RetroFan #16

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September 2021 No. 16 $9.95

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MARVEL SUPER HEROES TV CARTOONS OF 1966

AN INTERVIEW

Who’s your friend when things get rough?

H. R. Pufnstuf

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

LOGAN’S RUN’S MICHAEL YORK

Wolfman Jack • My Weekly Reader • Drive-in Theaters • Collecting Comic Art & more!

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FEATURING Ernest Farino • Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Michael Eury

Marvel Super Heroes © Marvel. H. R. Pufnstuf © Sid and Marty Kroff t Productions. All Rights Reserved.

RetroFan:

Pop Culture You Grew Up With!

If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, editor MICHAEL EURY’s latest magazine is just for you!

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Interview with Bond Girl and Hammer Films actress CAROLINE MUNRO! Plus: WACKY PACKAGES, COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE, FILMATION’S GHOSTBUSTERS vs. the REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, Bandai’s rare PRO WRESTLER ERASERS, behind the scenes of Sixties movies, WATERGATE at Fifty, Go-Go Dancing, a visit to the Red Skelton Museum, and more fun, fab features!

MAD’s maddest artist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, is profiled! Plus: TV’s Route 66 and an interview with star GEORGE MAHARIS, MOE HOWARD’s final years, catching up with singer B.J. THOMAS, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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Exclusive interviews with Lost in Space’s MARK GODDARD and MARTA KRISTEN, Dynomutt and Blue Falcon, Hogan’s Heroes’ BOB CRANE, a history of WhamO’s Frisbee, Twilight Zone and other TV sci-fi anthologies, Who Created Archie Andrews?, oddities from the San Diego Zoo, lava lamps, and more with FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MICHAEL EURY!

Holy backstage pass! See rare, behind-thescenes photos of many of your favorite Sixties TV shows! Plus: an unpublished interview with Green Hornet VAN WILLIAMS, Bigfoot on Saturday morning television, TV’s Zoorama and the San Diego Zoo, The Saint, the lean years of Star Trek fandom, the WrestleFest video game, TV tie-in toys no kid would want, and more fun, fab features!

Sixties teen idol RICKY NELSON remembered by his son MATTHEW NELSON, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., rural sitcom purge, EVEL KNIEVEL toys, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Saturday morning’s Super 7, The Muppet Show, behind-the-scenes photos of Sixties movies, an interview with The Sound of Music’s heartthrob-turnedbad guy DANIEL “Rolf” TRUHITTE, and more fun, fab features!

Dark Shadows’ Angelique, LARA PARKER, sinks her fangs into an exclusive interview.

Plus: Rankin-Bass’ Mad Monster Party, Aurora Monster model kits, a chat with Aurora painter JAMES BAMA, George of the Jungle, The Haunting, Jawsmania, Drak Pack, TV dads’ jobs, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MICHAEL EURY.

Our BARBARA EDEN interview will keep you forever dreaming of Jeannie! Plus: The Invaders, the BILLIE JEAN KING/BOBBY RIGGS tennis battle of the sexes, HANNABARBERA’s Saturday morning super-heroes of the Sixties, THE MONSTER TIMES fanzine, and more fun, fab features! Featuring ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW!, and MICHAEL EURY.

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CHRIS MANN goes behind the scenes of TV’s sexy sitcom THREE’S COMPANY— and NANCY MORGAN RITTER, first wife of JOHN RITTER, shares stories about the TV funnyman. Plus: RICK GOLDSCHMIDT’s making of RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER, RONNIE SCHELL interview, Sheena Queen of the TV Jungle, Dr. Seuss toys, Popeye cartoons, DOCTOR WHO’s 1960s U.S. invasion, and more!

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The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With

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CONTENTS Issue #16 September 2021 Columns and Special Features

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Retro Sci-Fi Interviews with Logan’s Run’s Michael York, Dean Jeffries, and William F. Nolan

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Too Much TV Quiz Game show hosts

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon The Marvel Super Heroes

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RetroFad The Mullet

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Retro Hollywood Drive-in Theaters

by Jim Trautman

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Super Collector Collecting Comic Art

by David Mandel

Scott Saavedra’s Secret Sanctum My Weekly Reader

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2

Retrotorial

Retro Remembrance My Friend, Tanya Roberts

by Mike Pingel

Ernest Farino’s Retro Fantasmagoria Sue “Miss Landers” Randall

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Departments

Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

Wolfman Jack

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Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning H. R. Pufnstuf

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RetroFanmail

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ReJECTED RetroFan fantasy cover

by Scott Saavedra

RetroFan™ #16, September 2021. Published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: RetroFan, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $68 Economy US, $103 International, $27 Digital.

Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Marvel Super Heroes © Marvel. H. R. Pufnstuf © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. Michael York photo courtesy of Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com/Wikimedia Commons. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2021 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows.

Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. ISSN 2576-7224

by Michael Eury

PUBLISHER John Morrow CONTRIBUTORS Michael Eury Ernest Farino David Mandel Andy Mangels Brian Martin Will Murray Mike Pingel Scott Saavedra Scott Shaw!

Anthony Taylor Jim Trautman DESIGNER Scott Saavedra PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS John Ellis Hake’s Auctions Heritage Auctions David Hofstede Sid and Marty Krofft Productions Mike Lefebvre Mark Thomas McGee Charles Robinson Amy Roy VERY SPECIAL THANKS William F. Nolan Michael York

Most of us grew up in front of the television. Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers taught us morals, the funny faces of Red Skelton and Flip Wilson made us laugh, and we knew we could trust journalists Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. We marveled at the patience the castaways maintained for Gilligan after his repeated foul-ups of their potential rescues, and were happy that Fred Sanford never really had “the big one.” No matter our gender, race, or religion, or if we were the product of a nuclear family or a broken home, or if we lived in a metropolitan high-rise or a trailer out in the sticks, TV was our common denominator.

Author David Hofstede’s new book makes that very claim in its title: When Television Brought Us Together (Black Pawn Press, 2020; available from online booksellers or the publisher at blackpawnpress.com). This isn’t a traditional dossier of time-honored TV shows. Instead, through insightful essays its author explores the reasons why so many of the programs we grew up on resonated with us. Or, in the words of Family Affair’s Cissy, actress Kathy Garver—who was interviewed in RetroFan #10—as quoted in the book’s promotional materials, “David Hofstede delves into the meanings of our favorite comforting classics and compares them with the TV fare of today. You’ll be happy you stopped by to take a long breath of nostalgic fresh air and rediscover why these past shows are so classic.”

Normally my Retrotorials are reserved for commentary about the issue’s features, but this time I had to take a moment to plug David Hofstede’s wonderful book, which I enjoyed NEXT ISSUE immensely and recommend to RetroFan readers. In this era of TV programs that foment division, from the argumentative curmudgeons of sitcoms and reality shows to the divisive rhetoric of demographic-skewed cable news, When Television Brought Us Together is a much-needed reminder of happy days and good times.

Dark There’s a ton of TV history in this issue of Shadows’ LARA PARKER RetroFan, by the way, including the first animated Aurora Monster Model Kits adventures of the mighty Marvel super-heroes, the wonky Saturday morning kid-vid H. R. Pufnstuf, and a retrospective of actress Sue Randall, known to many of you as Beaver Cleaver’s teacher Miss Landers.

Beyond TV, we also look at a host of other subjects…

It’s a and what other mag would dare co-bill Wolfman Mad Monster ’re Jack and My Weekly Reader? There’s something for Party and you invited! everyone here, so get ready for another groovy grabThe Haunting • Drak Pack • George of the Jungle • James Bama • TV Dads’ Jobs & more! bag of the crazy, cool culture we grew up with!

© 2020 David Hostede.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury

November 2021 No. 17 $9.95

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape!

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RETROFAN

September 2021

comes alive in an exclusive interview!

FEATURING Ernest Farino • Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Michael Eury

Mad Monster Party © 1997 Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt Archives. Dark Shadows © Dan Curtis Productions. Superman TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

RETRO SCI-FI

RRRUUUNNNNNNIIINNNGGG Revisiting A Counterculture Icon

with

Logan

by Anthony Taylor There is nothing run-of-the-mill about Logan’s Run; from its origins through the grandiose spectacle of the 1976 feature film, the story of the future cop running from his own mortality has always stood apart from the crowd. Spawned in a Malibu hotel in August of 1965 by two no-name (at the time) short fiction and television writers, Logan has gone on to inspire a big budget movie, a television series, several sequel books, and no less than three comic-book adaptations, not to mention hundreds of fanzines, amateur films, and other derivative works. Plans for a film remake have been in place for no less than 24 years as of 2021, and two additional sequel novels are ready to publish.

My own involvement with Logan began as a 12-year-old, when the movie came to my town. I was blown away by the art direction, costumes, special effects, and sheer other-worldliness of the environments I saw onscreen. It first resonated with me on a visual level, but it also sank deeper as I began to understand the implications of the plot and situations and relationships I was shown. I recall seeing it five or six times in the theater—I was enthralled.

As rumors of a remake began to take shape around 2006, I had the idea that a book on all things Logan—The Complete Logan’s Run was my working title—might be a decent seller if it could be released at the same time as the new film, or even better, in conjunction with it. I was surprised to hear that Bryan Singer was attached to direct it, and that I had some connection to him through a mutual friend. I contacted my friend and asked if he could see if Bryan could put me in touch with the correct people at Warner Bros. to whom I could pitch my idea.

(ABOVE) Your time is running out, Logan! Logan (Michael York) and Jessica As luck would have (Jenny Agutter), from the 1976 sci-fi it, I then bumped classic, Logan’s Run. © Warner Bros. Courtesy into Bryan on the of Ernest Farino. floor of San Diego Comic-Con and discussed it with him in person briefly. At that point, it was so early in the process that there wasn’t anyone yet assigned to merchandising a film that was still on the drawing board, but I got some positive feedback and felt the project was worth pursuing. I began gathering information and scheduling interviews.

Luck continued on my side as I made a connection to Michael York and found an email from him in my inbox soon after. He was very happy to speak to me about the film and even invited me to come to his home for an afternoon. We spent almost two hours talking about Logan, his other films, art collecting, and so many other subjects. He is a fascinating fellow and one of the smartest people I’ve met.

On that same trip to Los Angeles, I was also able to interview custom car king Dean Jeffries), who created the futuristic vehicles for the Logan’s Run television series that ran on CBS in 1977. Dean was a legend; he had created the Black Beauty for The Green Hornet, the Monkeemobile for The Monkees, the Moonmobile for Diamonds Are Forever, the cars for Death Race 2000, the Landmaster for Damnation Alley, and countless other show cars and hot rods. He had a long career as a stuntman and vehicle rigger for hundreds of films and TV series, and I was able to hang out with him at his shop situated at the bottom of Cahuenga Boulevard and the 101 Freeway in Hollywood and talk about cars.

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retro SCI-fi

As I began scheduling other interviews, Bryan Singer dropped out of the project to direct Superman Returns, and the remake floundered. At the same time, I had another book project take off, The Future Was FAB: The Art of Mike Trim, which chronicled the career of the model-maker, storyboard artist, and vehicle designer of such classics television series as Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and the illustrations for Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds album. I put The Complete Logan’s Run aside to work on this and a few other projects and by the time I got back around to it, the remake plans were up in the air yet again. I decided to hold on to what I had and if opportunities to expand my materials presented themselves, take advantage of them. If the remake picked up steam again, I would be ready.

Such an opportunity came my way in 2015 when Logan co-creator William F. Nolan was a guest at the World Horror

MICHAEL YORK Michael York first gained note playing Tybalt in Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet and quickly became a bankable face in films like Cabaret, The Three Musketeers, and its controversial sequel, The Four Musketeers. Since then, he has gone on to star in hundreds of films and television episodes, been nominated for several Emmy Awards, and won many other accolades, including a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. While appearing in a play at home in Los Angeles in 1974, he received the script for Logan’s Run, a film in which he initially decided not to appear.

RetroFan: Logan’s Run… Michael York: I remember it as a very happy time.

“You’ve gotta do this. Maybe you don’t get it, but I do. This is tapping into a lot of things that excite my generation. You should reconsider it.” So I did. I think I’d worked with [director] Michael Anderson before in England.

RF: This was not the same Michael Anderson who had been your theatrical agent for a time?

MY: No, different Michael Anderson. Both fellows of a different generation of doing business, both gentlemen. Both incredibly efficient.

RF: So this would have been around late 1974 when you first got the script?

MY: Yes. I was right in certain aspects of my first impression, there were things that didn’t make sense. There things we worked on quite a bit, and of course Peter [Ustinov] created a much higher role for himself than was in the script.

The character he came up with was principally his own invention. He was wonderful at improvising, and you know, Michael Anderson was smart enough to give him his head, so to speak. And what he got was fantastic.

RF: You said that you got the script and didn’t like it very much.

MY: Well, yes, I was doing a play at the time in downtown L.A., and I was on the freeway when someone hit me from behind. They hit me so hard the gas tank in my Rolls Royce ruptured and it blew up!

So the producers gave me a young man to drive me back and forth to the theater.

So we used to chat and I mentioned this movie and York as Logan in a publicity he said, “Could I take a look photo from Logan’s Run. at it?” I gave him the script © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Ernest and when he came to pick Farino. me up the next day, he was wagging a finger and said, 4

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Convention in Atlanta. I was able to sit with him for an hour or so and divine the origins of the novel, the journey to making the film, and what the future holds in store for the character. As a fan of his many other works as well, it was a wonderful thing to hear him discuss with enthusiasm—at the age of 88—all this wondrous things still ahead of him in his career.

All three of these interviews are collected here because it seems there may never come a time when a book like the one I envisioned will be marketable to a larger audience, and I felt that they should be seen and enjoyed. My journey with Logan has been memorable and cathartic and I’m happy to finally be able to share it. Whatever else the future may hold, I’m sure of one thing: Logan will continue to run and gain new fans worldwide.

RF: Having worked with Michael before, was it easier to slip into or find the character, or fit into the production?

MY: I think very much so, because we had each other’s confidence, you know.

Because we’d been through this very intense shoot… made with a clock ticking away the whole time, so we liked each other a lot. So I think when he mentioned me to the production head at MGM, Dan Melnick, they thought I might be a good fit. Also, I had been around making movies that were doing okay. What I found out afterwards, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that if I hadn’t accepted, they were going to shelve the film. So I accepted, and then we did film tests, and I actually tested with Lindsay Wagner.

retro SCI-fi

Advance poster and the main poster for the MGM-distributed Logan’s Run. © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Heritage.

RF: Very interesting. I knew that they had originally talked with Lindsay Wagner and Jon Voight for the film. Do you think they decided that with your accent, they needed another British actor to play Jessica?

MY: I don’t know what logic drove that decision. I thought that Lindsay was fantastic, and I expected her to be in the film. Who knows why she wasn’t, it could be a thousand reasons—her agent may have screwed up.

RF: Production started with location shooting in Dallas. How long were you there?

MY: Oh, a couple of weeks. We were using the apparel mart, which was this enormous space. It was the precursor of all the shopping malls that were about to spring up all over America. And there was some very modern, “sci-fi” architecture

in Dallas at the time and a lot of that was used as well.

RF: You’ve done a lot of costume-heavy movies. Do you have any memories of the costumes from Logan?

MY: I do. They weren’t the most comfortable. Especially working in the Texas heat! On the other hand, they looked fantastic on the girls—all the sort of diaphanous robes.

RF: I know a lot of actors talk about finding the character in the shoes of their costume—they find out how the character walks and it informs their performance. You mentioned in your autobiography that you found an early character in the mustache you had to wear for the part.

MY: Oh, yes!

RF: What was Logan’s mustache?

MY: That’s an interesting question. Well, I mean… he was pretty straightforward, to be honest, I think, and yet… because one wasn’t aware what one had. It was indeed

tapping into a lot of things that affected the boomer generation. I think I read about it in the book… being a parentless society, being a hedonistic society, being given everything you could possibly want, but of course the payoff is that it’s only for a very limited time. And I’m sure that to people of a parallel age it must have been very… attractive.

You know, it was very youthful oriented—we have this very youthful revolution that was happening and for old people to be reminded that there wasn’t… it was very much like discovering Peter Ustinov in the wild. You have to do a lot of preparation, so that when you go in on the day you’re ready to give everything.

And I’ve written about this as well; there’s a moment in the play [film] where the character will start playing you, not the other way around. And even if you have to change the script, it’s worth it because this monster has found you and taken over and he knows much better than you which way it has to go. And we actually did have to fix several things in the screenplay to make the changes work logically.

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RF: What about the props?

MY: Those guns were constantly misfiring, they were an absolute pain. And you know, they looked good but they ran on gas cylinders and they just weren’t very hightech, you could see all the wires running down the sides of them. But they worked.

I’m sure that any remake would have to be very high-tech indeed and be driven by special effects, because that’s what people expect. You can’t deny them.

Ah, you know, we were lucky in that everything was kept in a balance between the narrative, the acting, and the effects.

RF: Do you think Logan’s story still has relevance? It’s a very different time than in the Seventies.

MY: Yes, but there are still those people who want to see something worthwhile, something special, something you know, over and above the materialistic things.

You know, that spiritual quest, which is in a long line from grail legends to King Arthur… all of that it’s again, tapping into.

It’s a sort of modern equivalent. And even using the ankh, the ancient Egyptian thing, sort of plugged that in as well as a sort of visual shorthand.

RF: After an early screening, there were around 23 minutes cut from the film before it was released. Have you ever seen the original edit?

MY: No, but I’ve been approached about it at these conventions. They’ve asked my why something from the trailer wasn’t in the film, and I say I have no idea. That’s the whole point of a test screening; to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe, who knows, it will reappear as a director’s cut again, I don’t know.

RF: You and the rest of the cast gave performances that really transcended the material, in my opinion. What remembrances do you have of working with Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, and Peter Ustinov?

MY: We were very much a team. I remember that everyone was more or less on the same page. I do think there’s a sort of discipline with British actors; you tend more to just get on with it. If you have problems, you don’t agonize about them in public, you tend to take that off the set.

So you had three of us, me and Jenny and Peter and you know, Michael 6

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(ABOVE) York (Logan), Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Holly, and Agutter (Jessica), in a scene from the film. Courtesy of Ernest Farino.

(RIGHT) Her bestselling swimsuit pin-up wasn’t the only Farrah poster hanging on walls in the Seventies. Courtesy of Heritage. © Warner Bros.

Anderson, too, there were so many of us. So we weren’t bedeviled with “Diva-dom.”

And I think that’s again, a very British thing. That they’re going to take it very seriously, and behave seriously, and maybe they’re not going to show you who they are but what they can do. You have to take the material seriously and really give it your best shot and 100 percent concentration, and if it works—fabulous. If it doesn’t, at least you tried and you can walk away from it honorably. And also, in the knowledge that what works in the moment many not survive the ages. So I think that’s the nature of movies.

RF: You said Peter Ustinov improvised many of his lines—how was that to deal with as someone who is a little more structured in your approach to the script

and story? How do you respond when take two is nothing at all like take one?

MY: I loved it! Because you knew it wasn’t to throw you, it was all in a creative interest because he’d found his muse and he was just going with it. And it was very enjoyable, too, being around him.

Peter was the most delightful person, he was a very civilized man. He had a wealth of the most incredible stories to

retro SCI-fi

enjoy. But equally, he took it seriously with the work.

To come across T. S. Eliot’s Cats before Andrew Lloyd Webber… if you have that sort of literary repertoire and can bring it to bear…. He was amazing.

RF: Tell me about the fight between Logan and Francis. It looked like you and Richard Jordan were just wailing on each other. I know there were stuntmen, but there are shots where it’s clearly the two of you.

How long did it take to shoot?

MY: Oh, yes. These things always take longer than you think they will. We had several close calls, but it’s par for the course, you know.

It was quite strenuous.

(TOP) Shiny costumes (except for the dark, utilitarian garb of the Sandmen, like Logan) dazzled Logan’s Run’s audience. Shown here is concept art by costume designer Bill Thomas for the film’s character Doc (played by Michael Anderson, Jr.), with attached fabric samples. © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Heritage. (ABOVE) Logan and Jessica discover a brave new world as Logan’s Run builds to its climax. © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Ernest Farino.

RF: Any idea that Farrah Fawcett was going to become the biggest thing in the world two years later?

MY: Well, you know she was my discovery. She owes me everything! I saw her playing tennis, and found out she

was an actress and recommended her to the producer.

RF: Do you like to watch your work or do you avoid it?

MY: If the director wants you to watch dailies, I’ve always gone along with it.

You have to be objective. It’s very hard, it’s cruel, sometimes. But I think it’s important to make sure the point is coming over.

I’ve mentioned working with Bob Fosse on Cabaret; that was the most creative part of the day. We’d watch them and discuss them creatively and he’d say that’s not going to work and your version worked better, we’ll use that. But I know [Three Musketeers director] Dick Lester wouldn’t go to the dailies, because he was constantly discouraged and couldn’t see what had been achieved or not achieved.

No, I think there’s always a time for that [feedback].

RF: During production, did you begin to get a sense of how the film was going?

Whether it would be successful or possibly a train wreck?

MY: You know, I had a weird experience when I first came to Hollywood. I was actually in New York, and Bob Evans asked me to do Love Story. And again, I thought that wasn’t for me and it ended up becoming a gigantic phenomenon and it sort of gave me pause, and I thought, well, you can’t stand too far outside of this, and I think it made me much more proactive, and I’ve done many more things. I know there’s a whole school of actors that are much more careful about what they commit themselves to, but it’s part of my Aries nature to wade in and I’ve been proved right on so many occasions. The things that you thought were surefire were the things that went belly-up, and the unlikely things—this modest little comedy called Austin Powers explodes—so after all these years now, I go on instinct. That’s all you have to go on.

RF: Had you read the book when you did the film?

MY: No, but I’ve dipped into it since. It’s substantially different. And a lot of people were upset that we got the age wrong!

[Last day occurs at age 21 in the novel, 30 in the film.] The purists.

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RF: The book is much more violent, much more sexual, and much more drugoriented than the film. If the script had been closer to the book, would that have given you pause about playing Logan?

MY: I think you want to be responsible, but I think it’s interesting to recognize something that reflects the times in a very interesting way. I think we’ve always been interested in the futuristic—where are we heading, and so on. And it was such an interesting adventure once it got going.

But I do have a problem with violence.

It upsets me that you make a film that maybe has one scene in which a weapon is handled, and when the film is promoted it’s that one scene that is featured. That’s such a distortion. I can’t bear Reservoir Dogs, for one thing.

RF: If there was a Logan’s Run remake— Bryan Singer was attached do one not long ago—and the character of Ballard [an older runner] from the novel is part of the story, would you be interested in playing him?

MY: I wouldn’t want it to be too “gimmicky.” It’s just been done

somewhere, hasn’t it?

Singer did it in Superman Returns, I think.

RF: When you recorded the commentary for the laser disc release, which has since been ported to the DVDs and Blu-rays, did anything surprise watching the movie after so long?

MY: You know what happened? They released Michael Anderson’s film, Conduct Unbecoming, and they asked me to come in and do a commentary for Logan and I said I’d be delighted to. So you come in, they run the movie, and you have an open 8

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mic, so I started to speak and then I sort of trailed off—I was enjoying watching it! And I had to apologize at the end and asked them to let me go ’round again.

RF: The film was quite prescient in some regards—the scene where Logan goes on the Circuit to find a lover for the night…

MY: I was going online to get sex! We haven’t quite perfected the bit where a human gets transported to your location yet, but it’s just a matter of time. They had to run up that costume for that scene, they hadn’t got anything for Logan to wear at home. So that was made up in 20 minutes.

I still have it!

got to me and I can say to them it’s Logan’s Run. And they say, “Yes!” So I always say, well, what was it about the movie the turned you on, and I haven’t really gotten a satisfactory answer, so I’ve been doing a lot of my own interpolation.

He really touched people, Logan.

RF: What has stayed with you about the movie or the part that may be a touchstone for you?

MY: Well, what’s stayed with me and still happens is that I meet so many people in the street that almost paraphrase the same story; that there was one movie of yours when I was growing up that really

(ABOVE) Richard Jordan played Francis 7, Logan's fellow Sandman. (LEFT) This sweatshirt, bearing an early version of the Logan’s Run logo, was presented to Michael York during production and worn by the star. Courtesy of Heritage. (BELOW) Michael York and writer Anthony Taylor in York’s home in California. Courtesy of Anthony Taylor.

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DEAN JEFFRIES Dean Jeffries (1933–2013) began customizing motorcycles and cars after learning to pinstripe while stationed in Germany during the Korean War. Making his way back to California, some of his early customers included James Dean, A. J. Foyt, and Carroll Shelby, with whom he worked on the legendary Shelby Cobra.

In the Sixties he began creating custom vehicles for films and television shows, and in 1977 he built three vehicles for the Logan’s Run television series, which ran on CBS Television.

RetroFan: How did you get involved with building the cars for the Logan’s Run TV series?

Dean Jeffries: To tell you the truth, I don’t remember! [laughs] It was a couple of years ago. It was probably sometime in 1977, and usually they don’t give you any time to do this stuff. You don’t know until the last minute. So we worked night and day getting them done for the shooting.

RF: You built Logan’s hover car and two of the Sandman ground cars for the show.

Car customizer Dean Jeffries looks over photos of the Logan’s Run TV series cars in his Hollywood workshop. Photo by Anthony Taylor.

What were they based on—what sort of chassis did you use?

DJ: I couldn’t tell you. It was all metal construction, I didn’t use Bondo or any of that kind of stuff. I didn’t care for it, still don’t. These days I don’t have a choice, sometimes. [According to the April 1978 issue of Custom Vans magazine, Logan’s Solar Car was built on the chassis of a 1972 Chevrolet van. Extensive

modifications were made to the engine and transmission.]

RF: After you handed the cars over to the studio, who was responsible for servicing them?

DJ: I did it. I also did all the stunts coordinating and all the driving and stuff with the cars for the chasing scenes or anything like that. All they [the actors] did was pull up or pull out of the shot, but whenever they did any action scenes it was me driving. That’s the way most of

Interior pages from Custom Van magazine’s April 1978 issue’s article on the Solar Car from the Logan’s Run television series. Courtesy of Anthony Taylor.

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(LEFT) A photo of Dean Jeffries and the Sandman Ground Car from the Logan’s Run TV series, on the wall of Jeffries Automotive Shop. (BELOW) Dean Jeffries’ on-set parking pass for the Logan’s Run TV series. Photos by Anthony Taylor.

check. I rigged and jumped a five-ton truck on another film and they paid me $20,000 to do that.

the guys of that era did it, you know. They didn’t want to risk the actors getting hurt, and they could always get another stunt guy if they had any problems. I’ve worked on a lot of films doing stuff like that, and rigging vehicles for stunt work.

DJ: No that was the pass for my car to get onto the shooting locations. You had to have this or you couldn’t get into the area.

To be honest, I’m a little surprised it’s still here and never got thrown out. Most people don’t keep stuff like that.

RF: Driving around in those plexiglassdomed cars must have been hot in the California summer. Did they have air conditioning?

DJ: There ain’t any air conditioning in any of my vehicles. The first thing I do when building a car is tear the air conditioning out, because that system can screw up the car more than anything in the world. ’Cause they sit there with the air conditioning on [while waiting for a shot to get set up] and they blow up the motors!

Especially if you have an actor or actress in there, you know they’re going to have the air conditioning on.

RF: Do you recall how much the studio paid you to create the vehicles?

DJ: Not off the top of my head, no. I’d have to go through the paperwork. But I do have all of it, I have records for everything.

RF: Right in the middle of a heat wave!

DJ: Yep. We filmed out at the 20th Century [Fox] ranch a lot, and also the Disney lot out in the Valley. We did a lot of stuff out there. I still have my pass over here.

[Dean got up and pulled a small sign with a Logan’s Run logo off the wall to show us.]

RF: Was that for the vehicles?

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RF: How much time did you spend working on the set?

DJ: Well, the studio pays you by the day for eight hours. Over and above you get additional pay for overtime.

Then for anything like stunts you get an adjustment, and that’s added on to your

RF: A lot of risk involved in that.

DJ: Well, the risk is that if you don’t make that, it’s the end of you! [laughs] I have a bad back—I busted it twice on jobs. I used to come back to my shop and hang upside down two times a day. Did that for two or three years, I think.

RF: You rented the Logan cars out to other productions after the show…

DJ: Yeah, they were in commercials and other movies and stuff. I changed something here and there, repainted them, made a new front end for one them, and they kept working for a few years.

That’s how it works; I got to keep them and do whatever I could with them.

WILLIAM F. NOLAN William F. Nolan became enchanted by science fiction at an early age. In the Fifties he began publishing SF fanzines, including The Ray Bradbury Review. As part of the mid-century California science-fiction scene, he became friends with many of his favorite writers and began to have his own stories published. In addition to his many stories and novels, Nolan has edited collections and anthologies, and has won two Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as two Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writer’s Association, as well as many other accolades. In 1963, he began to imagine a world in which no one wanted for anything, but life was limited to a certain age and if you didn’t comply with

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mandatory termination, agents were sent to hunt you and do the job…

RetroFan: What inspired the situations, characters, and the plot in the novel Logan’s Run? William F. Nolan: The origin of Logan was a lecture I was supposed to give at UCLA for Charles Beaumont’s Science Fiction class, which was one of the earliest science-fiction courses in the country.

He wanted me to come over as a guest lecturer and he said, “I need one thing from you, I need you to come in with a definition for the difference between social fiction and science fiction.” I said, “Let me think about it… I don’t quite know how to answer right this moment.”

I was on the freeway heading down to the class a few days later, and I still didn’t have it and I thought of the old cliche, “Life begins at 40.” And I thought, what if death begins at 40? I thought, what if there was a society in the future that demands extinction at the age of 40?

So I went to the class and I told them, “Social fiction is when a man turns 40 and runs off with a Vegas showgirl and divorces his wife. Death at 40 in a future society in which you’re mandated to die at that age in order to control population [is science fiction].” So I made a little note to myself and said, what happens if these people don’t want to die at 40? Well, I said to myself, then they send a killer man after them. And I wrote “Killer Man, Killer Man, leave my door. Don’t come back here anymore.” I did a little sketch of the Killer Man and took it to George Clayton Johnson. George was doing a lot of TV work back then—Twilight Zone, he’d done a Star Trek, and he was really into scripting.

