was a wealthy man without powers who is devoted to fighting crime and injustice because of a family trauma involving the death of a father. Without the benefit of gadgets, The Phantom was even more resourceful than Batman, using only a pair of .45 automatics and the help of his horse Hero and his wolf called Devil. Occasionally, he would also get an assist from the pygmy tribe who knows his true identity.

The jungle setting of The Phantom was always a bit confusing to me. In the comic strip, he was surrounded by African tribes people, but in other comics and stories that I read, there were Indian references like the Singh Brotherhood. I later discovered that the location of Bengalla was moved from India to Africa in the strip during the 1960s. The movie serial made in the 1940s showed a really muddled picture of the jungle environment with people of all nationalities made up in tribe makeup that didn't indicate any particular race or nationality. I guess the producers figured the kids wouldn't know any difference.

Another thing that confused me was why the strip continued to use Kit Walker as The Phantom over all those decades. Unlike other comic characters where they must remain the same age year after year, The Phantom had its own built in excuse for aging the character and having future generations take over. During the run of the strip, The Phantom did marry and have two children, but Kit remained roughly the same age and continued as the 21st Phantom right up to today. At some point, Lee Falk or the subsequent writers could have had Kit's son take over and aged him as well. I always thought that was a missed opportunity to bring a level of realism to the strip.

When Captain Action came out in 1966, Ideal secured the license to make costumes based on many of the King Features properties, including The Phantom. I never had a Phantom costume for my Captain Action as a kid, but I definitely snapped one up when Playing Mantis came out with their reproduction versions in the late 90s. Later on, I managed to find some original costumes on eBay, but not all of the accessories. The version pictured in this blog is a mixed assortment of vintage and reproduction pieces. One of the main differences between the old and new costumes is that, on the vintage costume, the black stripes on The Phantom's briefs were created with sewn-on strips of vinyl. Playing Mantis wisely silk-screened the stripes on for the reproduction. Also, Ideal made the mask as a two-piece arrangement with the face part separate from the cowl. Playing Mantis came up with a one-piece mask that's easier to put on. The version pictured here has the vintage leotard and mask. The holster, boots, belt, and knuckle band are all reproductions, which mirror the original accessories almost exactly.

After paying little attention to The Phantom for many years, I read a couple of the Moonstone comics and was quite impressed. I also hear that a new movie is in the works (the Billy Zane film didn't do so well). While he doesn't get the same sort of press as Batman, it looks like The Phantom will continue to live on in pop culture like the character himself lives forever in the jungles of Bengalla.

Meet Doctor Doom!

2009-07-06T12:45:00.003-04:00

Shortly after Playing Mantis released its reproductions of Captain Action and some of his old costumes, it seemed as though a mini-cottage industry (dollhouse industry?) popped up with enthusiasts creating reproductions of old Captain Action accessories and new masks and costumes for super hero outfits never before offered by Ideal or Playing Mantis. One such entity was 2GFX which made custom masks such as Red Skull, Nick Fury, Captain America's sidekick Bucky, and Doctor Doom. I managed to buy a Red Skull and Doctor Doom mask before 2GFX disappeared into the ether.

The reason why I wanted to make a custom figure of Doctor Doom was because, unlike so many of the other Marvel villains, Doctor Doom seemed genuinely dangerous. I know I'm more of a DC guy and Marvel fans would probably wonder where I come off with a statement like that, but so many of the Marvel villains seemed more goofy than threatening, from my perspective. Mole Man and Green Goblin and The Lizard looked more cute than scary when I was a kid. On the other hand, Doctor Doom was a guy who wore armor and ruled a Balkan country and dabbled in the occult. He had brains like Lex Luthor, but he also had the power and influence of a national ruler. This was Saddam Hussein to the nth power. That was truly frightening to me.

Although I didn't read many Marvel comics when I was young, I was a regular follower of The Fantastic Four, and I was always thrilled when Doc Doom came to ruin the FF's day. As comic fans know, Victor Von Doom had once been a college friend of Reed Richards (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) and, when a dangerous experiment permanently damages Von Doom's face, he forever blames Richards for the accident and launches a decades long crusade for revenge. His capers were ingenious, and his status as a dictator made him difficult to touch. Still, the Fantastic Four (and whatever other Marvel heroes he battled) always found a way to put him in check...until the next time.

When I set out to make a custom figure of Doc Doom, I was of course first inspired by the mask 2GFX was offering. I was also working under the notion, at the time, that all my customs should be designed specifically for Captain Action or Dr. Evil figures. Since Dr. Doom was a villain, the costume had to be on a Dr. Evil figure, but I didn't want to use the standard blue Dr. Evil figure since he was...well, blue. Fortunately, Playing Mantis produced a tan colored Dr. Evil for its Ming the Merciless costume, so I managed to land a couple of the tan-colored figures on eBay. With a figure in hand, I first gave him a pair of black pants, black boots, and a black shirt to cover the bulk of his body. Over that, I created Doom's green tunic by making a rectangular piece of fabric with a hole in the center for his head and seamed it with fabric glue. When first put on the figure, it resembled a sandwich board, but by gathering the fabric at the waist with a belt I snagged from my Star Wars Count Dooku figure, it created the illusion of a tunic.

For the armor covering his arms and legs, I used the pieces from the Marx Toys Silver Knight character. At the time, a revised version of Marx Toys was putting out a reproduction Silver Knight figure, so I bought it. I later realized that I probably could have purchased original Silver Knight accessories on eBay for the same amount of money or maybe less. I was living and learning the game of action figure customizing. Anyway, the armor pieces worked perfectly even if they were a struggle to put on. Of course, I already had to the mask, so the only piece missing was Doc Doom's iconic hooded cape.

To make the cape, I used the same green fabric I used to make the tunic (most likely purchased from a scrap bin at Jo-Ann Fabrics). I found online a pattern for a Renaissance Fair type of costume which employed a hooded cape, so I scaled the measurements down to 1/6th scale. I didn't have a sewing machine at the time, so I feebly attempted to sew a black lining into the green fabric that I had cut to size. Taking pity on me, my wife took over the sewing chore and did a wonderful job with the finished cape. The finishing touch had to be the gold chain fastener that joins Dr. Doom's cape across his neck. In most of the later drawings of Doom, the chain is connected by two large, flat gold discs. After searching various fabric and craft stores for awhile, I finally found a chain that perfectly matched what I was looking for.

Even now, with all the other custom figures under my belt, I still think this early attempt is one of my best. Of course, the mask looks great, but the Silver Knight armor and that terrific cape by my wife really sets the whole thing off. He looks just as menacing as the guy in the comics.

Wonder Woman

2009-07-01T10:20:00.004-04:00

Since comic book readership has traditionally been predominantly male, female super heroes were often a tough sell. Not that there weren't several attempts made, but characters like Lady Luck are largely forgotten today. As the median age of comic book readers began to rise in the 1970s, it was easier for the comic book companies to cultivate popular female superheroes since adolescent boys were only too happy to see a curvy, buxom woman in spandex kicking butt. The one female who beat the odds and remained popular from the golden age to modern day was Wonder Woman.

As a kid, I was aware of her name, but I didn't really know anything about Wonder Woman until I read her origin story reprinted in Jules Feiffer's wonderful book on comic history, The Great Comic Book Heroes. In a sense, I was experiencing Wonder Woman for the first time the same way the rest of America experienced her for the first time in 1941. The origin takes place just before the beginning of World War II when Army Intelligence officer Steve Trevor uncovers the leaders of a spy ring and goes on a dangerous mission to capture them. Along the way, his plane runs out of fuel and crash lands on Paradise Island, home of the Amazons. While Trevor is nursed back to health, Princess Diana falls in love with the man and fights to win the honor of taking Trevor back to America so he can finish the job he started. Her mother, Queen Hippolyte, fashions a special costume for her that incorporates elements of the U.S. flag and the golden eagle. Thus, Princess Diana adopts the U.S. as her new home and fights to protect her.

Plenty has been written about what Wonder Woman represents to young girls and to American society in general. I think her biggest contribution was to bring a female perspective and influence to the male dominated machismo of the super hero world. Shortly after her introduction, she was given membership into the all-boys club Justice Society of America. By the time the Justice League of America was formed in the Silver Age, Wonder Woman was part of DC's top three heroes (Superman and Batman being the other two, of course) who had run uninterrupted in comics up to that time. She also established the precedent of there being at least one female in every comic hero team.

Other than that origin story, I have to say I never read a Wonder Woman comic. I only saw her as part of the Justice League, or in the Super Friends cartoon show. There was also this bizarre TV movie from the early 70s:

Gotta love the wakka-cha wakka-cha theme songs back then!

I also watched the Lynda Carter version, at least for a season or so. As much as I liked Wonder Woman, I couldn't bring myself to read a comic featuring a woman. My guess is that most boys had the same reaction, which is why action figures based on female heroes were not as popular in those days. Ideal put out a line of female hero dolls in the 60s to compliment their Captain Action line, but they sold poorly and are quite rare today. Called the Super Queens, the four dolls were Batgirl, Supergirl, Aquaman's wife Mera, and Wonder Woman. I never tried to collect them because, in addition to being expensive, I didn't think they looked all that good. While Captain Action was muscled and articulated to look and pose like a hero, the Super Queens were slight and had limited articulation. They also possessed extremely girly faces not befitting of a super hero.

Still, I wanted a Wonder Woman doll to put amongst my other DC figures. Several years back, Mattel put out a series of Barbie dolls dressed like DC's female heroes. The costumes were great, but I've never been a fan of the Barbie doll in general. Again, it's too slight, the articulation is wonky, and the faces are way too soft and pretty. They are dolls for girls, after all. I bought a Wonder Woman Barbie and slipped it in with my Superman and Batman and Aquaman, but I wasn't happy about it.

Then, last Christmas, my wonder woman wife bought me some Cy Girl action figures for customizing purposes. These female figures are articulated like male action figures and are more curvacious than Barbies, looking very much like the way women are drawn in comic books. They are also provided with two different chest pieces, one featuring smallish breasts and one with larger breasts, depending on what type of effect you want to create. Although my brunette Cy Girl had bigger hips than the Barbie, I figured she could probably slip into the Wonder Woman costume with some encouragement. Happily, I was correct. Of course, I had to use the smaller chest piece since the big boobs simply would not fit in the costume, but I think a smaller chest is better suited to an athletic woman anyhow.

The finished product appears to me as a modern, realistic interpretation of Wonder Woman rather than her iconic image, but I like it. She's also much easier to pose.

Golden Age and Silver Age Green Lantern

2009-06-28T08:00:00.001-04:00

Just like the Silver Age Flash, I first discovered Silver Age Green Lantern not in comic books but on the Aquaman cartoon show where he appeared in both his own solo back-up stories and as part of the Justice League of America. The thing that fascinated me about Green Lantern was that he belonged to a larger intergalactic organization designed to police all the planets in space. That imbued him with a greater calling than these other super heroes who simply got hit by radiation or fell into a pile of chemicals and gained super powers. Hal Jordan was blessed with his powers, or at least given a ring and lantern that contained powers, by a far superior group of aliens. If Superman was a veiled representation of Jesus Christ, the Green Lantern was something like a prophet.

I first learned Green Lantern's origin in one of the cartoon installments. Test pilot Hal Jordan is suddenly transported to a desert area where a UFO has crash landed. The alien belongs to the Guardians of the Universe and, now that the alien is dying, he has chosen Jordan to pass on his membership to because he is a good man without fear. The alien gives Jordan a green ring and a green device that looks like a lantern. The lantern charges the ring every 24 hours and, whitgh the ring, he can create just about anything he wishes. Its only weakness is that the ring is powerless against the color yellow. This was one of those bullshit twists that I always hated in comic books, like Superman's kryptonite. These guardians are so powerful, but all you have to do is paint your gun yellow and they're screwed. Oh well...

I discovered that there had been a Golden Age Green Lantern when DC Comics started publishing old reprints in the back pages of their comics in the early 70s. While Silver Age Green Lantern's origin was pure atomic age sci-fi, the Golden Age version had an origin borrowing more from magic, which was pretty common with those early super heroes. Alan Scott stumbles across a magic lantern made of green metal which has mysterious powers. Scott creates a ring that, when he touches it to the lantern every 24 hours, gives him great powers. While Hal Jordan's ring could not affect anything yellow, Scott's ring was defenseless against items made of wood. I think Hal Jordan had the better advantage here.

Like The Flash, Green Lantern was one of the top five super heroes of DC's powerful stable who had his own magazine in addition to appearing regularly in an anthology title (All-American) and as part of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics. Also like The Flash, Green Lantern faded away in the early 50s as super hero comics fell out of favor. Once The Flash was successfully resurrected in a new form in 1956, Green Lantern got his aforementioned face lift in 1959 and the Silver Age was off and running.

I wasn't a regular reader of the Green Lantern comics, but he was always a big part of my childhood through his appearances on the Aquaman show and, of course, the Super Friends. When I renewed my interest in the old Captain Action toy during the late 90s, I found there was a lot of fans online who wished Ideal had made a Silver Age Green Lantern costume for Captain Action. Indeed, had the toy line been more successful, I have no doubt that The Flash and Green Lantern would've been turned into costume sets for the trans-super hero. Of course, I had to make a costume for my own Captain Action.

The elements for the costume came from the usual suspects. The gloves and boots were courtesy of Wes McCue at Classic Plastick. To simulate the green ring, I cut out a ring shape from green electrical tape and stuck it on the right glove hand. The costume was made by Rauty, which cleverly consists of a full black leotard over which you put on the green one-piece bathing suit type of garment. The chest emblem was made by finding a copy of the logo online, adjusting it to size in Photoshop, and then printing the logo on sitcker paper.

The mask went through two versions. First, I used the mask that came with Playing Mantis's second generation Green Hornet costume over which I placed a green mask cut out of electrical tape. I had cut out the eye holes because Green Lantern was sometimes drawn with his eyes exposed. However, the Green Hornet face mask had bug eyes similar in look to Eagle Eye G.I Joe, and the hair style was all wrong. The finished mask didn't look anything like Hal Jordan.

After awhile, it occurred to me that Hal Jordan had a pile of curly hair similar to Aquaman. Since Ideal had made an Aquaman costume set for Captain Action, maybe I could repaint an Aquaman mask. One finally came on eBay for a price I was willing to pay, and I repainted Aquaman's golden locks brown. I used the same electrical tape technique for the green mask, but decided to paint the eye holes plain white. With this new face mask, I was reasonably pleased with my Silver Age Green Lantern.

A few years later, when I was making custom figures of all the Justice Society of America characters, I took on the daunting task of recreating Golden Age Green Lantern. His was one of the more audacious costumes from the era, featuring a red shirt, green pants, red boots with yellow criss-cross striping, a purple mask, and a high-collared cape with purple on the outside and chartreuse on the inner lining. In today's vernacular, he was a hot tranny mess!

Although I was no longer making costumes specifically for Captain Action figures, I decided to repaint a spare Lone Ranger face mask to use for Alan Scott's head because of the similarity. His hair went from black to yellow and his mask went from black to purple. To mitigate the extreme color pallate, I dyed a white shirt in a soft red tone and I used some olive drab pants instead of bright green tights. The chest emblem was created in the same process mentioned above. On the red boots, courtesy of Wes McCue, I created the striping pattern with yellow electrical tape. I wanted to make the cape, but I could never find the material in the right colors. For the sake of this post, I mocked up a cape with a little photoshoppery. This is a reasonable representation of what I want my finished Green Lantern to look like when I get the right cape material.

The Flash and Green Lantern survived through the 20th century by going through radical makeovers, but DC's other three big stars, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, remained relatively unchanged throughout their careers. I'll talk about my Wonder Woman action figure next time.

A Tale of Two Flashes

2009-06-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Going through my old posts, I realized that I neglected to talk about some of my earliest custom action figures. Although they lack some of the attention to detail that I brought to my later customs, I'm still pretty happy with them and thought it might be fun to share them. The Flash seems to be the best place to start since he was the first super hero to cross over from the Golden Age of Comics to the Silver Age in a completely new incarnation. Also, I just so happen to have created custom versions of each character.

Like many people born in the 60s, my first exposure to The Flash came not from the comics but from the Aquaman TV show where The Flash was featured in solo back-up stories as well as in The Justice League of America adventures. The Flash was the first "unitasker" hero I had ever seen. Unlike Superman who could do anything, or Batman who had no superpowers and relied mainly on his belt full of gadgets and gizmos, The Flash could do one thing well which was run like crazy. As a result, all his adventures were tailored to showcase his particular talent. The budding writer in me was fascinated by the contrived nature of these stories. I would think, "Boy, it's a good thing he doesn't have to lift up a train or set something on fire with laser vision. He just has to run across the country in time to defuse a bomb."

A few years later, I was able to read about The Flash's origin in the reprint comic title Secret Origins #1. In the story, police scientist Barry Allen leaves some jars of chemicals near an open window during a thunderstorm (why the window is open during a storm is not explained). Lightning jumps through the window, strikes the apparently conductive chemicals, and the resulting mixture splashes all over Barry Allen. Soon he discovers that he can move at super fast speed like a comic book character he remembered from his youth, the one we now refer to as Golden Age Flash. Since he already works for the police, Allen decides to become a new version of his comic book hero, fashioning a bright red costume for himself and fighting crime as The Flash.

I loved that story, not only because of the great Carmine Infantino artwork, but because the origin referenced an earlier DC creation. Barry Allen was inspired by a comic character who actually existed years earlier. This was the first time I learned of Golden Age Flash, but I was soon able to read his early stories thanks to DC's habit at the time of filling the back pages of its comics with Golden Age stories. Of course, this Flash was a completely different character. In this version, college student Jay Garrick has a lab accident (like Barry Allen) and he inhales fumes that make him super fast. Immediately, he puts together a costume modeled after the Greek god Hermes and starts fighting crime. His motivation for fighting crime is less clear than Allen's, but the stories were still a lot of fun.

As I grew older and became a full-fledged comic book geek, I learned that the creation of two versions of The Flash led to a major change in the DC universe. In 1961, The Flash #123 featured a story where the old and new Flash meet. It seems Golden Age Flash was not merely a comic book character, but a flesh and blood hero on an alternate world known as Earth 2. In fact, all the Golden Age super heroes lived there including older versions of Superman and Batman. This opened up a long series of cross over stories featuring the old and new characters.

Jumping ahead to the 12st century, I found myself increasingly fascinated with the idea of creating 12" custom action figures based on the super heroes I loved as a kid. More specifically, I was inspired by the old Captain Action line where you could dress Captain Action up in various super hero costumes. Unfortunately, the short run of the toy line prevented Ideal from creating certain super hero costumes that were no brainers, like The Flash and Green Lantern. I decided to create a Flash costume when I found a great Flash mask on eBay, created by Dale Van Slyke. I then purchased a red unitard from the Dr. Mego Web site. I have to admit that, although Dr. Mego makes great Mego parts, the unitard was of really poor quality. However, I liked that it was slightly baggy the way Carmine Infantino used to draw The Flash's costume, so I made some repairs and used it. I made the yellow lightning bolts around the elbows with electrical tape, and for the chest emblem, I took an emblem from the Internet, photoshopped it to size, and printed it on sticker paper. Once cut out and applied to the chest, the unitard was complete.

Since The Flash's boots had tread, I used a pair of army boots that I painted yellow. My original figure also wore red gloves which I bought from Classic Plastick, but I didn't like the way the mask fit on the figure, so I used a beefier action figure with a bigger head. Problem was, the gloves didn't fit his beefy hands, so I just painted his hands red. The yellow belt came from a uniform set sold by a Captain Action fan known as Rauty. His red unitard was better than the Dr. Mego one, but I used his for a different custom project.

The Golden Age Flash figure was created later when I got it into my head to make my own version of the Justice Society of America. I discussed the creation of this figure in an earlier post. Unlike my Silver Age Flash, which was originally devised to be a costume I could put on a Captain Action figure, the Golden Age figure was devised as a stand alone custom. After awhile, I liked the idea of just having figures on display that were meant to be solely one thing rather than making costume sets that could work on different action figures. That's why I chose a figure from ERTL's Fisherman set. I thought the headsculpt closely resembled Golden Age Flash's face.

After creating a Silver Age Flash action figure, my next logical project had to be the other super hero who got a Silver Age makeover: Green Lantern. A look at Silver Age and Golden Age Green Lantern next time!

