RetroFan #22 Preview

September 2022 No. 22 $10.95

I have the power!

HE-MAN & THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Zorro makes his mark on Saturday mornings!

zy These cra are a CARtoons ! real drag

TV’s Wild, Wild West • Sitcom legend Norman Lear • Valspeak (Like, totally!) & more!

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Featuring ANDY MANGELS • WILL MURRAY • SCOTT SAAVEDRA • SCOTT SHAW! • MARK VOGER • MICHAEL EURY He-Man and Masters of the Universe © Mattel. Zorro © Zorro Productions, Inc. Drag Cartoons © The Pete Millar Family. All Rights Reserved.

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The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With

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Columns and Special Features

Departments

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Retrotorial

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Voger’s Vault of Vintage Varieties Beach Movies

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Too Much TV Quiz

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Celebrity Crushes Sally Struthers

Retro Television The Wild, Wild West

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RetroFad Valley Girls and Valspeak

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Scott Saavedra’s Secret Sanctum Actor Michael Dunn

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Super Collector Remembering Robb Versandi

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Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

CARtoons and Drag Cartoons

RetroFanmail

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Retro Interview Norman Lear

ReJECTED

by Scott Saavedra

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Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning Zorro

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe RetroFan™, issue 22, September 2022. (ISSN 2576-7224 ) is published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to RetroFan, c/o TwoMorrows, 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, $29 Digital.

Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. He-Man and Masters of the Universe © Mattel. Zorro © Zorro Productions, Inc. Drag Cartoons © The Pete Millar Family. All Rights Reserved.All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2022 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

VOGER’S VAULT OF VINTAGE VARIETIES

Beach Culture, Frankie and Didi, and the cinematic wave

BY MARK VOGER

It sounds insane, but Frankie, Bonehead, and their fellow boys of summer from the “beach party” movies are male role models. I can explain. (Cue twangy flashback music.)

Let’s say you’re a pre-adolescent boy, a little fella, on a beach in the Sixties. (Any public beach will do, but in my case, it would be Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ocean City, Sea Isle City, Wildwood, or Cape May, all coastal burgs in South Jersey.) Let’s say you’re starting to notice the older girls frolicking nearby—but not too nearby—in the sand and surf. Let’s say you’re wondering how to approach such exalted beings, once you get a bit taller and your voice a bit deeper.

If you’re a devotee of the beach party movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, you have archetypes to aspire to.

You could be Frankie, the coolest guy on the beach (Avalon). Or you could be one of Frankie’s likewise cool wingmen (John Ashley, Aron Kincaid, et al.). Or—as was more likely in my case—you could be Bonehead (Jody McCrea). He was the klutzy, dimwitted guy whose only shot at romance was to meet a girl who found him amusing.

It’s too bad the one time this happened, she was a mermaid.

The beach party series from American International Pictures (AIP) played no small role in the proliferation of Beach Culture throughout popular entertainment in the Sixties. The films generally teamed Philadelphia-born Avalon, a singer who scored a swoony #1 hit with “Venus,” and Utica-born Funicello, who grew

up before the very eyes of Baby Boomers on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club.

They played star-crossed teens Frankie and Didi. He wanted to, as the Supremes sang, hurry love. She wanted to proceed at a more sensible pace.

The five (or is it eight?) films in the series—agreeing on a total is a bit complicated—can be goofy and sometimes downright insipid.

But they are also clever, breezy, and funny. Culturally, the films stand as a last gasp of naïveté before the hippies came in, with their marijuana and their free love. (The only “high” in beach movies was the rush you got from “hanging ten,” a.k.a. surfing.) At heart, the movies tell a story as old as time: Girl and boy are meant to be together, but not before a bunch of crazy stuff happens.

Still, Beach Party and its sequels (ABOVE) weren’t created in a vacuum. There were Annette precedents. (More twangy flashback music Funicello is heard here.) and Frankie Avalon starred BEFORE THE PARTY in American 1953 saw the formation of United States International Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Pictures’ beach Delinquency, which was chaired by the party series. world’s least-fun guy, Estes Kefauver. (He © Metro-Goldwynopposed both EC horror comics and Bettie Mayer.