He read my little paragraph and said, “This would make a wonderful script, we should do it as a screenplay.” And I thought, that was only one aspect of it. We should do it as a novel first, and then a screenplay.

He said, “Have you ever written a novel?”

I said, “No. Have you?” He said, “No!” I said, “Well, we’re gonna write one and it’s going to be called Morgan’s Run,” because Morgan was what we decided to call the character.

Just about the time we were starting to write the thing in Malibu, we heard about a film in England called Morgan, so we couldn’t call him that. My old phone number in Kansas City was in the LOgan exchange, so I said to George, “Why don’t we call him Logan?” And he liked that.

RF: So you wrote the novel and then went directly on to the screenplay?

WFN: Yes. The only people who’ve ever really seen the screenplay other than MGM, who purchased it along with the screen rights to do the film, was one of the writers for Cinefantastique magazine, who said it was “far superior to the one David Goodman wrote for the film. The Nolan/ Johnson script captures the feeling of the book, and there’s logic all the way through; they logically explain everything.” There’s no logic whatsoever in the MGM film.

Of course, I went to the producer, Saul David, when I read the screenplay that he was going to use ,and I said, “Saul, there’s no logic to this, no logic. Why would you have an ice cave at the top of a domed city with the sun burning down on it, and why would you have a carousel that people keep going back to when nobody ever renews?” And he said, “Bill, you gotta remember one thing; you don’t need logic in science fiction.”

What a statement. Of course you need more logic there than in any other form, because you have to explain marvels of the Author William F. Nolan speaks at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, where he received a Grandmaster Award.

Courtesy of Anthony Taylor.

First edition cover of the sci-fi novel Logan’s Run (The Dial Press, 1967), by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Courtesy of Heritage.

future, so logic is absolutely essential.

And the film, as nice as it was with Jenny Agutter and Michael York doing superb jobs in the central roles, had no logic, in my estimation.

RF: Before Saul David was attached, George Pal was developing the film with a script by Richard Maibaum, right?

WFN: Yes, that’s right. It was funny, in fact Maibaum invited us to lunch at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills one day and George and I showed up and he said, “Well, I’m going to do the screenplay on your book,” and we said, “Oh, really!” He’d done a lot of James Bond scripts and we thought, this guy’s good. And then he said, “Yeah, and the giant surfer thing is gonna be fine.” And I said, “The what?” And he said, “Well, on the island of Hawaii, there’s a giant surfboard as tall as the Empire State Building.” And he had these flying surfboards coming around it and I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute; what book are we talking about? There’s no flying surfboards. I mean, there’s devil sticks. Are you talking about the ones the gypsies had in the novel?” And he said, “Well, we don’t call them devil sticks, we call them flying RETROFAN

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boards, and there’s this great god, and…”

George and I looked at each other and tried to make sense of it, and in the end we just said, “Good luck” and got up and walked out and we shook our heads and said, “This is NOT our book.”

Luckily… this is a terrible thing to say, but luckily, Maibaum died before he could destroy the book, so the book was destroyed by [Logan’s Run screenwriter] David Zelag Goodman instead.

RF: George Pal was known for producing very family-friendly movies—The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and the like. Your book was pretty racy stuff; it was overtly sexual, casual about drug culture… very adult. Do you think George would have been okay with that, or would he have downplayed those elements of the story for a pass by the MPAA? WFN: I never met George Pal personally, but I talked to him on the phone and he said, “We have to work together.” This was after Logan’s Run had fallen apart for him, and he died shortly after we spoke.

So I never met the man, and I never talked with him about what he would do with Logan’s Run. I only know one thing— he wanted to film it in Brasilia. Brasilia is an abandoned town somewhere in Europe, I think [Author’s note: Though I’m sure he didn’t mean the capitol city of Brazil, I could find no other mention of this place other than in relation to Newcastle, England. After WWII, reconstruction of the city was to have utilized modernist architecture and was described as the “Brasilia of the North.”

The planned layout was abandoned and completed with more traditional structures after 1961. When fact-checking

this article with Nolan, he recalled that it was indeed Newcastle where Pal wanted to shoot. See illustration.], and it’s all open. He was going to take his cameras and crew and go film Logan’s Run there.

Beyond that, I know nothing about what he would do in terms of censorship or cutting scenes out or any of that. He might well have gone along with it or he might not; we’ll never know.

RF: So we know what you think of the Saul David movie and what you think they got wrong. What do you think they got right?

WFN: What they got right was some great sets, Sandman headquarters was wonderful. The interior was black marble, and I loved it. The vines covering the Lincoln statue in Washington, D.C. was beautiful, and heck, they won an Oscar™ for special effects! The surgery table and the entryway to the New You was beautifully done. I would say the music by Jerry Goldsmith was wonderful. The acting

by Jenny Agutter and Michael York—they were both British born and trained actors who had done Shakespeare on the stage.

They were superb. So all that I liked a lot.

What I didn’t like was the whole ending, with Peter Ustinov. [Ustinov] was a good actor, but he didn’t belong in this movie. Had nothing to do with my book. He chatted on and on about cats and the whole movie just ground to a stop right there. There wasn’t a “run,” and there was supposed to be

a “RUN.” George and I made it a RUN, we really ran with the characters and created the whole story in three weeks and the whole point was to run with Logan. When Ustinov comes on, it’s like hitting a brick wall and everything stops. That bothered me a whole lot. I did not like the last half of it, but I did like the first half. And then at the very end, where the little girl came out and they touched the face of the old man and the music rolls, that’s a beautiful last scene, but what leads up to that—I have a lot of problems with.

RF: How would you shape the story differently if you were writing it today?

Our culture is very different now.

WFN: Well, Warner Bros. and Silver Pictures have been struggling to do a remake for more than 18 years (24 years in 2021), and they can’t get it right. They’ve had 15 different writers try different drafts. George and I came in and they said they couldn’t hire us because we’re too close to the material. Well, of course we are—we wrote it! Hollywood wants a fresh viewpoint. You don’t need a fresh viewpoint; all you need to do is film the novel the way it was written. And why did they go to 30 for the death age [in the Saul David film]? To a boy who’s 15, 30 is old

(LEFT) An artist’s concept for the rebuilding of Newcastle, England, after World War II. City planners envisioned a futuristic center and nicknamed it “Brasilia of the North.” Producer George Pal envisioned filming Logan’s Run here amid the areas that were finished before the plan was abandoned. Courtesy of Anthony Taylor. (RIGHT) The iconic cityscape from Logan's Run. © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Heritage.

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age, I think. Twenty-one is scary to them because they come up to 21st year and they’re dead before they’re even out of their teens, barely. I said 30 is way too long, it deadens the whole impact of the thing.

They said, “We can’t cast a movie with under-21 people, we don’t have those kind of actors, we can’t do that.” I know Jenny Agutter was 23 when she did the film, and Michael York was 34. So I understood that, I said, “Yeah, I guess.”

I think we could do it today, but at the time, in 1975 or ’74, they just didn’t have those kind of people around and in a way I’m glad, because Jenny and Michael were wonderful and I would hate to think of it without them. They really transcended the movie.

I’d like to say something about Logan’s Run that you haven’t asked me.

RF: Absolutely.

WFN: The film was written on a level of trying to critique the society that was around it. George and I were in Malibu writing Logan when the Watts riots took place, the young people burning and assaulting the city. We would have written it pretty much the same way without that, but that certainly did make us believe that we were on the right track.

With something like that happening the same week we were writing it, we were very much ahead of reality. I thought, this is a good sign; people are going to be able to accept Logan’s Run on a more realistic basis because of the Watts riots, and that was one thing that led into the making of the film.

RF: You and George decided early that this book needed a more mainstream release than a sci-fi imprint could give it.

It must have made selling the book more difficult to that kind of publisher. What was the thinking behind that?

WFN: We both had two goals in mind at the time, and they both seemed very unrealistic because we were not big-name writers then. I’ve become a big-name writer since because I’ve been around so long and done so much, and George too because of his work on Twilight Zone and such, but at the time we were struggling writers and I said, “You know, I’m going to make a crazy demand on the agent who sells this, and and the studio that buys Logan. I want $100,000 guaranteed

before we sell this movie.” That’s over a million dollars in today’s money, so we were basically asking for a million dollars up front.

And I thought we’d probably never get it, but you never know until you try. The second thing we decided to do was to find an agent who would ask for $100,000 up front, or we wouldn’t go with that agency. And of course, we didn’t have an agent at that time. So we interviewed three different agents, and gave them the rough draft manuscript, which we hadn’t sold to a publisher yet, and said, “If you can guarantee us that you can get $100,000 from a studio plus selling the novel back in New York, then we’ll go with your agency.” Two of the three said it was just impossible to demand anything like that from a studio, it wasn’t realistic and would never happen. Okay, fine. The third agency, the Hamilburg Agency, said, “Yeah, we can get you the hundred thousand, we think. We read it, its unique, and as far as a mainstream publisher, we’ll submit to places like Dial Press, and Knopf, and MacMillan.”

So we signed with them. And by God, they did sell it to Dial Press, which is interesting because E. L. Doctorow, who wrote Ragtime, was the editor there and he bought Logan’s Run. E. L. Doctorow bought Logan’s Run! RF: Amazing! I had no idea.

WFN: Yep, and then we had another producer named Tom Stern who offered to buy the film. And he said, “Look, nobody can give a $100,000 for an unknown novel, I’m giving you top money here, $40,000.” So we said, no. And then MGM comes into the picture and George Pal wants it, so he talked MGM into making us an offer—$60,00! George and I, who had no money at the time, said, “No. The price is $100,000. Not $60,000.” They were incredulous—we wanted 40,000 more?

We said, “Yes! If you want the film rights

The Sandman headquarters explodes while Jessica and Logan run. © Warner Bros. Courtesy of Heritage.

to this book, the price is ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.” Now meanwhile, we’re sweating blood because we had a $60,000 offer which was great, and we had turned it down. So MGM said, “Well, let us think about it over the weekend and we’ll either cancel our offer altogether or come up with a hundred.”

So we were sweating it out. What if they cancelled the whole thing? I told George we’d be right back to zero and he said, “Hang in there, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.” And by God, on Monday they said, “All right. You’ve got your hundred. We’ll pay $100,000 for it.

And they did.”

So I can’t really complain about that; at the time it was really big money. And I think Hollywood had never paid that much for an original book at that time.

So that’s an interesting thing about Logan’s Run. It became a classic when George and I were just trying to sell a book.

So when the book came out from Dial Press, we got major reviews across the country and they were 99% positive— people loved the book. I told George that we’d done it—we’d broken through that ceiling. Because we had submitted it to three publishers at once, which was unheard of in those days. You never submitted anything to more than one publisher at once. You’d wait eight or nine RETROFAN

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First collected edition of Nolan and Johnson’s Logan: A Trilogy (Maclay & Associates, 1986). Courtesy of Heritage.

Clayton Johnson passed away on Dec. 25th, 2015, several months after this interview]. We’ve got editions around the world, and audio versions, we’ve had three different comicbook versions of it, the latest from Blue Water Productions. Marvel did an adaptation of the film, and then Malibu Graphics did a version of the first two [books]. So yeah, it’s become a classic and an icon. People know the name Logan’s Run that have never seen the movie or read the book, but they’ve heard of that title. So we’ve been very lucky.

months to get an answer. We weren’t going to wait that long, and Dial Press was the one that came through with the offer. So in almost every way you can look at it, Logan’s Run was unique in one way or another. It just wasn’t the average science fiction idea or the average science fiction novel.

RF: I think it’s more akin to something like Fahrenheit 451. It’s had that sort of impact on society.

WFN: Well, there’s been hundreds and hundreds of science-fiction books published since Logan, and yet it remains one of the top ten classics of science fiction, right up there with 1984 and Brave New World. That’s something that George and I never expected, and we’re delighted it happened, of course. I went on to write Logan’s World and Logan’s Search on my own, and I’ve also done another book called Logan’s Journey with a writer named Paul McComas that’s out with our agent right now [Author’s note: The book remains unpublished as of 2021, as does Logan Falls, co-written with Jason Brock], so the Logan saga is still going on and I’m still controlling it. George has pretty well given me the reins to this thing and said to take it anywhere I want to go, but George is still my close friend, I still split everything that comes from Logan’s Run, the novel, with him [Author’s note: George 14

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RF: What do you think is the future for Logan and the Logan franchise?

WFN: Well, it’s difficult to hang on to it in one way, because the bigger it gets… it’s like a giant fish. Trying to beach a giant fish, and the bigger the fish is, the harder it is to bring it up on the beach. There’s going to come a day when the book rights will be out of our hands and there’s going to be all kinds of other writers being brought in to write other versions of it and that’s going to dilute the thing. So far, we’ve been able to hold onto the book rights exclusively so that nobody can write a book on Logan without our permission. But that may fade away, so I don’t know what the future of that is going to hold.

RF: I’d be interested in seeing an anthology based in Logan’s World, with other writers contributing stories.

WFN: Possibly, that’s one idea. A lot of fans did write their own fan stories and published them in mimeographed fanzines. I remember I went to San Diego for WesterCon as the guest of the Logan’s Run Organization of Fans, run by Faye Metz, and posed with them; they had costumes, and guns, and everything. So there were fan clubs, there were artifacts, there were crossword puzzles, there were cartoons, an enormous amount of merchandise that became available at one time or another. And if the movie they’re trying to make at Warner Bros.

goes through, it could all come back and in a much bigger way. If we can hang on to merchandising [rights], we could make a lot of money! We’ve got lawyers working on getting the television rights back, and other things in the works.

So the answer is that I really don’t know what the future holds… only that we want to keep Logan running.

The author acknowledges the assistance of R. Yancey in the preparation of several interview questions.

ANTHONY TAYLOR is the licensing and brand manager for the Bram Stoker Estate, and a writer.

He is the author of Arctic Adventure!, an Official Thunderbirds™ novel based on the iconic British television series by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. He has also written episodes of the animated Paddle Pop Adventures series from Monk Studios.

In addition, Anthony wrote Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: The Complete Series – Volume 2, which includes reprints of the classic Gold Key comic-book stories, and The Future was FAB: The Art of Mike Trim, chronicling artist Mike Trim’s career designing models and special effects for Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and illustrating the cover for Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds album. He was a monthly columnist for Toy Shop Magazine for 12 years, covering garage kits and genre collectibles. Anthony was a regular contributor and editor for the British magazine Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models International, and contributed a chapter on the Flying Sub miniatures from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea for the book From Sketch to Screen. His articles have appeared in SFX, Video WatcHDog, Fangoria, Screem, HorrorHound, Famous Monsters of Filmland, FilmFax, Amazing Figure Modeler, Effects Special, Modeler’s Resource, and many other magazines. Anthony also designed and co-edited CultTVMan’s Ultimate Modeling Guide to the Jupiter II as well as CultTVMan’s Ultimate Modeling Guide to Classic Sci-Fi Movies. He is the force behind ATLRetro.com’s film and disc review column “Apes on Film.” His website is Taylorcosm.com.

WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON

Marvel Super Heroes

by Will Murray In the 21st Century, the Marvel Universe is a cultural juggernaut.

But it wasn’t always so.

Back in the Sixties, Marvel Comics was an upstart publisher staffed by a tiny team of artists and writers whose titles were printed so poorly that news dealers often stuck them behind the better-looking DCs and Dells. Yet by the decade’s end, Marvel was the industry leader.

I know. I was there, buying every title as it hit the racks of assorted variety stores and smoke shops, a proud part of that generation whose dimes sustained Marvel as it crawled up from the ghetto of infamy to which it had been consigned during the dark decade of the Fifties.

By 1966, I was a total Marvelite, having given up on my earlier favorite titles, the Superman-DC line. They were for kids. I was a teenager now. Stan Lee was the new king of the four-color jungle.

animation work; programs and commercials as well. And the comic books intrigued me. I’m not a comic book reader per se, but the artwork to me was absolutely alluring. We decided to see if we could animate a book. Now, if you recall, at that particular period, the business was in a slump, and the Goodmans, papa and son [Marvel publisher Martin Goodman and son Chip], were fighting to stay alive. And fortuitously, I was able to make contact with them.”

Not so fast. Producer-distributor Steve Krantz of Krantz Films credited his young sons, Nicholas and Anthony, whose Marvel collection was overwhelming the Krantz home.

“In desperation,” Krantz explained, “I picked one of the comics up and started to read it, and I realized that no one on television at that time was doing any of the comic books. My sons picked out a number of their favorite characters for me, and I went out and got the rights to them, and that’s how Super Heroes began.”

Coming Your Way on TV! Stan Lee settled the question when he Imagine my thrill when Stan announced said, “As far as I know, the deal was made that some of their top super-heroes between Martin Goodman and Grantraywere coming to TV. Grantray-Lawrence Lawrence.

I’m sure it was Bob who decided Animation acquired the rights to Captain Kids lost their minds when they which characters to use.”

America, Iron Man, Prince Namor the spotted this house ad in Marvel Comics “Originally, my concept was to use Sub-Mariner, the Mighty Thor, and the titles in 1966, announcing the forththe original art and try to utilize that as Incredible Hulk for release as a syndicated coming Marvel Super Heroes cartoon the basis for the production,” recalled anthology show, The Marvel Super Heroes. I and some of the stations broadcasting Lawrence, “but it proved to be too costly could hardly wait. the program.

TM & © Marvel. and too complicated.

We learned that Grantray-Lawrence’s Bob Lawrence Disney had acquired a machine where you explained the show’s genesis. can copy cels, and if we’d all been smart, we “I was associated with a fascinating would’ve bought stock in that company––that was the beginning group of amateurs in Hollywood,” he said. “Some of the best of Xerox. They had it locked up in a room, in Disney’s facility. ones were Ray Patterson and Grant Simmons, and we were doing RETROFAN

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

But Hollywood is like a sieve––so we got one. And we locked ours up in a room. And it made all the difference in the world. It was really a lifesaver.”

Here, Lawrence and Krantz were on the same page.

“It was set up as a ‘living comic book,’” Krantz said at the time. “We used the original comic book art, and animated only limited portions of it. It worked quite well, because you get very dramatic poses in comic books. Nothing is static. And we use the Pow! and Smash! words right on the screen.”

Batmania was in full swing, so the parties were hoping to cash in on the Sixties super-hero craze.

Having the foundation of Jack Kirby’s dynamic artwork, as well as those of Steve Ditko, Bill Everett, Don Heck, Gene Colan, and others to work from, gave the team confidence that the episodes would work for television.

“One of the secrets of Marvel’s success is its ability to draw action right into its panels,” Lawrence observed. “Marvel’s art is like no other penciling in comics, because its artists and production people understand the principle of arrested motion. Iron Man doesn’t just stand there. He tenses, or relaxes, or jumps, or recoils. The characters don’t actually move, and yet their actions seem to flow, catching the reader up in a current of activity. Since we wanted to retain this flow for our film, we decided to let their artists carry the ball— and the viewer—just as they do their own readers.”

“We were fortunate to have such fantastic art to work with,” added GrantrayLawrence President Ray Patterson. “In blowing up these drawings to 18x14, in order to do touch-ups on them, we found very little that our artists had to tinker with. Let’s face it, the comic book created the illusion of action very successfully. We merely helped it along a little.”

Lawrence recruited Stan Lee to assist with the inevitable challenges arising from adapting serialized comic stories into three-part cartoons.

“Stan Lee lived out in Hewlett Harbor on Long Island,” recalled Lawrence. “I rented a penthouse apartment for him in New York City to keep him near us so that we could work with him on a daily basis. You have no idea. This man could work 24 hours a day.

Absolutely writes dialogue that makes all kinds of sense. So we had that ability.”

At the time, Lee was thrilled. “They’ve been an absolute joy to work with. They check with us on everything and they’re tremendously anxious to keep with the spirit of our strips and stories. The original stories have been hanged to some degree because some of them aren’t complete in themselves. And the animation studio has to change the ending so it seems like it’s a complete episode.”

Early in the development phase, Stan Lee recorded a video pitch/pilot for the show. “And that is what really sold the concept,” revealed Lawrence.

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Marvel Comics artwork by Jack “King” Kirby and Gene “The Dean” Colan was used in these Grantray-Lawrence promos produced to syndicate The Marvel Super Heroes. TM & © Marvel.

Producing the Series

Steve Krantz farmed out the production work to five separate animation outfits, beginning with a fading Paramount Cartoon Studios, then headed by animator Shamus Culhane. Paramount selected Captain America’s origin for its shakedown episode.

“Krantz was using Xeroxed illustrations from the comic books, only animating the eyes and mouths of the characters,” Culhane explained.

“By adding special effects like death rays, explosions beefed up by camera moves, he had put together a sample film of a Captain America story which had been accepted by the networks.”

Accepted––after a near-disaster of a first attempt, Culhane later admitted.

“It was very easy work; the comic-book illustrations were Xeroxed directly onto cels and painted like normal animation drawings, so the animators had nothing complicated to do except for the special effects. The rest of the animation, the eye movements and mouth action, were so simple that even a novice animator could have finished a whole picture in three weeks.”

Simple, but not foolproof.

“Because the action was so simple nobody bothered to examine the drawings of the first two pictures,” Culhane recounted in his 1998 autobiography, Talking Animals and Other People. “Animators took the stock scenes as soon as they were animated, noted the drawing numbers of the characters, mouth actions, and special effects, and returned them to the inking department as quickly as possible because as long as they were in reuse the first two pictures were being delayed.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

“I had screened the Captain America sample reel for all the animators, pointing out the judicious use of blinks and the perfect synchronization of mouth action and dialogue tracks.

The animation was so basic that I had elected to dispense with the normal routine of checking each scene before photography. It seemed a needless expense. I also had omitted shooting a pencil test for the same reason.”

You can guess where this is going….

“When the first two pictures were ready to be screened,” Culhane recalled, “I sat in the projection room with complacence.

The first two films have been done within the budget and on schedule. A few seconds later after the first picture started, I was jolted into shock. The mouth moves were a mess; often they were completely out of sync. In some cases the mouths were so distorted that the characters looked as if they were in a class for speech therapy. All the eyes blinked and blinked. Thor looked like a junkie in great need of a fix. Practically nothing was usable except for the basic Xerox cells of the characters. Even the special effects were terrible! The second picture was only slightly different in that the mouths, in addition to being out of sync, slid all over the face. Needless to say, there was no usable animation in this one either.”

Back to the drawing board the team went, $10,000 poorer.

Eventually, they got it sorted out.

Culhane was given responsibility for The Mighty Thor, which aired appropriately on the day named after him, Thursday.

Four other Hollywood studios handled the other characters.

Jonny Quest’s creator, Doug Wildey, took on Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, which replaced Spider-Man in an 11th-hour decision to hold him back for his own show. Wildey was art director at Hanna-Barbara, which would soon produce a Fantastic Four cartoon.

Sample storyboards from two different Thor episodes.

The Mighty Thor © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.

Wildey related, “I art-directed that Sub-Mariner show, and across the street they were doing some of the other shows in which they would take the drawings out of the comic books and animate them from that. I wrote and laid out a number of bridge segments for the Iron Man segments as well.”

Wildey was assisted by artists like Sparky Moore, Herb Hazleton, and Mel Keefer, and well as inker Mike Royer, who extended and re-inked the comic-book panels where necessary.

“I wound up doing some original drawings of Tony Stark in the cockpit of his jet plane and things like that,” Royer related, “because there wasn’t comic-book art to fill it out. And on the SubMariner stories, not enough Sub-Mariners had been published at that time, and so we did a whole bunch of original stories.”

Marvel writer Roy Thomas recalled pitching in.

“I met and talked with Robert Lawrence, one of the GrantrayLawrence partners, once or twice,” he said. “Mainly, I was ‘asked’

by Stan to come up with a short plot or two for ‘Sub-Mariner,’ since that series had far fewer episodes from which to extrapolate plots and/or illustrations than the other four. I’ve no recollection, however, of how many plots I wrote (not many) or if they were used in any form. I do know that I was tempted to see if I could turn any of Bill Everett’s [Forties] or especially [Fifties] stories into MSH episodes, although none of the

earlier art would’ve been usable… but I’ve no recollection whether I actually did it or not.”

Comic-book artist Jerry Grandenetti storyboarded an original Sub-Mariner episode that never moved into production. As a fan, I was startled to see at least one Sub-Mariner story on TV weeks before it appeared on Tales to Astonish.

Marvel and Grantray-Lawrence worked very closely.

Roy Thomas stated, “I’m sure that MSH was given plots for upcoming stories, which would’ve been just several ahead of what was then currently on the stands.

Stan may have thought up an idea or two and then carried through in both places, because he’d have figured that MSH could pick up Gene Colan’s art for it later perhaps.”

Stan Lee was the unsung hero of the harried production process, juggling his Marvel editorial duties while he rewrote his older stories for the unfamiliar medium.

As Bob Lawrence explained, “Ray Patterson’s wife June was brilliant as an editor, and we would create storylines from the comic books. And Stan would edit. And that man could edit all RETROFAN

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

night, and he would correct and change the words. Dialogue, scripts, ideas, concepts.”

Since the formative Marvel Universe had largely coalesced, rights problems arose in adapting some story arcs. Insufficient Captain America stories were available to adapt, so several Avengers issues were converted into Captain America episodes, dragging along the likes of Giant-Man, the Wasp, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Avengers #2 was converted into an episode of The Hulk.

But the wildest thing the producers did was to combine the free-for-all slugfest of Fantastic Four Annual #3 and Fantastic Four #6, in which the FF battled with Dr. Doom and the Sub-Mariner, into a frenzied mash-up which also included the Avengers. This became sort of an inside-out SubMariner episode, with the original X-Men (see inset) substituting for the FF. This marked the mutant team’s first media appearance, although they were incongruously renamed the Allies for Peace.

A year later, when HannaBarbera adapted an issue with The Fantastic Four for their new FF cartoon, they couldn’t use Prince Namor, so they changed him to Prince Triton of Pacifica. Inexplicably, his archenemy, Attuma, carried over unchanged from Marvel Super Heroes.

The licensing department must have had nightmares. As a kid, I was sure confused.

Anyway, it was all a glorious mess. But it was all us firstgeneration Marvelites had. Today’s cinematic blockbusters were beyond our innocent ken.

Even by TV standards, the animation was primitive. The Xerography-dependent endeavor lowered TV animation standards to the level of a fusion of manipulated clip art and talking heads. Camera work provided much of the illusion of movement. Yet this was the earliest media building block of the current Marvel Universe. To this day, it remains the most faithful.

“They were interested in preserving the real feeling the Marvel characters had, and I worked with them,” Stan Lee confirmed.

“While the animation was rather limited, they made a concerted effort to keep them as close to the stories in the comic books and as close to the artwork as possible. Of everything that’s been done, those primitive cartoons were the closest to our own style.”

Even so, bloopers abounded, with stock shots being reused–– and sometimes misused—endlessly, and the voice actors often flubbing their lines, which at times came out of the mouths of the wrong characters. Because the art was lifted directly from the printed comic panels, character interpretations varied from scene to scene, with the Hulk shifting from Jack Kirby to Steve Ditko’s interpretation, or Iron Man morphing from Kirby to Don Heck and Gene Colan, sometimes frame by frame. If an episode included the original bulky Iron Man, he was recolored red and gold in a clumsy effort to pass him off as his sleeker successor. “On-model” was not a Grantray-Lawrence concept. Only Doug Wildey’s team went to the trouble of redrawing their star’s poses, so Namor had a consistent look.

“From an artistic viewpoint,” observed Shamus Culhane, “the series was garbage.”

Your Star-Spangled Host

It might have been garbage, but it was our garbage. I loved the show. And unlike mere mortal Marvelites in other cities, I enjoyed the privilege of watching it on Boston’s Channel 7, WNAC, which hired actor Arthur Pierce to portray Captain America as a liveaction host.

Wearing a shiny blue CA suit, he filmed a teaser that still survives on YouTube, thanks to an enterprising Marvelite with a Super 8 camera and a reel-to-reel tape recorder: “To be or not to be a Marvelite, that is the question.

“Whether tis nobler to join this jazzy group of goof-offs, “For to evade the slings and arrows of Brand Echh, “For to take up arms against a sea of super-hero competitors.”

(LEFT) Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner scripts and story notes from Grantray-Lawrence’s archives. (RIGHT) Jonny Quest creator Doug Wildey (see RetroFan #7) worked on the Sub-Mariner toons, including this dynamic drawing of the Avenging Son of Atlantis and “friends.” Sub-Mariner & X-Men (inset)w TM & © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

There’s more, but you get the idea. Pierce threw himself into the role like no other thespian, before or since, spouting off as if Stan Lee himself were wearing Chisel-jawed Arthur the red, white, and blue, waving his plastic shield while Pierce suited up as the introducing each segment. Other cities had to settle Star-Spangled Avenger for the local Bozo the Clown. to host The Marvel Super Pierce’s dialogue was written by no less than Heroes. Captain America TM Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. “I would write & © Marvel. Both, courtesy of comedy skits,” he revealed. “I would write intros Will Murray. commenting on the stories, and I think really some of the best and some of the most interesting writing I’ve done in my whole life was written for this show.”

Siegel had warmed up for this assignment by scripting the Archie Comics imprint Mighty Comics, a Marvel competitor Lee undoubtedly meant when he coined the term “Brand Echh.”

These studio vignettes soon turned into running stories, with Captain America narrating the off-stage action. My hazy memory is that Dr. Doom and some nameless television pioneer plastered in green foam as the Incredible Hulk showed up from time to time as the action spilled over into Boston streets. In the final installment, Cap learned that his old partner Bucky was still alive and rushed off to discover the truth. I always wondered what happened next. In the comics, Bucky stayed dead for decades.

Boisterous and bombastic, Pierce was a six-foottwo ex-Marine-turned-New York actor who shuttled between that city and Boston, keeping a residence in each town for convenience. He had recurring roles in two soap operas, One Life to Live and All My Children.

Real name: Arthur Daniel Levy.

Mighty Marvel Sing-Along

Old Jade Jaws is comin’ atcha in this Incredible Hulk cel appropriating Jack Kirby art. TM & © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.

Not every aspect of The Marvel Super Heroes was cheesy and crude.

Real money was put into theme and incidental music.

“In most animation work,” revealed Lawrence, “the music and sound effects are caricatures to match the art. For our program, we ruled out pops, whistles, and pings. In their place we have a carefully executed score with the kind of music you might hear in a feature film.”