Saturday Afternoon Matinee

2009-06-17T08:00:00.001-04:00

If my calculations are correct, it was on this day 31 years ago when the summer vacation between my 8th and 9th grade school years began. The summer of 1978 was an especially wondrous time for me when my imagination came into full blossom, and I cherished every mundane aspect of life as if it were priceless. I remember that first day especially well because my friend Vince and I went to a matinee double feature at the Northpoint Plaza Theatre (now a dreary Wall-Mart).

In the time before home video, double features were a great way of coaxing people to see a not-so-great new release by pairing it with a slightly better film that had been released a couple years earlier. Movie-goers who liked the older film and wanted to see it again, or those who hadn't had a chance to see it when it was originally released, might be lured in to see the new film. In this case, the double bill was Warlords of Atlantis and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

It was a Saturday and, as with every Saturday from May to October, I had to mow my neighbor's lawn. The woman I knew as Miss Peggy was a widow with a house on the corner, so her lawn was much larger than the rest of the houses on the block, encompassing not only the front and back of her house, but also a large section on the side by the intersection and the long strips of grass between the sidewalk and the street. For the handsome sum of $7 per week, I would mow and trim that huge lawn with her Toro gas-powered mower and my father's cheesy Black & Decker weed whacker. To make matters worse, Miss Peggy had her lawn chemically treated, so it grew just as fast as I could cut it and those chemicals wreaked havoc with my sinuses. Still, in a day when comic books cost 30 cents and a matinee was only $2, making $7 a week in addition to my newspaper delivery boy salary was good money.

I finished mowing the lawn around noon, took a quick shower, and then called Vince to make sure he was ready to go. My dad drove us to the theatre as he so often did. Looking back, I would've thought it a pain in the ass to drive us all over town, but he liked to drive. My mom said he should've been a bus driver.

Anyway, the first film to be shown was Warlords of Atlantis, the new release. This was the fourth Amicus release to feature Doug McClure as a turn-of-the-century explorer who stumbles into some forgotten world of monsters and lost tribes. The first three films were based on Edgar Rice Burroughs books, but this one was original. I guess the film-makers thought they could save some money by writing their own story but swiping the formula. In this movie, McClure takes a bathysphere down to the ocean's depths and is swept into a strange underwater world. I had never seen a bathysphere before, so I was completely captivated by the concept. Here's the segment of the film that fascinated me the most:

Aw, up your bathysphere with an ancient golden statue!

Did you catch Cliffie as one of the crew members? Someone has uploaded the entire film on YouTube if you care to watch it. Once they reach the underwater world, I think the story kinda bogs down. To a 13 year old, though, it was pretty exciting.

Next up was the much better Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, featuring the incredible special effects of Ray Harryhausen. It star's John's son Patrick Wayne as Sinbad and Tyrone Power's daughter Taryn. A very young Jane Seymour and Doctor Who #2 Patrick Troughton are also in the movie. There was only one scene that stayed with me all these decades, and someone just so happened to put it on YouTube. You'll discover fairly quickly why it burned itself so vividly into my adolescent brain:

More than the stories themselves, I became completely lost in these depictions of fantasy worlds from a bygone era. Having already had my fill of space opera like Star Trek, Space:1999, and Star Wars, I was ready for some new fantasy legends. In between the countless comic books I read that summer, I poured over books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the stories of Sinbad, and even tales from The Arabian Nights. All that lawn and newspaper money went straight to the comic book/used book store in my neighborhood. So lost was I in these fantasy tales that I doubt my parents were even aware of my existence until I showed up for dinner.

To this day, I remember that summer as a dream-like blend of fantasy and reality. While mowing the lawn, I was a giant slaughtering hordes of soldiers with my swirling blades of death. Wandering the sun-baked sidewalks of my neighborhood delivering newspapers, my mind was underground in the hidden world of Pellucidar helping David Innes defeat the evil Mahars. It was the last summer when I had no worries and could afford to completely block out the harsh realities that were looming on the horizon. During those sultry, hot days in 1978, I was purely a kid for the last time.

Men Into Spa-aaa-ace!

2009-06-11T10:16:00.003-04:00

Although I read comics from the time before I could read, I didn't seriously collect comics until I was about 12 years old. Among my early obsessions were the Dell/Gold Key comics from the 50s and 60s. Dell was the comic book arm of the Western Printing and Lithograph Co., which held the licensing rights to numerous pop culture properties from comic strips, movies, and television. Instead of having regular titles with monthly or bi-monthly publishing schedules, Dell primarily put out an anthology series known to collectors as Four Color Comics featuring an array of properties including Buck Rogers, Mr. Ed, the Three Stooges, and Leave it to Beaver. The quirky line-up of pop culture icons, coupled with the unique covers using either paintings or photo-collages, really jumped out at me as a collector. Also, they were way cheaper for me to buy than old Marvel or DC comics. This was important on my newspaper delivery boy/lawn mower salary.

One of my favorite Four Color Comics was the issue featuring the Men Into Space TV series. At the time, I had never heard of the show, but I was intrigued by the grim-faced astronaut on the cover with the cool helmet sitting next to the Chesley Bonestell painting. I later discovered that Men Into Space was a half-hour, syndicated series about the United States Air Force's attempts to explore space. Led by Colonel Edward McCauley (played by William Lundigan), these space explorers dealt with the hazards of space travel as they built space stations, moon bases, and planned trips to Mars. Although the stories were supposed to take place in some vaguely defined near future, everything looked like 1959.

Of course, I only had the comic to go by when I was 12, and it seemed pretty exciting to me. While I knew that the science presented in this 1960 comic bore no resemblance to the realities of the Apollo missions, I enjoyed experiencing this "what if" view of the future that seemed so much more elegant than the truth. The frustrating part about the comic book was that the story ended with a cliffhanger. During one of their moon missions, one of the crew is injured. Also, they do not have enough fuel to get back in their rocket ship, so the injured man and another astronaut are sent home in a makeshift rescue craft, leaving McCauley and another astronaut stranded on the moon waiting for help. I spent decades trying to find the second issue of this comic so I could read the conclusion of the story. It wasn't until a few years ago, with the help of the Internet, that I discovered Dell never published that second issue. I don't know whether the series' cancellation or poor comic sales were to blame, but Col. McCauley was never rescued from the moon.

I always wanted to see some episodes of the show, but the only way I could see them was to buy the entire set of 38 episodes on DVD for about $40. I wasn't prepared to invest that much money on a show I had never seen before, so I never bought them. Now, some generous person has posted one of the episodes on YouTube, so I'd like to share it with you. As I suspected, it's kinda like "Sea Hunt in Outer Space." The budget is low, there's a heavy reliance on stock footage, and the story is rather uneventful. Still, I wish I could have seen it in syndication when I was a kid. I think I would've enjoyed it. This episode features a young Robert Vaughn as guest star, who is clearly the best actor in this episode. Anyway, here it is:

Forty Winks: The Perils of Pandora

2009-03-23T13:30:00.003-04:00

In the waning years of the previous century, I found myself in the midst of a group of highly creative individuals who wished to take comic books beyond the worn out parameters of super heroes and the dreary pretensions of Frank Miller garbage to a universe where any type of story was possible and commercial considerations were not an issue. These people were part of an independent, small press movement. Brave souls who put their time, energy, and money into producing comic books for the sheer joy of creating something that had never existed before.

The comic that I was involved with was called Forty Winks (you can still find copies on eBay for cheap). It told the story of a 10-year-old girl named Pandora who lived with her widowed father. She was an ordinary girl except that she was an "active dreamer," that is, someone who didn't just float passively through her dreams, but could actually control her actions within the Dreamscape. When a mysterious monster begins attacking her in her dreams, she sets out to discover who this monster is and how he can be stopped. Along the way, she enlists the help of a scrappy gang of urchins known as the Smith Street Gang and a Dream Guide named Sam, who shows her how to navigate the tricky and treacherous world of dreams.

The initial adventure of Pandora and the gang ran over four issues beginning in September 1997 and ending in June 1998. A Christmas special and a TV parody issue followed. Forty Winks proved so popular that she appeared in another company's comic book titled, Comics Library International, where she appeared in five issues. The story, known as The Perils of Pandora, followed on the events in FW #1-4 where Pandora is put on trial in the Dreamscape for breaking several dream laws during her previous adventure. As punishment, she is sent on a mission to explore various aspects of the dream world and gather knowledge about how it works. By the time this new storyline started, however, our little group splintered apart and the producers of Comics Library International took over Pandora's story. The last two segments were written and drawn completely without the participation of her original creators. It was an unfortunate end to a promising story.

Almost 10 years later, the world of indy comics is a very different place, thanks to the World Wide Web. Now comics can be produced and presented to a global audience without the expense of printing paper copies and distributing them to whomever will take notice. Forty Winks artist John Peters has been a steady presence in this world of Internet comics for many years now, and he has returned to the story which ended prematurely. Forty Winks: The Perils of Pandora is being serialized on Web Comics Nation. You can take a look at it here.

Since the storyline in CLI was not fully realized as it was originally intended, John is recreating much of the comic and constructing a new ending. John is an amazing artist with a wildly creative mind. Please check it out. I, for one, am certainly looking forward to seeing where he takes little Pandora on this new, old adventure.

Custom Action Figure - Daniel Craig as James Bond

2009-03-09T11:03:00.005-04:00

When it was announced that Daniel Craig was the new James Bond, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. It seemed like every time a new actor was assigned the role, there was always some kind of buzz in the media about how this person is not right for the part. As a fan of both the novels and the movies, I can't see how anyone can truly claim any expertise on knowing who is or isn't the right person to portray the character.

Many think that Sean Connery is and always shall be the quintessential Bond, probably because he was the first to play the role on film and that's the first impression many have of who Bond was supposed to be. At the time, however, Ian Fleming was extremely disappointed in the choice, and anyone who's read the novels can understand why. In Casino Royale, the first Bond story, Fleming described Bond's features this way:

His grey-blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry and the short lock of black hair which would never stay in place subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow. With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek the general effect was faintly piratical.

In the same story, he writes that Bond had "a cruel mouth" and Vesper Lyn mentions that Bond looks a little like Hoagy Carmichael. That's an obscure reference for most of us today, so here's what the singer/songwriter looked like:

Not exactly Sean Connery, I would say. After the first movie came out, Fleming grew to like Connery in the role and even gave Bond a Scottish background in the penultimate Fleming-penned Bond novel, You Only Live Twice. When Roger Moore took over the role, some said that Moore embodied the proper British gentleman aspect of Bond's character, but Bond never struck me that way in the books. Although he could turn on the British charm when he had to, and he did have a certain code of fair play in his otherwise dirty line of work, he was generally a pretty coarse character. I think Timothy Dalton was also a bit too refined for the role, but I didn't really have a problem with the way he played the character.

Of course, Pierce Brosnan was likely the most popular next to Connery. He had that combination of gentlemanly refinement and rugged strength that fan came to expect from the cinematic Bond, but again, not really the literary Bond. So when Daniel Craig took over, I really had no feelings about the choice one way or the other.

"A blond Bond?" many scoffed.

Well, why not. Hair color or eye color really shouldn't be a determining factor. Instead, what I was looking for was whether or not he might be able to bring back some of the coarse manliness of Bond, especially since his first outing as the MI-6 spy was in a movie adaptation of the first novel. Once Casino Royale was in the theatres, all the fuss quickly blew away and the general public loved the new Bond.

My wife and I have gone to see Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace on her respective birthdays, and have enjoyed each movie quite a bit. We're hoping that they keep releasing Bond movies in mid-November so we can keep the birthday tradition going. That's why it was such a kick when, this past Christmas, she presented me with a 1/6ht scale resin headsculpt of Daniel Craig, made by Dale Van Slyke who sells numerous celebrity headsculpts on eBay. I finally got around to creating my Daniel Craig custom figure this weekend.

As per the usual process, I lopped off the head from one of my 12-inch action figures and glued the resin head onto the neck stalk using model glue. Once the glue was dry, I painted the head, occasionally glancing at a picture of Craig on the computer for reference. The sculpt is not a perfect likeness, but just as good as, if not better than, the other Daniel Craig action figures I've seen online. It's a lot cheaper to make your own as well.

After painting the head, I dressed him in a blue pin-striped suit that I bought from Old Joe Infirmary many moons ago. The light grey shirt is also from Old Joe Infirmary, and the black tie came from the old Playing Mantis Green Hornet set made for Captain Action. All my dress shoes were currently being used on other figures, so I found some G.I. Joe boots that, when tucked underneath the pant legs, could pass for black, lace-up shoes.

Without any armaments, my action figure just looks like Fred the insurance salesman, so I tried to find an assault rifle like the one Craig is holding in the poster for Quantum of Solace. I didn't have one that was exactly the same, but I think the one in my photos is fairly close. I also took some shots of him holding a pistol. I could've gone with a Walther PPK, but I think that's so overdone. Frankly, I'm not sure what kind of automatic he's holding here, but it's chunky and cool looking.

Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with the Christian Bale headsculpt my wife also got me for Christmas. Maybe I can stage a diorama where he's attacking a cinematographer!

Ticket for the Wind

2009-02-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

In the previous two posts, I talked about my adolescent experiences seeing both Smokey and the Bandit and Smokey and the Bandit II. For me, these movies fall into that strange category of films where they are so bad, they are good. However, I still thought they could have been better than they were. Not so much the first one, but the sequel definitely could have easily been improved with a more sensible plot and a faster tempo. I really didn't think the studio would risk a third installment after the embarrassment of the second, but the studio and Jackie Gleason were not ready to let go of the franchise just yet.

After seeing the horrible Cannonball Run in the summer of '81, I swore I would never see another one of these movies ever again. My resolve was only strengthened when I read that the third installment of the Smokey saga would feature Jackie Gleason in both roles and be called Smokey IS the Bandit. I couldn't get my mind around how this would work. Was Buford going to get knocked on the head and suddenly think he was the Bandit? If so, who would be chasing him as the sheriff? My mind boggled, but I still had no thought of seeing it, at least not in the theatre. Later, in the spring of '83, I read that the test audiences hated the dual-role idea and the studio was hastily shooting new footage to remake the movie in time for a summer release. It finally came out as Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 in late summer (why it was "Part 3" and not "III" is unclear). The bad-movie lover in me was tempted to see how they cobbled this mess together, but the only theatre showing it in my area was a dirty little dump that actually became a porn theatre later that same year. I took a pass.

The following summer, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 popped up on cable, so I watched it. I was surprised that I didn't dislike it as much as I thought I would. At least they did remember to fill the movie with lots of high speed car stunts, and they kept the story hopping at a rapid clip (at only 85 minutes running time, they had no choice). In the revised version, a retired Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) decides to take a challenge from Big Enos and Little Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) because he is bored. To hedge their bet, they enlist Cledus Snow (Jerry Reed) to pretend to be the Bandit and generally get in Buford's way. The Enos boys also create diversions of their own, including trying to blow Buford and his son to bits with explosives. Why these two would want to become murderers to protect their bet is not explained.

While watching the hijinks, I'm always distracted by the thought of how the movie looked in its original form. During the car stunts involving the Trans Am, you can see that the person in the driver's seat is made up to look like a fat, older version of the Bandit, in keeping with the original premise of Jackie Gleason playing both parts. The fact that Jerry Reed has to wear a bad fake moustache to look vaguely like the Bandit is also disconcerting. Although the movie has a disconnected feel no doubt created by the large amount of reshooting, the old and new footage meshes better than you would expect and you sometimes believe that Gleason and Reed may have actually been on the same set at the same time. Nevertheless, this movie is cringe-worthy in countless ways.

Burt Reynolds makes a cameo at the end which is utterly nonsensical, but I think the producers wanted to somehow make up for the Burt-lessness of the previous 80 or so minutes of the movie. It doesn't help. Just when you are feeling completely depressed for watching this travesty, the ending credits roll with a song from former Kingston Trio head John Stewart titled, "Ticket for the Wind." Although it's a great song, the downbeat quality is completely inappropriate for a farcical comedy. Think "Tom Dooley" with an 80s electronic beat. You can listen to it here.

I remember getting to this part of the movie and just feeling so sorry for the entire cast. They actually tried to be entertaining, but ended up embarrassing themselves. Around this time, Gleason seemed to be embarrassing himself on a regular basis with such films as The Toy and The Sting II. Somehow, his reputation remained unsullied, though. I guess people loved The Honeymooners so much, they could forgive him.

I can't leave this final segment on the Smokey and the Bandit saga without mentioning the dubbing. While in the first two installments they used character actor Henry Corden to overdub Gleason's voice in certain scenes, for the third installment, they couldn't even get his services. In Part 3, some scenes feature overdubs by someone who doesn't sound even remotely like Gleason. It's kinda like the sound engineer just went into the studio and took a crack at it. Although unintentional, it's the funniest thing in the movie.

Texas Bound and Flyin'

2009-02-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I talked about my adolescent memories of seeing Smokey and the Bandit. While I was growing tired of the car chase formula, the unabashed silliness and fast-paced action of Smokey sucked me in. When the sequel was announced, I wasn't so sure they could strike lightning twice, and I had no intention of seeing the movie when it came out. Things changed, however.

By the time I got my driver's license, Smokey and the Bandit II was in the theatres. In fact, on the day after I received my license, my mom let me borrow the car for the day and my friend Vince and I went out to exploit our new found freedom. We ended up at the mall where we wanted to see a movie. Unfortunately, the only film at the multiplex that was not rated R (we were both still under 17) was the new Smokey movie. Although I liked the first one, I had bad feelings about the sequel and my reservations were well founded.

Instead of a light, rapid-fire comedy, we were treated to a plodding, stupid story with a drunken, loser Bandit (Burt Reynolds) acting like an ass and generally bumming everyone out. In a nutshell, Big Enos and Little Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) resurface to make a proposition to Cledus "Snowman" Snow (Jerry Reed). They want Cledus and Bo "Bandit" Darville (Burt Reynolds) to transport a mystery package from Miami to Dallas, Texas in three days. Fairly simple, except the Bandit has disappeared. His 15 minutes of fame after the Texarkana to Altanta run had expired and Bo is now hiding in a sleazy Florida motel drinking himself to death. Meanwhile, Carrie (Sally Field) has left him and is about to once again marry the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. Justice (Jackie Gleason) is none too pleased with the arrangement, but when Carrie decides to run off again and save the Bandit, he holds her at gun point to stop her. After she escapes, Justice and his son (Mike Henry) are once again in "hot pursuit."

There's a lot of time wasted as Carrie and Cledus try to detoxify the Bandit. When they finally pick up the package, which turns out to be a female elephant, and get on the road, Justice has tracked them down and tries to stop them. From this point, the story plods along in fits and starts. The elephant turns out to be pregnant, so they pick up an Italian doctor (Dom Deluise) to watch after her. They have to stop frequently to accommodate the elephant's delicate condition, leaving plenty of time for Bo and Carrie to fight and for Bo to act like an insensitive jerk to the elephant. While the first movie was driven by the tight 28-hour deadline to get Coors Beer from Texarkana to Atlanta, there's no sense of urgency in the sequel and the gang spends most of the time out of their vehicles arguing with each other. Meanwhile, Buford T. Justice is supposed to be in "hot pursuit," but there is no explanation as to what he's up to while the heroes are mulling around. He just pops up conveniently when he's needed to chase them around.

Finally, in a feeble attempt to liven up the finale, Sheriff Justice enlists the help of his law officer cousins to lure the Bandit into an ambush. The ambush occurs in a desert environment where the law officers descend on the Bandit from the surrounding hills in their police cruisers. Although the visual metaphor of old-time movie Indians attacking the settlers in their stage coaches is obvious, the whole fiasco makes no sense since there are no desert areas anywhere between Miami and Dallas. Even if you are willing to suspend disbelief, dozens of cars smashing into each other like a demolition derby is not really the same as the thrill of watching high speed car stunts. It's just mindless destruction, and it gets monotonous real fast.

Since the theatre was mostly empty, Vince and I entertained ourselves by calling out remarks at the screen, mocking the whole mess while it spooled out onto the screen. The only redeeming factor was that I got to hear Buford's salty dialogue as it was meant to be heard, uttered by Jackie Gleason himself. As mentioned in the previous post, Gleason's redubbed dialogue for the TV version was voiced by character actor Henry Corden. As it would turn out, Corden would also provide the redubbed language in the TV version of the sequel. I still cringe at hearing Fred Flinstone's voice coming out of Gleason's mouth.