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Voger’s Vault of vintage varieties

Page.) Not coincidentally, rock ’n’ roll music itself came along in the middle Fifties. The zeitgeist was ideal for two pop-up film genres that often coalesced: the “J.D.” (for juvenile delinquent) movie and the rock ’n’ roll movie. The J.D. films ranged from high-minded big-studio releases (Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle) to good old low-budget exploitation (High School Hellcats, Reform School Girls). Rock ’n’ roll movies cashed in, rather cynically, on the burgeoning musical trend (Shake, Rattle and Rock; Rock, Rock, Rock!). In all of these films, there are traces of the character models, interactions, even the humor that would later be interpolated, and sanitized in the beach party movies.

Two films that preceded Beach Party are set squarely in the sandand-surf milieu: Gidget (1959), based on a novel about a surfer girl (then a rarity), and Where the Boys Are (1960), a big-studio road-trip movie set in Fort Lauderdale during Spring Break.

The 1957 novel Gidget was penned by Frederick Kohner, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter whose daughter Kathy (now Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman) was the inspiration for the titular heroine.

“When I started my discovery of the surfboard life, I remember very well that I could not drive; I was 15,” Kohner-Zuckerman told me in 2001.

“My father would drop me at the surf-rider beach, and pick me up at the surf-rider beach. I remember very well looking at him one day while I was sitting in the car. I said, ‘I want to write a story about what’s going on here. This is amazing. This is an unusual kind of subculture.’ I didn’t maybe use those words at the time because I was 15. And I remember Frederick saying, ‘Why don’t you tell me about what you’re experiencing, and I will write the story for you.’

I believe we even struck up some sort of deal where I would get a percentage of the take; I had no idea what that was all about. But it was the two of us.

“I kept a daily diary, and I have those diaries. I would tell my dad about the nicknames, about the surfing expressions, about the fellas who lived in the shack, about the fact that I was crazy in love with the guy who was the inspiration for Moondoggie (a character in Gidget).”

Kohner-Zuckerman recalled that her father banged out Gidget, his first novel, in six weeks.

“What’s interesting is that my father’s native tongue was German,” she said. “So here’s a man, like [Vladimir] Nabokov, who wrote this little gem in a language that wasn’t his mother tongue. So the little gem—a little, short novel—was sent over to 4

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(LEFT) Sandra Dee catches a rear-screen wave in Gidget (1959). © Columbia Pictures. (RIGHT) Connie Francis, Paula Prentiss, and Dolores Hart don sunscreen in Where the Boys Are (1960). © Warner Bros. the William Morris Agency. I do remember that someone called from the William Morris Agency and said to my father, ‘Mr. Kohner, this is incredible.

I think you and your wife can relax. This is going to be a book.

This is gonna be a movie. This is gonna be a television show. This is gonna be a comic book. This is marvelous.”

It all came true. I would call the 1959 movie Gidget—starring Sandra Dee as a gangly only child who is “pushing 17,” and not ready to follow the lead of her older, boy-crazy girlfriends, but discovers surfing instead—the first proper entry in the beach movie genre, with Where the Boys Are coming in second.

FINANCIAL GAMBLE

During the fabulous Fifties, the independent “studio” (a term used loosely) American International Pictures made its bones cranking out drive-in fare with black-and-white cheapies about—whaddaya know?—juvenile delinquents and rock ’n’ rollers. A common thread had the plots frequently told from the point of view of teenagers played by young unknowns, a real budget-stretcher.

In 1960, at the urging of director Roger Corman, AIP took a financial gamble with House of Usher, an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. Unlike AIP’s previous output, the color House of Usher had opulent production values and a “real” movie star in Vincent Price.

The somber Usher made its producers happy at the box office. AIP co-founders James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff learned they would not die if they (gasp!) spent more money on their films.

Corman and Price embarked on a series of stylish Poe adaptations.

Voger’s Vault of vintage varieties

(LEFT) Lobby card for Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

(RIGHT) Joan Crawford and Bette Davis have a beach day from hell in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). © Warner Bros.

Crawford—nemeses on and off screen—took part in what is, hands down, the most horrific beach outing captured on celluloid.

Which says a lot.