A young musician and former cartoon voice actor named Jacque “Jack” Urbont was hired to write the theme songs to the individual features. During a conference, Stan Lee was dubious since Urbont admitted he was unfamiliar with Marvel’s characters.

“Mr. Lee,” he recalled saying, “I know what you’re thinking, and if I were in your shoes, I’d be thinking the same thing. But just get me some source material––one or two comic books––and three days later, I will have songs that are so terrific you will wish you’d written them yourself.”

Lee was impressed, later saying, “I wish I could claim to have written the lyrics, because I think they’re brilliant, but alas, I didn’t.”

Urbont also composed the jaunty series theme, which ran: RETROFAN

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

Gene Colan’s work on Marvel’s Armored Avenger is evident in this Iron Man cel. TM & © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.

“Meet the sulky over-bulky, kinda Hulky super hero, “Optimistic and electrically transistored super hero, “An exotically neurotic and aquatic super hero, “The Marvel Super Heroes have arrived!

“Super-powered from the forehead to the toes, “Watch them change their very shape before your nose.

“See a cane-striking super hero change to Viking super hero, “A humdingin’ real swingin’ shield flingin’ super hero.

“They’re the latest, they’re the greatest, ultimatest super heroes, “The Marvel Super Heroes have arrived!”

“From this tiny little show that lasted only a year in syndication, for an outfit that went bankrupt a year later, this thing has grown exponentially,” Urbont marveled. “It’s now part of the fabric of American culture.”

animation unit because it received so little revenue from The Marvel Super Heroes. Culhane quit when they declined to do Spider-Man. In its original incarnation as Famous Studios, Paramount was responsible for the first superhero cartoons in history—Superman.

Yet Steve Krantz, who took over production, considered The Marvel Super Heroes to be an unqualified success. Although a one-season wonder, the episodes ran in syndication for years thereafter.

“Marvel made a great deal of money on the basis of the shows I produced,” he insisted.

Krantz was not done with Marvel properties, either.

Spider-Man storyboards created for The Marvel Super Heroes served as the basis for the Saturday morning Spider-Man cartoon, which Grantray-Lawrence developed.

That show was a big jump in animation quality, but that was because the show was sold to ABC. The difference lay in the budget.

“The Super Heroes cost $30,000 a half-hour and Spider-Man is $50,000 a half-hour,” Krantz explained. “It would be impossible without a network sale.”

“It was a network program,” clarified Lawrence, “so we had to put more production into it.”

Spider-Man was far more successful than The Marvel Super Heroes, running for two years, with another season that was syndicated. Animator Ralph Bakshi took over with Season Two. Paul Soles, who had voiced Bruce Banner, played Spider-Man. Dialogue was recorded in Toronto by a voice troupe directed by Bernard Cowan.

“If you watched us in the studio reading these scripts,” recalled Soles, “we were like little children in a sandbox… it was fun.”

For the third season, fantasy writer Lin Carter wrote the scripts and Spider-Man’s adventures lost their urban flavor and veered

Wherever There’s a Hang-Up, You’ll Find the Spider-Man

Marketed as a weekday afternoon program, The Marvel Super Heroes debuted on September 1, 1966. Original episodes continued into December. Then the endless and inevitable reruns commenced. WNAC broadcast it at 4:30 weekday afternoons.

John Vernon, who would later play Dean Wormer in National Lampoon’s Animal House, voiced both Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner. Sandy Becker was Captain America. Chris Wiggins played Thor. Max Furguson was the Hulk, but Paul Soles did his alter ego, Dr. Bruce Banner. Other voice actors included narrator Bernard Cowan, Don Mason, Paul Kligman, Peg Dixon, Len Carlson, and Vita Linde.

Shamus Culhane was gearing up preparing a Spider-Man cartoon show for the 1967–1968 Saturday morning season, but the company’s new owners, Gulf & Western, decided to dissolve their

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He’s got radioactive blood! Grantray-Lawrence’s Spider-Man. One of these days Spidey’s cartoon show will get a full spotlight in our pages. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

into dark realms and other dimensions, with painful recyclings of art and storylines. The show strayed so far from the Marvel vision that it didn’t feel like Spidey any more.

By that point, Stan himself had become disenchanted with Krantz Films, complaining, “They insist on strict simplicity. This immediately eliminates everything that is Marvel. We just gave up on them and they went off on their own to do all-new stories.

Personally, I was very dissatisfied with the way our heroes were handled.”

Lee also grew tired of attending pointless meetings with the producers. “I was very interested in the television series in the beginning. I flew out to the coast and I discussed these things with Hanna-Barbera and Krantz Films and so forth, until I realized discussing it meant nothing because all they’re interested in doing is pleasing the sponsor. Not the network, not us, but the sponsor.”

After Spider-Man ran its course, Krantz optioned that character and the Hulk for feature films. But neither came to fruition.

But the floodgates had been opened for a surge of Marvel merchandizing that continues to this day––toys, puzzles, games, T-shirts, and, of course, subsequent cartoons.

“I fought hard for a contract,” Bob Lawrence remembered, “and we wrote an unbelievable contract with the Goodmans, because they didn’t know what they had and where to go. Believe it or not, in this contract I was able to obtain participation in the merchandising rights, and continuing interest in it.”

Unfortunately, the Marvel artists whose work was being shown on TV at the time did not participate in the early bonanza.

Goodman’s failure to share in such revenue may be one of the reasons artist Steve Ditko quit drawing The Amazing Spider-Man in 1966.

Decades later, Jack Kirby complained, “They used the artwork as a background and moved the figures across the screen on the end of a stick. It was primitive animation. They adapted the stories exactly and wouldn’t even give me credit for it.”

Ultimately, the most memorable elements to survive The Marvel Super Heroes were the corny theme songs, which were burned into the impressionable brains of baby boomers like myself who were its captivated audience. Even though I knew the stories by heart, the show kept me going until the latest Marvels hit the racks.

As Stan Lee put it, “I thought those cartoons were great.

They used real Marvel stories and in some crazy way their shows captured the spirit of Marvel. The theme songs were wonderful—25 years later people still remember them.”

WILL MURRAY is the writer of the Wild Adventures (www.adventuresinbronze. com) series of novels, which stars Doc Savage, The Shadow, King Kong, The Spider, and Tarzan of the Apes. He also created the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl with legendary artist Steve Ditko.

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RETROFAN

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Too Much TV If your old man used to gripe that you’d never learn anything with your nose glued to the boob tube, here’s your chance to prove him wrong. (Father doesn’t always know best.)

Each congenial host in Column One corresponds to a game show in Column Two. Match ’em up, then see how you rate!

COLUMN ONE

1) Art Fleming 2) Wink Martindale 3) Gene Rayburn 4) Jack Bailey 5) David Martin Ruprecht 6) Bill Cullen 7) Bob Eubanks 8) Peter Marshall 9) Monty Hall 10) Allen Ludden 22

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September 2021

“Is it door number 1, door number 2, or door number 3?”

RetroFan Ratings 10 correct: Fine-Tuned RetroFan Sock it to me, baby! I bet you know theme song lyrics too!

7–9 correct: Rabbit-Eared RetroFan Dy-no-mite! You wasted your childhood with the rest of us!

4–6 correct: Fuzzy-Receptioned RetroFan Up your nose with a rubber hose ’til you spend more tube time!

0–3 correct: Tuned-Out RetroFan Ya big dummy! Put down that book and go watch some classic TV! COLUMN TWO

A) Queen for a Day B) The Newlywed Game C) Tic-Tac-Dough D) Let’s Make a Deal E) Supermarket Sweep F) Password G) Jeopardy!

H) The Hollywood Squares I) Match Game J) Eye Guess Eye Guess, Hollywood Squares, Newlywed Game, Tic-Tac-Dough © Sony Pictures Television. Jeopardy! © Merv Griffin Enterprises. Let’s Make a Deal © Hatos-Hall Productions. Match Game and Password © Goodson-Todman Productions. Queen for a Day © MCA/Universal Television.

Supermarket Sweep © Al Howard Productions. All rights reserved.

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23

ANSWERS: 1–G, 2–C, 3–I, 4–A, 5–E, 6–J, 7–B, 8–H, 9–F, 10–F

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

ED AND EXP COND SE ION! EDIT

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

MAC RABOY

25th anniversary retrospective by publisher JOHN MORROW and COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine’s JON B. COOKE! Go behind-the-scenes with MICHAEL EURY, ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY, and a host of other TwoMorrows contributors!

The final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time, in cooperation with DC Comics! Two unused 1970s DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales, plus unseen TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE and SOUL LOVE magazines!

Examines the complicated relationship of Marvel Universe creators JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE through their own words (and Ditko’s, Wood’s, Romita Sr.’s and others), in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and TV interviews!

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Master of the Comics

ROGER HILL documents the life and career of the artist of BULLETMAN, SPY SMASHER, GREEN LAMA, and his crowning achievement, CAPTAIN MARVEL JR., with never-before-seen photos, a wealth of rare and unpublished artwork, and the first definitive biography of a true Master of the Comics!

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HERO-A-GO-GO!

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LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

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Career-spanning tribute to a legend!

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ERNEST FARINO’S RETRO FANTASMAGORIA

Yes, Miss Landers…

How Sue Randall Became Every Boy’s Teacher-Crush

Sue Randall as “Miss Landers” poses with Jerry Mathews “as the Beaver.” Leave It to Beaver © NBCUniversal Television.

And Starring as—Kitty, Ruthie, Hope, Kathy Taylor Johnson, Kathy O’Hara, Lucy, Susan, Elaine, Anna, Phyllis, Lois, Elizabeth, Mimi, Chick, Kay, Evelyn, Peggy, Ellen, Effie, Bianca, Hardi, Sabina, Jen, Ann, Louise, Sarah, Virginia, Carrie, Diane Emerson Soames, and Mary Ann, to say nothing of Miss Turner, Miss McNulty, Miss Franklin, Mrs. Wilson, Nurse Thompson, Sgt. Addie Malone, an FBI Clerk, the Union Boss’ Daughter, the Bride’s Friend, a College Girl Holding a Newspaper, and— Wait a minute! What actress could possibly play all those divergent roles? Barbara Stanwyck? Meryl Streep? Sally Field?

Nope. It’s our favorite elementary school teacher, “Miss Alice Landers”— Sue Randall.

Like Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver, I, along with an uncountable number of schoolboys in the late Fifties and early Sixties, had a deep-seated crush on “Miss Landers,” experiencing on a weekly basis numbness too far down to be heartburn. It didn’t matter that when Miss Landers made her first appearance in 1958 Sue Randall was 23 and I was six. A kid that age lives in blissful ignorance of age and time, and I was confident we’d be married one day soon. The only bubble-bursting downside was the splash of reality I confronted on a daily basis at school: none of my teachers looked like Miss Landers! Or possessed her calming, pleasant manner. (Astrologically, Sue was a Libra, a personality that fits hand-in-glove to Miss Landers: “A considerate and thoughtful nature with understanding and sensitivity who puts the needs of others above her own, always available to offer a non-judgmental ear or supportive words, and likely described as the ‘perfect friend.’”). I would later reconcile this disparity between reality and art by chalking it up to the old adage, Life Isn’t Fair.

And if you think it was just me borne away on the wings of schoolboy naiveté, here are comments posted on the IMDb: “Sue Randall, with those big, beautiful eyes and girl-next-door

Written and captioned by Ernest Farino presence…” and, in reply, “I agree absolutely about Sue Randall— it’s easy to see WHY Beaver had a crush on her; if you didn’t you weren’t normal,” as well as “Sue Randall is forever etched in my memory as Beaver’s crush-worthy schoolteacher, Miss Landers.”

Years later, along with many other interests, I casually collected photos of Sue, helped by the advent of the internet and eBay. I always wanted to find out more about her, so an article for RetroFan seemed like the perfect excuse to knuckle down.

Sue Randall was born Marion Burnside Randall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 8, 1935. Her father was Roland Rodrock Randall, a well-known real estate consultant. The Randall family was one of the prominent families of Philadelphia at that time and Sue’s parents supported her ambitions to pursue theater arts. At the age of ten Sue began acting on stage in a production of Dear Ruth by the Alden Park Players in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, and in 1953 finished her early education at the Lankenau School for Girls. Then it was on to New York, where she graduated with honors from the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts. By then, though, she was so busy with theater work she was unable to attend her own graduation and receive the “Best Actress” award.

In an article in the May 19, 1956 issue of TV Guide (vol. 4, #20, issue #164), Sue recalled that she had “read in the paper that [producer Richard Aldrich] was looking for apprentices for his summer theater in Falmouth, Massachusetts.” So she simply arrived, unannounced, at his office. There was no one else there except Aldrich. “We began talking and he said I could have a job.”

Sue painted scenery and read for the director. She met Helen Hayes, who was to star in What Every Woman Knows, and was given a part. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/producer Howard Lindsay (who, with frequent collaborator Russel Crouse, would write the book for the Tony Award-winning musical The Sound of Music) saw Sue in the role and hired her for a production of RETROFAN

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his Life with Father. Sue also appeared at Falmouth with Gloria Vanderbilt in The Swan. At the time Sue was often described as “another Grace Kelly,” and, by coincidence, it was Kelly who starred in the film version of The Swan in 1956. Ironically, Sue’s brother and Grace grew up together. “They’re older, about 26,” Sue said. Grace did give Sue some advice: Don’t take a stock Hollywood contract. “Benefit from my experience,” Grace told her, describing how she had been signed to a sevenyear contract at $750 a week while her films made millions.

Of producer Aldrich Sue said, “I guess he just liked me. He sent me out to read Sue Randall for parts I couldn’t possibly fill, just so the also worked as right people would see me.” So Sue started a fashion model making the rounds of producers’ offices and between her in January 1954, 20-year-old Sue Randall early theater played “Sabina” in an American Academy and television production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer appearances.

Prize-winning drama The Skin of Our Teeth, a three-part allegory about the life of

mankind. Sabina was the family’s maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty-queen temptress in the second act. Sue honorably followed in the footsteps of notable actresses who had played Sabina on Broadway: Tallulah Bankhead (who won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Actress of the Year as Sabina), Miriam Hopkins, Gladys George, Lizabeth Scott, and Mary Martin (in a TV production).

Sue did so well in The Skin of Our Teeth that she later won roles in network TV dramas. Her first credited TV appearance came in the 1955 episode “Golden Victory” of the series Star Tonight, an anthology series on ABC (February 1955 to August 1956) that aired on Thursdays at 9pm opposite Shower of Stars (CBS), Capitol Wrestling from Las Vegas (Dumont), and Dragnet (NBC). Each of its 80 episodes consisted of a self-contained story, usually adapted from plays, short stories, or novels by contemporary authors, and provided a opportunity for young up-and-coming New York actors to star opposite established players such as Buster Crabbe, Neva Patterson, Theodore Bikel, and June Lockhart. In addition to Sue, other “newbies” who appeared in the series included Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Jason Robards, Jr., and Robert Culp (with whom Sue would appear ten years later in an episode of I Spy).

Sue then took the role of “Diane Emerson Soames” in the television soap opera Valiant Lady (which enjoyed a remarkable run of 1,027

(ABOVE) Sue plays a scene with Martin Balsam in Valiant Lady. © CBS. (LEFT) You can watch Sue’s commercial for Newport cigarettes on YouTube: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QGeTmaMyM6U.

Sue studies her lines for the ABC production of “Golden Victory” for the series Star Tonight. Sadly, only four of the 80 episodes of Star Tonight have survived, not including this one. So this photo is also a rare record of part of television’s lost “Golden Age.” The original network caption said, “Until a month ago, Miss Randall’s career had consisted almost entirely of summer stock, including the Helen Hayes Festival in New England last season, and an ingénue role on one of daytime TV’s top soap operas. Sue is a fashion model between TV commitments.” © ABC.

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episodes from 1953–1957). © R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

Helen Emerson was the “valiant lady,” a 40ish widow whose daughter Diane runs off with a married man. Because of its long run, “Diane” was essayed by four actresses: Anne Pearson (#1, 1953–1954, original cast), Dolores Sutton (#2, 1954–1955), Sue Randall (#3, 1955–1956), and Lelia Martin (#4, 1956–1957). (And, in a bit of crossover trivia, Lelia Martin later starred as “Momar” in that bona fide 1964 classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. See RetroFan #12.) At the time that they needed a “Diane #3,” Sue read for producer Leonard Blair who, after having auditioned 60 other actresses, hired her on the spot.

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In 1954 Sue portrayed Diane Emerson on the CBS drama Woman with a Past and then appeared on Playhouse 90 (1957) and General Electric Theater (1959). She also did an occasional TV commercial, including one for Newport cigarettes. Sue became a heavy cigarette smoker, which ultimately cut her life short (more on that later).

In the late Fifties, Sue filmed a pilot with Theodora Davitt for a proposed sitcom called Up on Cloud Nine, about the “the daffy misadventures” of two flight attendants, but the proposed series couldn’t land a sponsor. The pilot was described by one reviewer as “painfully unfunny” as Sue and Theodora’s characters “insult passengers and frighten them in flight by mistakenly preparing the plane for a crash landing.”

Steve Canyon

Sue appeared as a “stewardess” (yes, we know, but that’s what they were called back then) in the unsold pilot for a series called Up on Cloud Nine.

“Operation Jettison” is included on The Complete Steve Canyon on TV DVD vol. 1, still available for purchase. Producer: John R. Ellis, Executive Producer: Harry Grant Guyton.

Color art and graphic design by Johann Mitchell.

Steve Canyon® is the Registered Trademark of the Milton Caniff Estate. Entire package and contents © 2008 by The Milton Caniff Estate, all rights reserved.

Used here by permission of John Ellis, DVD producer.

Steve Canyon was a comic strip by writer-artist Milton Caniff that ran from January 13, 1947 to June 4, 1988. In the late Forties, Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick considered a Steve Canyon film series starring Guy Madison, but it was television that brought Steve to life. A filmed, half-hour television series of 34 episodes aired on NBC in 1958–1959 (with reruns on ABC in 1960).

Dean Fredericks, formerly the Hindu manservant on Johnny Weissmuller’s Jungle Jim series, played Steve, a troubleshooter for the United States Air Force stationed at the fictitious Big Thunder Air Force Base in California. Sue Randall’s Steve Canyon episode, “Operation Jettison” (episode #6), was filmed on August 15, 18, and 19, 1958 and first run on NBC on Saturday, October 11, 1958.

Coincidentally, several cast members in the “Operation Jettison” episode have connections with the original Star Trek series: DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) appears in the command center, John Hoyt was the doctor in the ST pilot episode, “The Cage,” Paul Comi (Steve Canyon’s co-pilot) played the navigator in the ST episode “Balance of Terror” (1966), and Tige Andrews was the first Klingon to appear in Star Trek

(TOP LEFT) Sue Randall as Sgt. Addie Malone in “Operation Jettison.” (TOP RIGHT) Steve explains the workings of the Lockheed C-130 Hercules to Addie. (CENTER) Dean Fredericks, Sue Randall, and Tige Andrews in “Operation Jettison.” (BOTTOM LEFT) Sue comforts the injured Lt. Castle (Michael Galloway). (BOTTOM RIGHT) Episode cast credits. At this early stage of Sue’s career, it still must have been a thrill for her to see her name on the screen.

Steve Canyon frame captures by DVD producer John Ellis, copyright ©2008 by The Milton Caniff Estate, used with permission.

(as “Kras”) in “Friday’s Child” (1967), co-starring the Batman series’ Catwoman, Julie Newmar.

As of February 13, 2021 the Decades network has been running the Steve Canyon episodes, so, as the saying goes, “check your local listings.”

You Outta Be in Pictures…

Sue Randall would appear in 62 television episodes from 1953 to 1967, proving herself to be a popular and reliable supporting or RETROFAN

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co-starring actor. Yet, she only appeared in one feature film; we’ll never know if she was content with her TV career or yearned for bigger projects on the silver screen. From my own experience in the film industry over the years, my sense is that, given the unpredictable and sometimes volatile nature of the business, she was likely content to be a working actress.

Her only feature film was Desk Set in 1957, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Sue was the third of three assistant

researchers, along with Joan Blondell and Dina Merrill, who made up the staff of the Research Department at a fictitious television network. The film was adapted from the Broadway play The Desk Set written by William Marchant that originally starred Shirley Booth for 296 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York from October 24 to July 7, 1955. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Booth would repeat her role in the film, which ultimately did not happen.

…And Along Came Beaver

Leave It to Beaver was created by writers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher and broadcast initially on CBS (then ABC) from October 4, 1957 to June 20, 1963, for six full 39-week seasons (234 episodes).

The series centered around Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver (Jerry Mathers), and his adventures at home, school, and around his neighborhood. Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont starred as Beaver’s parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and Tony Dow as Beaver’s brother, Wally. We assume that RetroFan readers are familiar with this iconic series in general [and if not, the show and three of its stars will be featured in a forthcoming issue—ed.], so I will keep the focus on Sue Randall as Beaver’s schoolteacher, Miss Landers.

Actually, Sue wasn’t Beaver’s first teacher. That was “Miss Canfield,” played by Diane Brewster for four episodes when the show first went to series.

Miss Canfield: “Theodore...”

Beaver: “My name’s ‘Beaver’.”

Miss Canfield: “‘Beaver’? Is that your given name?”

Beaver: “Yes ma’am. [pauses] My brother gave it to me.”

Sue Randall came on board as Miss Alice Landers in “Ward’s Problem” (S2/Ep42, October 16, 1958). Diane Brewster was

(TOP LEFT) Print ad for Desk Set, a rare version that features the full cast, including Sue Randall (FAR LEFT). (TOP RIGHT) Sue Randall as Ruthie Saylor. (CENTER) Sue Randall and Katharine Hepburn. Turns out Hepburn was something of a mentor to Sue, which is likely how she came to be in the film. (BOTTOM RIGHT) Director Walter Lang pours tea during a break in filming. Known for her sharp wit, it appears from the delighted expressions on the faces of (LEFT TO RIGHT) Dina Merrill, Spencer Tracy, and Sue Randall that Joan Blondell (in black dress) has cracked-wise at the expense of a chagrined Mr. Lang.

Desk Set © 20th Century Fox.

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The Leave It to Beaver first season opening title.

Each subsequent season had a new opening. The theme music is “The Toy Parade,” written for the series by Dave Kahn, Melvyn Leonard, and Mort Greene. Although the song had lyrics, the show always used an instrumental version. For the third season, the tempo was quickened and the tune whistled by a male chorus, and the final season featured a new version arranged by prolific jazz composer Pete Rugolo (who also wrote for Thriller, The Fugitive, Run for Your Life, Felony Squad, Alias Smith and Jones, and Family). Leave It to Beaver © NBCUniversal Television.

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unavailable to continue as Miss Canfield due to a scheduling conflict with the production of Torpedo Run (1958), in which she appeared as Glenn Ford’s wife. Sue stayed on for a total of 29 episodes through 1962. An interesting side note is that like many TV series that required contemporary wardrobe (and may have been on a tight budget), Sue Randall was required to buy or provide her own clothes for her role as Miss Landers.

The Plot Thickens…

Two “Miss Landers” episodes stand out.

The first is “Teacher Comes to Dinner” (S3/ Ep9, November 28, 1959). Beaver expresses joy at being in Miss Landers’ class so his mother, June, invites Miss Landers for dinner.

Beaver: My mother invited Miss Landers to dinner.

Larry: To eat?

Beaver: Sure. You can’t invite somebody to dinner without letting them eat.

Larry: Boy, Beaver, this could be the worst thing that ever happened to you in your whole life.

(LEFT) (LEFT TO RIGHT) Sue Randall (Miss Landers), Stephen Talbot (Gilbert), Jerry Mathers (Beaver), and Lelani Sorensen (“Classmate”) in “The School Picture” (S4/Ep30, April 22, 1961). (RIGHT) Jerry Mathers and Sue Randall display good ol’ American values throughout the series. At one point in the series Beaver muses, “I wouldn’t wanna do anything to hurt God. He’s got enough trouble with the Russians and all.” © NBCUniversal Television.

Beaver’s concern mounts, and as June is fixing the dinner, Beaver looks on:

BEAVER GIVES MISS LANDERS THE SLIP In the episode “Last Day of School” (S3/Ep38, original airdate June 18, 1960), June buys a gift for Miss Landers on Beaver’s behalf, since he can’t think of what he should give her. June settles on handkerchiefs, a sensible, “neutral” choice, but the purchase gets accidentally switched for lingerie at the department store. Wally and Beaver sneak an advance look and— Wally: “Boy, Beaver, it’s a slip!”

Beaver: “That’s some kind of ladies’ underwear, isn’t it?”

Wally: “Sure, it’s some kind of ladies’ underwear!”

Beaver: “Gee, Wally, I can’t give Miss Landers underwear in front of the whole class!”

Wally: “Well, maybe you could. You’re just a little kid.”

Beaver: “Yeah, but I’m not that little of a kid!”

Beaver: Nothing in here could poison anybody, could it, Mom? June: Why, of course not, Beaver!

Beaver: Larry said Miss Landers might eat something and get toenail poisoning.

June: You mean ptomaine poisoning?

Beaver: Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he said if she got it, she might get mad and flunk me and stuff.

The thing I related to in this episode, and I think is a good example as to why the series has endured, is the notion of the teacher out of her element and out in the real world. And on top of that, in your own house. I think we’ve all experienced that from time to time: your regular bank teller seen at the grocery store prompts that dilemma, “Where do I know her from…?” and that sort of thing. Our family never had a teacher over for dinner, but I do remember that my science teacher in the Fifth Grade was dating a woman from the front office and there they were at the movie theater together! I can’t tell you the name of the movie to save my life—I spent more time stealing sideward glances across the aisle than I did looking at the screen…

The second memorable episode is “Miss Landers’ Fiancé” (S4/Ep7, November 12, 1960). As the title suggests, this was the heartbreaker Beaver is shocked to see the wedding announcement. © NBCUniversal Television.

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for Beaver (and the rest of us). We never knew much about Miss Landers’ personal life, which made this development come as all the more of a shock. She’s engaged to a man named Tom Brittingham (Jack Powers). Oddly enough, though, while Miss Landers appears in another nine episodes, there’s no further mention of an eventual marriage or “Tom.” (Good riddance as far as I’m concerned.)

Sue Randall continued to appear in supporting or guest-star roles throughout the Sixties, intermixed with her appearances on Leave It to Beaver. I was too young to have made the connection, but I wonder if anyone blurted out “It’s Miss Landers!” during Gunsmoke or The Twilight Zone.

Rather than delve into summaries of all these shows, here’s a photo gallery of Sue’s appearances in a handful of TV episodes.

Sue guest-starred in a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “From Agnes – With Love” (S5 Ep20, February 14, 1964). James Elwood (Wally Cox) is a shy computer technician who listens to a meddling supercomputer named “Agnes” for advice on his love life. Sue plays Millie, Elwood’s co-worker—and crush—who finally agrees to go on a date with him. But Millie is smitten by the handsome Walter Holmes (Ralph Taeger), and Elwood catches them at Walter’s apartment cutting loose (with Millie dancing barefoot, the little minx!).

This episode was directed by Richard Donner, who would later helm the first Superman movie (1978; RetroFan #3). Donner’s assistant, Amy Roy, kindly inquired on my behalf but Mr. Donner said that he had no recollection of Sue in particular, so I’ll take that as having been a positive “no-problem” experience. © CBS.

In the Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened” (S1/Ep11, December 11, 1959), Sue played a nurse attending to three astronauts (Rod Taylor, Jim Hutton, and Charles Aidman) who return to Earth after a strange encounter and vanish one by one. Although Sue has only a small part (and is only identified as “Nurse”), this is a truly excellent episode based on the equally superb 1953 Richard Matheson short story Disappearing Act. © CBS.

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(LEFT TO RIGHT) Jackie Coogan, Art Carney, and Sue Randall in “Charley’s Aunt,” from the anthology series Playhouse 90 (S1/ Ep26, March 28, 1957). The episode is notable for its interesting roster of talent: Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and written by Leslie Stevens (co-creator of The Outer Limits), with additional cast consisting of Orson Bean (Anatomy of a Murder), Richard Haydn (Young Frankenstein), Tom Tryon (I Married a Monster from Outer Space and author of The Other), Steve Forrest and Sue Venetia Stevenson (Horror Hotel), and Jeanette MacDonald (San Francisco, and famous as operetta singing partner Randall in “See the Elephant and Hear the Owl,” Death to Nelson Eddy). And if that’s not enough, the music was Valley Days (S12 Ep25, April composed by Russell Garcia, who would famously score George Pal’s film The Time Machine a few years later. © CBS. 28, 1964).

Miss Landers becomes Miss Turner in My Favorite Martian (S2/Ep22, February 28, 1965). Tim accidentally shrinks Uncle Martin’s spaceship and it becomes the model for a toy version. How to get it back from the department store as it starts to grow back to its original size? © CBS.

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Sue Randall as Elaine Randall, the daughter of a man sentenced to hang, in the “Judgment” episode of The Rebel, starring Nick Adams (S1/ Ep2, October 11, 1959). © ABC.

Sue Randall, Troy Donahue, and Jay Chamberlain in the Surfside 6 episode “Spinout at Sebring” (S1/Ep32, May 8, 1961). The series was about three hip private detectives living and working out of a houseboat in Miami, Florida (although regular cast member Troy Donahue was not one of the detectives). © Warner Bros. Television.

Sue appeared in three episodes of 77 Sunset Strip: “Hit and Run” (1959), “Strange Girl in Town” (1959), and “The Affairs of Adam Gallante” (1960). Here she looks longingly at Edd “Kookie” Byrnes (“Gerald Kookson III”) as he once again combs his hair on the show. This habit inspired the song “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb,” performed

by Byrnes and Connie Stevens, which reached #4 on the pop charts. © Warner

Sue appeared in six episodes of Death Valley Days. These two images are from the episode “The Private Mint of Clark, Gruber & Co.” (S11/Ep12, December 28, 1962).

Bros. Television.

Sue appeared in two Perry Mason episodes, “The Case of the Ill-Fated Faker” (S4/Ep3, October 1, 1960), the first filmed for the fourth season though aired as the third show, and “The Case of the Garrulous Go-Between” (S7/Ep22, March 12, 1964). © CBS.

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CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF… Some reports are incorrect regarding Sue Randall’s screen appearances:

Sue appeared in the “No Exchange on Damaged Merchandise” episode of I Spy (S1/Ep9, November 10, 1965). © NBC.

© Walter Wanger Productions.