For days and weeks after seeing the debacle that was Smokey and the Bandit II, I kept pondering how the movie could have been so much better. By this time, I fancied myself a writer and had already scribbled out two novels, two screenplays, and numerous short stories. I knew I could come up with a better script than this horrid piece of junk.

At first, I thought the film would simply pick up where the last one left off. At the end of part one, the Enos's ask Bo, Carrie, and Cledus to run up to Boston and bring back a large quantity of baked beans. Since they only had 18 hours, perhaps they could employ airplanes or helicopters. Really open up the action. Then I thought better of that. After all, it had been three years later, and the filmmakers would want to use a new Trans Am, the iconic symbol of the series.

Fine, three years later it is. Although the Bandit could have built a celebrity status based on his stunts, he would still be facing numerous criminal charges from his behavior in the last movie. He would have to stay on the run or come to some arrangement with the law. Perhaps Carrie offers herself to Justice's son again as a way to get the sheriff to leave Bandit alone. Maybe she realizes that she can't stay with a guy like Bo long term, but she could still make a sacrifice for him out of love. That would provide some explanation for why she would try to marry Junior again, even if it was a weak one.

Okay, the Bandit is free and he is certainly no drunk, although he misses Carrie. The Enos's offer a big bet, but nothing involving cutesy elephants or kittens or koala bears. Maybe they have to bring Farrah Fawcett from Hollywood to take Little Enos's virginity? I don't know! Just keep the damn thing on the road and moving!

The feeble nature of the sequel's storyline only enhanced the unmistakeable sense that car chase movies were a thing of the past. All the CB jargon, so hip in the mid-70s, sounded tired and stupid by 1980. These characters and the whole genre was passe. When the chance to do a third movie cropped up, even Hal Needham and Burt Reynolds said, "no thanks." Jackie Gleason had other ideas though...

East Bound and Down

2009-02-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

After hearing the news that GM's sporty division Pontiac would become a small, niche car line with only a few models, I couldn't help but become nostalgic for the days when the Pontiac Trans Am was the American muscle car for the beer pocketbook set, helped in no small part by the Smokey and the Bandit movies. These films hold a special place in my vault of so-bad-they-are-good movies. I never sought them out when they were in the theatres, but I somehow ended up seeing each one several times and find myself dissecting them with a degree of analysis normally reserved for films like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. I think it's their very slip-shot nature that makes them endlessly fascinating since there are so many continuity issues, plot holes, and inconsistencies in character, you can't help but wonder why they wrote or shot what they did. To simply say, "It's a crappy movie!" isn't sufficient in my book.

The summer of 1977 seemed like the first true movie summer. Sure, Jaws had torn up the summer box office two years prior, but '77 was the first summer where the studios actively sought to put out crowd pleasing movies for the kidsc who were home from school and the parents who were on vacation. This was the summer of Star Wars, The Spy Who Loved Me, A Bridge Too Far, and Smokey and the Bandit. In fact, Smokey was the second highest grossing movie of the year. Even still, at the time, I didn't feel any great need to rush out and see it.

To me, Smokey was the culmination of a movie trend that was on the verge of playing itself out. Numerous car chase movies, usually dealing with good ol' boys who are runnin' moonshine or generally screwin' with the law, had been cluttering up the drive-ins for years. Initially, the movies were played straight, but audiences found the outrageous car stunts to be unintentionally funny. Also, watching the anti-heroes stick it to the corrupt, redneck sheriff usually brought about hoops and hollers of joy from the anti-establishment crowds of the 70s. After awhile, the filmmakers took a more lighthearted approach to these kinds of films. Even the producers of the Bond films inserted a comic-relief sheriff in two of their 70s films (Lie and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun). It took director Hal Needham to finally jump in the deep end and create a car chase movie that was played for pure laughs. Burt Reynold and Jerry Reed had already taken a serious stab at such material in the movie Gator, so they were perfectly suited to lampoon the good ol' boy action film. Throw in (then) sitcom darling Sally Field and comic legend Jackie Gleason as the blustery sheriff, and you had a big budget spoof that had real potential to reach a mass audience.

The plot was fairly straightforward: Millionaire Big Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick) and his son Little Enos (Paul Williams) offer Bo "Bandit" Darville (Burt Reynolds) the princely sum (for the 1970s) of $80,000 if he can transport a truckload of Coor's Beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia in 28 hours. In those days, Coor's Beer could not be transported past the Mississippi, so this was flat-out bootlegging. Bo agrees and, to make the best possible time, he enlists the help of his friend Cledus "Snowman" Snow (Jerry Reed) to drive the truck while Bo runs interference with the police using his flashy Trans Am. All goes well on the trip to get the beer, but things go awry on the return leg when Bo picks up a pretty girl in a wedding dress. Turns out the woman, Carrie (Sally Field), is running away from marrying the son of a Texas sheriff. The sheriff, Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), is not about to let her get away and soon, the Bandit has a permanent Smokey on his tail all the way to Atlanta.

Despite all the praise I was hearing about the movie, I was dubious. As I said, I had seen so many car chase movies already and even the star power of this one wasn't turning my head. It wasn't until two years later, when the movie finally popped up on broadcast television, that I gave it a chance. By this time, I was studying for my driver's license and I was becoming completely obsessed with automobiles. I studied everything I could get my hands on about how cars worked, the history and evolution of the car, the differences between the various makes and models, the whole nine yards. Suddenly, watching this flashy Trans Am do all these stunts and roar down the highway had new appeal. I liked the rapid pace of the story and the constant banter which, to a teenager, was far more clever than it would sound to me as an adult.

But I was also fascinated by the inexplicable oddities. I could chalk up the strange continuity issues to problems with matching the stunt shots with the principal photography, or the inexperience of a first-time director, but the odd dubbing of the broadcast television version was truly bizarre. When Smokey and the Bandit was originally released, it received an R rating, I assume for the harsh language. By the time it reached television, the movie had developed a huge following and I think the producers felt compelled to overdub virtually all the dialogue to wipe out any trace of foul language, lest they offend the Bible Belt viewers who were their primary audience. Burt, Sally, and Jerry all did their own overdubs, but for Jackie Gleason, it sounds like his voice was replaced with that of Henry Corden, a character actor best known for taking over the voice of Fred Flinstone after Alan Reed died. Not only does it look like Jackie Gleason is channeling the ghost of old Fred, the lines the writers came up with to replace the colorful metaphors are utterly inane and often unintelligible. All these years later, I've never been able to find a satisfactory answer as to why Gleason could not do his own overdubs.

A couple years later, cable TV invaded my neighborhood and the unedited version received regular rotation on channels like HBO and Showtime. With the original dialogue restored, I got a better understanding as to why everyone thought this movie was so funny. Still, I didn't have any burning desire to see the second entry in the series, but I did anyway...

Custom Figure - Silver-Age Iron Man

2009-02-16T10:56:00.007-05:00

For years, I've wanted to create a custom Iron Man action figure along the lines of the Captain Action suit sets from the 60s. Although I was always more of a DC kid than a Marvel fan, Iron Man was one of the few exceptions. The tone of the stories seemed different than most of the other Marvel characters, with dashing Tony Stark fighting communists and other world dominators in his fancy, hi-tech armor. He was like Bruce Wayne and James Bond rolled into one, which was more my speed than whiny Peter Parker or those preachy X-Men. Iron Man was definitely one of the super heroes I had hoped Ideal would use for their Captain Action line of outfits. Alas, it was not so and, like the Flash and Green Lantern and so many others, I would have to do it myself. But how?

At first I toyed with the idea of creating an actual suit of armor using bits and pieces from other action figure sets, mostly relying on the armor pieces from the old Marx Noble Knights line. Unfortunately, that did not prove very feasible and it really wasn't in the spirit of the old Captain Action outfits, which were stretchy polyester leotards. Then, a couple years ago, Rauty's Toy Shop created a nifty Iron Man outfit for 1/6th scale figures sort of like the Mego figure. I'd provide a link for Rauty, but he doesn't seem to have a Web site at the moment. His stuff pops up regularly on eBay, however.

At least I knew I could get a costume, but what about the boots and gloves? Wes McCue of Classic Plastick makes all kinds of gloves and boots based on super heroes, but he didn't have anything like Iron Man's, which had little repulsor rays in the palms of the gloves and on the soles of the shoes. I was lamenting all this to my wife Kathy who, God love her, took all this in and set into action. She contacted Wes about whether or not he had such items and, while he didn't, he liked the idea of creating some. Kathy wanted to present me with these items for Christmas, but as Christmas approached, Wes had only created prototypes, so he sent her the prototypes to avoid her being empty handed. The gloves and boots were modeled on his existing stock, but with the little repulsor rays added to the palms and soles. He has since refined the design to feature rolled cuffs on the tops of the gloves and boots as well. I think the prototypes work just fine, though.

On Christmas Day, Kathy presented me with the suit, gloves, and boots. Needless to say, I was bowled over and couldn't wait to get started on my custom Iron Man. Of course, there was still the issue of the mask. Wes had suggested to my wife that I start with the back part of a vintage Phantom mask. That made a lot of sense, but I had already used my last spare Phantom mask to create a mask for my Space Ghost custom. I finally decided to mold one out of polyvinyl clay even though I knew the material would never be thin enough to have the proper proportions. It would have to do for the time being, however.

To mimic the sort of belt arrangement with the red discs on the sides of Iron Man's hips, I used a strip of red foam rubber and scored lines and a belt buckle shape into it with an X-Acto knife. For the red discs, I used some red push pins I found in the crafts store, and I secured the belt around his waist with velcro.

I was also stuck on how to fashion the round disc on Iron Man's chest, so I scoured my spare model parts until I found a wheel piece from a old car kit. After painting, I glued the female part of a snap to the back of the wheel piece, and sewed the male end of the snap to the chest of the costume. By using a snap, the disc stays securely on Iron Man's chest.

Except for the bobblehead effect of the helmet, I think the rest of the costume turned out pretty well. If I can get a vintage Phantom mask at some point, I may take another stab at the mask, or I may pursue some other approach all together.

I have to thank Rauty, Wes, and my lovely wife. I haven't had this much fun with a custom figure in a long time!

Three Boys and a Lighthouse

2009-02-09T13:33:00.004-05:00

I've never been one of those people who romanticizes about the sea or sailing the ocean blue, but lighthouses have always held a certain appeal to me. Merely the sight of a lighthouse enthralls me, perched as it is on the edge of some rocky shore, sending out its lonely light to anyone who may or may not be out there. They're stoic and beneficent and courageous in their loneliness. At least that's what they represent, and I assume those who run them (or once ran them, I should say) had those same qualities. In some cockeyed romantic way, I could see myself living in a lighthouse. I love the idea of the solitude, and the chance to live in a cylindrical house. Of course, I'm sure at some point the job would require me to get in a boat and save somebody from the rocky coastline, and that would put me right off the job.

I think my fascination with lighthouses began with a book I read when I was 10 years old called Three Boys and a Lighthouse by Nina Hayden Agle and Ellen Wilson. I found it at my school library and, although it was aimed at a slightly younger audience, I was captivated by the illustrations by Marian Honigman. I'm not sure if they were linoleum block prints or simply drawn to look like that, but I loved the simple yet detailed illustrations. They were precise yet stylized, and perfectly evoked the idealized, boyhood notion of living in a lighthouse. In my cynical middle-agedness, I have to really flog my brain to recall how my ten-year-old self could so easily fall for such fantasies, but fall I did.

The story revolves around identical triplets named Abercrombie, Benjamin, and Christopher. Their mother is dead and their father runs a lighthouse, so they live with their grandmother. Finally, the father invites the boys to live with him at the lighthouse for the whole summer. To test the boy's meddle, he sends them off in row boats to each live on separate islands near the lighthouse. (The book was written in 1951, so no one would have screamed "child abuse" over such a plot twist back then.) When the boys show they can survive on their own, the father then sets about putting them through their paces, learning the tasks that come with running a lighthouse.

Finally, one foggy and stormy night, the lighthouse receives an SOS call and the father has to leave the boys to help the stranded seafarer. The father is gone for a day and a half and, in the era before cellphones, has no way of contacting the boys. However, the boys bravely carry on with the duties of running the lighthouse until the father eventually returns. For their bravery and devotion to duty, he gives his sons spiffy new lighthouse keeper hats with monograms on them.

Okay, not the most exciting story in the world, but I wanted so much to be one of those boys when I first read that book. It seemed like such an exciting life, and I carried the love of lighthouses with me long after I put the book down. Three years later, when I wrote my first "novel," the story was about a strange old guy who dressed like a sea captain and lived in an abandoned lighthouse. By that time, I had learned that most lighthouses were being shut down because they were unnecessary with the advent of modern navigational equipment, so the thought of living in an abandoned lighthouse seemed pretty cool. The strange old man turned out to be an alien who had a laboratory underneath the lighthouse where he built futuristic stuff, including a spaceship. Typically adolescent action yarn, and I'm not even sure if the length of it would technically put it in the category of a novel. It was about 150 handwritten pages in a composition tablet, so maybe more like a novella. Sadly, it got lost somewhere along the way, so I can't refer back to it.

The following Christmas, my brother gave me a framed print of a lighthouse. It was mostly blue, bathed in the night glow of a full moon as the waves crashed on the shoreline. Also sadly, the frame was broken and the print torn, so I had to throw it out. Such is the way with childhood memories. I still like lighthouses, though.

The Rally Series

2009-01-30T10:25:00.004-05:00

Sixth grade was the last year I would spend in Bear Creek Elementary School. Nowadays, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are lumped together as middle school, which makes a whole lot more sense to me. Back in the 70s, prepubescents shared the halls with kindergartners before finally moving on the junior high school. It makes an 11 year old feel kinda lost: am I still a kid or am I a teenager? The answer is, you are neither. It's a strange netherworld made all the more bizarre by the finger-paint-and-building-blocks surroundings of an elementary school.

As an avid reader, I was confused about what I should be reading at that age as well. Most of the books in the school library were aimed at those who were either beginning readers (Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are) or slightly more mature readers (Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew). None of this material felt quite right at age 11. The summer before, when the whole world went crazy over the movie Jaws, I had read the novel. Once you've read an adult bestseller with a foul-mouthed sea captain and bloody dismemberment, the Hardy Boys didn't quite cut it.

Then I noticed several of my male classmates were checking out these books with the word "challenge" in the title. There was Minibike Challenge and Motorcycle Challenge and Go Kart Challenge. If it had wheels, it had the word "challenge" after it. Known as The Rally Series, the books were all written by Edward Radlauer who illustrated the books with photographs rather than drawings. All the boys at school were wild about these books, and it was difficult to find a chance when the books weren't already checked out. Finally, one day in late fall, I managed to grab Minibike Challenge from the shelf and take it home.

The story involved two boys, next-door-neighbors Terry Brock and Cliff Crane, who develop a passion for minibikes when Cliff's eccentric uncle gives him a minibike he picked up at a swap meet. Trouble is, they have nowhere to ride the bike and Terry is pulled over by the police when he tries to ride it in the street. Terry and Cliff read in a magazine that some communities have minibike parks where minors can ride minibikes under adult supervision, so the boys nag Terry's dad into proposing such a park to his Rotary Club. He's reluctant, but soon learns that other dad's have had similar requests from their kids, so the plan moves forward.

In typical kids book fashion, the minibike park is set up in no time flat and Terry and Cliff take Cliff's bike to the park. Sharing the bike soon becomes a nuisance and Terry talks his dad into buying him a minibike from a used car salesman dad at the park. Of course, the bike turns out to be a lemon with a cracked engine block. Without enough money to have it repaired, Terry appears to be up a creek. Then Cliff's Uncle Flum comes to the rescue with a used engine that only has a cracked piston. With the money Terry has left, he and Cliff are able to repair the bike just in time for the big race. Terry and Cliff race well, but don't win. They are, however, rewarded with good sportsmanship awards.

Although the story was pretty simple, it's really just an excuse to provide loads of information about how minibikes work and the types of things minibike enthusiasts do. I had no interest in minibikes, per se, but I loved all the technical jargon and the chance to live vicariously through these boys who were doing something decidedly male. This book felt exactly like the kind of story an 11 year old should be reading. Also, given the enthusiasm all the other boys in my class felt for the books, there was a certain fellowship surrounding these pre-teen stories.

I think the photographic illustrations also provided a unique appeal. Obviously, the author was an enthusiast for motorized sports and took his camera along to rallys and such to photograph the goings-on for his books. The real life illustrations brought a sense of immediacy to the stories and allowed a novice like me to see up close how these vehicles actually worked.

Although I was 11 and trying to read more mature books, I still had my imaginary play time and most of my activities were structured around made-up TV shows airing on my made-up TV network. The photographs in Minibike Challenge made me think that a TV series based on the book would be ideal. A budding writer even then, I decided that instead of placing the focus of the show on the two boys, the real star of the show should be Uncle Flum since he was the only person in the book who was a fully developed person rather than a stock figure. From the book, I retained certain details like the fact that he lived in a run-down house full of junk and made his makeshift living by attending swap meets and flea markets. However, I also made him a handsome young man with a motorcycle and the person who urges the Rotary Club to create the park. I thought an eccentric hippy type wooing a bunch of stuffed shirts provided more drama than Terry's dad talking his fellow Rotarians into it. I also had the Rotarians put Uncle Flum in charge of the park, so he would be an integral part of each episode. Honestly, I can't remember what the episodes were about, but they probably involved busted bikes that are repaired in the nick of time and exciting races with spin outs and crashes.

As with all my made up TV show, Minibike Challenge had a set time in the evening when I would act out the show (usually in our dining room). I did several episodes until my attention drifted to something else and I stopped acting out any more episodes (the equivalent of being cancelled in my imaginary world). During that time though, I read all the Rally Series books in my school library, including the ones mention above. I didn't particularly care for Motorcycle Challenge because the main character's parents are going through a divorce. Since my own parents were on the verge of separation at the time, the story hit too close to home, but I still enjoyed all the nuts-and-bolts talk about motorcycles.

The Rally Series books were a brief passion for me, as I was beginning to develop the next passion that I would carry into my teenage years: science fiction. A friend got me interested in Star Trek, and I began to notice all the science fiction books at my local book store. These were grown-up books, but they had lots of action and ray guns and spaceships, so they appealed to my child-like interests. Science fiction became my gateway literature into adolesence. I kinda look at the Rally Series books as a comforting friend who held my hand through the awkward transition from childhood to pre-teenhood until I could fully discover who I wanted to be.

Baltimore Christmas Memory: Sing It Outdoors!

2008-12-15T08:00:00.001-05:00

It never ceases to amaze me how much can be found on "teh internets" these days! The flotsam and jetsam of a misspent youth in front of the TV or hiding in a movie theater can be easily retrieved with only a Google search. One day, the ipod in my brain shuffled up a song that I heard every holiday season when I was a kid. The song was called "Sing It Outdoors!" and it was played during the commercials for John Donnelly & Sons Advertising. It went like this.

I believe they were mainly into billboard advertising, so the title of the song had a duel meaning. It seems like they are singing about carolers, but the implication is that you can sing the praises of your company or product outdoors through billboard advertising. Get it? I was rather proud of myself that I figured that out when I was six or so.

I don't recall Donnelly & Sons running TV ads any other time of the year but Christmas, and for an advertising firm, the ads were surprisingly chintzy. The Christmas ad consisted of the aforementioned song while we were treated to abstract representational drawings of choirs, bells, and other Christmasy images. Just before the final line was sung, a syrupy announcer voice came on and would tell us how Donnelly Advertising wanted to wish us a Merry Christmas. No Happy Holidays back then. They were putting the Christ in Christmas, baby! It was fun not to be PC.

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, Donnelly & Sons ran a slightly different TV ad. As I recall, it would start off with a similar song and some more poorly rendered images of streamers and champagne bottles popping, and then the announcer would jump in with, "Rrrring out the old, rrring in the new, with all our best wishes! We at Donnelly Advertising wish you..." When he would say, "rrrring out the old," a graphic with the current year would appear, and when the announcer said, "rrrring in the new," a graphic with the next year would appear. For example, it might show "1972," and then jump to "1973." I remember one year - I think it was 1973 or 1974 - and they mistakenly put up one of the old commercials because it showed "1965" and "1966." I got a chill because I suddenly thought I had been transported back in time.