OTHER MEDIUMS PLUNGE IN

Meanwhile, Beach Culture was making a splash in other entertainment mediums. The Beach Boys of Hawthorne, California, formed in 1961 and rode a wave of popularity with beach-themed hits “Surfin’” (1961), “Surfin’ Safari” (1962), “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (1963), “Surfer Girl” (1963), “The Warmth of the Sun” (1964), and “California Girls” (1965). The group’s founding line-up—brothers Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson; their cousin, Mike Love; and their friend, Al Jardine—were teenagers when they first began to harmonize.

“The music we listened to was a combination of R&B and doo-wop and a little bit of folk music mixed in, which surfaced in ‘Sloop John B’ on the Pet Sounds album (of 1966),” Love told me in 1998.

(LEFT) Jan and Dean’s single “Surf City” (1963). © Liberty Records (RIGHT) Mr. Gasser and the Weirdos’ Surfink! album (1964). © Ed Roth, Inc.

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RETRO TELEVISION

The Sun Never Sets on

The Wild, Wild West

BY MARK ELLIS Genre mash-ups are nothing new, definitely not on network television. Match a medical drama with a crime mystery, you have Quincy. Slap together elements of Forties B-Westerns with Dragnet, shake well, and out pops Cowboy G-Men. To that mixture, add a touch of Jules Verne, a bit of James Bond, and the kind of unrestrained imagination that made most Sixties network execs uneasy, and you have The Wild, Wild West.

The brief period between 1964 and 1968 was a watershed mark in television programming. Never before had there been such a wave of imaginative series with such a high caliber of talent behind them. The Wild, Wild West appeared during this short renaissance and quickly established itself as that rarest of commodities—an entertaining anomaly which was so unique it could never be successfully imitated, and in fact is credited with creating an SF sub-genre known as “steampunk.”

Although the aforementioned Cowboy G-Men (1953) had a similar premise with government agents in the Old West, it required

(ABOVE) An iconic Wild, Wild, West animated show bumper. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

the popularity of the James Bond films to inspire the crazy-quilt panache that became WWWest’s trademark.

Actor-turned-producer Michael Garrison is credited with creating the basic concept. In the mid-Fifties, he and a partner held the film rights to the first James Bond novel Casino Royale—but they were unable to secure backing for a movie and sold their interests in the property.

A decade later, with the Bond Craze at full speed [see RetroFan #6—ed.], Garrison brought the idea of James Bond in the West to his friend, Hunt Stromberg, then head of programming at CBS. Ethel Winant, associate director of development at the network, wrote a short prospectus about a group of secret agents who operated in the post–Civil War U.S. The agents reported only to President Grant, all with the last names of points of the compass.

Winant recalled, “The others got lost very soon, but Jim West remained.”

‘SUCH WAS THE MAN THEY CALLED JIM WEST’

Once the go-ahead was given for a pilot—then entitled The Wild West—the script was assigned to Gil Ralston, a well known TV writer and novelist. Ralston’s script, “The Night of the Inferno,” introduced almost all of the underpinnings of the series: James T. West, former U.S. Cavalry Captain, and Artemus Gordon, former RETROFAN

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retro television

(ABOVE) Publicity photo signed by The Wild, Wild West’s heartthrob star, Robert Conrad. Courtesy of Heritage. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

Chisel-jawed Rory Calhoun was an early contender to play The Wild, Wild West’s Jim West. He had earlier headlined the TV Western The Texan, which scored this 1960 issue of Dell Comics’ Four Color. © 1960 Rorvic and Desilu Productions.

actor/inventor, traveled post–Civil War America on missions for the Secret Service. The two agents were conveyed from assignment to assignment by the Wanderer, a steam locomotive, and they lived in a lavishly appointed (by 1870s standards) coach car.

Said car contained a chemistry lab, hidden arsenal, booby-traps, telegraph unit, and even a billiard table. The cover story was that West was a rich man’s son, “the dandiest dude that ever crossed the Mississippi,” but this was soon dropped.

While the pilot script was still being written, the process of finding the leads began. Western star Rory Calhoun was a major contender and even the early costumes were made to accommodate his six-foot, four-inch frame. A theme song extolling the heroics of “Jim West” was written by famed composer Dimitri Tiomkin, with lyrics by Paul Francis Weber. Two versions were recorded, but rejected by Michael Garrison. That is little wonder, with lyrics like: “Men who could climb to the eagle’s nest/Men with their eyes on the far, far horizons/Such was the man they called Jim West.”