(TOP) Sue appeared in two episodes of Hennesey starring Jackie Cooper, “The Matchmaker” (S1/Ep13, December 28, 1959) and “The Green-Eyed Monster” (S2/Ep24, April 3, 1961). (BOTTOM) (LEFT TO RIGHT) Sue Randall, Jackie Cooper, and Cooper’s Hennesey co-star Abby Dalton. © CBS.

Sue’s final episode of Death Valley Days was in the episode “The Courtship of Carrie Huntington” (S14/Ep8, March 17, 1966), where she played opposite of Jeff Pearson.

(LEFT TO RIGHT) Will Hutchins, Karl Swenson, and Sue Randall in the Sugarfoot episode “The Mysterious Stranger” (S2/Ep12, February 17, 1959). © Warner Bros. Television.

Sue appeared in three episodes of Sea Hunt opposite the “Undersea Investigator,” Lloyd Bridges: “Rescue” (S4/Ep7, February 18, 1961), “Superman” (S4/Ep32, August 12, 1961), and “Crime at Sea” (S4/Ep37, September 16, 1961). Photos shown here are from the episode “Superman.” © United Artists Television.

Some have thought that Sue appeared in Don Siegel’s classic sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

However, my friend Mark Thomas McGee, author of the book Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The Making of a Classic (2012), checked his extensive files and could find no listing for Sue among call sheets, or even lists of actors considered for the film but not hired. Since the production hired local extras for the townspeople, it’s possible that Sue is in the crowd shown here. Probably not, though, since she was likely still living and working in New York in 1955–1956. (Incidentally, this location is in Beachwood, California, down below the Hollywood sign, and you can stand on the very spot of this camera angle.)

It has been reported that Sue appeared in William Marchant’s play The Desk Set on Broadway, thus assuming that this led to her role in the film version. However, this error is likely based on the fact that Sue’s role in the film (“Ruthie Saylor”) was first performed on stage by Anne-Marie Gayer, but as of June 25, 1956 was taken over

by Martha Randall. Martha Randall… Sue Randall… (at least it wasn’t Tony Randall).

The image below image popped up on the internet and while I cannot determine the artist, this is merely fan art, though nicely done. After meticulous research, I can confirm that Sue did not appear in any episode of The Love Boat. Wishful thinking by a clever fan.(Her image here appears to be taken from her episode of I Spy.) © Aaron Spelling Productions.

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Final Days

Sue retired from acting in 1967 at age 32 following a severe car accident that left her with a scar over her eye. Her final credit was on the episode “Heaven Help Us” of Vacation Playhouse (S5/Ep4, August 14, 1967), a summer-replacement series that spotlighted unsold TV pilots. Sue returned to Philadelphia and became involved in charitable benefits such as the Multiple Sclerosis Telethon, Joey Bishop’s Telethon for Handicapped Children, and the Arthritis Fund.

Sue Randall was married twice, first to Peter Blake Powell in 1957. The couple had two sons, Blake and Kenneth, but the marriage ended in divorce. Sue’s second husband was James J. McSparron.

In the Leave It to Beaver episode “Teacher Comes to Dinner” (S3, 1959), Gilbert, Whitey, and Larry are up in a tree spying on Miss Landers and the Cleaver family eating dinner at their picnic table in the backyard— Gilbert: This isn’t worth a quarter. I want my money back!

Whitey: Me, too! Nothin’ good is happening.

Larry: Well, come on guys! Let’s wait ’til dessert.

Gilbert: Nah! Who wants to see her eatin’ dessert?

Larry: Well, after dessert she might even smoke!

Gilbert: Smoke?

Whitey: You mean like a cigarette?

Larry: Well, sure!

Whitey: Boy, that would be worth a quarter to see that!

In real life Sue Randall was a heavy smoker (you’ll recall mention of that TV commercial for Newport cigarettes earlier in this article). Of course, back in those days, almost everybody smoked cigarettes (an unfair and memory-challenged criticism of the excellent series Mad Men, too). Unfortunately, Sue apparently developed an extreme smoking habit and was diagnosed with lung and larynx cancer in 1982.

Mike Lefebvre, author, researcher, and collector, was preparing a book on Leave It to Beaver and called up Sue back in late 1983.

A raspy, growly voice answered the phone, Mike asked to speak with Sue Randall, and the phone was handed off. Sue’s second husband, “Jim” McSparron, came on the line. Mike again said he’d like to speak with Sue Randall and Jim said, “That was Sue Randall.” By that time Sue had been given treatments and her larynx had been removed. Mike had a pleasant conversation with Jim, who was friendly and cordial, and who indicated that despite her condition, Sue was in good spirits.

Mike also relayed the story that Robert “Rusty” Stevens (“Larry Mondello” on Leave It to Beaver) was in Philadelphia in the early Eighties and happened to pass by Sue Randall. Except that he didn’t even recognize her. Apparently, by then the cancer had taken its toll.

Sue passed away on October 26, 1984 at Pennsylvania Hospital in her hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was 49 years old. Per her wishes, her body was donated to the Humanity Gifts Registry in Philadelphia for medical research.

Perhaps “Miss Landers” has left us with one last lesson about the dangers of smoking.

Sue’s son, Blake Powell, has said that Sue “was exactly like the ‘Miss Landers’ character. She was kind and considerate, and never raised her voice in anger, but could give you one look of disappointment that would change evil little boys’ ways. She also never tried to act in any way ‘above’ anybody else. She was loved by people from all stations of life.” Blake also said that it was between Sue and Mary Tyler Moore to play Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. A message from Blake on the Facebook group The Leave it to Beaver Fan Club said that he really does appreciate Leave It to Beaver and all the fans, and that “It is nice to know there are people out there appreciating all the talented actors on the show.”

Jerry Mathers remembered his co-star fondly, saying that she was “a wonderful friend and mentor.”

My thanks to John Ellis, Mike Lefebvre, Mark Thomas McGee, and Amy Roy. ERNEST FARINO recently directed an episode of the SyFy/Netflix series Superstition starring Mario Van Peebles, as well as serving as Visual Effects Consultant. Previously Farino directed Steel and Lace starring Bruce Davison, episodes of Monsters starring Lydia Cornell and Marc McClure, ABC’s Land of the Lost starring Timothy Bottoms, and extensive 2nd Unit for the miniseries Dune starring William Hurt, Noah’s Ark starring Jon Voight, and Supernova starring Luke Perry. A two-time Emmy®winning Visual Effects Supervisor for SyFy’s Dune and Children of Dune miniseries, Farino supervised the Emmy-nominated visual effects for the Tom Hanks/HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon; James Cameron’s The Terminator, The Abyss, and T2; as well as Starship Troopers, Snow White–A Tale of Terror, Creepshow, and many others. His publishing enterprise, Archive Editions, has published Mike Hankin’s elaborate three-volume book set Ray Harryhausen – Master of the Majicks, The FXRH Collection, and more.

(LEFT) Sue Randall on a seaside vacation, c. 1983. (RIGHT) James J. “Jim” McSparron, Sue’s second husband. Photos courtesy of Mike Lefebvre. (BOTTOM) Sue Randall’s obituary notice, 1984.

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RETRO REMEMBRANCE ,

My Friend,

By Mike Pingel Once upon a time there was an actress named Tanya Roberts who became known around the world as Charlie’s final Angel when she joined the hit TV show Charlie’s Angels in 1980 as Julie Rogers, the “Streetwise” Angel. That was my first introduction to this heavenly beauty. I was a huge Charlie’s Angels fan since 1977, and of course even today. I created a newsletter (Angelic Heaven) and website (www.charliesAngels.com) dedicated to the actresses and their hit series.

My friendship with Tanya began 20+ years ago when I did my very first Angel interview (by telephone) with her for the newsletter in 1998. At that time, Tanya was starring as the sexy mother Midge Pinciotti in the hilarious comedy, That ’70s Show.

One of the questions I asked her to compare a day on the set of Charlie’s Angels to a day on That ’70s Show.

Tanya told me: “On That ’70s Show, I come in at 10am and leave at 4:30pm. We rehearse all week—first day read through the script, then script into rewrites… every day the cast works on read-throughs. Then on Thursday, we have dress rehearsals and on Friday, we shoot the show. On Charlie’s Angels… in make-up at 7am, then [I] got home at 7pm! In filming Charlie’s Angels we did a lot of waiting around, for different shots… such as close-ups. I hate waiting around.”

Unknown to me at the time, I would meet Tanya in person shortly after that phone interview. My friend Jules and I went to grab frozen yogurt after the gym in West Hollywood. The woman in front of us was telling her order and I looked at Jules and said, “I think that’s Tanya Roberts,” and it was. I went over and introduced myself and met her husband Barry.

Our meetings kept happening. I was to film a segment for our local Fox channel in injunction with promoting That ’70s Show. The topper of the interview I was able to go to the That ’70s Show set and meet Tanya on camera. During the interview I even asked Tanya to “marry me”! LOL. She declined since she was already married.

From there, our friendship grew. I created her first website, went with her to fan signings, and worked as her publicist. This past year I co-hosted

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with her The Live Chats with Tanya Roberts. We went live every Saturday on Facebook, where Tanya would chat with her fans.

She loved doing she show and meeting her fans from around the world. It’s a blast of the show. All our shows can be viewed on YouTube.

After the cancellation of Charlie’s Angels, Tanya set her sights back to the silver screen. She went on to star as Kiri in The Beastmaster, and then posed for a nude layout in Playboy magazine. She is also took on the comic world with the featurefilm version of Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. Then in 1985 she became Bond Girl, Stacey Sutton, in A View to a Kill.

During my first interview with Tanya, I asked her about each of her major iconic projects. Here was her response for each one: Charlie’s Angels – “gorgeous, fabulous” The Beastmaster – “magical; surprise, never-expected cult hit; wonderful” Playboy (nude layout) – “Strange, I’m shy with being naked; scary; never will do again” Sheena – “fabulous; LOVED Africa” A View to a Kill – “total luxury; best of everything” That ’70s Show – “MOST FUN I EVER HAD” Tanya Roberts was born Victoria Leigh Blum, on October 15th, 1955, in the Bronx, New York. She dropped out of high school at 15 and hitchhiked around the country, looking for adventure.

She eventually returned to New York City, and began a career in modeling.

I was an Army brat living in Germany when the final season of Charlie’s Angels came on the air, introducing Tanya Roberts to the world. I was excited for the new Angel, but sadly AFN (Armed Forces Network) actually never showed the final season. It was not until I returned to the States, when TNT used to show the series, that I was finally able to watch her episodes. Years later, after graduating college, I moved to Los Angeles with dreams of being an actor.

There is that a wellknown saying, “Never meet your idols.” Well, Tanya was exactly what you would expect—she was wonderful, funny, and never lost her New Yorker “whatever” attitude.

Tanya Roberts One fond memory with Tanya was, we were in my car. As we were driving, we both started singing Duran Duran’s song, “A View to a Kill,” the title track from her 007 film.

When would that ever happen? It will be one of many cherished memories with her.

Tanya was always up for doing something silly. I remember we were at the mall during one Christmas shopping and I thought we should take a picture with Santa. Tanya said, “Sure,” and we went down and took a photo with the jolly St. Nick. But turned out we both hated the photo.

Tanya loved sushi. Her favorite restaurant was Katsu-Ya in Studio City, California, which we ate at so many times throughout the years. She began dragging me along and to be honest, I was never a fan of it, but Tanya taught me all about sushi and I now love it. I would always order the California roll with tempura shrimp on top. She always made fun of me that I love the ones with deep fried shrimp on top. Yet sometime during the meal she would steal one or two them. It always made us laugh!

Tanya was a health freak. Every morning she would take a hike with her dogs and drink her green smoothie when she got home. I took a hike with her once. I could not do it again; the hike was hard and wore me out!

She stayed in the house all of last year, not wanting to catch COVID-19, but sadly, an unchecked UTI was the cause of her death, on January 4, 2021. UTI is very common in women over 65, and

unchecked can be fatal. If you have any symptoms, check with your doctor; UTIs are preventable when caught early.

Tanya was a huge animal advocate. She owned many dogs, cats, koi-fish, birds, and frogs throughout her life. Her fur-babies were her life. If you would like to honor this beautiful soul, please make a donation to ASPCA.org.

Tanya was taken away from all of us way to soon. She was eager for the pandemic to get over and return to acting hopefully in a TV comedy.

What will I remember about my friend will be her smile, her laugh, and her love of life. I will miss chatting the most, we could talk about anything… and we did.

One of my favorite questions I asked Tanya in that 1998 interview was, “How did it feel to be the new kid on the block on Charlie’s Angels?” Tanya’s response was: “Great, and tough—the stars were tired of the show, knowing the end of the series was coming soon. I came at the end of the party.”

For Tanya, life was a party.

Sadly, she has now left the party too soon, which hurts my heart. Tanya was a wonderful, beautiful, and authentic woman, actress, friend, and Angel.

MIKE PINGEL has published seven books including Channel Surfing: Charlie’s Angels, Channel Surfing: Wonder Woman, and recently, Betty White Rules the World. He also hosts two online shows, Collector’s Heaven and The Mike Pingel Show. He has worked as a freelance publicist for over 20 years in Hollywood. Pingel owns and runs the CharliesAngels. com website and was Farrah Fawcett’s personal assistant. www.mikepingel.com RETROFAN

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SCOTT SAAVEDRA'S SECRET SANCTUM

Weekly Reader

12+

My

By Scott Saavedra

d do such a thing? Let's find out!

A newspaper for school children? Who woul

Special Introduction

Our week has seven days. That is a lot. We need so many days because we are all so very busy. On Monday the school days of the week begin.

All week long we study and learn

and boys get their very own copy of My Weekly Reader. My Weekly Reader is full of stories about important events just like your father’s newspaper but without extra words that

not a school day so you can watch television cartoons and eat sugar cereal until your head feels funny?

No! Friday is the best day because that is the school day all the girls

of all, there are no words that will make you sad. Well, except for the part of this story where My Weekly Reader dies…

and have lunch and milk. The last day of the school week is Friday. It is the best school day. Is it because the next day is Saturday and that is

would make you sad. RetroFan is a magazine that is almost the same as My Weekly Reader. RetroFan has stories about important old television shows and good toys and best

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In the interest of full disclosure: I do MWR referred to itself as “The Children’s Newspaper,” but not recall getting My Weekly Reader in they managed to leave out important details and even stay elementary school. I remember getting a away from upsetting topics, so wanting “to know more” competitor’s magazine, Junior Scholastic, in was entirely understandable. Weekly Reader: 60 Years of middle school. I liked Junior Scholastic a lot News for Kids, 1928–1988 (World Almanac, 1988), a book and even kept several copies for decades prepared by the then-current staff of Weekly Reader (the until finally returning them to the earth. But word My having been dropped by then), admitted as much, RetroFan didn’t get requests from readers indicating their policy was designed to “avoid difficult or for an article about Junior Scholastic… they controversial discussions in the classroom.” wanted to read about My Weekly Reader, so It’s true that there would be stories the newspaper felt here we are. could be safely overlooked (Did an eight-year-old in 1929 My Weekly Reader was a slim magazineabsolutely need to hear about the stock market crash?— sized newspaper for elementary school probably not), while others couldn’t passed over. The children. It was between four and eight pages long. The writing shattering assassination of President John F. Kennedy was too and design were clear and basic. There were eventually editions big a story to ignore, and yet their four-page “Special Memorial geared for all elementary school grades featuring news stories Section” (Dec. 1963) was mostly photos and a transcript of his and other information of interest. There was often a comic strip inaugural speech. It doesn’t mention the assassination at all. or some other cartoon, and a study guide on the last page. Special Kennedy was simply not alive anymore. Even as news for kids, it’s sections were sometimes included for the areas of science, health, a very elemental fact to not address. etc. Twenty-five issues were published during the school year and Despite such weak spots in its news coverage over the years, a Summer edition was available during, you know, the Summer. the desire to drive young minds to an interest in current events Judging from comments online, getting the latest My Weekly was a solid one. That goal, and My Weekly Reader’s story, began Reader (MWR) was also a nice break from the classroom routine nearly 120 years ago with a publication called, quite sensibly, for many students. If you were Current Events. lucky, the teacher would pass out copies and let everyone read Twin Births in class and then answer the Separated by Years study guide questions at their Current Events was the creation own speed. A quiet time for all of Charles Palmer Davis, a (especially the teacher). That former journalist and school method of distribution may have board member. When visiting been common. But RetroFan reader classrooms he noted that the school children were largely Doug Abramson wrote to share that unaware of the greater world during his elementary school years around them, not even able (1977–1984) Weekly Reader appeared to identify the then-serving in with the Sunday comics section of president of the United States his local newspaper. Unfortunately, (the sadly doomed William as we shall see, there are some McKinley). Davis was unsettled areas of MWR history that remain and felt that an education that somewhat murky. didn’t “prepare young people In whatever way they got their for better citizenship” needed copies, former children recalled to be fixed. His proposed the satisfaction of having their own solution was to create a news source like mom and dad newspaper for public school did. Some just enjoyed reading the kids. news, while others would sit with The first issue of Current friends later to discuss the stories Events was published May 20, from the latest issue. Early in 2020, 1902. Only a few hundred were author Rick Houser wrote in The printed, but the newspaper, Clermot Sun that “the Weekly Reader designed for middle and was the foundation of moving me This special section of My Weekly Reader (Dec. 1963) was high school students, grew towards growing into a thirst to intended for second grade students (note the number 2 in in popularity. That first issue want to know more.” He wasn’t the masthead).

Nothing inside even alludes to President put down a marker that would alone.

Kennedy’s assassination.

Unless otherwise mentioned, all also apply later to MWR. Each However, not to be too snarky images are from the collection of the author.

Junior Scholastic & issue would provide “prompt, about it since we are talking about My Weekly Reader TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved. reliable, fresh, clean” news news for children here, MWR could without “harmful features come up short as a news source.

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Scott Saavedra's secret sanctum

of the daily press.” It would also be affordable so that it could certainly a component of the newspaper’s success. Johnson be read by all students and present “a broader view of life.” The had experience writing educational material for children with success of Current Events led to the formation of the American some 50 workbooks to her credit in a variety of subjects, so her Education Press, Inc. (AEP) around the First World War. About a commitment to education is not in question. decade later, My Weekly Reader would find a home there.

The reason Johnson did not immediately join the staff was The credit for the creation of MWR is generally given to that she already had jobs in education during MWR’s early years. educator Eleanor Murdoch Johnson. Much like Davis before her, So while she was not initially an employee of the American Johnson noticed that elementary school students were getting Education Press, she did meet with its editors and have input on an incomplete education. She felt weekends until 1934 when she that “pupils had no idea of what became MWR’s editor-in-chief. was happening in the world—not Johnson would remain in that a flicker.” The innovation for her role until 1971 while consulting for conception of a newspaper for years after that. students was in creating a targeted As with any publication, edition for each elementary grade. success is never truly the result of The first issue of MWR was released just one person. The first editor of with a cover date of September 21, MWR was Martha Fulton. Fulton 1928 and was quickly successful. was the principal writer as well.

The best available biographical The managing editor of MWR information about Johnson (and and AEP’s president, Harrison the source of the preceding quote) Sayre, felt that Fulton’s work was a is an extended excerpt—in the definite source of the newspaper’s York Daily Record (Dec. 31, 2007)— success. from Legacies, an out-of-print York, Though he died in 1921, well Pennsylvania, history of the area’s before MWR was published, notable women. the impact of Charles Palmer Despite MWR’s success, Johnson Davis was also important to the was not employed by AEP in the publication. He devised Current newspaper’s early years. It would Events’ mission statement, which be this absence that, for some, was also used for My Weekly contributes to undermining her Reader: “To awaken [children’s] claim to being not just a founder interest in the great world in which but of having a significant influence they live… prepare them for good on the early days of MWR. citizenship… and help equip them Some of the car safety innovations discussed in For such a beloved publication for success.” this May 4, 1966 issue eventually became standard, there has been very little written on MWR’s own success was like airbags and shoulder straps. Sliding passenthe subject beyond business-centric immediate, a rare beacon of good ger doors? Not so much. TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. All (adult) newspaper articles and business news once the Great Rights Reserved. random blog posts and comments Depression unfurled its dark (“I looooved it!”). Most everything tentacles across a wounded nation of significance about the history of MWR has come from a short (you’d never see that kind of purple prose in MWR). No matter mid-Sixties booklet, History of American Education Publications, Inc., the events of the day, MWR tried to stay positive. Bad news was 1902–1965, by Charles E. Martz, an AEP editor. History does give diminished and ways to overcome obstacles were presented.

Johnson credit for founding MWR. However, an academic thesis, The first headline from the first issue provides not just a prime The Weekly Reader: A Corporate History, 1965–1995, by Cindi Lee example of MWR’s style but is often a component of articles about Weldy, notes that Charles Palmer Davis’ son Preston Davis thought the newspaper (ahem): “Two poor boys who made good are now that some of Martz’s work was flawed (with some details “the running for the highest office in the world!” The candidates were product of someone’s imagination”). Exactly what was wrong and Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. how is unknown. Weldy also suggests that Johnson’s contributions The thought that two poor boys, proxies for many children (so were “over emphasized.” Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry (yeah, long as they were boys), was a powerfully hopeful message. Of yeah) for MWR under its more modern name, Weekly Reader, doesn’t course, it wasn’t very inclusive, but it was a reflection of the time. even mention Johnson as having the idea for the newspaper in the But times change. And to their credit, the writers and editors did first place. attempt to keep up.

Despite the contradictions of what meager historical record The world grew more connected and complex as the there is, Johnson herself said she came up with the idea for the turbulent Sixties made way for the political and financial publication of news for students, and there doesn’t appear to be upheaval of the Seventies before landing in the “greed is good” any bold contemporary contradiction of that fact. Her concept Eighties. MWR did eventually address tough subjects that might of a specialized edition for each of the elementary grades was have been given a pass in the Forties and Fifties, as well as RETROFAN

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topics that still to this day get folks’ backs up in a crunch, like the Equal Rights Amendment.

What kind of stories did they cover during our formative years?

Let’s have a look, shall we?

News of a World Getting Smaller Everyday

The Sixties: Technology and science were popular subjects during the Space Race as the U.S. and the Soviet Union strove for everescalating advances in space science. “The First Satellite Phone Call” was made from New Jersey to California by bouncing a signal off of a satellite. The story pointed out that satellites would allow for live television broadcasts and phone calls around the globe. As many as 50 satellites were planned.

The Apollo 11 lunar landing (effectively calling the U.S. as the winner of the Space Race) was covered in nice detail, though Neil Armstrong’s famous “One small step for [a] man…” statement is incorrectly reported (or more correctly, Armstrong’s preplanned comments came out wrong but were reported as intended to be spoken).

The same story has President Richard Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew, indicating that a trip to Mars should have Americans on the red planet by 1999.

Time for a joke from the comic strip Peanut and Jocko (a regular feature). Jocko is a monkey. Peanut is an elephant, and they are both warmly dressed (this has no bearing on the joke but is mentioned to set the scene).

They both see a tall building and Jocko wonders how many stories it has. Peanut laughs (“Ha, ha, ha!”). “It’s a building not a book!” Then Jocko laughs (“Ha, ha, ha!”).

President Lyndon Johnson declares a “War on Poverty.” The listed descriptions of poverty are sound enough (lack of food, lack of work, and “not enough clothes”), but reporting that the United States is the richest nation in the world because we are a land of “ranch-style homes” is weird.

“Are Paper Clothes Here to Stay?” MWR is non-committal (the correct answer is no—see RetroFan #14 for more on that).

Amazingly, there was reporting on the Vietnam War, but the Johnson Administration was less than honest with the public so I’m not going to trash a children’s newspaper for any reporting weaknesses. They noted that “Others in the U.S. are against direct U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam… These people are Doves.” (Doves aren't people, they're birds. Ha, ha, ha!). Here’s a fun fact about Vietnam: The country has only two seasons, “hot and dry” and “hot and rainy.”

On the civil rights front, Thurgood Marshall is lauded as the first “Negro” judge on the Supreme Court. And in a striking shift from just a few years earlier when JFK was murdered, MWR gets right to the point about Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, saying up front that he “was struck down by a sniper’s bullet.” In the more hopeful vein that was a hallmark of MWR stories, they also reported that Dr. King’s efforts for racial equality would continue and of a call for a national holiday to be named after the civil rights icon, which did eventually happen.

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The Seventies: This was the decade when I became more aware of the world around me, and I’ve got to say at the time that I was terrified about drug use. I was warned before attending middle school in 1972 that heroin use was “all over.” Nope. You know what was “all over” my middle school? Exploded ketchup packages.

Stomping on them was some kind of bizarre ritual or something.

I stomped on a ketchup package exactly once. It shot straight into my pants and up my leg. So… drugs. MWR warned kids that they shouldn’t “Meth” with drugs. Just say “no” to those ketchup packages too.

“New TV Show Enjoyed by All” reports that Sesame (SESa-me) Street is a young kid’s program watched and enjoyed by everybody, regardless of age. It has puppets and cartoon (LEFT) Students (or more likely, their parents) could subscribe to My Weekly Reader during summer vacation. This copy was mailed to a home in York, Pennsylvania. Have you heard of York recently? What important person was once celebrated in a York newspaper?

(BELOW) Matters of Good Citizenship were important to the staff of My Weekly Reader. TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved.

characters and puppets and games. It even has a photo of Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson with the caption, “Puppet and Puppeteer.”

Attention, youths. Your family might have a television set made in Japan. Quick, go check the back of the TV! One in three American homes have television sets… “Made in Japan.” This is actually an interesting piece that explains why Japanese products were becoming more popular (“nine out of ten” transistor radios are from Japan!): cheap labor, lower prices, and good quality are the main culprits. Possible solutions to this problem mention tariffs (referred to somewhat benignly as “taxes”) or having U.S. manufacturers giving up on markets they can’t effectively compete in. Unmentioned is the fact that not many years earlier “Made in Japan” meant cheap and poorly made.

Cable television and its benefits were presented in “Is Cable TV Coming to Your Home?” MWR wanted you to imagine a world with cable TV where you could watch 20, 30, even 40 channels. One channel might even have weather, news, and the time continuously on tap. All for only $5, $6, or even $7 a month!

In the early Eighties, one of my brothers worked for a local cable company, so my parents had a full set-up including HBO. HBO’s movie line-up was pretty weak, as I recall. My mom and sister

Scott Saavedra's secret sanctum

watched An Officer and a Gentleman so often you’d think it was the only film in HBO’s library (and you wouldn’t be far wrong).

President Richard Nixon, following the arrest and conviction of the Watergate burglars (five men who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate hotel, which we’ll revisit next year in RetroFan #19), is quoted as saying in “Watergate Whodunnit” that “no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.”

For their part, Nixon’s fellow Republicans were worried about a loss of trust in Government that the ongoing scandal could create.

Yeah, that would be bad.

Other stories of import were the Energy Crisis (when, for various reasons, oil supply didn’t meet demand), women wanting to enter the work force and do jobs traditionally done by men (“a big work field for women is expected to be home appliance repair”), the popular Hamill Haircut (based on Olympian Dorothy Hamill’s follicle stylings and not Mark Hamill’s, though, frankly, there wasn’t much of a difference then), and a story about baby harp seals with a photo showing a hunter “kill [a] white-coated pup with a crushing blow to the skull.”

The Eighties: By this time, MWR was known as Weekly Reader (WR). Students of the Eighties had a very turbulent decade. As the staff of WR put it, they “responded head-on” with more news than in previous decades, giving special attention to possible solutions to national problems.

In “Tribesmen Resist Soviet Invaders,” there is literally no mention of Soviets invading Afghanistan. There are interesting facts about the country and its people like, f’rinstance: “every man owns a gun” and “travelers are welcomed into homes” and

WEEKLY READER STUDENT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION POLL MWR began asking its readers who they’d pick for president in 1940 (President Franklin D. Roosevelt over Wendell Willkie) and in the decades since has had a pretty good track record of reflecting the national mood. On occasion they’d get it wrong, as in 1948 when students picked Thomas E. Dewey rather than President Harry S. Truman, and when they picked Richard Nixon over JFK in 1960. But usually, as they did most recently in 2020 (Scholastic News has taken over the poll), kids selected the winner when they “elected” Joe Biden for president with 61% of the tally. Scholastic would like you to know that what they now call “The Student Vote” is just an educational activity (so please, no wagering).

TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“Afghanistan may never step into the modern world.” All of which, I have to say, is good information to have.

Under a report about U.S. imports into China is a comic strip.

The comic strip is called The V. P.’s (Vocabulary Pals). A male and female V. P. are conversing. The male is a wizard hat with legs. The

(LEFT) In 1968, disposable paper hospital supplies were an innovation, but more recently when the COVID-19 pandemic began, disposable supplies were in the news again. (CENTER) Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien adds machines and more postal workers to handle increased mail volume with the aim of “overnight delivery” between U.S. cities within the year. Students were often introduced to such stories as examples of America’s Can Do spirit. (RIGHT) Surprise was the kindergarten edition of My Weekly Reader. The surprise was that it carried no news (Bonus: this copy belonged to "Steven"). TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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female is a flapper-style hat with a skirt and legs. The wizard hat doesn’t like trade reporting because he’s “going to mix up import and export again!” The flapper hat lets two farmer hats explain that import means bringing goods in and export means shipping goods out. The flapper hat then belabors the point by telling the wizard hat that “Out is ex-, in is im-, get it?” The wizard hat gets it.

(I love that joke.)

Stop the presses: In an unusually lurid (“Jeremy wipes the blood from his mouth…”) story, “Knocked-Out Tooth Can Be Saved,” Jeremy Miller gets a hole in his smile thanks to a well-

thrown baseball to the face. A dentist returns the tooth to the kid’s mouth.

“Thousands of Searches are Held Yearly to Find Missing Youngsters” is the sub-head to the story “Missing Children.” There is good advice here (we’ve all heard it), but this kind of reporting had to unnerve kids. (The V. P.’s weigh in as a propeller beanie asks, “Is kidnapping a child sleeping?”)

A human baby gets a baboon heart transplant. Little Baby Fae lived for 20 days, which was actually the good news as previous primate transplant patients didn’t live past three and a half days following surgery. There was no word on just how the baboon was persuaded to donate its heart.

In other stories, Sandra Day O’Connor becomes the first woman to be a Supreme Court judge, unemployment reaches 10.1% (“it’s like death,” according to one out-of-work man), and a story about AIDS is both humane and informative.