Those commercials disappeared around the mid-70s and became yet more fond holiday memories to put on the brain pile. God knows why the song popped back into my head on a warm spring day more than 30 years after I had last heard it, but my mind tends to work like that. Just for fun, I did a Google search using the song title and found this blog site. Apparently, the song on the commercial was part of a complimentary record album that Donnelly & Sons gave away to clients at Christmas time. One side had music for Christmas, the other side featured dance tunes for your New Year's Eve party. The blog author, Ernie, provides a link where you can download the Christmas songs along with some photos of the album, which I've used here, with his kind permission.

One of the coolest aspects of this album is the fact that the record itself was made out of green vinyl. Take a look:

Be sure to check out www.ernienotbert.blogspot.com for more great, obscure Christmas music. He's currently running a 27 Days of Christmas series with a new Christmas album featured each day.

The 1/6th Scale Sushi Bar - 2008

2008-12-11T08:00:00.001-05:00

Awhile back, I related the story of how I built a 1/6th scale sushi bar as a Christmas present to my wife. For the uninitiated, 1/6th scale refers to the size of action figures who are usually between 11 1/2- and 12-inches tall. We're talking old G.I. Joes and Barbies. Anyway, every year I add miniature Christmas decorations to the bar and, while I'm at it, I usually change the customers at the bar. In years past, we've had Christopher Lee, Dr. Evil (from Captain Action fame, not Austin Powers fame), Man of Action G.I. Joe, African-American G.I. Joe, Barbie, Pierce Brosnan, Diane Farr, Captain Jack Sparrow, and, of course, Santa Claus. Here is the new line-up for Christmas 2008:

Santa Claus has popped in again for a sushi snack before finishing his rounds. At the front of the bar, the current Doctor Who, David Tennant, is talking an Asian woman into becoming his next companion, and on the side, Indiana Jones is kicking back with a cold brewski after taking on the Lair of Witchiepoo or something.

The sushi bar sits on our living room coffee table year round, but it seems particularly festive during the holidays. It's also a great conversation piece when the plumber or the exterminator drop by.

The Bell Telephone Company Presents: The Spirit of Christmas

2008-12-09T12:37:00.008-05:00

In A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas wrote, "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six"

As I get older, I'm beginning to have the same feelings about my own Christmas memories. Twenty years ago, I would amaze family and friends with my blow-by-blow accounts of everything that happened on this Christmas or that Christmas. My mom would sarcastically ask, "What was the weather like that year?" and I could tell her. Now, however, there have been too many holidays and the traditions are so faithfully followed each year that they start to blur together. One such tradition I could always look forward to (at least in elementary school) was the annual showing of the old 1950s television special The Spirit of Christmas.

This holiday special, first aired in 1953 and sponsored by Ma Bell, was produced by puppeteer Mabel Beaton. Ms. Beaton started out performing marionette shows for her community in a make-shift theater during the 1930s and 40s. By the late 40s, her small group of fellow puppeteers, mostly neighborhood friends, dwindled away and she decided to elevate her puppeteering career by creating filmed marionette programs. She got lucky with her first try out of the gate when she presented her half-hour Christmas special, The Spirit of Christmas, to The Bell Telephone Company. The president enthusiastically green-lit the show as their 1953 Christmas special, and it became their holiday show for the next several years during the 50s.

The special is split into two segments, the first being a presentation of Clement C. Moore's poem, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. The second segment portrays the story of the birth of Christ. Ms. Beaton maintained that her forte was with serious material, but the Santa Claus story at the beginning of the show was her concession to the commercial appeal of secular Christmas stories. Watching the special recently with an adult set of eyes, I can understand her point. The marionettes used in the Santa Claus segment appear more crudely designed and, in the case of the children puppets, downright creepy looking as compared to the marionettes in the nativity story. Also, there seems to be more loving care put into the staging of the biblical scenes. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas relies on some physical schtick that feels clumsy and forced by comparison, but I know I enjoyed it as a child.

Before you get the wrong idea about my true age, I never saw the show when it originally aired on television. My first exposure to it was in elementary school in the late 60s/early 70s. Every year, on the last day before Christmas vacation, the teacher would drag out that clunky 16 mm projector and put on the threadbare film print of The Spirit of Christmas. Usually, the teacher would show it just before the end of the day. I would always get a little flutter of excitement in my stomach when that happened because I knew we would have no more school work until the beginning of next year!

There was something magical about watching this marionette show. I had the same feeling when I watched those old Gerry Anderson shows like Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet. Most of the drawn animation available to kids in those days was of the Saturday morning variety and consistently pretty bad. Seeing three dimensional puppets manipulated in properly scaled dioramas was a real treat because you could sense the level of artistry involved. The Rankin-Bass stop-motion films had a similar quality and, like The Spirit of Christmas, I only got to see them once a year. This was way before the home video/on-demand world of today. You got one shot at all the Christmas shows and if you missed any one of them for some reason, you had to wait for next year. And one year to a kid may as well be a decade. That's why an impromptu shopping trip with your mom on the night The Year Without a Santa Claus aired was cause for true childhood trauma.

I can't remember exactly when they stopped showing The Spirit of Christmas at school. Maybe around the time I was 9 or 10. As I said, it's a blur. But I never forgot that program, and I thought for sure I'd never see it again. Just some vague, foggy memory shelved in the attic of my mind. Of course, with the magic of DVDs and the Internet, few things from the past are lost anymore. Last year, I discovered that The Spirit of Christmas was on DVD, complete with another Mabel Beaton film, Santa's Space Ship, and a one hour interview with Ms. Beaton videotaped in 1984. It's a wonderful package, even though the print of the film used on the DVD doesn't look much better than the print we had at Bear Creek Elementary. At least a DVD player doesn't skip and make that weird audio sound like someone wiggling his forefinger between his lips (anyone under 25 probably won't get that reference).

I'm so thrilled to have this Christmas memory back. When I watched the DVD recently, I could feel that little tingle in my tummy I used to have knowing that soon I would be out of school for 10 whole days and Santa was coming with lots of plastic goodies and my grandmother would be serving her delicious stuffing and noodle casserole and my Aunt Mildred would have that cool Chex Mix stuff and my Uncle Henry would mistakenly call Santa Claus "Kiss Kingle" and the world would be lit with multi-colored lights and glowing Santas and reindeer and all would be warmth and happiness and fun....until January 2nd.

The Outer Space Men

2008-12-01T11:34:00.003-05:00

Here's something that I came across on YouTube awhile back:

I have vague memories of these toys when I was four or five. Most of the characters were too weird for my taste, but I do recall having a Commander Comet action figure. Here is how he is described by their Web site: "From Olympus, largest of the great cloud cities of Venus, the mighty cloud ship Cumulus sets forth. Like a fiery comet it blazes through the blackness of outer space toward Earth. Its captain, Commander Comet, is a direct descendant of the mighty Zeus, leader of the historic first Venusian expedition to Earth, which landed near the Grecian Isles 3,000 years ago. Commander Comet's present mission is one of routine Earth surveillance, and once within the atmosphere of Earth, his ship will join the great fleet of Venusian craft that float like clouds above our planet night and day, watching undetected over our world."

I didn't quite understand all that when I was a kid, but I remember getting him because he looked like a super hero. I figured he was something like Thor; a mythological figure who traveled to Earth to help people in trouble. He was still a little strange looking, though, and I don't think I played with him for very long.

The creator of the toy line, Mel Birnkrant, says that the line was designed to compliment the then popular Major Matt Mason series. The thinking was that these Outer Space Men would give Matt Mason some buddies to pal around with in space other than his human astronaut friends. I guess they weren't aware that Mattel had already made some alien characters of their own for the Matt Mason line. Although the connection is obvious to me now, I never put it together as a kid. I never thought to play with both Matt Mason and Commander Comet at the same time. Perhaps other kids didn't either, because Colorform's space men never experienced the popularity that Matt Mason had. It didn't matter anyway, since interest in space exploration and space-related toys fizzled pretty quickly after NASA put a man on the moon. Here are some videos Mr. Birnkrant put together to explain the history of The Outer Space Men:

Apparently, Mr. Birnkrant is trying to revive the series as a collectible for all us Baby Boomers and slightly post-Baby Boomers who have fond memories of the toy. Currently, a new graphic novel has been released based on the characters. It never ceases to amaze me how these old toys keep resurfacing in new forms.

New 8 Inch Captain Action Figure

2008-10-20T13:12:00.004-04:00

Within a few brief years, Captain Action Enterprises has launched a wide selection of Captain Action merchandise, from t-shirts to comics to models. Now they've teamed up with Castaway Toys to produce new Mego-style 8 inch Captain Action and Dr. Evil action figures (currently called "Dr. Eville" to avoid legal trouble with the Austin Powers people). Creating an all new figure in a different scale rather than producing replicas of the 11 1/2 inch figures was a smart move in my opinion. A decade ago, Playing Mantis produced 1/6th scale reproductions of the vintage Captain Action figures and costumes with mixed results. The phrase "close but no cigar" comes to mind. Since most of the Playing Mantis products are still easily obtained on eBay at reasonable prices, there really seemed no need to do yet another repro line. These new 8 inch figures will appeal to both the Captain Action collectors and the much larger Mego audience.

I pre-ordered the Early Bird Special Editions some months ago and, after numerous setbacks with the Chinese manufacturers, the figures were finally shipped. When I received my shipment on Saturday, I was immediately pleased to see that the blister packs in which the figures are packaged can be easily opened, so you can take out the figure and the accessories, then neatly return them to the package. Of course, I broke into the box right away and checked out the figure. Castaway Toys promised a body that would be superior to some of the current Mego-type bodies out there, and they delivered. The body feels quite sturdy for its size and mimics the shape and articulation of the vintage figure pretty effectively. I don't know if it's the vinyl they use nowadays or what, but the headsculpt bears a stronger resemblance to the Playing Mantis version than the vintage one, primarily because the new vinyl seems less opaque. Also, the tone gives Cap a darker, more olivey complexion.

While the standard figures come with the basic accessories, these special editions offer a few extras. In the case of the Captain Action figure, you get the blue belt and blue-hilted sword like the one the vintage toy came with as well as a silver-and-red belt and gold-hilted sword like the ones pictured in the vintage box artwork. While the figure comes with a head modeled on the original doll, the special edition provide an alternative headsculpt which looks a bit like the alternative Playing Mantis head covered in Fred Flinstone beard stubble. There's also a few Captain Action and Mego Museum trading cards thrown in. Not a bad deal for five extra bucks.

The Dr. Eville special edition also offers some extra goodies. The standard figure looks very much like the vintage doll. Castaway Toys has even mimicked the greenish-blue tinge on the head that didn't quite match the bright blue on the body. For the early bird package, I received an alternative headsculpt that looks like the Playing Mantis alternative head, complete with the matching skin color and more horrific paint details. I also got two versions of Dr. Eville's necklace: one with an amber stone like the vintage figure, and one with a ruby stone. The ray gun, sandals, and Dr. Ling mask are remarkably accurate reproductions of the vintage toys even though the pieces are shrunk down to smaller scale. The bad doctor's Nehru suit, however, is a much darker shade of blue than the one offered on the vintage figure and the jacket is a bit too small around the neck and shoulders. I suspect that since Playing Mantis made their suit way too baggy that perhaps Castaway Toys overcompensated and made their suit too tight. Overall, though, it's a high calibre product.

I took some pictures of the Mego-style figures next to their vintage counterparts. I also wanted to show how the alternate Captain Action accessories matched up with the box artwork:

If they had also included a silver ray gun, the match would've been perfect. I would've taken photos with the alternative headsculpts, but the instructions for swapping the heads is rather elaborate and I didn't want to risk damaging the figures. Anyway, here's Mego-style Cap next to his grandfather:

And finally, Dr. Evil meets Dr. Eville:

I know, but someone had to make the joke.

In summary, Castaway Toys hit a home run with their new Captain Action and Dr. Eville figures. They are currently offering the standard versions online, and I can't wait for their version of The Phantom based on the old Captain Action costume. Since Castaway Toys already offers accessories to customize Mego figures, I'm hoping they may come up with new costumes and parts specifically designed for customizing Cap and the Doc. I'm so glad there are people out there who won't let this old soldier fade away!

The Tornados Doin' The Robot!

2008-10-06T11:17:00.002-04:00

This looks like one of my childhood nightmares!

For a little context, go here.

Latitude Zero

2008-09-23T10:42:00.004-04:00

A couple of months ago, I was trolling the Netflix site looking for movies to add to my queue when I came across a film I'd never heard of but thought for sure I should have known of it. The movie was Latitude Zero, a Toho production from 1969 directed by Ishiro Honda. Honda directed a truckload of Japanese monster movies, most of which I watched on Saturday or Sunday afternoons as a kid, so I was surprised that I had never heard of this one. I put it in my Netflix queue and it arrived last Friday, just in time for my weekend viewing.

The movie starts with a couple of marine biologists and an American photojournalist (Richard Jaekel) exploring the South Pacific ocean in a bathosphere. An eruption from a shaky faultline sends the bathosphere tumbling into an abyss. The men are rescued by scuba divers and taken to a futuristic submarine with jet engines. On board, they meet the mysterious Captain McKenzie, played by the ruggedly macho Joseph Cotton. Now, Mr. Cotton was always a bit effeminate, but here he comes off like a contestant from Project Runway with his open-chested, poofy shirt with gold lame' trim and striking green ascot.

Captain McKenzie explains that he is over 200 years old and that he built his submarine, The Alpha, 164 years ago, making improvements over the years. Before the dazed rescuees can process this information, the Alpha is attacked by a vicious looking sub complete with shark fins. This is the attack sub of McKenzie's arch-rival, Malick (Cesar Romero). Fresh off his turn as the Joker in the Batman TV show, Romero plays the evil Malick with gutteral laughs and an impatient swagger denoting a true sociopath. This guy would run over a box of kittens because he was late for a seal bashing contest.

McKenzie and Malick were once boyhood friends, but Makick had dreams of conquering the world, so he built a small island fortress where he plots evil with a middle-aged floosie named Lucretia, who looks like a cross between Della Street and Mrs. Roper. Also assisting him is an army of extras in furry brown costumes with bat masks and ungainly wings. With a staff like that, I can't imagine why he hasn't conquered the world by now.

Anyway, the Alpha manages to outfox the shark sub and returns to the domed city where McKenzie lives, 15 miles below the surface. The city is populated by scientists from all over the world who were plucked from their ordinary lives on the surface to build a scientific utopia under water. After showing his new friends the World's Fair-type wonders of the city, McKenzie takes them to their new living quarters in an apartment building gaily decorated with spotches of pink and lavender (McKenzie's personal design, I would imagine).

Forty-five minutes in, the story finally gets moving when Malick kidnaps a Japanese scientist who is on his way to the domed city. He apparently has invented an anti-radiation serum, and he is seeking asylum from all the nuclear-powered nations who want the serum so they can unleash atomic war while keeping their own people safe from radiation poisoning. Malick wants that serum for his own purposes, and demonstrates his evilness by subjecting the scientist and his lovely daughter to displays of grotesque organ transplants. Romero really relishes his performance as he takes the brain out of his attack sub commander's head and places it in the body of a lion, then cuts the wings off a huge bird and attaches those to the lion as well. Finally, he grabs a syringe with his blood-soaked hands and injects the beast with a growth serum, creating a do-it-yourself griffin. Yes, the whole sequence is as bizarre as it sounds! And it begs the question, if you can come up with a growth serum, why can't you also invent your own anti-radiation serum? Oh, that's right, then we wouldn't have a story!

Meanwhile, McKenzie gets wind of the kidnapping and prepares a commando crew to rescue the Japanese scientist. Along with his new pals, he enlists for the mission his sub pilot Kroiga and Dr. Anne Barton (Linda Haynes, who's clearly a student of the Ricky Nelson method of acting). After dressing his crew is stylish gold lame' jump suits and matching skullcaps, they voyage to Malick's island hideout where an all-out battle is launched. Boulders tumble, lasers fire, bat wings flutter, and griffin fur flies! I guess you can imagine who wins. Afterward, McKenzie takes his pals on a long ocean voyage to Fire Island (just kidding). Actually, they try to work in a strange "maybe it was a dream, maybe it wasn't" twist that doesn't quite work, IMO.

Still, I love crazy Japanese camp like this and can't believe I've never heard or seen this movie before. According to imdb.com, "When the television syndication contracts had expired this film became unavailable, reportedly due to a dispute over the rights." So I guess it's been hiding for many years and only recently made it to DVD. It's a shame it was off the radar for so long because it is definitely one of the better made movies from the Toho studios. Best of all, even though it's a Japanese production with a half-Japanese/half-American cast, the whole film is in English. No goofy dubbing with bad lip synch. An extremely fun and watchable movie... if you're in to bat people and flying griffins.

Saturday Morning Preview Shows

2008-09-05T13:53:00.003-04:00

I know I babbled on about this last year, but I can't help but start to feel nostalgic when we reach the first Friday after Labor Day. I'm speaking about those Saturday Morning Preview shows each network (there were only three back then) would air on the first Friday evening after Labor Day. The shows were designed to promote the new Saturday morning line up premiering the next day and would usually feature stars popular with the kiddie/pre-teen crowd. In our 24/7 cartoon world of today, where kids can watch cartoons or youth-oriented programs whenever they get near a TV, such programs are alien concepts. The few cartoons shown on Saturday morning now are merely reruns of programs already aired on cable channels like Nickelodeon or Disney. Back in the 70s, though, the only new programming kids had available to them was on Saturday morning, and the Saturday after Labor Day was always the launch date for the new season. Since I went back to school that week, it was always nice to know that I had the Friday night preview show to look forward to after those stomach churning first few days of new teachers, new classmates, and new classes.

When I made my post last year, I couldn't find any video examples of the preview shows I watched when I was a kid. There are a few examples of the shows from the 80s when VCRs became available, but I wasn't watching cartoons any longer by that time, so I get no nostalgic kick from them. Today, though, I found a clip from the 1978 ABC preview show featuring Kristy and Jimmy MacNichol. The clip showcases Donny Osmond mostly, but it gives you an idea of what these Friday preview shows were like:

I know, it seems pretty lame now, but to a kid in the 70s, it was fun to see the networks put this much effort into kids shows. I remember this episode in particular because, afterward, ABC aired At the Earth's Core. This is one of my guilty pleasures and at the time, I was reading every Edgar Rice Burroughs book I could get my hands on, so I was in hog heaven that night. Here's a little taste of the movie:

Come to think of it, if I had to watch these two programs in one night now, I'd probably consider it torture. Ah, to be young and without taste!

Where Did the Summer Go?!!

2008-09-02T13:17:00.003-04:00

Another summer is winding down and once again I'm wondering where the time went. I seldom wonder where the winter goes; I'm just glad it's going. With summer, though, there is a child-like sense of anticipation as Memorial Day approaches and a sense of melancholy as Labor Day disappears (although my wife would disagree with that). Anyway, the sunny, sweaty months have past and I've barely touched this blog. Frankly, I just haven't been much into the past-times that I usually discuss here: action figures, childhood toys, and model building. My preoccupation with various writing projects have left me with little interest in customizing, and my limited resources have not allowed me to indulge in frantic eBay bidding. I did pick up a few things during the summer that I guess I should mention.

After being completely knocked over by the Iron Man movie, I picked up a 12" Iron Man action figure during a trip to Target. This is not the really cool one with the removable mask, but it still has some nice features like the variety of jet exhaust noises it makes as you pretend to fly him through the air and the orange plastic blobs that he can shoot from a rocket launcher in his sleeve. The figure is also really sturdy and a nice rendering of the movie version of the suit. Once upon a time, I plotted to make a Captain Action-style costume of a 60s version Iron Man, but I could never get around how to construct a proper mask. I've made masks from Poly-vinyl clay before, like my Hawkman and Dr. Fate customs, but I was intimidated by Iron Man for some reason. I may get around to it sometime.

Another action figure I picked up during that same Target trip was a talking Indiana Jones. Indy was another character I long hoped to make a custom figure of, but other projects took precedence. Since the latest movie initiated a series of 12" figures, I decided to just buy one of the ready made dolls and scratch that character off my list. I bought the talking version mainly because I liked the head sculpt better than the non-talking version, and the talking one came with more accessories. It still doesn't look much Harrison Ford, however, and the talking feature is a bit creepy.

When you stick your finger in his stomach, his mouth opens in an expression of sheer agony. Then the recorded sayings are played, all lifted from previous Indiana Jones movies (e.g., "Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?"). If the mouth moved up and down like a ventriloquist dummy, the effect might work, but because the mouth just hangs open in that painful look of indigestion, Indy appears to be possessed by some ancient Mayan god who is talking through him.

"Burritos! Why did it have to be burritos?!!"

My wife Kathy and I have become hooked on the new Dr. Who series, especially since David Tennant took over the role. One day, Kathy surprised me with a David Tennant-version Dr. Who action figure. I had seen the smaller, molded plastic versions on eBay, but this is a 12" figure with cloth clothing. The accessories are pretty skimpy with just the sonic screwdriver, but the tight-fitting suit is spot on. I'm in the process of designing a 1/6th scale TARDIS to go with the figure, but I have to find some time to use my brother's workshop to put it together.

Finally, I was sad to see that my local hobby shop closed this summer. When I was single and living in Dundalk, one of the few advantages of living in my neighborhood was being able to walk to this nifty hobby shop to pick up models and model-building supplies whenever I needed them. Just before I got married, I moved to a house in Towson and was relieved to discover a similar hobby shop within walking distance. If I happened to be working on a model or action figure and discovered I needed glue or a particular color of paint, I could just wander down to the hobby shop and pick it up. Well, the owners decided to retire and I will now have to get in the car and expel carbon gases into the atmosphere to get to my nearest hobby store. Before the store closed, I went in to see what they had on sale. Sadly, all the model kits I was interested in had already been sold, so I settled for a kit of the U.S.A.F. Bell X-1 Rocket. I'm not really interested in building it as a complete model, but I thought I would use it for parts on some other custom project (whatever that may be).

As I bought the kit, I had hoped to find some pithy thing to say to the owners on my final visit to the store. The woman at the register thanked me for my years of patronage, and I thanked them as well and left. No big speech or teary farewell. I wish I wasn't so afraid of expressing my feelings in such moments. I always let them slip away and regret it later. I will miss that little shop, though.

Well, that was my summer. I hope to get more into the swing of things in the coming months and post more frequently. The crisp Fall weather always gives me a jolt of adrenalin, so I'm eager to make use of it.

My First Time With James Bond

2008-07-24T14:18:00.003-04:00

With the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace about to be released in the fall, I decided to read some of the old James Bond novels that I didn’t get around to reading during my James Bond obsession in college. Back then, I was more interested in the action, so I started in the middle of the series with Dr. No and worked my way through Goldfinger, Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, and Man with the Golden Gun. Later on I read Casino Royale (the first Bond novel), For Your Eyes Only, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker. Now, I feel the need to complete the series, so I started this summer with From Russia With Love and then Live and Let Die.

Mind you, I bought all the Ian Fleming Bond books back in college, picking up different editions from various second-hand bookstores. The copy of Live and Let Die that I have is a movie tie-in from 1973. When I dusted off the old paperback and looked at that cover with the movie poster artwork, I was immediately transported to a summer 35 years earlier and my heart ached a bit from a sharp twinge of nostalgia. You see, Live and Let Die was the first James Bond movie I ever saw.

My family and I were in Wildwood, NJ that summer, as we had been for so many summers before and for several summers afterward. Ocean City, MD was closer to our home, but Wildwood, NJ had so much more to offer. I haven’t been there for many years, but the boardwalk in Wildwood seemed like a city unto itself when I was a kid. It went on for miles and featured pier after pier of rides and arcades. The boardwalk itself was studded with all manner of attractions, including nice sit-down restaurants and grand old one-screen movie theatres with giant marquees outside. It was in one of these theatres that I saw Live and Let Die.

This was a big moment for me because, not only was this the first James Bond film I had ever seen, this was the first grown-up action movie I had ever seen. For years, my brother Craig had been coming home from really cool movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection and telling me how exciting they were, describing in careful detail all the action set pieces. Deep down I knew that this sort of action was so much better than the feeble, low-budget fare I got to watch on television. And in the days before cable and home video, you had to wait at least two years before a theatrical film hit television, and even then it was heavily edited. I really cursed the fact that I was too young to see these films.

But now it was the summer of 1973 and I was only one month away from turning nine years old. The glowing marquee on the boardwalk called out to me. I was well aware of James Bond, having listened the summer before as Craig described the exploits of the suave James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. I also remembered seeing the Corgi version of that Moon Buggy from the film and knew that it had to have been one exciting flick. Now there was this new Bond film and I was determined to talk my parents into letting me see it. I knew my brother would help in the cajoling department, and the fact that we were on vacation in Wildwood always had a softening effect on my parents’ resolve. They decided it wasn’t such a bad way to spend the evening.

I can’t emphasize enough how much better the movie-going experience was back when you had large single-screen theatres as compared to the multiplexes of today. Since they only had one movie to show, the theatre made every effort to create an aura of excitement about the movie you were about to see. The multiplexes have every movie available in one place, so they put no effort into promoting anything. The lobbies all look the same and rather rinky-dink at that. Movie posters and standees are scattered haphazardly around where there is space. Their main interest is funneling you to the refreshment counter. Not so in the old days.

I remember standing in front of the theatre as my father stood in line to buy tickets. Not only did the flashing marquee scream that this was “the best Bond ever,” two huge, beautifully painted movie posters stood on either side of the box office. We’re talking boats crashing into cars, cars crashing into boats, boats crashing into boats, an alligator regurgitating a boat, guns, explosions, voodoo priests, sexy women in bikinis, and standing in the midst of all the mayhem was 007 himself, holding a really big gun! Of course, my brother made a point of lamenting the fact that Sean Connery was not playing James Bond anymore. It was now that prissy Saint guy, Roger Moore. This made no never mind to me, since I had never seen Sean Connery before. I liked The Saint. I even liked his show with Tony Curtis: The Persuaders. Roger Moore was okay with me. Plus, I liked how the poster artist incorporated the two “O’s” in Roger Moore’s name to spell out “007.” I thought perhaps the producers had hired Mr. Moore solely for that reason.

After getting the tickets, we walked inside and down a long hallway plastered with Bond posters and lobby cards. Seeing this hall of stills from the movie really got me jazzed. I was bursting at the seams before the movie started. Right away I was amazed at the fast-paced teaser, followed by the Paul McCartney theme song. Then we finally see Roger Moore himself in bed with a hot Italian chick. Cool! When he checked his digital watch (a very new invention in 1973), there was an audible gasp in the crowd. Little did we know that within one year we would all be wearing one (including me).

By this time, the Bond films had developed a formula of their own very different from the formula of the novels. The movies had to have at least two Bond girls (the novels usually only had one), there had to be a plethora of chrome-shiny gadgets (the novels had few if any), and there had to be a long series of superfluous action set pieces to keep the audience entertained until Bond finally ended up at the villains hideout and commenced to blowing the place up. Because the producers were so compelled to stick with a proven formula, there’s very little in these later movies that relate to the books other than some characters, locales, and maybe a few actual scenes. In the case of Live and Let Die, the similarities include a Harlem crime boss named Mr. Big who uses his Haitian roots and voodoo as a weapon of intimidation, a smuggling pipeline running from Harlem to a state in the Deep South to a Caribbean island, and an exotic fortune teller named Solitaire. Other than that, the movie is a completely different story and one that is unnecessarily more complicated, in my opinion.

I was surprised to discover that the scene in the movie where Bond is in a Harlem nightclub and his table sinks through a trapdoor in the floor into Mr. Big’s office was taken directly from the book. It seemed like the kind of cheesy thing that would only happen in a movie, but Ian Fleming always liked to push the credulity envelope (remember Pussy Galore?).

Anyway, the movie was a real thrill ride for an eight-year-old. I was surprised at how familiar the situations felt, since by this time the silliness of the action set pieces in Bond films were not far from similar scenes in Disney movies. Also, the use of a Black Mafia felt similar to the Black Exploitation movies of the day, like Shaft and Superfly. As a white kid in the ‘burbs, I was fascinated by the previews for those films shown during episodes of Soul Train. They had the exotic allure of the forbidden. I could never go downtown to see movies like that, but with Live and Let Die, I felt like I was getting a taste of them.

The rest of the summer, I was obsessed with James Bond. The theme song was a hit on AM radio all through those summer months. I ran around the neighborhood playing James Bond. I even wrote secret agent stories about my own made up spy whose name escapes me. My brother and I stayed up at night debating who was a better Bond, Connery or Moore. I was arguing for Moore simply because he was the only Bond I knew. Craig felt that Live and Let Die was a big step down from Diamonds are Forever. Looking at those movies today, I would have to say they are pretty similar since they both follow the rigid formula of 70s Bond movies. Actually, I would give Live and Let Die the edge if only because Moore’s performance seems more energetic than Connery’s, who was weary of the role at that point.

I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with James Bond ever since. My disappointment with Man with the Golden Gun caused me to miss The Spy Who Loved Me. I gave Bond another shot with Moonraker, and had my heart broken. For Your Eyes Only restored my faith in him, and even the goofy Octopussy hooked me on a reading spree of the old novels. I’ve seen every Bond movie in the theatre ever since, but their quality has been generally mediocre and, by the 90s, I wondered if there was any place for a character like Bond in our modern pop culture. Casino Royale proved to me that Bond could be revamped for the 21^st century, and I’m back to reading Bond books again.

The Project Pegasus Saga

2008-06-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

Last summer, as I sat through the interminably long and overdone Spider-Man 3, I couldn't help but think that these Marvel blockbusters had gone horribly far afield from what made Marvel Comics great. I'm primarily a DC guy, but I did read quite a few Marvel titles in the late 70s and early 80s, and I read plenty of back issues to familiarize myself with the Marvel Universe. I couldn't understand why the movies placed so much emphasis on the name brand of a single character rather than delving into the mythology of old Marvel story arcs. After all, the second Fantastic Four movie based its story line on the original Silver Surfer story arc, leading to what I thought was a fun, action-packed film in keeping with the Fantastic Four style.

As my wife and I were driving home from the theater after Spider-Man 3, I related my feelings to her. "These sequels all fall flat because, after they've told the origin in the first movie, they don't seem to have anywhere to go. Why don't they use some of the old stories like Project Pegasus?"

Since my wife read a lot of Marvel comics in her youth, I assumed I could speak in such short-hand and she would immediately know what I was talking about. I forgot she didn't get into comics until the 80s and missed The Project Pegasus Saga by a couple of years. When she questioned me about it, I had to admit I didn't remember too much about it myself. I only recalled that it took place in Marvel Two-In-One, which was The Thing's version of Batman's The Brave and the Bold, and that it had to do with a top secret, underground project to investigate alternative fuel sources. The premise alone could be timely once again.

Fast forward one year and I suddenly find myself giddy over the terrific Iron Man movie and the big plans Marvel Studios have to get their movie projects on track again. With the tantalizing prospects of having Iron Man and the Hulk come together in an Avengers movie, I started thinking about the old Project Pegasus story again and sought to find the old comics on eBay (Marvel Two-In-One issues #53-58). As luck would have it, Marvel put out the whole story in a trade paperback about 20 years ago and I found a slightly beat up copy on eBay for cheap, so I snagged it.

In a nutshell, Pegasus stands for Potential Energy Group/Alternate Sources/United States. It was a "mammoth research facility of the U.S. Department of Energy located in Mount Athena in upstate New York." The Thing is called in to help with security in the facility, which is headed by an eager young superhero named Quasar. Turns out, Pegasus is investigating every possible new source of energy including the energy produced by strange supervillains and aliens. One of the beings under study is Thing's old friend, Wundarr. Wundarr has some kind of energy-absorbing abilities, but a recent experiment has put him into a coma. Meanwhile, one of the scientists on staff, Dr. Lightner, is up to no good, and the cyborg villain Deathlok shows up to do some sabotage.

More super people show up, including Thundarr and Giant Man, and the radioactive villain Nuklo is unleashed from his cage to wreak havoc. In usual Marvel fashion, there's lots of fighting and destruction over the six-issue story line, but it basically comes down to Dr. Lightner getting hold of a device called the Nth Projector which turns him into a human black hole, sucking in everything around him. Along the way, Wundarr comes out of his coma as a much stronger being known as Aquarian. Fortunately, he arrives just in time to help confront the mutated Dr. Lightner, who is now calling himself the Nth Man. Giant Man is the first to confront the human black hole and gets sucked into another dimension. Aquarian decides he's the only one powerful enough to take on the creature, so he allows himself to be sucked in. Once he finds Giant Man, Aquarian expands his entropy enducing field, causing Nth Man to collapse in on himself like a dying star. Once destroyed, Aquarian and Giant Man are returned to reality.

Of course, I'm condensing this story a great deal. There's a whole lot more that goes on, but I wanted to give you a sense of the action. When I read this series in 1978, I was completely overwhelmed by the suspense and excitement this story generated. I became a regular reader of Marvel Two-In-One after that, but none of the stories lived up to the scope of Project Pegasus.

I think Marvel Studios should seriously consider doing an updated, live action version of this story. Get Michael Chiklis back as The Thing and bring in an ensemble cast of not-so-well-known actors to play the various third-string superheroes and villains. What you lack in big name superhero recognition you make up for in number and variety. Also, the focus should be on the story rather than the character. As the Batman movies from the 90s proved, having a recognizable superhero in the film doesn't mean much if you don't have anything meaningful for him to do. With Project Pegasus, there's enough action for a team of superheroes, and the mystery of Dr. Lightner's mission is pretty intriguing.

Using memorable stories from Marvel's mythology is the only way I can see Marvel Studios succeeding with a new generation who love the characters but aren't much into reading comic books. I mean, we're already down to the second-stringers with Iron Man and Captain America, and there were even plans to do a movie based on Ant-Man, for God's sake! Stick with what you do best, Marvel, and go with team ups!

Then Voyager

2008-06-23T13:23:00.003-04:00

During my trip to Red Bank, NJ, a few weeks ago, I managed to find the new Voyager model kit from Moebius Models. Not to be confused with the Star Trek series, this Voyager is the vehicle used in the animated version of Fantastic Voyage. As you may recall, the Fantastic Voyage motion picture used a miniaturized submarine called the Proteus to travel through the veins and arteries of the human body. For the animated spin-off, the crew needed a more versatile means of transport which could take them anywhere their tiny hearts desired, hence the snazzy aircraft. You can watch a full episode from the series here.

As a kid, I loved both the movie and the TV series and always wanted model versions of both the Proteus and the Voyager. Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, no one ever made any. I did find a resin model of the Proteus online a few years ago, but when it arrived at my house, some of the brittle resin parts had already broken and it just seemed to heavy and fragile for me to build without some major cursing. It's still unassembled. Recently, however, this new plastic kit of the Voyager was released, and I'm thrilled to report that the kit is a wonderful rendering of the flying machine.

Immediately, I was excited to discover that the ship's interior is recreated in exact detail including all four crew members: Commander Johnathan Kidd, Pilot Busby Birdwell, Indian Mystic Dr. Guru, and resident hot babe Erica Lane. I had a lot of fun painting those tiny figures, right down to Kidd's eye patch and Birdwell's spectacles. I was worried that all my painstaking efforts would disappear once the kit was assembled, but the front windshield and overhead dome provide ample portholes through which to see the interior.

The outer body is relatively paint free since the ship on the series was plain white. I decided to paint the motor intakes a bronze color to make them appear more realistic and provide a pop of color to the front. For the back, I painted an orange glow effect inside each of the exhaust ports. Otherwise, I stayed true to the basic white look from the animated series.

In keeping with Moebius's attempt to mimic the Aurora model kits of old, the air craft comes with a stand which holds the Voyager aloft in a flying position. The stand even has the obligatory decal of the vehicle's logo. Every time I built one of these Aurora-esque models, I get a twinge of excitement like I'm 8 years old all over again. Moebius provides assembly instructions that look just like the old Aurora instruction sheets. The box art, while still trying to look Aurora, is a bit low rent with a spray painted styrofoam ball with nails stuck in it hanging in the background like some crude atomic particle or something. Oh well, the kit is still nice.

I've enjoyed just staring at this new model. I keep dreaming of how much fun it would've been to have this kit when I was young. What adventures we would've had... until I accidentally smashed it against a wall or dropped it down a stairwell.

Things That Went Clunk in the Night

2008-06-06T10:42:00.003-04:00

If you were a kid during the period between the late 50s and the early 80s, you probably spent at least a few Saturday nights staying up late to watch horror movies. Every television market had a local horror movie show and in Baltimore, that show was Ghost Host on WBFF Channel 45. The Ghost Host himself was played by George Lewis, whose day job was showing cartoons and Three Stooges shorts to kids after school as Captain Chesapeake. But whereas Captain Chesapeake was a live show, the Ghost Host segments were pre-taped and reused every week for years. Let me explain:

The introduction would start with a blurry graphic of an old house over which the words "Ghost Host" would appear in a typical horror-movie-style font. The graphic would dissolve to George Lewis, the Ghost Host, dressed in some Gothic mad scientist get-up in a cheesy laboratory set. He would bob around and move his lips. That was the standard prerecorded segment which ran every week. Over top of that, they would dub in a new audio track which started with, "Good evening, this is your Ghost Host, inviting you to watch...if you daa-aare..." and then he would say whatever that night's movie would be. Here's an example:

About mid-way through the film, the Ghost Host would return in another stock sequence, this time walking around a graveyard set, complete with cardboard headstones and some straw tossed around on the floor. This is where they would dub in a new audio track each week announcing next week's film. This is how that looked:

When the movie finally ended around 1:30 a.m. and you could barely keep your eyes open, the creepy Ghost Host would return with the stock closing sequence. This one never changed. He would always utter the same words that have stuck with me for decades. He would say...well, let the man do it himself:

"Mmmm-mmmwwwaaahaaahaaaa!"

I don't know what scared me more: the grainy black-and-white Universal monster movie or the Ghost Host's Tai-Chi movements and out-of-sync lips. Somehow, we felt rebellious staying up and watching Ghost Host. It seems absurd now, but you got to do two things you didn't normally get to do during the week. One, you got to stay up late and two, you got to watch something that might be a tad more grown up and disturbing than The Brady Bunch. Parents usually played along, having already seen these movies as kids and knowing that there wasn't anything all that bad about them. We could feel out of control in a safe, restrained sort of way. Plus, the movies were just plain fun.

Shows like Ghost Host disappeared in the 1980s as home video became the preferred method of watching horror films. Who needs commercials to take you out of the movie just as they got to the really juicy part? Unfortunately, we also lost those wonderful local hosts who tried so hard to add a little extra fright on such a teeny budget. They are missed.

CHASING KEVIN SMITH

2008-05-23T11:21:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, my brother Craig sent me an e-mail with the subject line, “Let me know if this is a crazy idea.” He had included a series of links to sites about writer/director Kevin Smith and locations he used in some of his movies. Craig wanted to check out some of these places, including Kevin Smith’s comic store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, in Red Bank, NJ. Craig asked if I would be willing to play navigator on his little quest. Always up for a long road trip in search of places I’ve never been to before, I said sure.

In the fall of 1994, two movies came out that completely blew me away. One was Pulp Fiction; the other was Clerks. To me, both represented new visions from writer/directors who were of my generation. Pulp Fiction incorporated a visual style that reflected the comic books, low-budget exploitation films, and Hong Kong cinema that permeated the consciousness of many a geek who grew up in the 70s and 80s. Clerks was the stark, indie film showing what everyday life was like for middle-class young adults with no particular direction. The Look Back in Anger for the Gen-X crowd, only with a lot more dick jokes. I was really exhilarated to see both films, which to me were ushering in a new era of films aimed at my own sensibilities rather than my parents. For the rest of the 90s, I dutifully trudged out to see every Kevin Smith film, even finding Mallrats to have a certain charm.

By the 21^st century, however, I have to say I cooled on Mr. Smith. My biggest issue with his movies was that, as he grew as a writer and attempted to tackle more challenging material, he was unwilling to let go of the sophomoric humor. Within the context of a Clerks or Mallrats, that sort of scatological and sexual material was hilarious, but in more serious films, it just got in the way. I would’ve loved Dogma so much more if Jay and Silent Bob had sat that one out, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m am less of a Kevin Smith fan than Craig, I was still interested in joining his quest. So we set out from Baltimore on a long drive up the Jersey Turnpike. The day was one of those perfect spring days with temperatures in the low 60s, cool breezes, blue skies, and cotton-candy clouds. That is, except for the pop up storms that hit every half hour or so. You can see in the picture above how blue skies were in view even as we were getting pounded with rain.

After about three and a half hours of driving, we finally found our first stop: the Quik Stop Groceries store made famous in Clerks. Although the RST Video store is closed, the sign is still up and the videos sit neglected inside. My brother was downright giddy to see the place and hurried in while I took some pictures outside.