News You Can Lose

BEYOND MY WEEKLY READER Both Scholastic and Weekly Reader had book fairs that would bring to schools what amounted to a pop-up, kidfriendly bookstore. At Rhoda Street Elementary School, our book fairs were in the auditorium. The sensation of anticipation and excitement as I walked with my mom down the center aisle toward the front of the stage where all the beautiful books were remains one of my strongest childhood memories (that and the whole ketchup package thing).

Book publishing was another project. There were Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club editions of a number of popular books including Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion; Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile by Bernard Waber; and Snoopy and the Red Baron by Charles Schulz. General book collector advice is to avoid book club editions, but apparently Baby Boomers get all nostalgic for these.

READ magazine was for older students (grades 6–10) and featured both non-fiction and fiction. READ ended in 2012 with Scholastic’s purchase of Weekly Reader Corp. Based on the number of volumes published at the time, 61, the magazine had been around since 1950–1951. A solid run for sure.

(ABOVE) Weekly Reader Book Club catalog. Many thanks to Shawn Robare (Brandedinthe80s.com) for the scans.

(RIGHT) READ magazine reached the upper-grade students that Junior Scholastic did (and does, it’s still around). TM ® & © 2021 Scholastic Inc. Star Trek © CBS. All Rights Reserved.

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Weekly Reader celebrated its 60th birthday in 1988. WR continued to be published for years but suffered from the same challenges that other publications faced in a changing media environment.

Adding to their difficulties was the shrinking of school budgets.

Shifting ownership also affected WR. The original publisher was Charles Palmer Davis’ American Education Press. AEP became American Education Publications in 1949 when it was sold to Wesleyan University. From there it was sold to Xerox Corporation in 1965. The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company is often mentioned as an owner of WR, but a specific date of acquisition could not be found. Ripplewood Holdings bought what was now Weekly Reader Corp. in 1999. Ripplewood then merged with Reader’s Digest (at one time having a circulation of many millions) in 2007. Reader’s Digest declared bankruptcy in 2009, affecting WR’s resources, and circulation dropped dramatically. In 2012 Scholastic Inc. purchased both Weekly Reader and Current Events.

The company merged the newspaper with its version of WR, Scholastic News, to create Scholastic News Weekly Reader (a name change that didn’t last). Current Events joined with Junior Scholastic.

All but five of WR’s 60-person staff were laid off. Like many, many MWR stories, I saved the worst news for the end of the report. The idealistic creations of Charles Palmer Davis and Eleanor Murdoch Johnson were now gone.

For all those who look back fondly to My Weekly Reader and, better still, those who found the publication lifeenhancing, the good memories live on. That may not be news, but it is a fact.

Of special help in finding otherwise difficult to track down information about My Weekly Reader was Walter Duane Carpenter’s dissertation “Values, leaders and My Weekly Reader: An historical study.” I am grateful for his research.

SCOTT SAAVEDRA is a Retro Explorer operating from his Southern Californiabased Secret Sanctum. He is a writer (more or less), artist (occasionally), and graphic designer (you’re soaking in it).

Check out his Instagram thing, won’t you, at instagram/scottsaav/

THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!

“Bitten by the Curse of Radio, It’s WOLFMAN JACK, Baby!”

“If someone was to nominate me for the Supreme Court it would be a shame, because with my two-tone wolfish goatee and all I’d probably look great in those dignified robes. But I would never get past the preliminary phase, where they check your closet for skeletons. ’Cause I’ve got enough bones kicking around in there to build my own dinosaur.”

– Robert Weston Smith, a.k.a. “Wolfman Jack”

Wolfman Jack through the years: at KUXL, in the movie American Grafitti, a publicity shot (with fangs!), on TV’s Midnight Special, and as the subject of a 1995 memoir, Have Mercy!, co-written by Byron Laursen. Photos courtesy of Scott Shaw!

American Grafitti © Universal Pictures.

Midnight Special © NBC. Have Mercy! © Grand Central Pub.

by Scott Shaw!

As a kid, I liked beatniks, outlaws, eccentrics, and weirdos. I still do. Many of them inspired what eventually became part of my oddball personality.

Growing up in San Diego, California, a border city, in the mid-Sixties, I raptly listened to a raspy, outrageous, and hilarious fellow who went by the “air name” of “Wolfman Jack” on XERB, a megawatt “border blaster” radio station in nearby Mexico that broadcast prerecorded shows.

While in 11th grade, I spoke like Wolfman Jack for a week just to see if I could get away with it. I drove my parents crazy, especially when my Spanish teacher, a guy from Germany, met with my parents on PTA Night and informed them that I “spoke like a colored person.”

(My parents were much more upset with that racist comment than my entire week of Wolfmanning.) In 1966, during a family weekend vacation in Los Angeles, after Wolfman Jack was doing his radio show live from Hollywood, I had a five-minute conversation with him from a phone booth outside our motel one Saturday night.

(I’ve been told that our session was included on one of his many LP-record-album collections of his on-air phone calls.) He was a complete mystery to me, my friends, and most of the teenagers in San Diego.

Who was this Wolfman Jack? What did he look like? Where did he come from? Was he a put-on? Why was his voice so raspy? Was he black or was he white?

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I bought November 1967 issue of Cheetah magazine (the first publication from The National Lampoon’s Matty Simmons) because it featured the first-ever-in-print photo of Wolfman Jack. I also ordered a poster that he constantly mentioned on his radio show, the “Wolfman Jack Psychedelic Drug Calendar,” a cartoon image of a werewolf inside of a clear gel capsule. When it arrived, I immediately taped it to my bedroom’s closet door. I was so innocent then that I never noticed the implication… and fortunately, neither did my parents.

Kid Wolfman

Since his health situation dictated that radio would be his main source of entertainment for a while, he embraced it all. Bobby loved to listen to Abbott and Costello, The Shadow, Jack Benny, and The Green Hornet, with particular attention to the power of words and how they can inspire the imagination. And a career, as Bobby went on to prove.

As time passed, the Smith family moved to Brooklyn and Bobby fell in with a rough block gang. The Wolfman freely admitted that he was reluctant to get into fights with rival gangs, but once he did, he wailed on his opponents. He was involved in other juvie crimes, such as stealing cars for joyriding and shaking down guys who propositioned them in the bus station’s bathroom. Eventually, he formed his own gang of actual friends, which included black kids.

One of his pals, a guy nicknamed “Klepto,” deftly stole dozens of 45 RPM records for Bobby. He built a primo collection of songs—mostly rhythm and blues but tons of other hip material like Afro-Cuban jazz— and put together his own faux “radio shows,” spinning discs and laying spiels on his pals.

One Christmas, his father gave him a fancy radio, a transoceanic model that received broadcasts from all over the world. Bobby and his buddies found tuning in to listen to all of the frantic, fast-talking disc jockeys lurking in the ether to be irresistible. They considered the deejays to be the coolest guys around, learning to imitate the patter, the voices, and the timing. But none of them were into it as much as Bobby Smith was. He was unaware of it, but he was training himself for a career in radio—in his eyes, the coolest possible job on the planet.

Robert Smith was born in Brooklyn on January 21, 1938. His father, Weston Smith, was a successful, intelligent, and talented man, an Episcopal Sunday school teacher, writer, editor, and stage magician.

The Wolfman has described his mother, Rosamond Small, as “being a little too open-hearted, sympathetic, and trusting.” Bobby (as everyone called him) was especially close to his older sister, Joan, as well as the family’s African-American maid, Frances, a.k.a. “Tantan” (that was toddler Joan’s name for Frances).

He grew up in a posh apartment in Manhattan, until his father experienced a financial reversal.

Weston suddenly had to work as a shoe salesman, but he was an ambitious man and became the vice-president of Financial World, a magazine that “created” the Golden Globes Awards. Meanwhile, Joan (who was ten years older than Bobby) began a modeling Buttons promoting the Wolfman’s early radio career. Things were looking good stints and events have become prized collectibles again until, bizarrely, their parents among Baby Boomers. Courtesy of Hake’s Auctions. divorced, only to wed their alsorecently-divorced best friends! Poor Bobby was having a very hard time digesting the situation. So did Tantan, who eventually quit over XERFin’ Safari the uncomfortable “flip.” This was especially upsetting for Bobby, Soon, Bobby Smith became an avid fan of R&B music and the disc jockeys who played it. His favorite deejays included Douglas who loved his black friend like a second mother. Even worse, his “Jocko” Henderson of Philadelphia and New York’s “Dr. Jive,” space was invaded by a stepbrother the Wolfman described as a.k.a. Tommy Smalls. Then he got a second opportunity to “a creepy kid.” His stepmother, Marge, a mean alcoholic, treated escape, this time a physical one, spending a stress-free summer Bobby horribly, even poisoning his dog Rags. Despite a summer at his newlywed sister’s place. When he returned to Brooklyn, spent with his real mother, he felt trapped, with no chance of he started listening to “the weirdest station of all,” XERF. During escape from his his once-happy-now-hellish-household.

When he was eight and laid low with a case of mononucleosis, daytime, it broadcast a bizarre combination of hillbilly music, fiery evangelism, and sales pitches for oddball quasi-religious Bobby found his way out, at least psychologically speaking.

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items. Then, at midnight, a deejay called “Big Rockin’ Daddy” took over, playing song after song of “jump-band music, rhythm and blues with a stripped-down sound.” XERF was essential to the creation of Wolfman Jack.

Bobby’s powerful radio also made it possible for him to listen to Cleveland’s “King of the Moondoggers,” Alan Freed. When the “Moondog” brought his Alan Freed Show to NYC, Bobby not only was there, he had a fleeting encounter with Freed, who blew him off. But Bobby persevered and schmoozed his way into becoming a backstage go-fer. When his stepmother learned of his show-biz shenanigans, Bobby was immediately grounded and sent to the Friends Academy, a Quaker prep school. After suffering cruel physical punishment for cracking a joke in the chapel, Bobby dropped out during his sophomore year of high school and spent the summer of 1956 mellowing out with his sister’s family, stationed in Key West. But once he was back in Brooklyn, his parents enrolled him in a trade/tech school, planning a bland future for him as an electrician. After almost electrocuting himself and a classmate, Bobby took his life into his own hands and formally began to educate himself about the radio broadcasting industry.

he became known simply as “Smitty.” One night, KNJR’s engineer called in sick, and one of the other jocks suggested that Smitty fill in to run the board. He did such a professional job that everyone was impressed… except his parents, who’d received his report card, reporting a majority of absences. They not only busted Bobby, they tossed him out of his own home. His father sneaked him $300 to “get started” as he was forced out the door.

He and his old pal Richie Caggiano bought a ten-year-old Buick with intentions of making a roadtrip to Hollywood. Instead, they wound up at his sister Joan’s, a place he thought of as “a emotional oasis,” with a happy household of relatives who truly loved him.

Bobby especially enjoyed playing with her boys, chasing them around the house, growling and howling, “The Wooolfman is coming down the hall… the Wooolfman is coming to your door… now he’s coming to get you and eat you up! Awoooooo!”

To chip in on expenses—Joan’s husband was in the military and temporarily got stationed in the Midwest—Bobby applied his charming skills to selling Collier’s Encyclopedia door-to-door. Then he switched to selling all sorts of stuff—and enjoying a lot of wild experiences in the process—as a Fuller Brush salesman. Bobby was ambitious just like his father, and it didn’t take long before the Wolfman became the area’s Fuller Brush king.

Have mercy!

Doing fairly well for himself, Bobby became a well-dressed ladies’ man… until the night he got jumped by a bully and his buddies for getting too much attention from a popular girl. He was injured badly enough that he finally admitted to himself that he was wasting his time selling brushes. He wanted to be a disc jockey. With hesitance, he asked his father to fund a year of education at the National Academy of Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. After Bobby’s brother-in-law vouched for him, Weston forked over the best cash he’d ever spent.

Wolfman Jack’s management published this hard-to-find comic book, Wolfman Jack Comics #1, in 1970, illustrated by Dan Koffman (artwithasmile.com). Shown are its cover and inside back cover, the latter hyping zany products for sale.

Every day, Bobby would take the bus to the school, walked a few blocks past the institution, and hung out at a tiny radio station, KNJR. He charmed the engineer into allowing him to unofficially intern around the station, on which happened to be one of his favorite deejays, “Mr. Blues.” Young Robert Smith ran all sorts of errands for Mr. Blues and everyone else in the place, until

Radio Daze

Bobby was finally where he wanted to be.

He got straight A’s. He became a group leader. He helped the other students. He was well liked and respected. But still, he didn’t quite fit in because he was the school’s only student whose career goal was to work at a rhythm and blues radio station.

Before graduating, Bobby recorded an audition tape in the style of “John R.” that he planned to send to 75 different radio stations. But before he could mail them, Bobby had a casual introduction to Richard Eaton, the president of the United RETROFAN

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Broadcasting Company. His business plan was to buy up small, unsuccessful radio stations, program them for a specific audience like an ethnic group, and build this into an empire. The ethnic groups were the same ones who dug rhythm and blues. Robert Smith was hired to work at WYOU in Newport News, Virginia. He was no longer pretending to be a deejay. Bobby was finally in the club.

WYOU’s office was in a huge, crumbling building. The station only had one other disc jockey, Tex Gathings, a black man who’d studied at Harvard. He and Eaton mentored Bobby, who used his record collection as a way to connect with his audience, who were mystified—was this guy black or white? And did it matter? That was an aspect of his identity that the Wolfman exploited for years.

In fact, that was exactly why Richard Eaton had hired him. Tex was black but he sounded white. Bobby was white but he sounded black. Part of the gig was making personal appearances at local public events and part was selling commercial airtime to white business owners. Wolfman Jack remembered, “Between us, Tex and I had all the bases covered.”

It was 1960 and Bobby was going by a new air name, “Daddy Jules”—a sly reference to “the family jewels”! —was a real go-getter, always living it up, driving a nice car—a new Ford Galaxie 500, no less—and dressed like the slickest musician in Sam and Dave’s Soul Review. Maintaining that cool image wasn’t cheap, but Bobby wasn’t averse to making a few bucks on the side as long as he was still spinning records. One airtime booking deal wasn’t so mundane, since it involved delivering marijuana to a popular nightclub, the Starlight Room. His connections where Bobby lived for free (there was a advertising/ lodging trade-off between the Warwick Hotel and WYOU) came in handy when Daddy Jules was also a parttime arranger of commercial sexual trysts! Have mercy— talk about “skeletons in the closet”!

Bobby came up with a great idea to further connect with his fanbase. Since the building that housed WYOU was voluminous, he hosted The Daddy Jules Dance Party every weekday after school, playing those same .45 records that Klepto had illegally acquired for him long before. The admission to WYOU’s parties were free, but the station made a nice profit off of the vending machines Bobby brought in. At first, the attendees were all black kids, but it wasn’t long before it was equally integrated.

Bobby and Tex braced themselves for trouble from the Ku Klux Klan, but refreshingly, there was no discernible racial outrage from anyone.

While introducing the station’s new salesman to some of its clients, Bobby met a shy young lady who worked for a low-class advertising agency. Her name was Lou Elizabeth Lamb… and she didn’t harbor a scintilla of interest in young Robert Smith or Daddy Jules. But Wolfman Jack was on the air at Los Angeles’ KDAY when he co-headlined this July 1, 1972 San Diego concert also featuring Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels of “Devil with a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly” fame. Poster courtesy of Heritage.

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when he rescued her from a lecherous dance school instructor, he invited her to drive his new car. That melted the ice. Now all Bobby had to do was convince her that he was more than guy who dressed like a pimp; he had no idea that her father was a busted moonshiner. An extended visit with his big sister’s family did the trick. The future Wolfman had met his future Wolfwoman.

Meanwhile, Bobby had become friends with another enterprising fellow, Red Guavi. They both enjoyed working within the black community, so they decided to take Daddy Jules Dance Party one big step further, a bring-your-own nightclub specializing in rhythm and blues. Bobby and Red leased a Quonset hut in Newport News’ industrial zone. They named it “The Tub,” decorated its interior with “murals of Jazzbo beatnik-type characters in shades and berets,” and booked black entertainers to play live. And despite the increasingly violent reactions to the social mixing of races, the Tub’s crowd was left alone to dance, drink, listen to exciting performances, and generally have a great time. They even cross-promoted the Tub and WYOU, but unfortunately those call letters weren’t long for the world…

The Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

Birth of the Wolfman

In 1961, since the station had become so successful, its owner Richard Eaton sold the place for a hefty profit. WYOU became WTID, rhythm and blues became “Music in Good Taste,” and Daddy Jules became “Roger Gordon.” (The Tub was also a casualty of the sale.) Although he despised the changes, Bobby was still treated well. He was miserable until he met the station’s new salesman, an eccentric “brainiac-type,” a brilliant dealmaker, and a lifetime friend and coconspirator, Mo Burton.

Various records by or about Wolfman Jack. Courtesy of Scott Shaw!

Between the two of them, they convinced the new owner to play less of the “sappy stuff” and more genuinely cool music. Even better, Lou Lamb and Robert Smith got married for life.

Weary of WTID’s restrictions and now working with Mo, Bob and Lou moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1962 to run a little station his pal had purchased. KCIJ/1050AM was “nothing but country music, country gospel, and white preachers.”

The station was in serious trouble, so Bobby became—all at once—its station manager, program director, one-half of the advertising department, and early-morning disc jockey, “Big Smith with the Records.” Hooo-wee! Bobby played the hillbilly schtick to the hilt and within a few months, WTID was back in

the black. Lou and Bobby also had their first child, Joy, during this stint.

As time went on, Bob realized that Mo was grooming him to be a radio businessman. He appreciated the effort, but he greatly preferred performing on the radio to running things behind the scenes. While on their trip to Shreveport, Bob became enamored all over again with XERF, the distant station that he obsessively listened to on his transoceanic radio as a kid. The station that aired a wild combination of outrageously passionate preachers, ads for strange products both religious and carnal, and raucous rhythm and blues music was exactly what and where he wanted to be working. He kept his day job with Mo, but privately, he was creating a new radio personality, one that he felt would fit perfectly in the world of R&B stations. The character he was working on, refining its personality by recording entire faux radio shows late at night, was heavily inspired by a pop culture fad that swept America only a few years earlier—monster movies!

The concept of “Wolfman Jack” had many fathers. Alan Freed was one of Bob’s boyhood heroes. As “Moon Dog,” he was integral in promoting and supporting black rhythm and blues into the rock-androll music community. Freed “borrowed” his moniker from a New York City street musician who was known as “Moondog,” and added wolf howls from sound effects records during his early shows as a deejay. Then there was the influence of the wild bluesman known as Howlin’ Wolf.

Robert Smith was a also big fan of monster movies, many of which he saw for the first time only a few years before, when Universal released its classic horror films to television on Shock Theater in 1957. And as noted earlier, he loved to chase his two young nephews around the house while howling, “I’m the Wooolfman!” The name Jack, as in “hit the road, Jack,” was tagged on for coolness’ sake. As for Wolfman Jack’s gravelly voice, he credited it for his success, saying, “It’s kept meat and potatoes on the table for years for the Wolfman and the Wolfwoman. A couple of shots of whiskey helps it. I’ve got that nice, raspy sound.”

While Bob had his mind on creating America’s most recognizable disc jockey, his partner Mo was busy making deals.

He and the owner of K-REB, Lawrence Brandon, decided to join forces and combine stations. Financially, things were going well, and Bob was being treated like a third partner, but when he privately shared one of his tapes of The Wolfman Jack Show, Mo blew his stack. He felt that Bob was wasting his potential to become a shrewd businessman in the radio industry. On the RETROFAN

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other hand, the new partner Larry was very receptive to Bob’s new character and vowed to to get him on the air. During all of these developments, Lou and Bob had their baby boy, Tod, in 1963.

I’m on the Mexican Radio

That same year, since they already had a relationship with most of the preachers on XERF, Bob and Larry decided to take a road trip to Cuidad Acuña, a small but sinfully “popular” border town on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande across from Del Rio, Texas. They brought along Bob’s demo tape of The Wolfman Jack Show in hopes of making a deal to air Bob’s show after midnight. Even though XERF wasn’t interested, the trip wasn’t wasted—at least they could have a good time. From there, the boys paid a cabdriver to take them out the station so extremely removed from civilization, every one of its broadcasts was a “remote.” But XERF was a border blaster with the most powerful signal in the world, one that resonated on teenagers’ braces, lit up automobile headlights, killed any birds that happened to fly near its tower… and had an incredible range that allowed most mainland Americans to tune in. After a few hours, new employees felt dazed, then had to lie down for a nap until they got used to the electrical vibrations in the air.

After getting a tour of the place, Bob and Larry entered a lounge and encountered a tense situation that felt like a stick of dynamite with the fuse lit. The station had a long history of grifting, false advertising, and government corruption. XERF began its reign in 1923, when a man named John Brinkley, a fake “doctor,” established one of the first commercial radio stations in the country, XER. America was hungry for inexpensive entertainment, so it didn’t take long for the radio industry to achieve true power, including Brinkley’s station. A lot of them tailored their content to match the tastes of poor, uneducated people in rural areas, those who were desperate to be entertained. Since commercial radio was a new concept, the FCC and other overseeing organizations didn’t yet exist. Brinkley and many other station owners took full advantage of this, selling various snake oil products themselves and through radio preachers to their somewhat naive listeners. Brinkley’s specialty was luring men to his clinic for the bizarre surgical procedure of implanting goat parts in men to increase their sexual potency.

But in 1930, his medical and broadcasting licenses were revoked, so Brinkley concentrated on running for the governorship of Kansas… and lost. Then he moved his family to Mexico and created a new million-watt station, XER, whose range covered the U.S. and at least 15 other countries. When Brinkley tried suing his biggest critic, the trial went sideways and he was sued by a number of his “patients before he died, penniless.” XER eventually became XERF, but the laws against peddling shoddy products on the airwaves were not in practice yet.

The current owner made a deal with the preachers: $1,000,000 for a permanent slot in XERF’s schedule. The preachers were so wealthy that most of them signed. But when the station got in big trouble with the Mexican government over tax issues, they placed a corrupt official there to keep an eye on things. He tried to shake down the preachers due to a sneaky clause in the first agreement.

It was a big problem, and in those days, big problems in that area of Mexico were “solved” with bullets.

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In Japan, they clap for the Wolfman! American Graffiti’s Disc Jockey made the movie poster when the 1973 film was distributed to the Land of the Rising Sun. © Universal Pictures. Poster courtesy of Heritage.

and Larry bought a lot of favors and a lot of firepower, bracing themselves for trouble, which did eventually show up. But in Bob’s POV, the opportunity to share The Wolfman Jack Show on his favorite radio station ever was absolutely worth the risks, which were like hurdles he and Larry got very good at jumping over.

Things were looking good and Bobby made a lot of new friends with Mo’s money. Despite their success, when they told him what they were up to, Mo fired them both on the spot for illegally appropriating his funds, money they fully intended to repay. One night, there was even an armed attack on XERF by the men they’d outsmarted in winning over the evangelical crowd. A band of pistoleros circled the XERF building on horseback like crazy extras in a Sam Peckinpah movie, raining bullets on the men inside the radio station. Two attackers were killed and the Wolfman got a bullet crease across the tip of his nose. The harassment continued for a while, but the criminal element finally went silent regarding the wonderfully outrageous radio station. Bob and Larry repaid Mo Burton with a large bonus attached, so all was right at XERF.

‘The Life of the Party’

Lou and Bob stayed in Del Rio for less than a year, but he used the time as an opportunity to hone Wolfman’s style and

The Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

performance to his live advertisements of some of the strangest products ever sold in the Western world, including weight-loss pills, dog food, live rose bushes, weightgain pills, live baby chicks, libido-inciting “Florex” tablets with “some zing for your ling nut,” record albums collections of R&B classics, and the Wolfman Jack Official Roach Clip. And best of all, he was a complete mystery to his listeners, but we loved him anyway. Radio was never this much fun before. Yet the best was yet to come for the man who called himself Wolfman Jack.

He was definitely getting a lot of attention, from the music industry and the press, but Bob avoided payola and photographers. All the same, if certain celebrities—like “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” James Brown— showed up unexpectedly for a tour of XERF, the Wolfman was suddenly available. But Lou, Bob, and the kids were getting tired of living in such isolation, so they moved back to Louisiana. Bob got a great reception from the locals who fondly remembered him as “Big Smith with the Records,” and they absolutely (TOP) Wolfman Jack as Disc Jockey in an iconic scene with Richard Dreyfuss as Curt loved Wolfman Jack from listening to his in American Graffiti. (BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT) Promotional stills from the film. show on XERF. Bob was offered a gig at the © Universal. Stills courtesy of Heritage.

Peppermint Lounge, a club named after the one in New York City but actually in nearby Bossier City. The plan was to record the Wolfman as he was hosting an R&B dance party with live music.

But they’d never seen Wolfman Jack before. In fact, no one had! And what did Wolfman Jack look like, anyway?

Bob had to come up with something fast. Although the Wolfman’s on-air voice gave many of his listeners the impression that he was black, Bob rejected the idea of going in blackface. So he decided to create a look that was intentionally confusing, racially speaking. He hacked up a Beatle wig, bought a cape, claw-like glueon fingernails, a fake beard, and make-up that would slightly darken his skin. Sometimes he’d wear a huge Afro wig and oversized sunglasses. Bob described himself as “the offspring of a Greek Mexican from Nairobi and the The force is with ’em, baby! Universal publicity photo of Wolfman Portuguese-French woman he met one carefree night in Jack and a pre-Star Wars George Lucas at a 1973 theater owners’ event a Bangkok backstreet.” He was so nervous he drank half promoting American Graffiti. © Universal. Courtesy of Scott Shaw! a bottle of whiskey before going onstage to sing, prowl, and swear like, well, Wolfman Jack. He was such a hit that the club’s owner asked him back two more nights in persona. Wolfman Jack readily admitted that his specialty a row. Again, everything went well until the last night. When was always being “the Life of the Party.” And he understood the attendees left the club, they were greeted by the sight of a that genuine rhythm and blues music is loaded with sexual flaming, nine-feet-tall Ku Klux Klan cross right across the street. innuendo, so that became part of his patter, too. Not dirty, Even worse, when Lou and Bob went home, they saw two Klan just uniquely weird and funny, outrageous stuff that probably members light up another KKK cross, this time on the Smith had the FCC scratching its collective head. His dad had been family’s front lawn. It was clear to Bob that the Wolfman should an excellent stage magician, and Bob applied that same sort of stay safe by restricting his presence to the interiors of radio RETROFAN

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stations for the next four years. But even vocally, the ambiguity actually broadcast from this location during the early-to-midof his race kept people talking about Wolfman Jack.

Sixties, although they more likely were pre-recorded shows. (The While keeping a low public profile, The Wolfman Jack Show space was very similar to the small broadcast studio depicted in continued to hold a slot on XERF but one filled with Bob’s preAmerican Graffiti, which was filmed at KRE in Berkeley.) taped broadcasts. Meanwhile, Bob was back to being Mo Burton’s broadcast businessman. He was given the assignment of running California Screamin’ KUXL, yet another small radio station, this time in Minneapolis, In 1965, the Smiths moved to Los Angeles, and settled down with Minnesota. Wolfman Jack never appeared on KUXL, though, just the aid and encouragement of his sister’s family, who’d relocated Bob Smith stalking the hallways. He and Lou enjoyed living in there a few years earlier. How cozy can you get? Bob brought Minneapolis, with gorgeous along his pal Arthur Henning, Lake Minnetonka and a racially a black man who was not only diverse population. Bob added a radio technician but also a new shows to KUXL’s schedule, deejay going by the moniker ones that played to specific “Fat Daddy Washington.” After cultural niches around town they tested XERB’s reception and built new audiences. around the L.A. area, Bob and Before long, the station Arthur paid a visit to the city’s was performing up to Mo’s dominant black radio station, expectations. Bob should have pretended they were potential been delighted, but he was clients with money, and walked getting antsy under Mo’s thumb out with a carefully researched and was yearning to call his demographic rundown on own shots. More than anything, Southern California’s black Bob Smith missed one thing community. After cutting his and missed it bad: working live ties with Mo Gordon (who as Wolfman Jack. There was no still didn’t understand Bob’s turning around. urgent and genuine need to Bob’s determination to perform), Bob began his search the heart of Hollywood for the get back on the air led him to perfect office for his dream approach Chicago’s Harold station. Finally, in January of Schwartz, the “king of border 1966, Bob signed a lease for the radio.” He and his new partner bottom floor of a pink stucco Teo Bacera were the official building on Sunset Boulevard American representatives for and ordered a red neon sign to four of the key Mexican border identify the joint as XERB. blaster stations in the U.S., For about five years, including XEG, XELO, XERF, and Wolfman Jack spread his XERB. Bob convinced Schwartz outrageous personality via to start running on three of the airwaves that not only covered four stations simultaneously.

California, but also reached (For some reason, XELO was left into Arizona, New Mexico, out.) It wasn’t difficult to make Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, the deal; Wolfman Jack was Poster for Wolfman Jack’s 1975 traveling stage show, I Saw Washington, Oregon, Alaska, already essential to Schwartz’s Radio. The art shown is repurposed from the Wolfman’s Fun & and even Canada. He recorded beloved XERF. Even better, Romance LP cover. © 1975 American International Associates. Courtesy his shows in Los Angeles and the Wolfman would attract of Heritage. shipped his tapes across the even more nutty preachers border to Rosarito Beach to to all three stations. But as beam it back into the U.S. and time went by, Bob researched beyond. Life was good for Bob Smith and his family, and at least a the numbers and realized that XERB, the smallest of the three little bit better for those of us who grew up listening to Wolfman stations, was wildly outperforming them, due to an influx of new stations. But XERB reached San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Jack. Radio was never funnier, freakier, nor funkier than his stint on XERB. and more.

We never knew what to expect and I cannot come even close XERB—still broadcasting as XEPRS-AM—was a border blaster to the vibe, the humor, the excitement, and the taboo aspects of station in Rosarito Beach, in Baja, Mexico. It became branded his nightly show. Suffice it to say there was plenty of tasty R&B as “The Mighty 1090,” with “50,000 watts of Boss Soul Power.” cuts, lots of almost-dirty exclamations, howls, and laughter, XERB also had an office in the rear of a small strip mall on Third Avenue in Chula Vista, located only ten minutes from the Tijuana/ phone-call conversations with fans, song dedications, surprise guest appearances of soul superstars like James Brown and Ray San Diego border crossing. It was rumored that the Wolfman 50

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Charles, and numerous ads for Zeidler and Zeidler stylish threads and Wolfman Jack-related merchandise.