Shortly after taking this shot, some guy who looked like Jay came out of the store and got into that Camaro.

I took some shots inside to show how small the place is. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to film in those cramped confines. We asked the guy behind the counter if we could take these pictures and he said, “Sure. Fine.” He must get dopey tourists like us all the time.

After our quick stop at the Quik Stop, we took a short drive down to Red Bank. The town was actually more picturesque than it seemed in Chasing Amy. I took a shot of Jack’s Music Shop which was used in Chasing Amy not only as a music store, but as the entrance to the main characters’ studio and apartment.

Across the street is Smith’s comic store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. I hadn’t set foot in a comic store in about three years, so it was fun to reconnect with my old passion and marvel (no pun intended) at how much the comic scene has changed. I bought a copy of The
Invincible Iron Man #1, which appears to be a reboot of the series in light of the new movie. This book was a much more sophisticated production than the old Iron Man comics I remember, and the story was quite good. To soothe my culture shock, I purchased a trade paperback collection of old Avengers stories and a World’s Finest Comic from 1979. Craig bought some Kevin Smith movie memorabilia and later said that he saw the manager and Smith cast regular, Walter Flanagan, behind the counter. Somehow, I only saw the guy who rang me up.

Our next stop was at the Broadway Diner on Monmouth Street to grab a late lunch and visit the restrooms. This was a true, actual, old fashioned diner that the North East is well known for. Most of the diners in Baltimore are newly built with modern fixtures intended to remind you of the 30s, 40s, or 50s, but actually remind you of nothing in particular. They’re a mish-mash of chrome and formica. The Broadway Diner in Red Bank retains its original look, which was created with a carefully planned design. This is the real deal. The food is good, honest diner fare as well.

Happily sated, we continued to wander around town, and I was quickly drawn toward the Hobby Masters building (their sign apparently came off, but the Toy Masters sign next door is still intact). This was a huge, two-story space filled with all manner of hobby gear. Since my main interest is in plastic models, I had to check out their large selection. I was thrilled to discover a model I’ve been searching for: The Voyager by Moebius. I’ve waiting most of my life for someone to put out a model based on the aircraft from the Fantastic Voyage animated series, and now I have one in my stubby fingers.

The afternoon was fading when Craig and I set out for home. My poor navigational skills sent us on a meandering trip back to the Garden State Parkway and eventually to the New Jersey Turnpike, but it gave us plenty of time to talk and unwind. Craig even had time to educate me on the virtue of Kevin Smith’s movies. With my interest piqued, I plan to take a second look at the movies I’ve already seen and catch up on some of his later films.

We made it back to Baltimore around 8:30. Despite the hours of driving, both of us were pretty energized. I snatched one last photo of Craig excitedly displaying his Mooby the Golden Calf hat.

IT’S SO RICH AND THICK AND CHOC-A-LICK

2008-05-14T14:32:00.002-04:00

Just as my adult self has searched for the perfect single malt scotch, my childhood self searched for the ideal chocolate milk. It wasn’t a quest I was consciously aware of as a kid, but looking back on it, chocolate milk was just as much a preoccupation as G.I. Joes or The Three Stooges.

Since my mom discouraged us from eating sugary snacks and seldom kept any in the house, chocolate milk was one sweet treat that was readily available when I needed a quick sugar fix. Unfortunately, the only chocolate additive we had in the house was a sad, neglected can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup which sat in the back of the refrigerator covered in hardened brown drizzles. Before the nifty plastic squeezy bottles, the only way chocolate syrup could be purchased was in tin cans that you had to open with a can opener. Once those triangular holes were punched into the top, the syrup was exposed to all manner of odors and bacteria. My mom was clever enough to put one of those generic plastic lids on it that she found at the supermarket, so we weren’t subjected to hints of onion in our chocolate syrup, but no one every bothered to wipe off the gooey overflow after they were done with the can, so six months in, the once proud Hershey’s label was oozing with cocoa dribbles resembling a Hershey Park mascot with a head wound. Having to wrestle with that can and get sticky globs of chocolate on my fingers was sometimes not worth the effort for a lousy glass of chocolate milk.

Not to mention the fact that the stuff never dissolved properly. No matter how vigorously you stirred, the first few sips were mostly milk flavored, the last few sips were violently chocolatey, and half the syrup still clung tenaciously to the bottom of the glass. Not cool.

On the other hand, Nestles’ Quick powder looked invitingly clean and simple. You put a spoonful in the milk, you stirred a few times, and the powder dissolved completely. That looked like a great solution, plus they had that clever rabbit mascot imploring you to drink it slow, but then sucking it down in one gulp. That had to be terrific! My mom wasn’t so convinced, however. I just think she preferred Hershey’s chocolate over Nestles’. Both tasted fine to me. I was grading on neatness and efficiency.

In the late 60s and early 70s, PDQ Chocolate Mix was also heavily promoted. The cool part of PDQ was the fact that it came as little, coarse pellets that dissolved in milk. I really lobbied hard for this stuff, but Mom was again reluctant, this time because it was made by Ovaltine. At the time, I wasn’t sure what she had against Ovaltine, but I wanted to try this PDQ stuff. Eventually, she broke down and got me some. I can’t remember what it tasted like, but I really liked it, which made it all the more frustrating when I had to beg my mom for a new jar every time we ran out. She would usually say, “But we have Hershey’s syrup in the fridge.” Ugh.

By the time I was eight or nine, I became fascinated with old radio shows. My parents would often wax nostalgic about them, and we had an LP record with dozens of radio show intros on them. I really got excited when a local radio station started playing some of the shows, like The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, on Friday evenings, and I also discovered that my local library had some available on cassette. One radio serial I really loved was Captain Midnight, and he was sponsored by Ovaltine. The commercials for Ovaltine were so effective, I drooled for the stuff every time, even though I had never tasted it.

Finally, I asked my parents if we could get some. Their faces went gray as if I had suggested that we take up human sacrifice as a hobby. “Ooohh, I never liked that stuff as a kid,” my dad warned ominously. My mom readily agreed, “It sorta tasted like malted milk, but…” Her voice trailed off with a wince. Still, I had to find out for myself. Heck, Ovaltine made PDQ, right? With even greater reluctance than the PDQ purchases, my mom put a jar of Ovaltine in the shopping cart, immediately regretting this waste of her meager food budget. I was not deterred, however, and excitedly made myself a glass of Ovaltine before Mom had finished unbagging the groceries. Always listen to your parents, kids! It did taste like malt, but malt that was processed in an oil refinery. I can’t quite describe the odd chemical flavor it had, but I surely didn’t want to ever drink it again. Mom looked at me knowingly, and I accepted my guilt. I had made her waste money on a jar of Ovaltine that would sit in our pantry until my freshman year of college.

Although my parents were willing to keep powders and syrups around the house, they seldom wasted money on sugary drinks like bottled soda or Hi-C Fruit Drink. That’s why I was secretly jealous of the kids that could get Yoo-Hoo. I was mainly attracted to the bottle. Currently, they come in 9 oz. bottles, but my memory from the 70s was a shapelier 6 oz. bottle. Anyway, I really wanted to hold one of those sweaty little bottles in my hand and partake of its chocolately goodness. When I started receiving an allowance, I blew some of my precious coin on a Yoo-Hoo. My disappointment did not quite match the Ovaltine fiasco, but I was not pleased. My first reaction was that it tasted watered down, but it was more than that. I knew this was not real milk. This was some sort of non-dairy representation of milk, feebly flavored with an uninteresting chocolate-like substance. I still drank it on occasion, though, mainly so I could hold that sweaty bottle.

I guess it was all these chocolate milk disasters which led me to go cold turkey as a teenager. I can’t tell you the last time I tasted chocolate milk, and as much as I like chocolate, the thought of it does not appeal to me. Now single malt scotch, that’s another story…

NEAL THROUGH THE CATHODE RAY TUBE

2008-05-01T13:37:00.001-04:00

In the words of the Talking Heads, “I was born in a house with the television always on.” At least, that’s the way it felt to me. I awoke to cartoons, my mom watched games shows and “her stories” during the day while she did house work, I watched cartoons and Gilligan’s Island until my dad came home and we had dinner, and I finished up the day with prime time shows like Mod Squad, Laugh-In, and the Partridge Family. Television was my window to the world beyond my street in the boring suburbs. I even gleaned bits of information from the nightly news, like Viet Nam and Watergate. In 1973, Saturday morning cartoons were interrupted by the signing of the Paris Peace Accord which ended the Viet Nam War (sort of). Television was not merely entertainment for me; it was hardwired into my very being.

Small wonder that my normal play activities were conceptualized through a television perspective. I spent an awful lot of time playing alone as a kid, and I usually pretended to be performing a television show. It had to start at a specific time and run for an allotted period (usually 30 minutes since my short attention span rarely afforded me the ability to launch a 60-minute storyline). During the day, I acted out my shows in my front or back yard. The front yard was especially good because we had a tree there where I could act out my high-flying stunts. I could imagine myself as a pirate swinging from the mast of a creaky ship, or a maverick cop chasing a bad guy over the girders of an unfinished office building.

Not that all my shows were action dramas. I did sitcoms as well, often enlisting my puppets as comic foils with me playing the straight man. I had a show with Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, then switched to a different series with Charlie McCarthy, and eventually worked with my Will E. Talk ventriloquist dummy who I considered a close friend when I was 10 years old (but that’s for another session, Doctor).

One of my favorite early evening reruns during the 70s was Get Smart, so I created my own version of the sitcom and acted it out at 7 o’clock, right after WBFF- TV Channel 45 aired Get Smart at 6:30. There was a bumbling secret agent of course, but instead of having a female partner, my show had a young, hip sidekick. Eventually, I became so enamored with the cooler side kick that he ended up doing more on the show than the main character. Think of Fonzie on Happy Days. I finally gave in to my obsession and created a spin-off show for him; however, I quickly realized that he worked better as a side kick than as a front man. Think Fish after he spun off from Barney Miller. Since I couldn’t think of a way to bring him back to the original series, I lost interest in both and I stopped acting them out in my front yard. This was my version of cancellation.

As I grew older, the television fantasy took on more shape and texture. I named my fictional TV network the Intercontinental Broadcasting Company (IBC), which I swiped from Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. All my shows were simply reworkings of programs that I was currently interested in. My fascination with Columbo and Banacek morphed into a hybrid I called Banzo (don’t ask). When I read about this odd science fiction show in England called Dr. Who, I created a sort of rip-off called The Captain. My interest is Star Trek and M*A*S*H became a science fiction dramedy called Aurora. Basically, I merged the premise of a starship roaming around the galaxy with crew members modeled after Hawkeye, Radar, etc. I even envisioned a new Batman TV show reflecting the darker, more gritty version of the Dark Knight appearing in 70s comic books.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this fantasy play acting of mine continued until I was 14 years old. Of course, as I hit puberty, I could no longer run around outside acting goofy, so I limited my activities to the basement, or maybe in other parts of the house when family members weren’t around. I convinced myself that I was merely acting stories out which I would later write down. By age 12, I was convinced my only true skill was writing, so this play acting allowed me to work out stories before actually writing them down. Both The Captain and Aurora ended up as novels which I wrote at age 13 and 14 respectively.

A few months into my 15^th year, I had to admit that my TV fantasy had to be put to an end like the rest of my childhood. The Intercontinental Broadcasting Company quietly went out of business around December 1978. I was no longer acting out shows, but my brain continued to think in terms of visual stories. In high school, I started writing screenplays. I still have some of those old handwritten manuscripts and cringe at the writing, but I am impressed that I was so obsessed with writing at such a young age. Now when I struggle to write even a simple blog entry, agonizing over every word, I yearn for a time when I could write so freely simply for the sheer enjoyment of creating stories. Just as I became self-conscious of my play acting as a teenager, I am now self-conscious about my writing as a middle-aged man.

MORE FUN WITH FILMATION

2008-04-03T10:12:00.004-04:00

With all the warm and fuzzy nostalgia directed at the Brady Bunch over the last 30 years or so, those who were not around during the 70s might think that the Brady’s were considered the coolest thing going. Well, I’m here to say it wasn’t so. While I do admit to watching the Brady Bunch on Friday nights, I laughed at them more than with them. Even as a kid, I made fun of their Astroturf lawn, their lame clothes, and the bathroom without a toilet. When Greg got his groovy bachelor pad or pranced around as Johnny Bravo, I cringed and looked away. Yeah, I wasn’t fooled: they were a bunch of dorks.

Which makes it all the more difficult for me to figure out why I liked The Brady Kids cartoon show so much. Actually, it’s not if I put my mind to it. What made the cartoon work was that they put the kids in an environment all their own, much like Filmation was doing with The Archies (another show I really liked). No annoying parents or Alice, just the six kids, their mynah bird Marlon, the shaggy dog Mop Top, and their twin pandas Ping and Pong, all living in a tree house. This was pure fantasy with no lectures or moralizing. They even had Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Lone Ranger pop in for some episodes. As I said before, Filmation understood what kids enjoyed.

In the early 70s, Filmation was branching out from their established niche of super hero and science fiction cartoons into more comedic directions. They started with The Archies. There were several variations on the Archies theme, but my favorite show was Archie’s TV Funnies, where they filled a half hour with small snippets featuring comic strip characters like Smokey Stover, Dick Tracy, The Captain and the Kids, Nancy, and others. Of course, I mainly watched for the Dick Tracy segments, which closely followed the style of the comic strip, unlike that other Dick Tracy cartoon incarnation.

The spin-off shows like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and The Groovy Ghoulies were even more fun. I even liked their Jerry Lewis cartoon, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down! even though I was not a fan of Jerry Lewis. This leads me to one of those weird epiphanies that I still remember to this day. There was a sequence that was repeated in almost every episode where the animated Jerry would look into the camera and wiggle his ears and the laugh track would guffaw with hilarity. It was that same canned laughter that they would use in all the sit-coms of the day, which didn’t really sound like laughter at all but rather like bizarre cackles and kazoo noises. It made me think of evening in the arboreal forest of the planet Mongo. Anyway, one morning as I watched animated Jerry doing this very unfunny act and eliciting the joyous eruption of prerecorded chortles, I thought how ridiculous the whole canned laughter process was. I mean, it was hard enough to accept laughter echoing from nowhere while Colonel Hogan and Kinch were standing underneath a bridge in Nazi Germany with explosives, but from a cartoon? A series of drawings that were photographed one frame at a time to create the illusion of movement? Where could the audience be in that scenario? It was probably the first time I recognized the manipulative nature of the medium, and it aged me a little bit. But I digress…

In 1973, Filmation put out what I would consider their best animated effort: Star Trek: The Animated Series. Bringing back most of the actors and writers from the original series, the show was not merely a kiddie program, but for all intents and purposes the fourth season of what would become an iconic series. Moreover, the use of animation freed them from the tight budgets of the live-action show to create aliens and other worlds which could never have been achieved on the original series. Despite the limitations of the animation, Filmation produced unique alien vistas that I still find interesting today. At the time, I was not yet a Star Trek fan, primarily because every time I tried to watch Star Trek on my local station, they would be airing one of the Harry Mudd episodes. I hated Harry Mudd and thought that these comic relief episodes were a boring waste of time. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for Star Trek, I was curious enough to give the show a chance. The first episode of the cartoon series that I saw was…you guessed it…”Mudd’s Passion” with the master of cheese himself, Roger C. Carmel, providing the voice of the annoying Harry Mudd. I never watched another episode until it was in syndication years later.

Not that this put me off Filmation shows altogether. I still felt that they were far and away more inventive than any of the other producers of Saturday morning fare. One of my favorites was Uncle Croc’s Block starring Charles Nelson Reilly and Jonathan “Dr. Smith” Harris as the cranky Basil Bitterbottom. Reilly played the title character, a disgruntled kid show host with a cast of strange sidekicks. The show lampooned the kid shows that populated local TV stations across the country (in Baltimore, for example, we had our very own Captain Chesapeake). Uncle Croc was surrounded by strangeness, my favorite of which was Koo-Koo Knievel, a puppet bird that lived in a coo-coo clock and would leap out of the clock on a motorcycle like he was making a daring jump. Okay, it sounds lame, but I was 11 and Evel Knievel was really popular back then.

In addition to the train wreck of a show Uncle Croc was conducting in the live-action world, there were regular cartoon features including Wacky and Packy, Fraidy Cat, Super Fiends, and M*U*S*H. M*U*S*H was my favorite since it was a parody of M*A*S*H, only this version had dogs. The title stood for Mangy Unwanted Shabby Heroes, a group of mounted dog policemen stationed at an outpost in the Arctic Circle. The characters mimicked their M*A*S*H counterparts with names like Bullseye, Trooper Joe, Cold Lips, Major Sideburns, and Colonel Flake.

Uncle Croc’s Block was like a less sophisticated version of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and its innovative style may have been ahead of its time, for the show was canceled mid-season. Its major competition was another Filmation show, The Shazam!/Isis Hour. With these shows, Filmation was entering a period where live-action would overtake its animation output. More on this era in a later post…

NEW CAPTAIN ACTION MODEL FROM MOEBIUS

2008-03-24T10:41:00.004-04:00

Moebius Models, in conjunction with Captain Action Enterprises, has finally released their long-awaited Captain Action model, a reproduction of the original Aurora model issued in the late 60s. The model kit mimics the original in every detail possible, from the box art to the instruction sheet provided inside, but Moebius also provides some added options for those Captain Action fans who were never quite happy with the original.

When Captain Action Enterprises first announced that the kit was in development, one issue that was discussed on the Yahoo! Captain Action list was the fact that the face on the original model did not look like the action figure or the artwork on the box. In fact, it didn't look like much of anything with its bland, simplistic features more at home on a totem pole than a figurine. In response to this criticism, Moebius Models enlisted Terry Beatty to create an alternative face sculpt which looked more like the actual artwork on the box.

A second alternative element was the creation of a nameplate for the base which used the familiar Captain Action logo. The nameplate provided with the original model used a rather bland font, perhaps to suggest a hand-chiseled design like an actual stone sculpture. At any rate, the modeler has the option of building the model with the original face and nameplate, or use the alternative elements.

I pre-ordered two kits since I wasn't sure whether I wanted to build the original version, the alternative version, or both. Due to production delays, I waited almost a full year before finally receiving my two kits, but I think it was well worth the wait. After opening one of the kits and examining the pieces, I chose to build the alternative version. While I'm not entirely convinced that the new face looks exactly like the box art (and it's certainly nothing like the action figure), it's still a much more interesting face than the dead-behind-the-eyes original.

These kits are limited editions with only 1,000 being made, so the price was far higher than your usual hobby shop kit. Therefore, I was determined to take my time and build the thing properly. Mind you, I've built many a model kit over the years and I think I'm pretty competent at it, but I can also make some messy mistakes when I get over eager and rush along in a mad dash to get it completed. The kit comes with an instruction sheet, designed by CA fan Jim Alexander, which looks remarkably like the old Aurora instruction sheets while incorporating details about the new elements. The sheet tells you to follow their point-by-point instructions to assemble the model correctly, but I have one word of advice there:

The instructions tell you to assemble the upper body section, then the lower body section, and glue the two assembled sections together. Trouble is, the bottom part of the upper body assembly has pegs which fit into holes along the top of the lower body assembly. If you allow your two assembled body pieces to thoroughly dry before fitting them together, you can't fit the pegs into the holes. I would suggest instead to assemble the lower body section first. Next, glue the face piece to the back part of the upper body, and then glue the front and back pieces of the upper body assembly together while simultaneously fitting the two halves to the assembled lower section. Otherwise, you'll have to pry the two sections apart again to glue them to the lower section. I was lucky and was able to fix the problem without damaging the pieces, but not everyone may be so lucky, so you have been warned!

Other than that small quibble, the model came together fairly easily and was a fun project. Although there are relatively few pieces, it is a big model and will require some time to paint and assemble. Be sure that you make sure pieces are securely glued together before moving on with assembly as the sheer weight of these large sections can cause them to fall out of position.

So, after 40 years of lamenting the fact that I would never have a Captain Action model to build, I finally have one to call my own, and I think it's a big improvement over the original. I'm so grateful to Moebius Models and Captain Action Enterprises for making this rare model kit accessible to those with modest budgets!