When the Wolfman wasn’t blistering the airwaves, Bob also built a team of disc jockeys and preacher pitchmen: New York City’s Magnificent Montague, Brother Henderson, Minneapolis’ Preacher Paul, Reverend Ike, and a fortune-teller named Sister Sara.

It was 1967 and everything was going great for the Wolfman.

Then his old boss Mo Burton showed up in town to buy another radio station. He and Bob hadn’t spoken to each other since the Wolfman switched over to Mo’s rival station, but it didn’t take long for them to be buddies again and concoct big plans together.

They bought a huge building that was previously a Fred Astaire dance Studio east of downtown L.A. They spent millions of dollars on interior décor and equipment, with a publishing company and a video production house added to the mix. The Wolfman even cut a record album there with a number of heavyweight musicians. Of course, business was business anywhere, so Bob and Mo had a fund to lubricate the wheels of progress, too.

Bob was a smart man with an eye on the future and was recording every single Wolfman Jack, then sending tapes the next morning down to Rosarito Beach early the next morning. Those tapes would benefit him throughout his life… and beyond.

they judged those programs to be detrimental to the youth of Mexico. There went 80% of XERB’s revenue.

And that’s how Wolfman lost his howl for a while. Bob and Lou owed about $300,000 to the Bank of America. Rather than declare bankruptcy, he charmed the bankers into further extending him credit in order to spring back. Bob realized that the success he lost was due to Wolfman Jack, a fictitious character he created from a hidden aspect of his personality. Therefore, Wolfman Jack was the guy to turn things around, not Robert Smith. “I became my own invention; my invention became me,” he said. “Just like Samuel Clemens gradually became Mark Twain or Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.” There were plenty of people out there who would pay Wolfman Jack to work for them.

The Wolfman moved on, accepting a rather low-paying gig—one-tenth of his previous salary—as a jock at L.A.’s KDAY 1580AM. The station had an odd broadcast pattern that made it sort of hip, specializing in extended album cuts rather than clusters of shorter songs— what became known as “albumoriented rock.” KDAY made a public fuss about acquiring Wolfman Jack and even paired him with Alice Cooper for a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl. His nighttime radio show started attracting drop-in guest stars like John Lennon.

The Wolfman was on the prowl again.

Since the Wolfman was now doing a different shtick Hallelujah! Wolfman Jack as Reverend Billy testifies to Good Moon Rising and needed income more than sausage-lady Ida Smith (Nancy Parsons) and her hubby Now that Bob felt more ever, he and his manager—and Vincent (Rory Calhoun) in this lobby card from 1980’s comfortable with his Wolfman now business partner—Don gruesome but hilarious slasher flick, Motel Hell. © United persona, he also started Kelley found a way to monetize Artists. Courtesy of Heritage. hosting live, in-person West his XERB radio shows that Coast R&B revues every he recorded. The plan was to weekend, all over California, offer pre-recorded rock-andin nightclubs, roadhouses, and armories. These events not only roll radio shows to stations everywhere, creating the concept of extended Wolfman Jack’s brand while bringing in a lot of cash, syndicated radio. They re-cut the old tapes to acceptable in any they also gave many music groups—mostly black kids—some town in America. He also appeared on Armed Forces Radio from prime exposure to talent scouts. These gigs led to a one-month 1970 to 1986. It worked, and not only did Wolf and Don make contact to perform live at Las Vegas’ Bonanza Hotel. It was there money, other radio stars jumped on the same scheme, including that he met Don Kelley, a guy who looked like Paul McCartney the voice of Scooby-Doo’s Shaggy Rogers, Casey Kasem. (As time and sang for a polished vocal group called the Swinging passed, they were also marketed to oldies stations.) At his peak, Lads. He’d been in show business since he was a kid and had Wolfman Jack was heard on more than 2,000 radio stations in 53 a lot of solid advice, so he became Wolfman Jack’s manager countries. and transformed him from a cult figure into a mainstream entertainer in recording, television, and film. But he never lost Multimedia Wolfman the funky essence of the Wolfman.

Don Kelley promoted the Wolfman to the major media and had 1971 was a pivotal year for Bob Smith. XERB was nearing its good relationships with journalists. Thanks to him, the Wolfman fifth anniversary and the station was doing quite well and paying began to expand his territory into other media. The Midnight most of its debts. That was primarily due to the stacks of money Special was the first television series to be based totally on live coming in from all of those radio preachers. But a few weeks into rock-and-roll performances. At this point in time, professional January, the XERB brass got really bad news: Decisions rendered rock-and-roll musicians only knew how to lip-synch and pretend by the government of Mexico banned the Pentecostal preachers to be playing their instruments while faking it on an American from radio. Most of the Mexican public is of the Catholic faith, and Bandstand rip-off. The Wolfman convinced the TV series’ producer RETROFAN

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The Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

that he was the person who could coax the best possible live television performance by the guest-star musicians. That’s how Wolfman Jack appeared on more than 400 episodes of The Midnight Special.

Around this time, Universal Studios contacted the Wolfman about appearing in a movie with a tyro director. After he read the script, he joked to Don, “How much do I have to pay ’em?” because he saw the role as free publicity, since the role was “Wolfman Jack.” Of course, the film was American Grafitti (1973), and the director was the George Lucas. The two of them bonded over the fact that in 1967, while he was a student at the University of Southern California’s Film School, George planned to shoot a documentary about… Wolfman Jack! The deejay lycanthrope agreed to play himself in the movie for $3,000.

It wasn’t much for two days of shooting a single scene with Richard Dreyfuss, but Wolf truly was grateful for the publicity… and the cash. Lucas gave him a fraction of a “point” of American Graffiti, which was so successful that it provided him with a regular income for life. He also appeared in the film’s 1979 sequel, More American Graffiti, though only through voice-overs.

Unfortunately, the bosses at Universal weren’t impressed with the final product. They even turned down the ambitious sci-fi film Lucas was hoping to interest them in. Of course, they didn’t understand that the movie industrial was rapidly mutating.

American Grafitti not only made a lot of money, it won a lot of awards.

If that wasn’t enough good news, New York City’s WNBC couldn’t beat WABC’s disc jockey Cousin Brucie. Thanks to a referral from Don Imus, Don Kelly brokered a deal that promised Wolfman Jack with the most money he’d ever made in a year, $350,000. And those were 1973 dollars! Wolf joined the WNBC team in August 1973—the same month that American Graffiti premiered—to spin Top 40 sides. The station did a huge ad campaign proclaiming, “Cousin Brucie’s Days are Numbered.”

Time magazine published a profile article about Wolfman Jack. He was getting so much attention, the Wolfman’s head was spinning and his judgment was slipping. Sex and drugs are often tied to rock and roll, and Lou split for North Carolina rather than put up with the Wolfman’s prowlin’ ways. He was trying to fix himself, but that meant escaping the crazy schedule and demands of too much success. Suddenly he had an incredible offer that would allow him to return to L.A.

Clap for the Wolfman

The Guess Who had recently recorded a minor hit song called “Clap for the Wolfman.” They were going on tour and offered Wolf a gig touring with the band for 37 dates in six weeks, with a paycheck bigger than he made in a year. The bosses at KDAY weren’t werewolf fans, so they were elated when the Wolfman convinced Cousin Brucie to leave WABC when his contract ran out and take over his slot on WNBC’s schedule. Everyone was happy, especially the reformed, reunited Wolf and Lou.

Wolfman Jack as a talking tree in a production cel for a 1980 Halloween animated special directed by animator Bob Kurtz, who signed this cel. Courtesy of Heritage.

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The Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

Who remembers the short-lived television toon Wolf Rock TV? This 1984 program quickly disappeared, but Wolfman Jack’s popularity inspired the release of these and other merchandised items tying in to the series. © 1984 DIC Enterprises/Dick Clark Productions.

series Wolf Rock TV finally sold, but ABC cancelled it after three episodes aired in 1984. It’s noteworthy to mention that during promotions for some of these projects, the Wolfman was bitten by a wolf pack as well as the grizzly bear known as Gentle Ben. Have mercy!

Record albums by Wolfman Jack include Boogie with the Wolfman by “Wolfman Jack & the Wolfpack” on the Bread label (1965); Wolfman Jack (1972) and Through the Ages (1973) on the Wooden Nickel label; and Fun & Romance on the Columbia Records label (1974). Wolfman Jack’s also been in a number of songs: The Bobby Fuller Four’s “Wolfman” and the Grateful Dead’s “Ramble On Rose” mention him, but Todd Rundgren’s “Wolfman Jack,” the previously mentioned Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman,” and the Stampeders’ “Hit the Road, Jack” all include guest vocals by Wolfman Jack.

The Wolfman Signs Off

In 1975, the Wolfman hosted an old-school-style traveling stage show called I Saw Radio. It was composed of wild Fifties rock and roll and the stage set was designed to resemble a 40-foottall radio. The show featured singers (including the Wolfman!), dancers, musicians, and the voices of classic deejays, including Gary (Space Ghost) Owens. Next, Canada’s CBC network signed the Wolfman to do 26 episodes of The Wolfman Jack Show, a variety series.

Wolfman Jack went back to California to concentrate on his syndicated radio show, which was carried on KRLA-Pasadena (Los Angeles) from 1984 to 1987. In the 1980s, he did a brief stint at XEROK 80 then went to Y95 in Dallas, Texas. From 1975 to 1980, Wolfman Jack hosted the annual Halloween Haunt event at Knott’s Berry Farm. It was the most successful special event of any theme park in the country, and often sold out.

Of course, being back on the West Coast meant even more television and movie appearances. In addition to American Grafitti, the Wolfman also appeared in these films: A Session with the Committee (1969), The Seven Minutes (1971), Deadman’s Curve (TV) (1978), Sgt. Pepper’s Hearts Club Band (1978), Hanging on a Star (1978), More American Graffiti (1979), Motel Hell (1980), Galactica 1980 (1980), Mortuary Academy (1988), and Midnight (1989). His list of television appearances is even longer: The Midnight Special (1972–1981), The Odd Couple (1975), Emergency! (1975), What’s Happening!! (1976), The Wolfman Jack Show (1977), Police Story (1978), Vega$ (1980), Wonder Woman (1978), The Hollywood Squares (1979), The Midnight Hour (1985), Swamp Thing (1992), Married… With Children (1995), and more. He also did voiceovers for Garfield in Paradise and Garfield and Friends (1986), and The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang series (1980). In the early Eighties, all of the animation studios were working on cartoon concepts to star the Wolfman. DIC’s animated

In 1989, Bob “Wolfman Jack” Smith moved to Belvedere, North Carolina, to be closer to his extended family.

Wolfman Jack believed that life was for having a good time and he went out rockin’. Due to a heart attack on July 1, 1995, the man once known as Robert Smith died at his house in Belvedere. A few hours before, the Wolfman was finishing one of his weekly radio broadcasts. He’s buried at a family cemetery in Belvedere.

But like the real thing, it’s hard to get rid of the Wolfman. In 2012, Wolfman Jack’s estate released a hip-hop single featuring sound bites of Wolfman Jack. In 2016, clips from his XETV show were used in Rob Zombie’s film 31. Videos of The Wolfman Jack Show were reintroduced to syndication in 2005.

Even in death, Wolfman Jack will always be “Number One with a Silver Bullet” in pop culture history.

For 48 years (and counting), SCOTT SHAW! has written and drawn underground comix, mainstream comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, TV cartoons, toys, advertising, and video games. He has worked on such characters as Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew (which he co-created with Roy Thomas), Sonic the Hedgehog, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, the Simpsons, the Futurama gang, the Muppet Babies, Garfield, the Garbage Pail Kids, and yes, even Annoying Orange. His career has garnered him four Emmy Awards, an Eisner Award, and a Humanities Award. Scott is also known for his “Oddball Comics Live!” visual presentation of “the craziest comic books ever published” and for his regular participation in “Quick Draw!” with Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragonés. He was also one of the teenagers who co-created what is currently known as ComicCon International: San Diego, America’s biggest annual fan event. He can be reached at shawcartoons.com.

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RETROFAD

Patrick Swayze rocked it. Superman… not so much.

It’s easy to wince when confronted with your hairstyles of yesteryear, especially when your kid or grandkid is mocking your yearbook photo or wedding portrait. While absolution for past transgressions of beehives or high-top fades can be obtained with a shoulder-shrugging “It was the times” apology, one disreputable ’do has earned a spot on almost everyone’s Bad Hair Day lists: the mullet.

Yes, the mullet, the hairstyle that defied boundaries of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and decorum. It has inspired costumers (mullet Halloween wigs), musicians (The Beastie Boys’ “Mullet Head”), documentarians (American Mullet), Hollywood comedies (Joe Dirt and Joe Dirt 2, Mulletville), and authors (two books: Barney Hoskyns and Mark Larson’s 2000 The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods, and Alan Henderson’s 2013 Mullet Madness!: The Haircut That’s Business Up Front and a Party in the Back). It’s like the horrific auto accident we pass that we don’t want to

Business (front) Party (back)

The Brady Bunch © Paramount Television.

Captain Planet © Captain Planet Foundation. Joe Dirt © Columbia Pictures.

Lethal Weapon © Warner Bros. Pictures. The Mullets © Warner Bros. Television.

Superman © DC Comics.

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see but still observe in rubbernecking awe.

You might want to wag a finger at the late David Bowie for planting (or dyeing) the root of this craze. During his Ziggy by Stardust phase beginning Michael in 1972, Bowie shocked Eury the meek (and probably his grandmother) with his androgynous, carrot-orange hairstyle that was spiky short on top and long in the back. Glam rock artists and punk rock musicians aped the look, and it took wing in a big way when former “cute Beatle” Paul McCartney not only let it be but let it all hang out (in the back, but not the front). Lest you think this brazen hairstyle was the exclusive domain of Seventies rockand-rollers like McCartney and fellow mullet head Rod Stewart, one of television’s most beloved matriarchs sanctioned the mullet.

Florence Henderson, who, as Carol Brady, sported more wig and hairstyle changes throughout The Brady Bunch’s five seasons than you’ll find in an average episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, is best remembered with her “flip” look, a proto-mullet. (While daughters Marcia, Jan, and Cindy all had hair of gold, like their mother, they did not go the mullet route.)

If you crack the dust layer off your old history and world cultures textbooks, you’ll discover that while David Bowie may have been a trailblazer both in fashion and music, the mullet was not his invention. There’s historical conjecture that primitive man might have worn the mullet, chopping off hair on top to keep it out of their eyes but allowing a mane to grow for neck warmth.

Short-topped, long-backed hairstyles definitely go back to Ancient Greek statues. Some Native Americans wore the style, often with a Mohawk on top. According to History.com, one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin—arguably the smartest guy in the room during his day—eschewed the customary powdered wigs worn in French courts when, in the late 18th Century, he petitioned France for increased financial support for the nascent America by dressing down for

the occasion, including his own very-short-on-top (balding), long-backed natural hair… a “skullet.”

But we can trace the hairstyle’s emergence as a cultural trend to Bowie. His Ziggy Stardust cut, a convergence of male and female hairstyles, became a symbol of gender fluidity and was coopted by many lesbians who in a closeted era dared to come “out.”

Then came the Big Eighties, the decade of excess (including big hair), when the mullet enjoyed its widest exposure. You have to wonder if Hollywood agents weren’t inserting a “mullet clause” into their clients’ contracts, since numerous stars were going the “business up front, party in the back” route. Richard Dean Anderson brought the mullet into your living room each week as television’s MacGyver. The mullet helped new TV star George Clooney look hip. On the big screen, Mel Gibson, especially in the Lethal Weapon movies, made the mullet cool. So did Kiefer Sutherland, who stole teen girls’ hearts and a lot of scenes as a mulleted vampire in The Lost Boys.

There were cases, however, when the fashion police should have issued mullet citations. John Stamos, a guy so handsome that even straightarrow heteros like me can’t help but gasp, “Good Lord, that’s a purty man,” misfired with his Full House, full-headed mullet that was so large it could have provided shelter for his co-stars.

Other flagrant violators include martial artist Jean Claude Van Damme and wrestling he-man Hulk Hogan, but no one dared ridicule their respective kinky or bleached mullets for fear of a fractured jaw.

Lots of professional athletes favored the hairstyle, and who could blame them? The long hair in the back made them look trendy, as Larry Bird demonstrated as his locks flapped behind him when dribbling down the basketball court, but the short hair in the front kept sweating to a minimum— and warded off hair pulling, a frequent assault found in hockey clashes. The style became so popular on ice that some dubbed it “Hockey hair.” If you don’t believe me, ask Wayne Gretsky.

Mario Lopez’s mullet in the TV teen show Saved by the Bell helped the haircut transition from the Eighties into the Nineties, and Captain Planet picked up the look as one of several mulleted cartoon characters. When you think of country star Billy Ray Cyrus, what first comes to mind, his mullet or his 1992 hit, “Achy Breaky Heart”?

Up to this point, the mullet was like Clint Eastwood in spaghetti Westerns, a haircut with no name. Back then, if you walked into a salon and asked for a mullet, you’d be directed to the nearest grocer or fish house (for the benefit of our landlocked readers, the oceans are full of gray fish called mullets).

The hairstyle’s name wasn’t officially coined until 1994, when the aforementioned Beastie Boys screamed the lyrics “Cut the sides, don’t touch the back” in their hard-rock anthem, “Mullet Head.”

But by then, this RetroFad was frizzing out. The mullet had become commonplace, and soon only commoners dared become mullet heads. Mulleted unfaithful husband Joey Buttafuoco certainly didn’t help the hairstyle’s rep when his ugly 1992 sex scandal involving “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher dominated the headlines. The haircut was now synonymous with rednecks and lowlifes, earning derogatory nicknames like “The Mississippi Mudflap” and “The Kentucky Waterfall” and giving David Spade a chance to play a signature film role. DC Comics misfired when following their bestselling 1992 “Death of Superman” storyline with the following year’s resurrection of the world’s first superhero wearing a Mullet of Steel, which was ridiculed by fanboys.

Remember the sitcom The Mullets? You’re excused if you don’t, as it only ran 11 episodes in 2003. It was about a pair of polaropposite brothers, Denny and Dwayne Mullet, who shared the same hairstyle but little else. The Mullets might have performed better a decade earlier, before the fad had run its course, but was an embarrassing example of milking a dead trend. Co-stars Loni Anderson and John O’Hurley no doubt are sorry they signed on to that stinker. The mullet was dead. Rest in pieces (on the barbershop floor).

Some former mullet heads like Bono have publicly regretted ever sporting the look. Billy Ray Cyrus, however, crooned “I Want My Mullet Back” in his 2006 song. There have been brief attempts to resurrect the mullet, from adventurous hair stylists to courageous starlets like Scarlett Johansson and Zendaya. They also continue to love the mullet in the Land Down Under. There’s an annual “Mullet Fest” in Australia, and the Melbourne comedy troupe the Travelling Sisters pokes fun at the hairstyle in their mockumentary web series Meet the Mullets.

These folks are lucky they don’t live in Iran. There, in 2010, the mullet was outlawed as a “decadent Western haircut.”

Today in the U.S., you’re only breaking the laws of good taste if you’re a mullet head. But who am I to judge? Maybe you’ll get cast in a supporting role if David Spade makes Joe Dirt 3.

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RETRO HOLLYWOOD

FROM FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT TO TEENAGE PASSION PIT AND BACK AGAIN

by Jim Trautman Each day the American flag flies over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., it is to recognize an important event, person, or organization. On June 6, 2008, it was flown to recognize the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, opened by Richard Hollingshead in Camden, New Jersey, on June 6, 1933. The admission charge was 25 cents per person and car.

The first night at Hollingshead’s Drive-in movie drive-in featured the long-forgotten Adolphe speaker being Menjou movie Wives Beware (1932), which hooked onto car ran a mere 61 minutes and was so short window. Photo by that the movie was shown three times that Bob Matti. first night. After each showing the parking lot was cleared and new customers were admitted. The coming and going to this new novelty brought in 600 customers on that opening night. Sounds like doubleheader baseball games of today.

The sound system was actually behind the movie screen, since what we remember as the speaker in the car was not invented by RCA until the mid-Forties. The screen measured 40 feet by 50 feet. In the Fifties, actress Natalie Wood would appear in print advertising for in-car, silver-aluminum speakers, two to a pole, a new innovation for the drive-in. You’d roll down your window and clip the speaker onto the door to bring the movie’s audio into your car.

Much of life is based on events that become part of the “myth culture” of society.

It is said that Hollingshead founded the drive-in for a simple reason: his mother was too fat to fit in a traditional theater seat. Fact or not? In addition, it is believed that a version of a drive-in existed in the Twenties, and since the movies were all silent at that time it would seem that could be a fact.

No matter the real story of the drive-in’s beginnings, a social culture was created around the venue that has taken us through various phases of life: young families and their children, then the “teenage passion pit,” to (TOP) Ad from the Leamington, Ontario, Drive-In. Movies at the drive-in changed quickly to keep the customers coming in.

(BOTTOM) This ad for the Skyway in Malvern, Ohio, promoted not only its feature but also the facility’s concession stand and playground. Courtesy of Hake’s Auctions.

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retro hollywood

The Grove City Drive-In Theatre, Springdale, Arkansas. John Margolies Roadside America Collection, The Library of Congress.

adult movie houses, and finally back to the family business. I have lived through all these phases and have personally been involved in the drive-in theater culture, a culture rooted with the Baby Boom generation and the automobile. It is the story of our lives, which in many ways is like a drive-in movie we watched.

Prior to the start of World War II, several other driveins opened across the United States, including one at Shankweiler’s Auto Park in Orefield, Pennsylvania, which is still in operation.

The Car Culture

Drive-ins did not do very well during World War II for a simple reason: gasoline was being rationed as part of the war effort, and moviegoers had to depend on walking or taking a bus to the local movie house. That changed once the war ended and the Baby Boom began, which created mass migration to the suburbs. America’s love of the automobile was born. New highways were built, jobs flowed, and disposable income soared. Cookie-cutter housing developments that are now often mocked (think Levittown, New York) were being built across the country, affordable for most, and the “American Dream” was born. My parents moved into a little house that cost $10,000. Like the Roaring Twenties—the good times had arrived!

Drive-in theaters exploded across the United States and Canada. By the early Fifties there were over 4,000, including a canoe-in drive-in and a fly-in model in Asbury Park on the New Jersey seashore. It actually could accommodate 25 small planes and 500 cars. Wonder if a car ever became lost and ended up on the runway?

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The car culture of the mid-Twentieth Century created not just the drive-in theater, but a new wave of drive-in or drive-to eateries. Prior to World War II only ten Dairy Queen restaurants existed. By 1950, there were 1,446. A&W Root Beer stands joined that explosion, although they weren’t constructed in the big cities, but in the outlying suburbs; same with McDonald’s.

When the UFO craze was upon us, with flying-saucer sightings in our daily newspapers and Earth-invasion flicks showing in movie houses, we rushed to Carvel Ice Cream drive-ins to get the new “flying saucer” ice cream sandwich filled with either vanilla or chocolate ice cream.

Drive-in theater owners had to purchase movies from distributors, and since customers appeared to like the movies to change often, profits were tight for the theater operators.

Savvy owners hit upon the answer to increasing profitability: making the drive-in a family experience that started long before the onset of darkness that would allow the movies to be shown. Patrons were enticed by advertising to arrive early.

Many drive-ins had a playground for the kids, and several had swimming pools and bottle-warming stations for babies. Some even allowed you to bring your laundry and pick it up on the way out. In the early days, some cars (including my parents’) had a searchlight next to the driver’s window, allowing patrons to play “light games” on the blank movie screen prior to the show while the kids amused themselves in the theater’s playground.

An ad for a drive-in theater promoted, “Smoke, talk, relax in the wide seats of your car, and hey, how about having a tasty meal?” Approximately 60% or more of the drive-ins’ profits come from the concession stand. The concession booth usually had many employees and was better organized than a military operation!

retro hollywood

The Concession Stand

Advertising for drive-ins in early TV ads from the Fifties concentrated on the concession stand. A boxed chicken dinner could be purchased for $1.50: half a Southern fried chicken, hot buttered bun, French fries, and sauce. Hot dogs toasted to a turn—just watch them turning on that grill—a mere 24 cents!

In New England and its coastal drive-ins, one could get a shrimp roll full of meaty shrimp and seasoning, or a pizza made to order, from ten inches to a whopping 65 inches… and in the South, many drive-ins had pit-cooked barbecue. Like ballparks of today, the food available at drive-ins differed between regions and included the specialties of that area.

Oh, the smells that came from the concession stand…! Hot dogs, hamburgers grilling, fried chicken… I can smell and taste them now. There’s nothing like the fresh aroma of popcorn. If you (BELOW) A typical concession stand filled with tasty treats. John Margolies didn’t want popcorn, Roadside America Collection, The Library of there were shelled Congress. (RIGHT INSET) “Sport” (or is peanuts, a popular item at these outdoor venues that “Tad”?) makes a concession stand run for his famished family. (BELOW since, as the ads stated, INSET) Hurry back to your car! The a moviegoer didn’t have to worry about where the show’s about to resume! empty shells would go.

You had to be careful on the journey from the concession stand back to the car to remember where you had parked! Some families designated one of their older kids to keep track of where the car was parked. Another peril on your journey from the concession stand to your car was reaching your vehicle before the mosquito-spraying jeep passed by! In the summers of the Fifties and early Sixties, before Agent Orange during the Vietnam War alerted people to the dangers of such activities, DDT was sprayed on the drive-in theater grounds during the pictures, creating a heavy fog. Hey, the ads back then said DDT would only harm the mosquitoes… who knew??

Layout and Architecture

One arrived early to the drive-in, since some theaters were large, and being stuck in the back row made it difficult to make out the action on the screen that might be 140 feet away. Cars were parked on an incline so the view was not obstructed by other vehicles. By the Sixties, most drive-ins had a Cinemascope surround screen.

John Margolies, the legendary Roadside Americana photographer and architectural critic who passed away in

2008, recorded a visual history of drive-in theaters over the years. Margolies donated his entire collection of photos of drive-in theaters across the United States and Canada to the Library of Congress. As his photos show, almost every drive-in was different. The ones created in the Space Age of the Fifties and Sixties often had marquees with satellites and rockets.

Sometimes their looks reflected the local legends, with architectural elements in different regions such as a Viking boat, a painted ski scene, or a Western wagon trail motif. My favorite was an Olympics painting of a man and woman surfing in the Pacific Ocean. Each drive-in attempted to set itself apart from the others. The local one near where I live in Canada, the Mustang Drive-in, which is still open, has a large neon cowboy marquee.

Marquees were always made to be eye-catching, to draw the driver’s eye into looking to see what was playing.

This enticing information was designed to program the passing motorist to say, back in the Fifties when schlocky horror movies were the rage, “Hey, did you hear The Skull and Premature Burial will be playing this weekend?” Or in the Sixties, “Guess what? Frankie and Annette in Beach Blanket Bingo will be playing this weekend!” In later years, when the multiplexes had replaced the drive-in as the main attraction for movies, you might spy a drive-in marquee promoting a Saturday or Sunday flea market or an outdoor church.

The Drive-in Experience

Most drive-ins began with two cartoons for the kids, coming attractions, a feature, then an intermission to get food, followed by the second feature… and on special horror nights, usually a third feature. (The concession stand made lots of money on those nights.)

There was always a long pause for the intermission. If you weren’t hungry when you entered, then the intermission’s cartoon commercial of dancing and singing hot dogs, French fries, and ice cold sodas—or, if it was chilly, coffee or hot chocolate—might get you salivating.

Afraid if you went you’d miss part of the second feature?

No problem. On the screen in between the dancing hot dogs and other food would be reminders: “Ten minutes to show time”… “Five minutes to show time.” (I wonder if that is where the atomic scientists picked up their idea for the doomsday clock?)

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Along with the coming attractions there was always the announcement: “If you should accidentally tear a speaker loose, please return it to the snack bar or box office.” (My father was guilty of doing that one night, but his excuse when he returned it was there were several others inside with him who were equally guilty of his “crime.” For some reason he thought he was at the White Castle Hamburgers drivein restaurant, where a carhop removed your food tray when you started your car and began to back out of your spot. This is why wives often claim that husbands are a “special breed.”)

Drive-in patrons who were short of cash at times would stuff the trunk of the car with four or five friends who hopped out once the car was parked. (We’re lucky we survived!)

The Airway Drive-In, St. Louis, Missouri, could accommodate 800 cars. It opened on September 23, 1948 with Walt Disney’s Song of the South. It has been closed for over 36 years, but the beautiful neon sign with the female drum major has been preserved.

(BOTTOM LEFT) The Campus Drive-In Theatre, San Diego, California. Many driveins were simple in appearance but used neon lights to attract attention. (BOTTOM RIGHT) The painted back of the movie screen of the Olympic Drive-In, Los Angeles, California. John Margolies Roadside America Collection, The Library of Congress.

Crank ’em Out

The major movie studios—MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros.—controlled distribution and did not provide their films to drive-ins for a simple reason—money!

The large, indoor movie houses could show the same movie several times a day, generating more profit from the number of tickets sold.

Drive-ins were limited to one nighttime showing, or on some special days, all-night shows. And rainouts could be a problem. If you look at old advertising for drive-ins, big studio movies are rarely listed. Distributors would not send a major Hollywood production to drive-ins until it had run for a year or two in the usual permanent city theaters and it was determined that the maximum number of tickets had been sold.

Thus, in the beginning, most of the movies shown at drive-ins were old releases, many Westerns starring the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, or comedies like Blondie and Dagwood. A new movie industry was developed to create low-budget entertainment focused on the drive-in movie market, a genre that could be called B-movies, or grindhouse or exploitation movies.

With the rise in popularity of drive-ins, the demand was unlimited for new releases each week. There was money to be made on these low-budget flicks by companies, directors, producers, and new actors or actresses looking to break in. The key to their production was keeping costs low, which sometimes led filming to take place in environments less costly than Hollywood, such as the Philippines or Hong Kong.

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As the number of drive-ins and Baby Boomers grew, more movies were needed to fill the demand. The new motto of Hollywood became “Make them fast, make them cheap, make them fun.” One take… and if someone forgot their lines, no retake.