CLAPTON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2008-03-12T13:49:00.003-04:00

This entry is way off the mark for this blog, but it is my blog after all, so what the hell. I just finished reading Eric Clapton’s autobiography and I feel like a raw nerve. It’s not because of his dissertations on the purity of blues or the numerous guitars he’s owned or all the famous people he’s known, it’s because of his journey through serious drug and alcohol addiction and his emergence on the other side.

I don’t know exactly why I picked up the book. It was my wife’s book. Unlike me, she has a love for blues and blues-infused rock. I’m more of a pop or folk-oriented rock fan. To put it simply, I’m a Beatles fan rather than a Rolling Stones fan. I always found Clapton grating in interviews with the way he babbles on about the blues. I thought Cream was ridiculous. Just to have the audacity to call the band Cream (as in “cream of the crop”) was annoying enough. Then seeing the concert footage of those rambling guitar solos, which always sounded like musical masturbation to me, just sent me over the edge. Only stoners can get into music like that where the pointless runs up and down the fret board are only background noise for their altered states of being.

The gossip of Clapton's own substance abuse problems also were a negative tic in my book. I’m still wrestling with issues I have over my late father, an alcoholic who never fully broke his bond with the bottle. While I understand the disease from years of dealing with my dad and his numerous trips to rehab, I have little patience for addicts. The fact that Clapton got clean later in life was a point in his favor, but I still wasn’t sold.

I did enjoy the original Layla by Derek and the Dominos, but then Clapton had to ruin the memory by putting out that awful acoustic version which was mercilessly repeated on rock radio stations. I felt sorry for him when his son Conor met such a tragic end, but was put off by his capitalization of the event when he released Tears in Heaven. Just didn’t care for the guy very much.

Anyway, I was looking for something to read and I usually like biographies, especially about people who lived through interesting eras in pop culture, so I thought I give it a try. I almost took the attitude, “Let’s see what the man has to say for himself.” Well, he had a lot to say, and I was impressed with the way he said it.

Written in an honest, straightforward manner, Clapton takes you through his humble beginnings, his love of the blues and his pursuit of a career in music making. He also recounts the public life and musical accomplishments of which we are all aware. I completely disagree with his perspective on music, but since I’m only an avid listener and not a musicologist, I have no quibble one way or the other about such things. The part that drew me in was when he discussed his descent into heroin addiction, his recovery, and his descent into his new addiction to alcohol.

What strikes me most when I observe addicts or hear them recount their experiences is that they all exhibit the same personality traits. Their backgrounds and experiences are different, but the behavior patterns are always the same. The maddening part for me is that they are so much in denial about it. Protecting their addiction becomes more important than saving their relationships or their lives. It’s a clear path the hell and they are looking the other way.

That tendency to dismiss or marginalize the reality of it is what I find most off-putting when I hear or read testimonies from addicts. Even those who are clean may still dilute the truth as a way to protect their own self-image. Clapton takes no such easy road, and I found his honesty so refreshing. One line that walloped me like a ton of bricks was when he talked about his first wife Pattie, “However much I might have thought I loved Pattie at the time, the truth is that the only thing that I couldn’t live without was alcohol.”

After going through various rehab adventures with my dad, he managed to stay sober for 23 months when I was 12 to 14 years old. Then, during the Christmas holidays in 1978, he fell back into drinking. I had gone through his on-again-off-again drinking bouts countless times, but this time was particularly devastating, and for years I could not quite figure out why. It wasn’t until a few years ago, long after my dad’s death, that I realized what it was. On some subconscious level, I realized that my father’s need for alcohol outweighed his love for his wife and children. Pretty hard notion to swallow at age 14, so I never allowed myself to articulate it until I was an adult. However, from that Christmas onward, I treated my father as an obligation. Someone I had to love and care for because he was family. He was no longer the dad I looked up to and admired. Because his love was conditional, mine had to be as well.

The inspiring thing about Eric Clapton was that he finally got it. He’s been sober 20 years and continues to work the 12-step program that is so essential to remaining clean. This was something my father could never bring himself to do. He knew all the right things to say and how to pretend that he was okay, but he never could truly do the hard work it took to stay sober. In the epilogue, Clapton writes, “My family continues to bring me joy and happiness on a daily basis, and if I were anything but an alcoholic, I would gladly say that they are the number one priority in my life. But this cannot be, because I know I would lose it all if I did not put my sobriety at the top of that list.” If only my father could have learned that lesson, maybe it would’ve all been different.

Seeing the travails of addiction through the eyes of the addict, depicted in such an honest and forthright way, was a harrowing and ultimately cathartic experience. I even came to realize that Tears in Heaven may have been helpful to others rather than a crass way to cash in on tragedy. This is so much more than just another pop star tell-all. I would recommend it to anyone who is wrestling with addiction or who is struggling with a loved one who is addicted.

THE TALE OF TWO WHITMANS

2008-03-04T11:17:00.004-05:00

If you were a kid in the 70s, Whitman Publishing Company was probably your publisher of choice whether you knew it or not. Whitman produced the Big Little Books, along with various hard and soft cover books aimed at a pre-teen audience. Most of the books were based on movies, TV shows, and comic book titles which were sure-fire favorites with kids. They even repackaged unsold comics into economical three-packs, sealed in flimsy plastic bags that hung from spinner racks in discount stores and book stores. Chances are, if you did any reading as a kid back then, you read Whitman books.

During the summer of ’72 when I crossed the threshold into age eight, I was becoming an avid reader. I was at that awkward reading stage, however, where basic books like “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Cat in the Hat” didn’t really cut it anymore, but I wasn’t quite ready for the Hardy Boys. This is where Whitman bridged the gap. I was already hooked on comic strips and I particularly loved Dick Tracy. During one of my numerous trips with Dad to the Read’s Drug Store (now known as Rite Aid), I found a Big Little Book on the magazine rack titled, Dick Tracy Encounters Facey. This was the first Big Little Book I had ever seen, and I was curious about it. Not only was it quite small (perfect for my pudgy little hands), it had an illustration on each right-hand page and text on each left-hand page. It reminded me of the picture heavy children’s books I was familiar with, but it also had a grown-up feel with its blocks of text and chapter breaks. Just flipping through the book, I saw enough pictures of interesting action and familiar faces like Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem that I had to have it. Another round of begging with my dad, which wasn’t so bad since he was usually pretty amenable to buying me reading material.

My dad had to stop off at a couple more places before we went home, so I stayed in the car and read my curious little book while he did whatever. Funny how you could leave an eight-year-old alone in a car back then and not fear any trouble. Different world.

Anyway, I finished reading the book in a few days (always was a slow reader even then). The story involved a criminal known as Facey who was a master of disguise. He started out doing petty crimes for larger criminal gangs, then decided to go solo as his confidence grew. Meanwhile, Dick Tracy and his partner Sam Catchem worked the case, did the forensics and so forth, but couldn’t catch a break. Facey became so self-assured that he even had the guts to masquerade as Tracy himself, walk into the police station, and take away evidence that might lead to his capture. Of course, like all criminals, he pushed his luck too far when he kidnapped the daughter of a world leader. Tracy and Catchem finally tracked him down to his lair and busted him. Facey disguised himself to beat the rap, but Tracy blew his cover by putting him in a shower and washing off his make-up. Pretty entertaining stuff.

I was so taken with the book that I had to tell my best friend Nick about it. When I ran into him, he was carrying a book himself and this one had Superman plastered on the cover. Titled Superman Smashes the Secret of the Mad Director, this book was the size of a regular, mass-market paperback, but it used a similar format as my Big Little Book. That is, lots of pictures and large print, but here the text was on the bottom half of the page and the illustrations were on the top of the page. Only difference was this book had black-and-white drawings rather than the full color pictures my Tracy book had. As I told Nick about my book, he told me how cool his book was as well.

“When you’re done with it, maybe we can swap books?” I suggested.

He agreed. I felt so mature. We would exchange books and each get to read two books rather than only one. How civilized. I was growing up. A few days later, on a Friday afternoon, Nick handed me his Superman book and I quickly dashed into the house to retrieve my Dick Tracy book. I was so thrilled. I had never read a Superman story before, not even in comic book form. I made a point of reading the book as fast as I could so that I wouldn’t hang onto the book for too long. That would be rude after all, and we were acting all mature and stuff. The entire weekend, I carried the book around with me and read through a few pages every chance I got. Even while I was playing with my friend Johnny, I would pull the book out of my back pocket and read while he went to the bathroom or ran an errand for his mom. Sunday night, I barreled through the rest of the book and felt quite pleased with myself for finishing a 166-page book so quickly (never mind that half the book was pictures and the print was extra-large).

Looking back, the story was one of the oddest things I’ve ever read. A famous movie director in the Otto Preminger/Eric Von Stroheim mold comes to Metropolis to film a Medieval epic. The tyrannical director, subtly named Max Malice, has a reputation for creating period films of tremendous accuracy, so Clark Kent and Lois Lane are assigned to cover the filming of the movie. They finagle bit parts on the film, Lois as a handmaiden and Clark as a serf, and report for costume and make-up. They are surprised to find out that all actors must wear contact lenses. Clark notices that Malice is putting special lenses on the cameras as well. Somehow these special lenses cause all the reality elements (e.g., city skyline, crew, light stands, etc.) to disappear and the flimsy sets suddenly appear solid and totally real. Also, all the actors lose their memories and actually believe they are in the Middle Ages, except Clark of course, whose Kryptonian physiology must be resistant to the magical contact lenses. Malice dresses as a court jester and encourages the actors to act out the scenes he wants. He talks a couple of thuggish types into fighting Clark and later, the brutes kidnap Lois. Incensed by this attack on his woman, Clark can no longer stay in character, so he transforms into Superman to stop the thugs from running off with Lois. Meanwhile, Max Malice decides that capturing Superman’s escapades on film are more interesting than his original script, so he races madly all over the set in a motorcycle, filming the action from the sidecar while a helicopter captures the action from the air.

As Superman fights with the thugs and generally destroys the set, Malice screams that he is capturing the best footage of his career. What kind of film he could cobble together from these random shots of destruction, I have no idea. Anyway, Superman finally puts an end to the whole mess by burning the film with his heat vision. The rest of the story deals with Clark trying to convince Lois that he’s not Superman even though he disappeared during the whole time that Superman was around. Stupid woman falls for it again.

Although my eight-year-old brain accepted the story at face value, my 43-year-old brain gets a headache from it. How these lenses could make plywood sets look like solid rock and make people believe they were in the Middle Ages is thoroughly mindboggling. Also, Max Malice’s playful ruse to get some good action for his movie seems slim justification for Superman to trash the set and burn Malice’s film stock. Malice slinks away like a chastened criminal without questioning the fact that Superman has cost the studio millions of dollars in damages and lost time. As usual, Superman uses excessive force under the slightest provocation and gets away with it. Little wonder I was Batman fan.

Okay... so I finished the book and excitedly went to Nick after school that Monday to tell him so, hoping that he had also finished my book and we could swap back. Nope, Nick hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. I feigned understanding; we were being civilized after all. I told him he could hang onto it as long as he needed, but I was clever enough to keep his book hostage in the meantime. Days turned into weeks. Nick kept making excuses. After awhile, I gave up asking. I still had his book and sooner or later, he would want it back. I just had to be patient.

Flash forward 35 years: I still had that Superman book collecting dust on the book shelf. I didn’t like it and didn’t particularly want it, but I wanted my Dick Tracy book back, so in some insane twist of logic, I held onto it. That book sat on four different book shelves in four different houses. I haven’t seen Nick in at least 25 years, but I kept hoping my Dick Tracy book would show up. He would finally cave into the guilt and send it to me in an unmarked, plain brown wrapper. I, in turn, would track him down and rightfully return his Superman book. It would be the mature thing to do.

Christmas 2007: Among the gifts that my lovely wife had given me, there was a small, hard package. I curiously peeled away the wrapping. It was a slightly worn copy of Dick Tracy Encounters Facey. I gingerly, but joyously, flipped through the pages, instantly recognizing the illustrations and the story. There’s Facey getting his makeup washed off in the shower! Tears brimmed around my eyelids. I was reunited with a long lost friend. My thoughtful wife had brought my torment to an end.

Nick, you still aren’t getting your book back.

THE EXCITING WORLD OF FILMATION

2008-02-28T13:58:00.003-05:00

Any child who was glued to the TV in the 60s and 70s the way I was became intimately familiar with the handful of cartoon producers who dominated the TV animation market. And just as people develop brand loyalty with everything from cars to toothpaste, I was a devoted Filmation man. I admit I watched everything, and I did have a few favorites produced by those other guys, but Filmation consistently put out material that was right up my alley. Now that many of these shows are being put out on DVD, complete with audio commentary by producer Lou Scheimer and others from the Filmation family, I’ve been reliving some of these wonderful childhood memories.

My earliest memories of Filmation go back to their first Saturday morning cartoon show, The New Adventures of Superman. I was too young to remember when they first aired, but I saw episodes aired as repeats on Sunday afternoons. I do recall, however, the premiere of The Adventures of Batman and Robin which came along a couple years later (the animated show couldn’t air until after the live-action show was canceled). I was a huge Batman fan and was thrilled to death that an animated version was coming to Saturday morning. The frenetic opening credit sequence, with its quick cuts and flashing primary colors, really got me jazzed right off the bat (pardon the pun). I also loved their new Batmobile design. Far more sleek and serious looking that the George Barris creation, it looked like the muscle cars I saw zipping up and down my front street at the time.

Despite the initial excitement over the opening credits, I remember feeling a bit let down by the stories. The format was essentially the same as the Superman show (seven minute adventures with fairly simplistic storylines), but the animation seemed even more limited. Also, I don’t recall the first episode featuring any of the major villains like The Joker or The Penguin. I could be wrong about that, but that was my memory. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something not quite right about the show. Having seen some of those cartoons on YouTube recently, I think I was probably disappointed with the slow pacing. Even with limited animation, Superman could still generate excitement because he was saving jet planes from fiery crashes and shifting the Earth’s orbit. Batman was simply gathering clues and catching crooks. That was great in the live-action show when you had Adam West and Burt Ward chewing up the scenery, but those strangely immobile close-up shots that Filmation was so famous for just didn’t inspire much excitement. Nevertheless, it was Batman, so I stayed loyal.

Around the same time, I remember seeing their movie tie-in shows, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fantastic Voyage. I was especially fascinated with Fantastic Voyage, just as I had been with the movie. What I liked about the animated series was that they had a flying ship called the Voyager rather than a submarine like in the movie. With Voyager, they could travel anywhere in their miniaturized state. And the hero had an eyepatch! That was really startling to me (I hadn't yet seen Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.). The closing credit sequence (yes kids, they used to have those once upon a time) was especially atmospheric, showing clips of the empty, darkly lit miniaturization lab while moody music played; probably the gloomiest credit sequence of any Saturday morning show in history.

I didn’t discover the Aquaman TV show until the early 70s when it was in syndication. One of the local independent stations ran the show early on Saturday mornings before the network shows started. This was really my first exposure to Aquaman since I never read his comic books. Although I was only lukewarm about Aquaman, I loved the back-up stories featuring other heroes of DC’s line-up like the Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, Teen Titans, and the Justice League of America. The miniaturization thing must’ve really captivated me back then because I was especially fond of the Atom, and I got a real kick out of seeing the whole gang in the Justice League of America sequences. Again, legal issues prevented Batman from being in this animated JLA, but he never had much to do in JLA anyway.

All these action/adventure shows really made Filmation stand out in my mind. I was never a fan of the anthropomorphic funny critters that Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cranked out. I liked science fiction and comic books, and that was Filmation’s source material, at least in the early days. By the early 70s, they started branching out. More on that later…

SECRET ORIGINS OF A COMIC FAN

2008-02-22T10:41:00.004-05:00

When last I blogged, I was talking about the moment I became a serious comic fan. It was the spring of 1972 and I had just gotten three comics while shopping with my dad and brother: Batman #242, Justice League of America #99, and The Brave and the Bold #102 featuring the Teen Titans. Something in the spring air made me absolutely ecstatic about these comics, and I wanted to read more.

When I went back to school after the weekend, my second grade teacher, Ms. Morningstar, announced that we could bring comic books in to class to share with our classmates during our recess periods. I couldn’t believe it! I would get to read more comics without having to get my parents to buy them. I also wanted to share my excitement for the comics I had read, but I didn’t wanted to bring in those three comics I had just gotten. I was young but no fool; those classmates of mine would destroy my new comics in no time.

I decided to dig out my old Batman #220 and #227 as soon as I got home from school. When I finally found them, they were even more worse for wear than I remembered. Batman #220 had a huge tear across the cover, which I clumsily repaired with Scotch tape. Since I thought this might be the last time I would see the comic, I read through #220 one last time. It was exciting to discover how much my reading skills had improved and that I could follow the story much better than I could a year earlier. I noticed that one character in the story was named “Sloan,” which sounded to me like a person in a TV crime show or on one of my mother’s soap operas. Suddenly, comics seemed like real adult entertainment and not silly kid stuff like the Saturday morning cartoons. You have to realize, I had a much older brother, so I was in a real hurry to grow up, at least intellectually.

I took my battered Batman comics into class, which I felt gave me the legitimate right to paw over the comics that the other kids brought in. I was immediately drawn to a copy of The Brave and the Bold #60 featuring my new favorites, the Teen Titans. Unbeknownst to me, this was only the second appearance of the Teen Titans and the first time Wonder Girl joined the group. Wonder Girl was a bit of a fudge on DC’s part anyway, since the original Wonder Girl stories were of Wonder Woman as a girl, like Superboy was Superman as a boy. For Teen Titans, however, she miraculously became the daughter of Wonder Woman, putting her in the same time frame. Of course, I learned all this later. At that moment, I was just blown away at how different these Teen Titans seemed from the ones I saw in my B&B #102.

While the Teen Titans, as they existed in 1972, were older, more independent adolescents like The Mod Squad, the early Teen Titans reflected their younger, more subservient roles as pint-sized sidekicks to their big league partners. There was one page in B&B #60 were each Titan bids farewell to their older partners before they go off on their mission. I was particularly struck by the brief conversation that occurred between Batman and Robin:

Although it was just a couple of panels, I was thrilled to see Batman and Robin looking and interacting just like they did on the TV show. I quickly realized that this book was from the mid-60s, obviously a hand-me-down from an older sibling to one of my classmates. It was so fun to see Batman and Robin like this, rather than the separate crime fighters they had become in the early 70s. This comic made me yearn to see more older comics so I could piece together the entire history of my heroes. The comic bug had settled in my heart for the long haul.

During the summer of ’72, I asked for a comic book every time my dad and I stopped by a drug store or convenience store, which was frequently since he was a heavy smoker and always needed cigarettes. I often wonder how much my dad’s nicotine addiction contributed to my comic book addiction. At any rate, I read all kinds of comics that summer, including some Marvel titles like Spiderman, Captain America, and Daredevil. But it was another Teen Titans issue that really touched me.

Teen Titans #40, “Spawn of the Sinister Sea,” had Aqualad betray his fellow Teen Titans because the daughter of this bad guy had seduced him. To keep Aqualad from causing any more trouble, the other Teen Titans chain him up. There’s one panel where the chained Aqualad is crying out his anguish, so strong is the power of the girl over him. To my seven-year-old brain, this was serious drama. I was enthralled with comics. I kept reading comics. I didn’t realize that I had become a comic fan, or that such a thing even existed, but I certainly was one. It took a few years before I fully embraced my passion.

THE DAY I BECAME A COMIC FAN

2008-02-21T11:08:00.004-05:00

I mentioned in my previous post about my first encounters with comic books as a child. My big influence was the Batman TV show, which led me to ask for Batman comics even though I couldn’t read them. As I learned to read, I was better able to appreciate them and, by the spring of 1972, I was turning into a serious reader. So on a warm spring evening while I was out shopping with my father and older brother, I came across a comic spinner rack that changed my whole life.

It’s funny the things your brain chooses to remember. This would have otherwise been a fairly ordinary moment hardly worth registering, but I remember it as clearly as any wedding or funeral or holiday. It was a Friday evening, but still light out due to the longer spring days. I tagged along with my dad and brother Craig on a trip to the Eastpoint Shopping Center (a few months later they put a roof over the whole complex and turned it into one of those newfangled malls). Dad and Craig did a lot of things together and I would feel left out, so every once in awhile I had to assert myself and insist on going with them. Then I would be disappointed because they would talk about stuff that I was too young to understand and I would still feel left out. By the time we stopped into a drug store, I wandered off to check out the toys and stumbled across their comic spinner rack. I was immediately struck by the cover of Batman #242. The caped crusader was looking grimmer than ever, looming over the grave of Bruce Wayne (?!!), the glow of the eternal flame by the gravestone lighting Batman’s countenance from below for dramatic effect. Bruce Wayne dead but Batman alive? How could this be? I had to get this comic.

No sooner did I grab the Batman than I also spotted Justice League of America #99. I had never seen a JLA comic before, but I was familiar with the super heroes from the Saturday morning cartoon shows. This book had all the heroes together in one comic, including my fave Batman. Flipping through the pages, I also saw that they had reprinted old stories of the Atom and some guy named Sandman. This Atom looked different from the one I knew, and this Sandman guy was completely strange. Also, the artwork had a certain crudeness to it that I found appealing. At this point, I was reading the daily comic strips and I fancied doing my own comic strip when I grew up. My own attempts at drawing a comic strip were nowhere near as accomplished as the artwork I saw in these new comics, but the rough simplicity of these Golden Age stories gave me hope. I wanted this book too.

I was about to track down my dad when I noticed a third comic that I couldn’t resist. The Brave and the Bold #102 featured good ol’ Batman again along with some group called the Teen Titans. All I knew was that Robin was part of the group. Robin and Batman in a comic story together! I hadn't seen that in my brief comic reading life, so I had to see what this was all about. But now I was holding three comic books in my hand. I had never asked for more than one comic book at a time in my life. Also, these comics were 25 cents each rather than 20 cents like some of the others. As I nervously worked out my sales pitch, Dad and Craig appeared.

“I can’t make up my mind between these three books,” I whined. “I know they’re 25 cents each, but they have extra pages in them. And they have some old stories like from when you were a kid.”

“Well, let’s get them all then,” Dad stated, as if this was a no-brainer.

Thus was the difference in perspective between an adult and a child. To me, spending 75 cents on comics was an extravagance. To my dad, 75 cents was two or three packs of cigarettes which he would burn through in a day. Looking back, my dad never denied me any reading material, even if it was a hardcover that might have cost four or five dollars back then. He wanted me to read, which was a noble and understandable motivation. I didn’t see reading as something that was helpful to my development at the time; I equated it with play, and I knew how hard it was to coax my parents into buying me certain toys. Toys and books were the same in my mind, requiring equal amounts of persuasion. If only I had understood the difference in our perspectives then, maybe I could’ve talked him into getting me more comics.

Anyway, he bought me the comics and I spent the whole weekend pouring over them. There’s something about spring that fills your spirit with renewed energy and joy, and somehow I associated that burst of euphoria with the reading of those comics. Batman #242 kicked off what would become the now famous multi-part story with Ras Al-Ghul and the League of Assassins, which was reprinted in its entirety as a giant-sized treasury book. I was completely hooked with this opening chapter. The JLA story was less memorable for me, but it still got me interested in reading JLA for a couple of years. But that The Brave and the Bold with the Teen Titans really got me excited.

The young sidekicks of DC’s heavy hitters (Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Speedy, and Wonder Girl) worked together as a team like my TV favorites, The Mod Squad. This particular story had something to do with the Titans fighting Batman and his uptight, establishment grown-ups over some urban renewal project. Just like the kinds of hip, relevant stories they did on The Mod Squad. This was cool stuff to me. I was really digging comics.

I went back to school after that weekend filled with a new enthusiasm for reading. This is where the serendipity came in. Often as the school year would draw to a close and the weather would get warmer, teachers would start to get a little more permissive. In this case, my second grade teacher Ms. Morningstar told us that we could bring in comic books to class that we could share with our fellow classmates during recess periods. Hot dog! We would be allowed to read comics in class! Still more tomorrow….

THE MAKING OF A COMIC FAN

2008-02-20T11:30:00.003-05:00

I can narrow down the time I became a comic fan to one specific moment when I was seven years old. It was in the spring of 1972 and I found myself captivated by a comic spinner rack in a drug store. From that point, my future geekdom was assured. But before I get to that, I should step back a couple years.

I owned my first comic books before I could read. Having been weaned on the Batman TV show, I always had a love for the caped crusader and, if I saw a Batman comic on the shelves in a drug store or convenience store, I would instinctively point to it and whine my desire for it simply because it had Batman’s face on it. The first Batman comic I remember owning was Batman #220, This Murder Has Been Pre-recorded! This was the winter of 1970 and I hadn’t learned to read yet, but I liked looking at the pictures. And boy, those were some pictures! This was a radically different Batman from the one I saw on my TV screen. He had taller ears on his cowl and his lean, sinewy body made him appear more menacing and stern. Robin was nowhere to be found, so forget about any friendly, “ol’ chum” banter. And while I couldn’t read, I could tell that this story was more like a crime thriller a la Mannix or one of those Quinn Martin crime shows. It was different, a little scary, but way cooler.

Several months later, I talked my dad into buying me Batman #227, The Demon of Gothos Mansion! I was just beginning to read at this point and I wanted desperately to comprehend what was going on in this book, but since none of the dialog said “See Spot run” or “Dick has a red ball,” I was hopelessly lost. But I loved those pictures! This issue was along the lines of a gothic horror story, and for the first time I understood how Batman’s persona was supposed to be utilized. He was the personification of a bat, a symbol of the supernatural and feverish nightmares. (I believe the cover was inspired by the cover of Detective Comics #31, channeling those earlier roots.) Batman was meant to be dark, brooding, grim, and mysterious. I was catching on. Suddenly, Adam West was looking pretty lame.

The back-up story featured Robin, now a college student living on campus and, in his spare time, patrolling the college town of Carthage as Robin, the Teen Wonder. This new environment put Dick Grayson/Robin right in the thick of hippies, drug pushers, and war protesters. Quite a long way from “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!” but I liked it.

My six-year-old brain was piecing together the evolution from the TV show to the then-current comic. Years later I discovered that, had I bought a Batman comic even one year earlier, it would’ve looked pretty similar to what I had seen (and was still seeing thanks to syndication) on TV. However, with the rapid changes taking place in American society in the late 60s, Batman’s campy television image had become an embarrassingly passé fad, plummeting in popularity just as quickly as it had risen two years before. No one was interested in that old Batman, least of all the baby boomer writers who were taking over the direction of DC characters in the late 60s and early 70s. The metamorphosis of Batman from 1969 to 1970 was beyond dramatic, and I was jumping in right as the transformation had reached completion.

So while I liked these Batman comics, the fact that their reading level was slightly higher than my own prevented me from really enjoying them. By second grade, however, my reading ability accelerated rapidly. So much so that I was moved to the highest level reading class in my grade to encourage my growing interest in books. By the spring of 1972, I was reading whatever I could get my hands on. That’s why that drug store spinner rack fascinated me so much. I was ready to tackle those comics. More on that tomorrow…

ACTION FIGURE PROJECT - CAPTAIN ACTION ATV CONT'D.

2008-02-12T13:58:00.001-05:00

The creation of the Captain Action ATV continues...

About 10 years ago, while I was attempting to quit smoking, I returned to my adolescent hobby of model building as a way to get my mind off my nicotine addiction. At the time, there were several retro model kits on the market, including the one pictured here from AMT. The kit allowed you to create a customized car by taking a generic 1964 Ford Galaxie and attaching to the body any combination of trim pieces and decals provided in the kit.

Not only did I get to play George Barris and make my very own customized car:

but I’ve continued to uses pieces from this kit to customize other models and action figure projects. The kit came in handy with my Captain Action ATV project.

With the kit, I was able to create a radar assembly on the back spoiler and add a set of brake lights. It disturbed me that this ATV toy did not come equipped with proper safety features like brake lights. I know Captain Action wouldn’t drive any vehicle without brake lights.

I also added additional side vents for the turbo-charged engine, and front fog lights. Along with the rocket launcher mentioned in my previous post, I think this ATV is starting to shape up into an appropriate action mobile for the Captain. My final step will be to add some flashy decals to jazz up the design. And I need to figure out what to do for the headlamps. More later…

ATTACK OF THE MECHANICAL TOYS!

2008-01-30T14:09:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned numerous times in this post, my brother is six and a half years older than I. That meant that his childhood toy references were very different from my own. His early Christmases were filled with the mechanical toys of the 60s, while my own were filled with the action figures of the late 60s and early 70s. He often talked about the guns and rifles and secret agent gadgets that he had, but as far back as I can remember, I don't recall seeing any of those toys in the house. It was as if my brother gave up on toys at an early age.

His friends, on the other hand, still had old toys hanging around their basements and attics, and I loved to sneak a peek at these artifacts of toy past. There were three brothers who lived in a large house behind our own smaller house, and my brother hung out with all three of them since they were pretty close in age (one a little older than Craig, one the same age, and the third a little younger). The youngest brother, Barry, was the most mild mannered and was the only one who actually treated me like a friend rather than a pesky younger brother. Every so often, he'd give me one of the old toys that was lying neglected around their house. This was such a thrill for me because these were not toys I could buy in the store and none of my friends would have anything like them.

One day, I was playing in the alley that divided our house from Barry's house. I saw Craig and Barry walking down the alley toward me, carrying this green thing between them. When they got nearer, I could see that it was a plastic dragon or monster of some kind, like Godzilla.

"Here Neal," Barry said, "this is for you."

My eyes grew big and I stammered and stuttered the usual things like, "Are you kidding me?" and "Is this a joke?" They kept reassuring me that Barry was actually giving it to me to the point where I think Barry was becoming annoyed and was tempted to take it back. Before that could happen, however, I grabbed it and helped them drag it back to my house. It was green with chartreuse legs and a long, pointy tail that wiggled a bit. It clearly was battery powered, but I don't recall ever putting batteries in it. I would just drag it around and growl like I was attacking Tokyo.

Only recently did I discover that this creature was called King Zor, made by Ideal in the early 60s. From what I can gather, it also came with a dart gun that I never had. The idea was that King Zor would shoot marbles out of its back at you while you tried to stop it by hitting the end of its tail with a dart. Toys with flying projectiles didn't seem to bother parents back then. I didn't experience any of this excitement with my King Zor anyway; I just loved lugging this heavy chunk of plastic around and pretending to menace the world.

I discovered this commercial for King Zor on YouTube. This should provide a good glimpse at how the toy worked:

This was one of the few mechanical toys I ever owned. By the late 60s, the scene had shifted to action figures and items that didn't require so many batteries. I do recall, however, having a couple of those Japanese robots. These clunky metal monstrosities lumbered along while flashing lights and making irritating grinding noises. I believe it was Christmas 1969 when my aunt and uncle gave me a robot known as Super Astronaut. He was a variation on another robot known as Attacking Martian Robot, the gimmick being that after taking a few steps, the robot would stop, open the doors on his chest, project twin machine gun barrels, then fire these machine guns as its torso spun around 360 degrees. Here's a video to show you the robot in action:

At the time, I found the whole display rather horrifying. I had seen enough war movies to know the destructive power of machine guns, and this robot not only had two, he could spray the entire room with bullets without even taking a step. As I played with the robot in my aunt and uncle's living room on that cheery Christmas evening, I could just picture my entire family being mowed down in a blood bath of human carnage. The part that I found especially creepy was that the robot had a human face. This impassive male countenance peered through the glass shield of the robot's head. My five-year-old mind imagined that a person had been imprisoned in this robot body, thus losing all his human compassion, and was coerced by some alien force to annihilate humans indiscriminately.

Needless to say, I didn't play with this toy very much. And I've always been a little curious as to how the grown-ups felt about such toys. I suspect they didn't give it much thought. To them, it was probably just a mechanical toy that moved and lit up and made noise. Nothing too terrifying in that, is there?

NEW ACTION FIGURE PROJECT - PART TWO

2008-01-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I talked about a 1/6^th scale all-terrain vehicle (ATV) that I bought as a post-Christmas clearance item at my local drugstore. I decided it might be fun to turn this ATV into a special vehicle for Captain Action. Here’s what has happened so far:

I went to my local hobby shop and picked out a color of spray paint which I thought matched the color of blue found on many Captain Action accessories. I then removed as many parts off the body of the ATV as I thought I could without damaging the vehicle. For the rest of the parts I didn’t want to paint, I masked them with masking tape and newspaper. I caught a break with the weather and was able to spray paint the body outdoors on a nice 60 degree day. However, because I had to mask significant sections of the ATV, there were several spots where the paint spray would not go.

I checked the paint manufacturer’s Web site and discovered that the color I chose only came in spray cans; I couldn’t get a bottle of the same color for touch up. After kicking myself for not checking this sooner, I decided to try a trick from my adolescence and spray the remaining paint into a clean glass bottle to condense the liquid into a form that I could brush on. Unfortunately, the trick was not as effective as it was 25 years ago as the paint in the bottle was runny and too thin to spread. I tried adding other paint to it and attempting a close match, but that proved futile.

Back at square one, I decided to buy a couple different bottles of blue paint and mix my own color. Then I brush painted the entire ATV. Although not as smooth and professional looking as spray, I think it turned out pretty good.

My next concern was finding a device to replace the swiveling machine gun that was originally mounted on the ATV. I thought the oversized assault weapon was way too aggressive looking for Captain Action, so I rummaged through my boxes of left over action figure accessories to find something more suitable. I found a rocket launcher that came with my 12” G.I. Joe Cobra Commander figure from a few years back. The device reminded me of the rocket launchers on Captain Action’s Silver Streak vehicle. I had to modify it to fit on the front of the ATV, however. It turned out that the butt of the launcher was a separate piece from the launcher itself, so I was able to carefully remove the butt without any damage to the launcher. I then cut off the mounting stalk from the original machine gun and affixed it to the back of the rocket launcher. Once I paint it, I will mount it on the ATV.

Next, I’m going to have to come up with some additional trim pieces and stickers to jazz up the look of the vehicle and make it scream, “CAPTAIN ACTION!” Stay tuned…

HI-TECH - 70s STYLE

2008-01-17T13:17:00.000-05:00

Having a brother half a dozen years older than I created a bit of anxiety in the growing up department. From my earliest memories around age four up to age 13, I was always envious of what Craig could do or what he had that I didn’t. Perhaps that’s why I spend so much time as an adult reminiscing about my childhood; I didn’t really appreciate it when I was experiencing it. Instead, I kept yearning for that time when I would be Craig’s age and could do what Craig did or have what Craig had. I was forever projecting six years into the future. A perfect example of this age envy is in the area of electronics.

My brother was always a bit of a tinkerer (and still is, but the equipment has changed from transistors to microchips). So while I was asking for G.I. Joes and Big Wheels, he was asking for stereos and recording equipment. I remember his massive chrome and black reel-to-reel tape recorder, about half as tall as I was at the time. Something so huge that did so little would seem absurd today, but in the early 70s, this was what every swinging bachelor on TV had on his book shelves. It looked cool, but was really intimidating for a small kid.

That’s why Panasonic was the cool electronics company for anyone under the age of 12. During the early 70s, Panasonic (or National Panasonic) put out devices that were completely in line with the “mod” aesthetic. Instead of boxes made of chrome and black plastic and faux-wood, their products were molded out of brightly colored plastic in smooth, curvy shapes. They looked like toys, but still played music or recorded sounds like the more sophisticated devices did.

The first Panasonic product I remember coveting was those spherical transistor radios. They looked like one of those laser-spouting balls that Luke Skywalker trained with, but re-imagined by Walt Disney. My friend Linda had one, and we would loll away many a summer’s afternoon listening to the crackly AM signals floating out of the ball’s tiny mono speaker. The cool bonus to this radio was that it had a chain attached to it for easy portability. We didn’t use the chain to carry it around, though. We held the radio up by the chain and spun the little sphere around while songs were playing. The repetitive Doppler effect made every song sound like Tommy Roe singing “Crimson and Clover.”

A few years later, Panasonic came out with portable cassette recorders that were shaped like small boxes with rounded corners. The day-glo colored plastic made the thing virtually indestructible, and the retractable handle and light-weight design was perfect for a kid to tote around. Best of all, it had a built-in microphone so you could record your friends and family without them knowing. As soon as I got my little recorder for my tenth birthday (which was bright red, not blue like the one pictured), I set about recording my friend’s candid conversations. This was shortly after Watergate, after all, and there was a certain air of espionage about the whole thing. I remember capturing one gem from my friend Kevin while we listened to my other friend Nick speak to his Greek family a few yards away.

“Ya’ know what?” Kevin declared. “I can’t understand one word of that Greek stuff. NOT ONE WORD!”

Really, Kevin? It’s like they have a different word for everything, huh?!!

Later on, I struck up a friendship with a school mate, Johnny, and we would hang out at his house after school. With my trusty recorder on hand, we would make up the audio equivalent of Mad Magazine movie and TV parodies. And as hard as it might be to imagine, we were actually less funny than Mad Magazine, although we thought we were hilarious.

The process went as follows: we would pick a movie or TV show to satirize, think of an opening gag, turn on the recorder, state the gag, turn off the recorder, think of the next gag, turn on the recorder, say the gag, turn off the recorder, and so on until we had the whole show. When it was played back, it sounded something like this:

(Click, scrape, crackle)

Johnny: "Hey Inspector Krojak, did you take a bath this morning?"

Me: Why? (snicker) Is there one missing? (chuckle)

(Crackle, scrape, click, pause, click, scrape, crackle)

Johnny: That killer was a dead shot. How did he miss you? (giggle)

Me: I looked down to pick up a penny (chortle) and the glare from my head blinded him. (snort)

(Crackle, scratch, clunk, click)

This went on for about 10 minutes when we finally ran out of hilarious quips. We thought we were so funny, we boldly played some of our sketches to our fifth grade teachers. Looking at their slack-jawed expressions, I soon understood the saying, “I guess you had to be there.”

Electronics continued to grow smaller and more sophisticated, but the concept of whimsical, fun design went out the window. Granted, a lot of what passed for cool in the 70s was pretty tacky, but we quickly shifted to the other side of the spectrum where only black or white boxes with lots of buttons could be seen as serious electronics. It wasn't until the late 90s and the introduction of the iMac that we would see the fun brought back to home gadgetry.

NEW ACTION FIGURE PROJECT

2008-01-11T15:03:00.000-05:00

A couple days after Christmas, I went to my local drug store to pick up a prescription. As is my habit, I walked down the toy aisle on my way to the pharmacy counter. Whenever I'm in any store that sells toys, I have to take a gander to see if there's anything I might be able to use for my custom action figure projects. During the last couple of years, toy companies have backed away from the 1/6th scale action figure format, so I usually hold out little hope that I will ever find anything interesting, but I always figure it doesn't cost anything to look.

Given my general state of cynicism, I was surprised to find a shelf full of 1/6th scale action figures with accompanying vehicles. The line was called Rescue Team, and while they won't cause anyone from Hasbro or Mattel to lose any sleep, they were still pretty serviceable toys. Each action figure was driving either an ATV or a chunky military-type vehicle complete with rocket launchers. The military styling didn't interest me that much, but I thought they could easily be modified to look like excellent vehicles for Captain Action. Still, I wasn't too keen on spending the $20 price on the box for a low-end toy I only want to experiment on. Then I noticed a tag taped to the shelf:

"All toys in this aisle 75% off!"

Of course! The after-Christmas markdowns! For five bucks each, the vehicles were looking more appealing. I still hesitated, however. For one thing, I had come on foot, and lugging one of those huge boxes home would've been a chore. Also, my house was already cluttered with lots of toys. I shouldn't add to the pile. Sullenly, I left the toy aisle, picked up my prescription, and wandered home.

During the walk back, I kept thinking about how I could repaint the body "Captain Action Blue" and jazz it up with my custom-made stickers and leftover bits and pieces from model kits. I was getting that sensation I call "toy lust," something I thought I had lost when I reached puberty and found another kind of lust. So lost was I in my reverie, I had strayed from my usual route home and had to take a lengthy detour to right myself. This gave me time to rationalize. "I can drive back to the store in my car and buy one of those vehicles," I thought. "And besides, I already sold a bunch of collectibles on eBay, so I've made plenty of room for one more new toy!" By the time I reached my front door, I had made up my mind.

After I drove back to the store, I grabbed one of the boxes from the back of the shelf without looking at which vehicle I had laid my hands on. It wasn't until I got home that I realized I had bought the ATV. Although the other vehicle had those cool rocket launchers, I thought the ATV was more suited to Captain Action and probably easier to customize. I think it was the best choice.

So now I'm embarking on a new project. Here are some shots of what it looked like in its original form. Stay tuned to see its transformation into the new Captain Action ATV!