Once on an Al Adamson movie there were six takes, but he was so overjoyed when he got that useable take that he forgot to put film in the camera. (Saved money on that one.) Adamson became famous for rereleasing the same movie three times. His mindset was, change the feature’s name and its posters, and it was a “new” movie.

Sometimes, movie plots were recycled. If you watch CatWomen of the Moon (1953) and Missile to the Moon (1958), you’ll notice there are different casts but the storylines are the same.

Susan Morrow, who starred in Cat-Women, became famous for two things: being married to Gary Morton, who would become Lucille Ball’s husband, and being the sister of Judith Exner, who was gangster Sam Giancana’s girlfriend and rumored to be connected to JFK. Movies were shot in six days, some less, on shoestring budgets. On a Roger Corman movie, one actress remarked that oxygen tanks were needed for an underwater scene, but Roger

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Ads for drivein horror shows like these packed ’em in on weekend evenings.

(ABOVE) From the author’s collection, a lobby card for a tawdry 1964 release filmed in “Voluptuous Color,” definitely indicative of standard drive-in fare. © Dominant Pictures of the Carolinas.

(LEFT) The ad for this 1956 release implied more sex than actually happened in the movie… sort of like the sensationalized cover of a comic book you bought as a kid but soon discovered misrepresented the story inside. Two in a Sleeping Bag starred Susanne Cramer, who sadly took her life when she was in her early thirties. © Holt International. Courtesy of Heritage.

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Grindhouse Genres

The major studios, with the advent of television, seemed to lose sight of the trends in moviegoers’ tastes. Not so with the makers of B-movies.

In the Fifties, science fiction was the thing, with invaders from Mars and UFOs in movies like This Island Earth and The Thing—movies about fear of the consequences of atomic bombs that would unleash prehistoric monsters or create giant bugs.

Giant-insect movies are my favorites, such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and my all-time favorite, The Spider (1958), which starred Ed Kemmer of the TV show Space Patrol. The Spider’s advertising screamed, “Bullets can’t kill it! Flames can’t hurt it!

Nothing can stop it! The spider will eat you alive!” [Editor’s note: See RetroFan #9 for more about the filmmaker behind The Spider, Bert I. Gordon.]

B-movie directors and producers of drive-in movies would become famous not so much for the movies, but the advertising campaigns that preceded them. Many designed their own posters and movie books sent out by the distributor to line up bookings. If enough orders were received, then the actual movie was shot. Since a B-movie was completed in only six days, it was not that difficult to work with such a short lead time.

Next, enter the juvenile delinquent phase of the drivein movies! Fear gripped the nation and U.S. congressional hearings were held about what was happening to all those kids, and what was polluting their minds. First up under scrutiny was comic books, and publishers like EC Comics’ Bill Gaines were in

ROGER CORMAN Roger Corman (b. 1926) left a major studio over a dispute involving his work on The Gunfighter (1956) starring Gregory Peck. Corman scrambled for resources to begin producing B-movies that became legendary at drive-ins. Corman made a series of horror movies based on Edgar Allan Poe’s works for American International Pictures, to compete with the Hammer horror films being imported from the United Kingdom. The Poe movies—including The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), and Masque of the Red Death (1964)—made a star of Vincent Price and resurrected the careers of forgotten stars Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Other Cormanproduced films that were favorites at the drive-in were The Little Shop of Horrors (1960); The Wild Angels (1966); The Trip (1967), a movie about LSD starring Peter Fonda that was shot on a $100,000 budget but made $10 million; Bloody Mama (1970), featuring a young Robert DeNiro; and Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha (1972), the second movie directed by Martin Scorsese.

Corman received an honorary Academy Award® for achievement in 2009. Quentin Tarantino continues in Corman’s tradition today.

Corman has since sold his entire movie catalogue to a Chinese company for hundreds of millions. Who says no one watches drive-in movies?

Angela George/Wikimedia Commons.

said, “Watch the breathing, since it costs money to put air in the tanks.”

hot water. Parents were concerned about stories of wild rock-androll dances and kids going mad.

In 1961, United Artists released the movie musical West Side Story, about gangs in New York City. Cheaply made B-movies followed at the drive-in, where you could see a double bill of Girls in Prison and High School Hellcats. On another weekend you could catch The Mini-Skirt Mob or She-Devils on Wheels.

Horror movies were also a drive-in staple. The success of the drive-in assisted in the establishment of American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1954 by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson. When Hammer Pictures of the United Kingdom was filing the theaters with monsters like Frankenstein and Dracula, in the U.S. Roger Corman signed a six-movie deal with AIP to make competing films for the drive-ins. Each was focused on an Edgar Allan Poe story like Premature Burial, The Raven, and The Tomb of Ligeia. American International Pictures became the employer of (LEFT AND OPPOSITE PAGE) Sometimes creepy, sometimes cheesy, spooky B-movies of the Fifties and Sixties were drive-in staples, resurrecting careers of old-timers and providing early credits for up-and-comers. Both, © American International Pictures.

Posters courtesy of Heritage.

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vintage Hollywood actors who had been left behind by the major studios.

Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Elsa Lancaster, and even Buster Keaton began to appear in Sixties’ beach movies with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Bikini Beach, Ghost in the Invisible Bikini…

Beach movies had lots of singing, go-go dancers with boots, and guitars, although no one seemed to know where were the electric guitars were plugged into. And no one seemed to ever notice if the sand was burning hot or not. When the summer was done, the shindig moved to the slopes, like 1965’s Ski Party with Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman. The drive-in became the “passion pit” for teenagers who would make out in their cars during these movies. (Once, when I was on a date at a drive-in, there was a knock on my car window. I rolled it down and the attendant requested that I and my date leave. When I wiped

Cover of the boxed DVD set of B-movies by filmmaker Al Adamson. Grindhousedatabase.

TED V. MIKELS AND AL ADAMSON Ted V. Mikels (1929–2017) and Al Adamson (1929–1994) would become major players by making B-movies for drive-ins. Both contended their audiences did not care about reviews or bad acting, but wanted to be scared or entertained.

Mikels’ films were often big on blood and gore. They included The Girl in the Gold Boots (1968), a product of the James Bond craze; The Corpse Grinders (1972), a grindhouse favorite so successful that Ted came back to it for two later versions; the Charlie’s Angels prototype The Doll Squad (1973), starring Michael Ansara and Francine York, a movie whose production budget was so small it reused the same borrowed machine gun footage over and over again; and Violent Women in Prison (1982). Ted’s budgets were so tiny he usually gave himself a big part in his movies.

Adamson loved the title “blood” in his movies, and in the Sixties also made lots of movies about go-go dancers and motorcycles. In some of his movies the same actor played one to three parts. His films included Psycho a Go-Go (1965), which appeared with several different titles over the years; Satan’s Sadists (1969), shot on a budget of $100,000 and earning several million dollars; Hell’s Bloody Devils (1970); Horror of the Blood Monster (1970); The Female Bunch (1971); Blood of Ghostly Manor (1971); The Naughty Stewardesses (1973); and Brain of Blood (1974). Tragically, Adamson’s life ended like a scene from one of his movies. He was murdered on June 21, 1995 by a handyman he had hired who had stolen money and checks from him. Adamson’s body was buried under the sauna in his house and covered over with concrete.

away the steam from the windshield, I realized my car was the only one left on the lot!)

It was also the time of “sex, drugs, rock and roll.” While Beach Blanket fans were watching movies that delivered good, clean romance, the roar of motorcycles could be heard on some drive-in lots—and on the screens, as motorcycle outlaw gang movies became the drive-in theater competition to sweet and romantic beach movies! “Their credo is violence, their God is hate, they call themselves The Wild Angels.” In that 1966 biker movie from Roger Corman, Peter Fonda and Nancy “These Boots Are Made for Walking” Sinatra were members of a motorcycle gang. America in the Sixties and Seventies was a time of contrasts, with its “summers of love” that took place while the body count from the Vietnam War climbed. Drive-in movies were part of the diversion from the real world. The high point of the outlaw biker movies was 1969’s Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson.

The rise of Blaxploitation films and martial-arts movies filled lots of drive-ins in the Seventies. Marquees featured African-American-starring fare like the horror movie Blacula and James Bond-like characters in movies shot on the cheap such as That Man Bolt, Black Heat, and Black Samurai. There were kung-fu movies of all types, like King of Kung Fu and Karate Warriors.

Drive-ins became home to a new trend in adult movies.

Filmmaker Al Adamson exploited this trend with movies like Nurse Sheri, Naughty Stewardesses (“They fly first class all the way”), and Blazing Stewardesses. Adamson formed a fake organization of women who were “picketing” against the movies outside drive-ins to drum up attention to the films.

Like with the controversies over banned books, drive-in ticket sales skyrocketed—peopled wanted to see what was so bad.

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(LEFT) The Mendon Drive-In, Mendon, Massachusetts, where the author’s daughters saw Disney movies in Eighties. The drive-in is still operating and even has shows in the winter months. Courtesy of the Mendon Drive-In. (RIGHT) The Mustang Drive-In, Guelph, Ontario. The theater sits in the middle of a cornfield and still operates, although its former grandeur is gone. Photo by Jim Trautman.

The drive-ins might have inspired a Seventies TV hit. In 1973, director Ted V. Mikels released The Doll Squad, about a group of sexy female government agents. Watch it today, and then watch Charlie’s Angels. Was Angels’ producer Aaron Spelling in the drivein audience? Three years later, his similar show premiered. (And the main character in The Doll Squad was named Sabrina.)

The End of the Drive-in

Sadly, drive-ins began to disappear once the late Seventies arrived. Mainstream Hollywood was making more of the type of movies that had been the bread and butter of the drive-in owners.

Also, when constructed the drive-in theaters were located outside of cities, but as metropolitan areas grew and land became very valuable, the drive-ins were now B-Movies’ A-List competing with giant multiplex theaters There’s a large cast of unknowns that would which were not showing just movies, but move on to become famous and win Oscars hosting birthday parties and games—the but started out in low-budget drive-in multiplex had taken over the drive-in movies, such as Francis Ford Coppola and model. Most drive-ins disappeared.

Martin Scorsese. Roger Corman met Jack There have been attempts to once Nicholson in an acting class. Reach back again market drive-ins to families. to about the first ten years of Nicholson’s When my girls were growing up, it was career and discover the many Corman like the old days, taking them to a stillmovies he appeared in until his breakout standing drive-in, both girls in their PJs, and watching Disney movies like The Fox in Easy Rider in 1969—his first appearance and the Hound and The Black Hole. And was in 1958 in The Cry Baby Killer. Same The Movieland drive-in theater toy from when the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 with other B-movie grads like Bruce Dern, Remco allowed kids to drive in past the temporarily closed many multiplexes, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper. B-movie marquee and into the ticket booth, and some of the few remaining drive-ins companies employed a regular stock of park one of the six beautiful cars before a reopened, many showing older movies. actors, actresses, and cameramen. giant screen.

It contained six movie reels: If you long for classic drive-in King Brothers Studios which turned out Have Gun Will Travel, Heckle and Jeckle, nostalgia, search eBay for Remco’s monster movies, crime movies, and general Mighty Mouse, Captain Kangaroo, Dinky Movieland drive-in theater toy. Made schlock, some of which was written by the Duck, and Farmer Alfalfa.

Released in time in 1959, it features a screen and six film famous two-time Academy Award winner for Christmas 1959, it originally retailed strips… or, as its TV ad said, “Beautiful Dalton Trumbo in his blacklisted years. for a mere $5.98.

Brian Monroe collection.

Also, cars, a marquee, and ticket booth.” The Famous drive-in B-movie director Al manufacturer Selchow & Righter Co. Adamson convinced actor Russ Tamblyn, ad closed with, “Every boy wants a Remco produced Drive-In: The Money Making who had received an Academy Award® toy,” and a young actress wearing the Movie Game, a board game. nomination for West Side Story, to come ticket taker hat added, “and so do girls,” out of retirement to play in 1969’s Satan’s winking to the camera. That was a young Sadists, billed as “wild beyond belief.” Satan’s Sadists had a Patty Duke, who was featured in other Remco toy ads as well.

Vietnam theme, as the hero was a U.S. Marine vet, and was a Remco’s Movieland originally cost $5.98, and can be yours today box office smash only with drive-in audiences. Adamson’s The for about $200.

Female Bunch (1971), featuring a motorcycle gang of women, was filmed at L.A. County’s legendary Spahn Ranch while the Pop culture historian JIM TRAUTMAN has written about antiques Manson family was in residence. and collectibles for World Class Antiques, The Wayback If you were at the drive-in for the double feature of Bloody Times, and Antique Week. He is the author of the book The Pan Mama (1970) and Boxcar Bertha (1972), you watched a young American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs accompanying this article are Robert DeNiro in the first and Barbara Hershey in the courtesy of Mr. Trautman. second. Boxcar Bertha was directed by Martin Scorsese.

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SUPER COLLECTOR

Collecting

Comic

Art

by David Mandel I was in third grade, about eight years old, and drawing a picture of the human heart for a school report on the floor of my parents’ bedroom when my stomach started hurting.

It was not exactly my stomach but rather my side that hurt. I had a mild fever and I vomited once, and before I knew what was happening, they were taking out my appendix at Mt. Sinai Hospital. This was before laparoscopic surgery, which meant they made a large incision to get the appendix out, and the recovery was painful, especially at first, and I stayed in the hospital for over a week.

It was kind of scary, the food was terrible, and I hated when they woke me up early in the morning to take blood.

But what I remember most about my stay in the hospital was X-Men Annual #4. To cheer me up, my parents had picked up a whole bunch of comic books for me, and on top of the pile was a new issue of the X-Men, and it was a double-sized one at that. Written by Chris Claremont © Marvel.

(TOP LEFT) Star Wars Marvel Treasury Edition and (BOTTOM LEFT) the original art by Rick Hoberg and Dave Cockrum. © LucasFilm Ltd.

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(ABOVE) Daredevil #184 and (RIGHT) the original art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson. © Marvel.

with cover and art by John Romita, Jr. and Bob McLeod, “Nightcrawler’s Inferno” had the X-Men, with help from Dr. Strange, journeying through Dante’s Inferno to save Nightcrawler’s soul from his… mother! There were other comics in that pile, but that was the one I read over and over and over. That was the comic book that got me through my surgery. And it took me just a little less than 25 years to track down and buy the original art to the cover. I would have paid anything to get it. I had to have it.

In case it was not clear, I collect original comic art. If you do not know what original comic art is, it is the original, hand-drawn pages that are used to make comic books. Often one artist pencils them, and then a second artist inks them, and they are black and white—the color is added later before the comic book is printed. I used to joke that I collect original art because regular comic book collecting was not nerdy enough for me, but it is really so much more than that.

So, what is original comic-art collecting?

Original Comic Art is Nostalgia

All collecting is nostalgia, of course, but comic art for me is doubly so. Not every piece of comic art in my collection is connected to a hospital stay, but for most of my pieces, I can remember where and when I read the original issue. Some comics, I bought with 66

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my friends first on the upper west side of New York City at West Side Comics and then later at Big Apple Comics on 92nd Street, across from where my grandmother lived. Some are from comics my parents sent me as a “Care Package” at sailing camp, which I hated because everyone seemed to know how to sail already. I own the original art to the cover of the Star Wars Treasury Edition.

And that cover not only reminds of seeing Star Wars—twice in a row—when it came out, but more importantly, I specifically remember reading the treasury with my dad on the beach in Cape Cod during a summer vacation. We had seen the movie together and now we were reading the treasury edition together. And later that same day, we went out in the ocean and got the crap knocked out of us by a big wave that stole my father’s sunglasses. Pure nostalgia. But it is more that, too.

Original Comic Art is Ego

Comic art also does something that seems to stoke what I like to call my “collector’s ego.” You see, anyone can have a copy of X-Men Annual #4. X-Men was among Marvel’s bestselling comic books

super collector

(ABOVE) G.I. Joe #2 and (LEFT) the original art by Herb Trimpe and Jack Abel. © Hasbro.

Comic Art is a Peek Behind the Curtain

at the time, and they printed a lot of copies. It is not a rare book, even in “mint condition,” but there is one and only one, original, hand-drawn cover to X-Men Annual #4 by Romita, Jr. and McLeod.

There is something very pleasing about that as a collector. No matter how nice a copy of the comic book you have, someone else has one, too. I have the only original art to the cover. The only one.

Me. Not you. It can be intoxicating.

There are comics in the collecting world that were hard to find—anyone who grew up in the Eighties remembers that some “issue #2s” like G.I. Joe #2 were very collectible because retailers ordered fewer of them. I remember going store to store to find G.I. Joe #2, in which the Joe team races across the frozen tundra to fight Cobra, so imagine my pleasure years later in acquiring the original art to the cover to G.I. Joe #2 by Herb Trimpe and Jack Abel. Again, I have it, and you do not!

I love seeing the process of how a comic book gets made through a piece of original art. Did they shrink the cover? Did they redraw a face? Are there notes from the artist to the editor or the colorist?

I have a wonderful Daredevil cover

by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson in my collection. It is the cover to Daredevil #184, although comic fans remember it as the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” cover, with the gun. And there on the bottom of the cover is a hand-written note from Mr. Janson requesting that cover be printed with a “very dark background.” The finished printed cover? It is… bright yellow. I love that.

Or how about an original Jack Kirby piece of X-Men art from one of the early issues? Kirby would fill the margins with pencil notes to himself and to Stan Lee about what the story was. I love reading the notes as much I love the art.

Comic Art is a Salve to Frustrated Artist

I am perpetually frustrated by how terrible an artist I am.

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drawing my own version of that cover over and over. Romita, Jr. had nothing to worry about, but it made me want to own the original art even more.

There was another Miller Daredevil cover that I drew all the time: issue #189, the one with Daredevil and all the arrows flying at him. I bought the original art in the late Nineties from a collector who had a comic shop. Again, I had to have it.

Comic Art is About the Journey

Comic Art is About Artists

I have fond memories of the bar at the Oakland Marriot where WonderCon used to take place. That was one of the nice things about the comic conventions I attended in the Nineties, they were small enough that you could actually meet people. That bar is where I became friends with Arthur Adams and Joyce Chin. We started doing regular dinners that have lasted to this day and now include our kids and… Bruce Timm. I remember hanging out to all hours of the night with Dan Brereton getting watercolor lessons from him that did not quite take. And somewhere along the way, I got to know Dave Stevens, who’s friendship I miss to this day, but led to my helping getting The Rocketeer republished. I own art in my collection, drawn by my friends.

I once made my college roommate drive with me into New Jersey during rush hour to get to a comic shop that was selling a Dark Knight Returns splash featuring Superman. It should have taken 20 minutes, but it took almost two hours. Worth it!

And I will never forget driving down to San Diego with my then assistant and future comic-book super collector writer JT to do a comic-art deal in a strip mall behind a grocery store. I opened my car trunk like a drug deal, so the pile of original Frank Miller Daredevil art could be loaded in, and I handed over a mix of checks and cash.

And then there was the time I did a giant deal in the middle of the night, deep in the San Fernando Valley. By the time we finished negotiating, I had added some amazing gems to my collection including a Kirby Fantastic Four cover and a Ditko pre-hero story. It was the biggest deal I had ever done at that point, and the date on the check: April 1. It seemed like a joke.

Comic Art is About the Writers

If ten-year old me knew that one day I would be sitting at a poker game playing with Marv Wolfman AND Len Wein, his head would have exploded. Original comic art pages are not just about the art, they are about the words, too. I have pages that I own because of memorable lines of dialogue and story moments that future TV and movie writer in me have never forgotten.

These days the lettering is sadly done later, but there is nothing like paging through my collection and stopping on an Alan Moore Swamp Thing page to “hear” Batman referring to Superman as “what’s his name.”

Back to the poker game: I had gotten to know Mr. Len Wein through a mutual friend (inker/ David Mandel with comic art-collecting friends Kelvin documentarian Steve Mitchell) and Comic Art is about Mao and Joseph Melchior. And Batman. eventually got invited to play in the People his regular game. There was Len, When I look back, I realize that Marv, and Steve, and artist Jerry many of the friends I have made Bingham (Batman: Son of the Demon).

It was a very serious game in my adult life are actually from comic-art collecting. for incredibly low stakes, but they took it very personally. I could The first time I spoke with Kelvin, we argued on the phone about a piece of John Byrne art and vaguely threatened each have cared less about the poker! Over the years, Len and I would other (more than vaguely). Ten years later, we were in each other’s try to meet up for a bite—usually deli, he loved Brent’s in the wedding, and we speak almost every day, starting most of our Valley—and I was honored when he decided to sell me the cover calls with “anything new collecting-wise?” to Giant Size X-Men #1, a piece of art that was as much a dream at My friend Jim and I have a standing plan to drive to San Diego the poker game. I miss our lunches. every year together, and we make sure our rooms are on the same floor of the hotel. When we first got to know each other, Jim had Comic Art is… Art young kids. Now he’s retired and has his first grandchild, and I am At the end of the day, what I love about comic art is framing a piece, the one with young kids. hanging it on the wall, and just looking at it. I see so much.

As the years went by, even the dealers who I once approached so timidly have become good pals and dining compatriots. You DAVID MANDEL is the Emmy Award-winning showrunner of the could have easily set up a mini comic-con at my wedding just HBO comedy Veep and was an executive producer and director for based on the number of dealers and customers that attended.

Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld.

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ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING

by Andy Mangels

(BACKGROUND) H. R. Pufnstuf title card. (INSET) Promotional image for Sid and Marty Krofft's Kaleidoscope. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

Television of the late Sixties and early Seventies was not without its far-out candy-colored mod/hippie-influenced shows, but rarely did the world of the counterculture creep into children’s television. Such was not the case with one series… a series that has stayed in the public eye as a psychedelic cornucopia of oddity… a series that despite everyone in the world claiming it is chock full of drug references, the creators claim it is not…

That series was H. R. Pufnstuf, and its producers, Sid and Marty Krofft, built a legacy on its bizarre tales. With only one full season of shows—and a lesser-known feature film—how has H. R. Pufnstuf’s influence lasted for over 50 years?

The Krofft Kaleidoscope

In the world of Sixties/Seventies Saturday morning television, only a few companies ruled the roosts on the three networks: Hanna-Barbera Productions, Filmation Associates, DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, and Sid and Marty Krofft. Though Filmation had been dabbling with live-action among its H. R. Pufnstuf and Jack Wild as Jimmy. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

animated offerings, the Kroffts would almost singlehandedly keep live-action alive on Saturday mornings, first designing The Banana Splits for Hanna-Barbera in 1968, then debuting their hallucinatory (some would say hallucinogenic) hit H. R. Pufnstuf in 1969.

The Montreal-born brothers Sid and Marty Krofft were the sons of a watchmaker, and Sid worked in vaudeville as a puppeteer, eventually being featured in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus shows. His one-man puppet show, “The Unusual Artistry of Sid Krofft,” toured the world in 1940, where he worked with his father. Younger brother Marty eventually learned the puppet trade on stage, and began working with Sid. In 1957, they even produced a touring risqué puppet production called Les Poupées de Paris.

The Kroffts created the costumes and world of The Banana Splits for Hanna-Barbera in 1968, working for the first time with a respectable budget and national audience. They decided to break off on their own the following year, and the show they created, H. R. Pufnstuf, was their first opportunity to let their fertile imaginations run wild with oversize puppets interacting with humans, kaleidoscopic colors and production design, and even crude special effects.

The H. R. Pufnstuf character actually began his “life” as a character named Luther, a mascot for the 1968 World’s Fair, also known as HemisFair ’68. Held in San Antonio, Texas, from April 6–October 6, 1968, the fair included a Coca-Cola-sponsored RETROFAN

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Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

pavilion called Kaleidoscope, which was created by the Kroffts.

The mascot for the pavilion was Luther, an anthropomorphic dragon with an oversized blue head and friendly smile. He also had a cowboy hat, wore cowboy boots, and talked with a bit of a Southern drawl… apropos for a Texas location.

The plot of Kaleidoscope was described on the back of a souvenir puppet book, which allowed viewers to recreate the show using punch-out cardboard puppets on strings: “Kaleidoscope takes you into a magical world of illusion and surprise… where comedy, music and dance are spectacular, and anything is possible. It boasts a cast of over 120, and features the talents of many Hollywood stars. There have never been so many elaborate effects in one production, where the entire audience becomes involved in the spectacle. You are taken back to the beginning of time where a Super Hero is changed into a monster by a terrible witch and the only way the monster can be changed back is to be kissed by someone. For thousands of years he can get no help until he meets a famous young girl, and the two travel thousands of feet through space searching for the wicked witch who might help. They are entertained by many well-known characters along the way and also go through a few horrifying moments. Finally the show swings to happy times and you find out who the Super Hero is…”

In the story above, the characters included Luther the Enchanted Dragon, Wicked Ol’ Witch (who “flew” over the audience), Senor Ole’, Bull, Ape, and Dog. It is unknown who the “famous girl” was, or which celebrities were involved in the production (although puppets of Judy Garland, Liza Minelli, Marlene Dietrich, and John Wayne were used). Somehow cowboys and giant spiders were also involved, and 16-foot-tall puppets of historical figures like Davy Crockett. Nor do we know who the Super Hero was… According to a souvenir postcard from Coca-Cola, though, at some point in its story, Kaleidoscope explained “man’s interest in, and need for, refreshment.”

Kaleidoscope was presented in a 500-seat auditorium, with the building surrounded by a lagoon.

The Kroffts had a second show—this one adults-only due to its risqué puppets—Les Poupées de Paris, at the nearby Lido Theatre pavilion, but this one was devoid of Coca-Cola branding (though it did have pre-recorded material from Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin).

The only fly in the ointment for the enchanted dragon star was his name; two days before the World’s Fair opened, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. With racially motivated 70

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(TOP LEFT) Exterior of the Coca-Cola-sponsored Kaleidoscope show.

(TOP RIGHT) Marty Kroft with Kaleidoscope's star, Luther. (ABOVE) Production art for the show. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

riots occurring in many cities, the “Luther” name might have struck the wrong chords in audiences. Perhaps this is why the puppet program only references “Enchanted Dragon” as his name?

Creating a Television Trip

NBC daytime executive Larry White and his “people” visited the sets of The Banana Splits while the show was in production, and marveled at the craft that went into the life-size creature suits and puppets working together. NBC suggested to the Kroffts that they try to sell them their own show, but White was leaving Hollywood by train at the end of the week. Sid pulled together and repurposed elements from Kaleidoscope, and three days later (a Friday) the Kroffts delivered the “Luther Land” proposal to White. The exec studied it on a train cross-country, and the following Monday, informed the Kroffts that they had a sale. NBC would debut their Saturday morning live-action life-sized-puppet series in Fall 1969!

NBC quibbled though about the name, feeling “Luther Land” would sound too much like “Lutheran Land.” Marty asked a friend, screenwriter Michael Blodgett, for ideas. Blodgett considered that the most famous dragon in the world was “Puff the Magic Dragon,” made popular from the 1963 song by Peter, Paul and Mary. By playing around with the concept “Puff and all his stuff,” Blodgett suggested to the Kroffts that they call the show

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

“Pufnstuf.” Sid added the honorific “H. R.” in front of it—which reportedly stood for “Highness Royal”—and the series had its new name: Luther Land was now H. R. Pufnstuf!

Of course, once it was changed, NBC wasn’t happy with the name H. R. Pufnstuf for the series either. They feared that it sounded too feminine—and might remind children of powder puffs—but the Kroffts refused to change it again.

As the new show took shape, Pufnstuf, the now green-andyellow dragon, was the mayor of Living Island, a fantastic land where everything inanimate was actually alive! Performer Roberto Gamonet was inside the eightfoot costume, but he was gifted arms in the redesign for the series; Kaleidoscope’s Luther had been armless.

Gamonet had been a famous puppeteer in British Honduras; Pufnstuf would be his only major screen credit.

One book lists

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP) Sid and Marty Kroft greet Jack Wild as he comes to America. Concept art for Witchiepoo and H. R. Pufnstuf. Jimmy and Luther have a tense introduction. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

Gamonet as passing away in 1972, while a newspaper source cites a puppeteer by that name working in 1976; either way, his later life is unknown.

Bedeviling the Living Island was Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo, essentially the same character from the live production, though this one rode around on a broomstick-like flying vehicle called the “Vroom Broom.” While Witchiepoo lived in a castle, her magic could not always affect Pufnstuf, though sometimes it could.

Witchiepoo was played by stage actress Billie Hayes, who was one of two actresses that the Kroffts had to finally choose between.

The first was a then-unknown Penny Marshall, years before her success in Laverne & Shirley. But then Hayes came into the room with a cackle and leapt onto a desk, then sang a song a capella for the Kroffts and director Hollingsworth Morse. Hayes had been suggested to the Kroffts by Peter Walker, who worked with her in a Las Vegas touring production of Hello, Dolly! The Kroffts knew they had their star.

The third main protagonist for the series was set as an 11-year-old boy named Jimmy. Lured to the Living Island aboard Witchiepoo’s enchanted boat, Jimmy had a magic talking flute named Freddy. When searching for Jimmy, Sid Krofft had fixated on an unknown British actor he had recently seen. His friend, Lionel Bart, showed Sid a rough cut of his Dickens-based musical film Oliver (released in September 1968), and young Jack Wild had a leading role there as the Artful Dodger.

Because the 16-year-old actor was underage, he had to have a guardian to work in Hollywood; Marty Krofft accepted guardianship of the youth. Wild worked to tamp down his natural Cockney accent; he could sound British, but not too British. He didn’t have to do much with his singing voice, though; he reportedly hit puberty at the late age of 19, so was able to do fine with the songs. A slight speech impediment meant he couldn’t say “r” easily, meaning that his companion was always referred to by him as “Fweddie the Flute.”

Other main characters of the cast included: the large scientist owl, Dr. Blinky, in charge of the “Anti-Smog, Pollution, and Witch Committee”; a singing and dancing sequined frog based on Judy Garland, coincidentally named Judy the Frog; shady W. C. Fields-like peddler Ludicrous Lion; famous dragon actress and Shirley Temple clone Shirlee Pufnstuf; Witchiepoo’s henchcreatures Orson Vulture, Seymour Spider, and Stupid Bat; the mute Rescue Racer Crew police creatures Cling and Clang; and RETROFAN

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Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning (LEFT) H. R. Pufnstuf, Witchiepoo, and Jimmy have a laugh. (BELOW) Everything is alive on the Living Island including trees, seen in this production sketch, and whatever Keystone Cop-esque Cling and Clang are. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

assorted anthropomorphic clocks, lollipops, birds, trees, houses, mushrooms, and even winds!

Other than Jack Wild and Billie Hayes, pretty much every other creation on H. R. Pufnstuf was a performer in an elaborate costume, or a puppeteered object or animal. Because the Living Island was entirely alive, almost anything could open its mouth and speak or sing. Many of the characters had voices that were reminiscent of famous film stars of the era, including the aforementioned Judy Garland, Shirley Temple, and W. C. Fields, as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mae West, Bela Lugosi, Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Peter Lorre, Jimmy Cagney, Boris Karloff, and others.

The voice performers were almost always the show’s writer Lennie Weinrib, as well as Walker Edmiston and Joan Gerber.

The costumed performers—who were rightfully called “puppeteers” because they had to puppeteer their costumes and perform in them—included several dancers (including former Mouseketeer Sharon Baird) and shorter/little people (such as Felix Silla, Angelo Rossitto, Johnny Silver, Harry Monty, Joy Campbell, and Patty Maloney). Famed little person actor Billy Barty had helped spread the word to diminutive actors that helped them get hired by the Kroffts. The performers got the SAG minimum of $420 a week. Remember that number. It will be important later…

Filming the Living Island

The designs and stories for Pufnstuf were changed from the Beauty and the Beast plotline in Kaleidoscope to one that more closely resembled the Land of Oz, from L. Frank Baum’s book series and the 1939 MGM musical film. Like Dorothy, Jimmy was a stranger in a strange land, who was befriended by multiple magical characters even as he faced the wrath of a wicked witch who wanted something from him (substitute a magical flute for magic slippers). Like Dorothy, Jimmy wanted nothing more than to go home, even if it meant leaving his friends behind. Even one of Jimmy’s potential ways home—the Magic Path—was a yellow brick road!

In charge of writing the series was Lennie Weinrib, who worked on all 17 scripts. Weinrib was inspired to change Jimmy’s 72

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The only way on or off Living Island. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

quest just a bit—adding multiple barriers to Jimmy’s exit leaving the island—because he had been watching the British television series The Prisoner, a 1967 series about a secret agent trying to leave a mysterious village. Weinrib’s first writing partner was Bob Ridolfi, who had only worked on the pilot script as he was killed in a car accident, on New Year’s Eve 1968. Shortly after the series sold, Weinrib met writer Paul Harrison during a dispute over a parking space, and the two worked on the rest of the series together.

Longtime television director Hollingsworth Morse came on to direct the series; years later, he would jump ship to Filmation to direct Shazam!, The Secrets of Isis, and Ark II. The Kroffts made the decision to have Morse shoot Pufnstuf on film, rather than videotape; it was the only Krofft production that they would ever shoot on film.

NBC requested to see a rough cut of the first episode, but the music and sound effects had not yet been added in. They reportedly hated the results, and told the Kroffts to reshoot the entire show. The producers added in the music and effects and

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning The Krofts and Jack Wild on set. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

FA ST FAC TS H. R. Pufnstuf ` No. of seasons: One ` No. of episodes: 17 ` Original run: September 6, 1969–September 5, 1970 (NBC, Saturdays)

Primary Physical Performer Cast

sent it back to the network, without telling them it was otherwise the exact same footage. The executives loved the “revised” episode, and approved it.

Si Rose, a sitcom writer brought in to punch up the scripts and produce the series, convinced the Kroffts to add a laugh track to the series as well. Although they initially resisted, Rose convinced them that children would need the track as a cue to know when it was okay to laugh. The producers relented, and Pufnstuf got its laugh track.

Although the opening sequence with Jimmy and the boat was shot at Big Bear Lake, a resort area in California, the remainder of the show was shot at Paramount Studios on elaborately colorful sound stages. The sets accommodated not only the performers and their costumes, but were designed to hide the puppeteers and wires needed for stunts such as flying objects or creatures (or an occasional witch). Art director Nick Nadeu had been brought aboard the team by Si Rose, and although Wes Cook produced the fanciful designs for the show on paper, Nadeau was responsible for the colorful sets and general distinctive look that eventually became known in Hollywood as “the Krofft look.” Coral Kerr holds the distinction of designing Freddy the Flute, a character the art department was concerned might be a bit too phallic for a preteen boy to be handling!

Most H. R. Pufnstuf episodes highlighted musical numbers sung by Jimmy, occasionally with others joining in. The songs were short and repetitive, designed for younger audiences, and all written by Les Szarvas. Choreographer Hal Belfer came in to oversee dancing on the show, and he was aided by Hayes, Wild,

` Jack Wild: Jimmy ` Robert Gamonet: H. R. Pufnstuf ` Billie Hayes: Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo ` Sharon Baird: Stupid Bat, Judy Frog, Shirlee Pufnstuf, Lady Boyd ` Joy Campbell: Orson Vulture, Cling ` Angelo Rossitto: Seymour Spider, Clang ` John Silver: Dr. Blinky, Ludicrous Lion ` Andy Ratoucheff: Tick Tock, Polka-Dotted Horse ` Felix Silla: Polka-Dotted Horse, Cling ` Also starring Jerry Landon, Jon Linton, Scutter McKay, Harry Monty, Robin Roper, Patty Maloney

Primary Voice Performer Cast ` Lennie Weinrib: H. R. Pufnstuf, Bela Lugosi Tree, Dr. Blinky’s Talking Book, Stupid Bat, Pop Lolly, West Wind, Max Von Toadenoff the Great, Orson Vulture, Polka Dotted Horse, Jimmy as Movie Villain ` Walker Edmiston: Boris Karloff Tree, Dr. Blinky’s Candle, East Wind, Grandfather Clock, North Wind, Chief Redwood, Alarm Clock, Dr. Blinky, Dr. Blinky’s Test Tube, Ludicrous Lion, Seymour Spider ` Joan Gerber: Freddy the Flute, Grandmother Clock, Judy the Frog, Madame Willow, South Wind, Lady Boyd, Shirlee Pufnstuf

Jack Wild mugs for the camera between scenes while Roberto Gamonet gets some air. John Silver as Dr. Blinky is in the middle. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

and Sharon Baird, all of whom had stage musical and dancing backgrounds.

The costumes for most of the players were oppressively hot, and one puppeteer—a Russian little person named Andy Ratoucheff—would often have to take breaks due to an asthma attack. Although many of the performers puppeteered their mouths, including some that had animatronics, Gamonet had to work Pufnstuf’s mouth with his hands, leaving him unable to use his arms.

Sometimes the dragon mayor had one “swinging dead arm,” while in one of the costumes, the arms were both stuffed, or even puppeteered through the use of strings! Eventually the Pufnstuf head was given controls so that Gamonet

(RIGHT) Roberto Gamonet gets help with his H. R. Pufnstuf costume. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

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could properly act with both arms and mouth movement. During shooting, the lines for the characters were read by the female dialogue director, and the voice actors would dub the lines in later in ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement, a.k.a. “looping”). The only “traditional” puppet on the set was Freddy the Flute, which was operated with cables from below, sometimes by Sid Krofft himself!

Filming for Pufnstuf was from 7:30am to 7pm daily, with all 17 shows shot in three months. It was an expansive schedule compared to some later live kids’ shows, but with the amount of technical wizardry involved, the pace was always frenetic.

Throughout the first season, due mostly to Sid Krofft refusing to compromise his vision for the series, Pufnstuf went wildly over budget. The show was budgeted at $52,000 per half hour, or around $884,000 for the season; by the end, it was reportedly a million dollars over, an astronomical cost for the time! By the time the show came to its final episode, the producers had to engineer a “clips show” to even make it, utilizing minor new footage and reused footage from other episodes. Thankfully, the Kroffts were making money from their puppet shows at four Six Flags theme parks, and they funneled the money into Pufnstuf. But the cost could have buried the company if Pufnstuf wasn’t a hit.

Pufnstuf on the Air

H. R. Pufnstuf debuted with NBC’s new season on Saturday, September 6, 1969, at 10am, just before The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. Pufnstuf was a monster-sized hit, and the Kroffts were picked to do further Saturday morning development. They created the insect-themed musical series The Bugaloos for NBC

H. R. PUFNSTUF THEME SONG Written by Les Szarvas (and Paul Simon), performed by The Ron Hicklin Singers H. R. Pufnstuf Who’s your friend when things get rough?

H. R. Pufnstuf Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough.

Once upon a summertime Just a dream from yesterday A boy and his magic golden flute Heard a boat from off the bay “Come and play with me, Jimmy Come and play with me.

And I will take you on a trip Far across the sea.”

But the boat belonged to a kooky old witch Who had in mind the flute to snitch From her Vroom Broom in the sky She watched her plans materialize She waved her wand The beautiful boat was gone The skies grew dark The sea grew rough And the boat sailed on and on and on and on and on and on.

But Pufnstuf was watching too And knew exactly what to do He saw the witch’s bold attack And as the boy was fighting back He called his Rescue Racer Crew As often they’d rehearsed And off to save the boy they flew But who would get there first?

But now the boy had washed ashore Puf arrived to save the day Which made the witch so mad and sore She shook her fist and screamed away.

Beautiful production art by Wes Cook. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. Courtesy of Heritage.

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H. R. Pufnstuf Who’s your friend when things get rough?

H. R. Pufnstuf Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough. (repeats)

© Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

(1970–1972), the anthropomorphic hat series Lidsville for CBS (1971–1973) [see RetroFan #6 for an interview with Lidsville and The Munsters actor Butch Patrick—ed.], the humans-adopt-a-cute seacreature show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters for NBC (1973–1975), the adventures of a family trapped in an alternate world full of dinosaurs and lizard-men Sleestacks known as the Land of the Lost for CBS (1974–1976), and androids from the future trapped in the present in ABC’s The Lost Saucer (1975). Even more hits followed…

While the Kroffts were still producing the first season of the television series, Universal Pictures approached them about doing a Pufnstuf feature film, to be co-produced by Kellogg’s Cereal.

The film, written by John Fenton Murray and Si Rose, featured elements that predated the television series (including Jimmy’s pre-Living Island life), and elements that were concurrent with the show. With a (slightly) bigger budget, many characters and sets got redesigned a bit, and new characters were introduced: Googy Gopher, Orville Pelican, and chauffeur Heinrich Rat. Most specifically new were Boss Witch (diva Martha Raye) and Witch Hazel (Sid Krofft’s neighbor Mama Cass Elliott).

Lennie Weinrib did not contribute any voices; his parts were mostly taken by either Don Messick or Al Melvin, the latter taking over Pufnstuf’s voicing.

The 98-minute Pufnstuf was released to theatres in June 1970, while the first season was in its first round of reruns. Even though it had a small budget, compared to Pufnstuf on TV, the feature was Colorful poster for the theatrical release, considered a flop.

Pufnstuf. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

Still, it was brought back to theatres over the next few years as a matinee seat-filler, often paired with June 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

Strangely, despite its TV success, H. R. Pufnstuf did not go to a second season; new NBC executive George Henemann offered another 17 episodes, with a meager budget increase of 5% additional over the $52,000 per episode, but the million-dollar budgetary overrun and the losses to the Kroffts could not be overcome by the pittance. The Kroffts turned the deal down.

But the series did not leave the air for the 1970–1971 NBC season, nor for 1971–1972 (though it aired spottily this final year). When NBC dropped the show, ABC picked it up, airing it on Saturdays in 1972–1973, and Sundays for the 1973–1974 season. Following its five seasons of network airing, Pufnstuf went into syndication, from September 1974 to June 1978. Following that, it remained on the air in syndication as part of a package called Krofft Superstars

from 1978 to 1985! Since that time, the show has aired on TV Land and MeTV, among others.

H. R. Pufnstuf was also a licensing bonanza for the Kroffts.

Characters from the show would appear on cereal boxes, soundtrack albums, toys, puzzles, games, coloring books and storybooks, hand puppets, comic books from Gold Key, lunch boxes, and much more.

Additionally, the Kroffts would reuse—or loan out— their characters to other television productions. H. R. Pufnstuf appeared in episodes of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Lidsville, and The Krofft Superstar Hour segment The Lost Island.

Witchiepoo later appeared on Lidsville, and The Krofft Superstar Hour segment Horror This H.R. Pufnstuf Press Out Hotel (alongside Orson Vulture, book was just one of many Seymour Spider, and Stupid licensed items generated by the Bat). Witchiepoo also appeared show. © Sid and Marty Krofft in ABC’s 1976 bizarrely campy Productions.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, where she was the sister of The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (portrayed by Margaret Hamilton)! Hayes reprised her role as Witchiepoo in all cases, but Pufnstuf was now played by actor Van Snowden, who took over the role in 1972 from Roberto Gamonet. Snowden would be Pufnstuf from 1972 to at least 2007.

Pufnstuf and his friends appeared in many theme park shows—mostly for Six Flags parks—since 1971. There were also stage show tours that travelled the U.S., and special events such as 1973’s H. R. Pufnstuf & The Brady Kids Live at the Hollywood Bowl. The entire cast (including a faux Jimmy) appeared in an Ice Capades touring show in the early Seventies. Additionally, Pufnstuf has appeared on episodes of CHiPs, My Name is Earl, George Lopez,

Billie Hayes (CENTER), Mama Cass (LEFT), and Martha Raye (RIGHT) get witchie in this theater photo promoting the film Pufnstuf. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

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and the Kroffts’ 2016 Nickelodeon series Mutt & Stuff, and the series has been parodied on The Simpsons and Mr. Show with Bob and David, among many others.

Fans could also recreate Jimmy’s journey for themselves for a brief time as there were Pufnstuf elements at the World of Sid and Marty Krofft, a six-floor indoor amusement park in Atlanta, Georgia which was opened in May 1976. The lowest floor held the Living Island Adventure, and it featured the Living Island forest and an actress playing Witchiepoo to heckle the visitors. Sadly, the indoor park was a colossal failure, and it unceremoniously closed in November 1976.

Cloned Songs, Thieving Burger Burglars, and Something Smells Skunky

Three legal issues arose for the Kroffts out of H. R. Pufnstuf. Well, two legal issues and a 50-year controversy…

The first related to the theme song, written by Les Szarvas.

None other than Paul Simon sued over the track, claiming that it was far too close to his own hit, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” The exact nature of the settlement of the lawsuit is unknown, but Simon is now listed as co-writer on the song in credits.

The second related to McDonald’s. An advertising representative for the fast food chain had come to the Kroffts in early 1970, to ask them to develop ideas for a McDonaldland group of characters that they could use in advertising. In August 1970, after the Kroffts designed some characters, the ad exec told them they were going to go in another direction. In January 1971, the Kroffts saw the “new” direction; that being that Mayor McCheese directly ripped off H. R. Pufnstuf, and that Officer Big Mac, the Apple Pie Trees, Hamburgler, Grimace, Captain Crook, and other characters bore more than a tiny passing resemblance to the Krofft designs! As they would later learn, not only had the ad exec hired former Krofft employees to produce the McDonaldland suits, but he had also hired Pufnstuf voice actors to provide voices! The brothers filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in November 1973.

After a three-week trial, a jury found in favor of the Kroffts and awarded them $50,000, but both sides appealed. In late 1977, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeals on Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions Inc. v. McDonald’s Corp., 562 F.2d 1157, and decided again that McDonald’s had lost. Now, the case was remanded to find Jimmy and Cling and Clang find themselves trapped and at the mercy of Witchiepoo. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

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H. R. PUFNSTUF FEATURED SONGS Written by Les Szarvas * Note that song titles varied from copyright entries to songbooks to soundtracks, but these are the “most” correct titles.

“When We Woke Up This Morning” (Jack Wild) “How Lucky I Am” (Jack Wild, Lennie Weinrib) “Pronouns” (Jack Wild) “Oranges Smoranges” (Billie Hayes) “(I’m A) Mechanical Boy” (Jack Wild) “Campfire Grannies” (Billie Hayes) “(The) End of the Road” (Jack Wild) “(A) Bucket of Sunshine” (Jack Wild, Lennie Weinrib, and company) “Ice Cold Lemonade” (Billie Hayes) “I’m So Happy To Be Here” (Joan Gerber, Jack Wild) “Moonwalk” (Joan Gerber) “The Loneliest Witch in Town” (Billie Hayes) “(The) Beggar’s Song” (Jack Wild) “I’m Just a Bundle of Sunshine” (Billie Hayes) “Pufnstuf for Mayor/Witchiepoo For Mayor” (Jack Wild and company) “The Fastest Hoof in the Whole Darn West” (Lennie Weinrib) “Someone Who Cares” (a.k.a. closing theme) (The Ron Hicklin Singers)

© Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning

out how much money was owed. Many years after the lawsuit began, the Kroffts got their answer; McDonald’s owed them $1,044,000! According to some sources, McDonald’s still sends regular checks to the Kroffts even today.

The aforementioned controversy came about due to the general public being certain that not only was the wildly colored psychedelic land and characters—like talking magic mushrooms—inspired by the use of illegal drugs… but that

continually maintained otherwise for years. “You cannot be creative and do a show stoned,” Marty Krofft said in a 2016 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It just isn’t going to work.

Sid and myself really never did the drugs. The bottom line is, the audience was probably getting loaded.”

Okay, but remember the SAG scale the actors were paid to work on the show? $420 a week? “420” is slang for “pot consumption in progress.” Coincidence?

About the closest to an admission of guilt that anyone has ever gotten was when Marty Krofft, in a February 2004 interview with Albany, New York’s The Times Union, stated, “I think we probably messed around a little bit with what we said and did sometimes, but the shows had nothing to do with drugs.”

Okay, Marty, we get the denials, loud and clear. If you’re holding, you aren’t sharing. But maybe once the marijuana laws have been changed across the country, we’ll finally get the “true” True Hollywood Story.

Pufnstuf’s Legacy

Inventive character and set designs were a hallmark of the trippy H. R. Pufnstuf… and none of it had anything to do with drugs. © Sid and Marty Krofft Productions.

the title character himself was, in fact, promoting drug use through his very name! After all, not only was Pufnstuf literally pronounced “Puffin’ Stuff,” but H. R. meant, in marijuana terms, “hand rolled.” In other words, the popular thinking went, “hand-rolled puffin’ stuff” with its hallucinogenic imagery, and mushrooms, was clearly all about drugs…

Over the years, the fan claims have become more strident, asking for the Kroffts to just come clean and narc on themselves. The dragon mayor even sounded like a hippie, albeit a laid-back Southern hippie. Even Lennie Weinrib, in a December 24, 2000 episode of The E! True Hollywood Story: H. R. Pufnstuf and the Strange World of Sid and Marty Krofft, said, “I think fans gave it a kind of mysterious code-like meaning, like, ‘Ah, was Pufnstuf puffing stuff? Like grass?’ Was it psychedelic? Was it drug oriented? Not to us, it wasn’t.”

In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in February 2004, responding to the question, “Is H. R. Pufnstuf just one giant drug reference?,” Marty Krofft said, “We’ve heard that for 35 years.

We did not intentionally do anything related to drugs in the story.

People thought we were on drugs. You can’t do good television while on drugs. People never believe you when you say that, but you can’t. The shows were very bright and spacey looking. They may have lent themselves to that culture at the time, but we didn’t ascribe that meaning to them, and I can’t speak to what adults were doing when they were watching the shows. We just set out to make a quality children’s program.”

Despite the fact that most fans (and publications) insisted Pufnstuf and other shows were drug-inspired, the Kroffts have

Today, H. R. Pufnstuf has slotted highly in many polls of cult TV shows, and the show is available on DVD and digitally online. The Kroffts have worked with Sony for a proposed feature film, and the original series is trotted out any time a celebration of kitsch or retro TV is prepared. When the brothers Krofft appear at conventions or public appearances, a live Pufnstuf is often with them, still an audience favorite.

In the 50+ years since its debut, H. R. Pufnstuf has remained a vital, psychedelic part of the fabric of American television.

So, what will be the legacy for Luther the Enchanted Dragon, or Highness Royal Pufnstuf, or the Living Island? At its base, H. R. Pufnstuf succeeds at being wildly vibrant and colorful, packed to the rafters with outrageous performances and puppetry unrivalled until The Muppet Show. Homages and parodies of vintage celebrities, groan-inducing puns, punchy songs… and, whether the creators wanted to intend it or not, the inescapable smoky element of an escape to an altered consciousness.

H. R. Pufnstuf is appealing and entertaining, for both kids and adults who want to escape. It seems that the dragon really is “your friend when things get rough!”

Artwork and photos are courtesy the collection of Andy Mangels, unless otherwise credited.

ANDY MANGELS is the USA Today bestselling author and co-author of 20 books, including the TwoMorrows book Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation, as well as Star Trek and Star Wars tomes, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, and a lot of comic books.

He recently wrote the bestselling Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman series for Dynamite and DC Comics, and has written six Fractured Fairy Tales graphic novels for Junior High audiences, for Abdo Books in 2021. He is currently working on a book about the stage productions of Stephen King and other projects. Additionally, he has scripted, directed, and produced Special Features and documentaries for over 40 DVD releases.

His moustache is infamous. www.AndyMangels.com and www.

WonderWomanMuseum.com RETROFAN

September 2021

77

Thanks for all the wonderful issues of RetroFan. Your magazine gives me hours of entertainment when I am out on the road. I truly enjoyed the latest issue [#12] spotlighting Three’s Company. The trio never failed to keep me laughing! Keep up the good work and I look forward to the next issue.

CHARLES ROBINSON You’re welcome! And thanks for your support, and the photo (BELOW) you included… a celebrity endorsement! For readers who don’t follow professional wrestling, Charles Robinson is a WWE referee and a former wrestler himself.

music when he downed a can of spinach, and his calling his opponent “Brutisk.”

The coverage of Rudolph’s 1964 TV special was intriguing for an unexpected connection: Some of the folks did voices, shortly thereafter, on the 1966 Marvel Super Heroes TV cartoons.

Better still, you even included photos. A large one of Bernard Cowan, and tiny shots of Peg Dixon, Paul Kligman, and Paul Soles. If you include them in #16, please, just a tiny bit larger. Or, if not, a heads-up so I can get Lasik surgery and a magnifier.

Laughed at seeing coverage of CB radios in 2020. So dated a trend! Yet once pervasive at the time. That was the one instance I gave my dad actual good advice. He mused about investing in it. I suggested: “Don’t.”

Hilarious.

An unexpected hit with me was Andy Mangels’ Saturday Morning Holiday Cards, specifically, the large one from 1965. Fun seeing how many I could name after all this time. Of the 50-plus characters, I recognized about 30. Not bad. I’d have done better with the Jetsons and Jonny Quest included. Or Space Ghost characters, but they were still a year away. How much brain space was wasted remembering obscure ones like Touche Turtle and Morocco Mole for half a century?

The Dr. Seuss article was interesting for the correct pronunciation of the author’s penname. Turns out I’d been incorrectly pronouncing it forever— along with Dormammu and Mjolnir.

Or that there was ever a Cat in the Hat model kit. News to me.

JOE FRANK Joe, sometimes our images run small because we only have small, lowresolution images available, which was the case in the Rudolph voice cast pic.

I was amused that Sheena [RetroFan #12] was before my time, Three’s Company after, and Good Morning World, though of the correct era, completely off my radar as a kid. Still, I enjoyed that article best as it had three actors I pleasantly recall: Ronnie Schell, Billy DeWolfe, and Goldie Hawn. Schell was a guest on a lot of shows. DeWolfe, briefly, on some program with Larry Storch called The Queen and I. Goldie Hawn, of course, on Laugh-in. Imagine how her career would have changed if GMW had been renewed for a second season. Enjoyed Schell’s reminiscing about other shows on the lot or various comedians he interacted with. The most pleasant aspect is that he’s still around!

The Popeye cartoons I must have seen at the time but don’t remember much aside from the

Hey, CB radios! I got in on that craze after someone sold his radio to me for $50. I talked like an idiot on it for a while (honestly, I don’t know how those truckers made it sound so cool), then gave up.

I was also relieved to score a perfect 10 on the Too Much TV Quiz, especially after having a disastrous crash-and-burn in the previous issue. Keep these quizzes coming, they’re a lot of fun! And I smiled when you referred to the Professor by his real name, “Roy Hinkley.” After all, this is not a quiz for the casual TV viewer; if you watch too much TV, you’d better know inside information like this.

Ironically, I loved the interview with Irish McCalla, even though I’ve never seen a single episode of Sheena. She just sounds like a delightful woman. I would have loved to see a current photo of her to accompany the article.

Whenever possible, I’d like to see “then and now” photos, like you did with the Ronnie Schell article.

Which brings me to my favorite article.

Seriously, this is why I love this magazine so much; where else would I get photos and inside info on a TV show that was only on for one season? Good Morning World is one of many TV shows I really liked as a kid, and are all but forgotten today. Forgotten by everyone, that is, but RetroFan. Ronnie Schell was one of those character actors that was on nearly every show I watched, and when he was on it was always a treat. He strikes me as a man who is versatile, talented, willing to work, and a genuinely pleasant fellow.

I’m not surprised he was, as he told us, never out of work for more than three weeks.

Speaking of people we saw all over the dial, I’d like to see articles about Jack Gilford and Alice Ghostley. With beautiful women and men with chiseled features burning bright for a year or two, these two character actors quietly racked up role after role as ordinary-looking, relatable (but very funny) people and, like Mr. Schell, always brightened up any episode, movie, or commercial they appeared on.

Keep bringing us articles about the stuff we cared about! I can’t wait for the Lost in Space interviews next issue… I loved that show!

MICHAL JACOT Michal, Irish McCalla’s quotes were from archives. She passed away in 2002. We do, whenever possible, run contemporary photos of our faves from yesteryear, such as the Michael York photo seen in this issue.

Just wanted to write in and say what a great read issue #12 was. I especially enjoyed the Three’s Company retrospective and tribute to John Ritter. Have you ever considered adding in a collector spotlight? I would love to glimpse photos of super-fans’ collections.

BILL DESMOND Thanks for the kind words, Bill! You must be a new RF reader, because “Super Collector” is an occasional feature in our pages. It was a regular feature in our earliest issues but has tapered off a bit, but is back this ish, with David Mandel’s comic art collection featured.

And while on that topic, a shout-out to you super collectors out there: If you’d like to spotlight your collection, and your reasons for collecting, in our magazine, email me at the address below.

Tell your friends about us, and share your comments about this issue by writing me at euryman@gmail.com.

MICHAEL EURY Editor-in-Chief

RETROFAN

September 2021

79

ReJECTED! Just keep telling yourself, "This isn’t a real cover... this isn’t real a real cover..."

by Scott Saavedra

A PUBLISHING HISTORY FIRST!

TO󰈜󰈜󰉝󰉝󰈳󰈳L󰇳󰇳󰇳 AN󰈾󰈾󰈲󰈲󰉚󰉚󰈙󰈙ED CO󰈐󰈐󰉋󰉋󰈣󰈣󰈣󰈽󰈽N T󰉀󰉀E MA󰈰󰈰󰈰󰈰󰉋󰉋R OF 󰈜󰈜󰈿󰈿󰉋󰉋 MARVEL SUPER HEROES TV CARTOONS OF 1966

80

RETROFAN

September 2021

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Author PETER BOSCH has spent years researching and documenting this amazing area of comics history, tracking down the well-known series (Star Trek, The Munsters) and the lesser-known shows (Captain Gallant, Pinky Lee) to present the finest look ever taken at this unique genre of comic books. Included are hundreds of full-color covers and images, plus profiles of the artists who drew TV comics: GENE COLAN, ALEX TOTH, DAN SPIEGLE, RUSS MANNING, JOHN BUSCEMA, RUSS HEATH, and many more giants of the comic book world. Whether you loved watching The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, and Zorro from the 1950s—The Andy Griffith Show, The Monkees, and The Mod Squad in the 1960s—Adam-12, Battlestar Galactica, and The Bionic Woman in the 1970s—or Alf, Fraggle Rock, and “V” in the 1980s—there’s something here for fans of TV and comics alike!

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Career-spanning interview with TERRY DODSON, and Terry’s wife (and go-to inker) RACHEL DODSON! Plus 1970s/ ’80s portfolio producer SAL QUARTUCCIO talks about his achievements with Phase and Hot Stuf’, R. CRUMB and DENIS KITCHEN discuss the history of underground comix character Pro Junior, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his wife, HEMBECK, and more!

Extensive PAUL GULACY retrospective by GREG BIGA that includes Paul himself, VAL MAYERIK, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, TIM TRUMAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. Plus a JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL; BUD PLANT discusses his career as underground comix retailer, distributor, fledgling publisher of JACK KATZ’s FIRST KINGDOM, and mail-order bookseller; our regular columnists, and the latest from HEMBECK!

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PAUL GUSTAVSON—Golden Age artist of The Angel, Fantom of the Fair, Arrow, Human Bomb, Jester, Plastic Man, Alias the Spider, Quicksilver, Rusty Ryan, Midnight, and others—is remembered by son TERRY GUSTAFSON, who talks in-depth to RICHARD ARNDT. Lots of lush comic art from Centaur, Timely, and (especially) Quality! Plus—FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #81

BACK ISSUE #128

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BRONZE AGE PROMOS, ADS, AND GIMMICKS! The aborted DC Super-Stars Society fan club, Hostess Comic Ads, DC 16-page Preview Comics, rare Marvel custom comics, DC Hotline, Popeye Career Comics, early variant covers, and more. Featuring BARR, HERDLING, LEVITZ, MAGUIRE, MORGAN, PACELLA, PALMIOTTI, SHAW!, TERRY STEWART, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and more!

THE KIRBY LEGACY AT DC! Explores Jack Kirby’s post-Fourth World Bronze Age DC characters! Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, Sandman, and Kirby’s Odd Jobs (Atlas, Manhunter, and more). Plus: the SIMON & KIRBY Reunion That Wasn’t! Featuring BISSETTE, BYRNE, CONWAY, GIBBONS, GOLDEN, GRANT, RUCKA, SEMEIKS, THOMAS, TIMM, WAGNER, and more.

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2021

“KIRBY: BETA!” Jack’s experimental ideas, characters, and series (Fighting American, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, and others), Kirby interview, inspirations for his many “secret societies” (The Project, Habitat, Wakanda), non-superhero genres he explored, 2019 Heroes Con panel (with MARK EVANIER, MIKE ROYER, JIM AMASH, and RAND HOPPE), a pencil art gallery, UNUSED JIMMY OLSEN #141 COVER, and more!

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