Allegedly, Rory Calhoun wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to series TV after his stint on The Texan (1958–1960), nor did his screen test impress the producers. Robert Conrad was the 17th actor tested for the role, an experience he later recalled as painful, due to wearing elevator shoes fitted for Alan Ladd’s feet in order to make him seem taller than he actually was.

A former Marine and stuntman, Conrad was already well known in Hollywood, having co-starred in the popular Hawaiian Eye series (1959–1963). He was chosen for the part, although adjusting for his height became an issue throughout production of the series.

According to Ethel Winant, they had to be conscious of who they cast to play opposite him: She told writer Susan Kesler, “If he was supposed to be this great hero, he couldn’t look like a child.”

For the part of Artemus Gordon, the only choice was Ross Martin, who had impressed CBS executives with his gift for dialects on the short-lived adventure series, Mr. Lucky (1959). His acting credits were far more extensive than Conrad’s, including roles on numerous TV series and featured parts in in two Blake Edwards’ films, Experiment in Terror (1962) and The Great Race (1965). Before accepting the part of Gordon, Martin asked for changes to be made to the character and CBS obliged.

“The Night of the Inferno” established the format, tone, and attitude for the entire series. The plot dealt with a crazed Mexican revolutionary named Juan Manolo (Nehmeiah Persoff), who wreaked havoc in the border towns of the Southwest. James West and Artemus Gordon were assigned to stop the raids. Although a simple enough premise, the story quickly became convoluted with the introduction of a mysterious Chinese merchant named Wing Fat (played by Victor Buono) and Lydia Monteran (Suzanne Pleshette), the gun-toting owner of a gambling casino who bore a grudge against West.

After a stretch of cat-and-mousing in the local cemetery, which included crossing a rattlesnake-filled trench in a crypt, West and Lydia were captured by Manolo’s men. West was beaten and subjected to villainous posturing by Manolo, but he managed to escape by using a smoke bomb.

(LEFT) An unbeatable team: a screen capture of Secret Service agents Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) and James West (Robert Conrad). The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc. 14

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retro television

(LEFT) Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn) plots to be rid of James West once and for all in this screen capture from “The Night of Miguelito's Revenge.” (RIGHT) Robert Duvall as the Falcon, a villain with the biggest gun shaped like a falcon in the world, in “The Night of the Falcon,” alongside falconer Lana Benson (Lisa Gaye). The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

Loveless and his entourage (spritely songstress Antoinette, played by Phoebe Dorin) and brutish giant Voltaire (Richard Kiel) returned in three more episodes during the first year. In “The Night of Murderous Spring,” the next-to-last episode of the season, Loveless and Antoinette were back without Voltaire. Instead, they were in the company of Kitten (Jenie Jackson), a woman of great size and strength, hopelessly in love with the diminutive doctor.

Loveless’ plan this time involved poisoning the waters of America with a drug that induced murderous insanity.

The final scene of the episode established the tone for the remainder of the war between West and Loveless: the doctor had apparently drowned in a lake. After diving repeatedly in search of him, a saddened West said, “Maybe hate is as strong a bond as love... I’ll miss him... that little man with the giant rage against the whole universe.”

As he and Gordon walked away, the surface of the lake began to boil as if in sly mocking laughter... freeze and fade out.

Phoebe Dorin reported during the filming of the drowning scene, her long dress became tangled in the mechanism that sank the boat she and Michael Dunn were sitting in. She was dragged underwater. Fortunately, Dunn dived down and tore her dress free.

As colorful and vivid a villain as he was, Dr. Loveless wasn’t the only major antagonist West and Gordon encountered over the course of The Wild, Wild West’s four-season run.

There was the disfigured Zachariah Skull (Lloyd Bochner) in “The Night of the Puppeteer,” and fiendish sorcerer Count Manzeppi (Victor Buono), who was aided in his first nefarious scheme by a young Richard Pryor, in “The Night of the Eccentrics.”

Burgess Meredith played manic-depressive Professor Cadwallader, who invented a device to trigger earthquakes, in “The Night of the Human Trigger.” Robert Duvall portrayed the outlandishly costumed Falcon, who boasted the biggest cannon in the world, in “The Night of the Falcon.”

West and Gordon also contended with Emma Valentine, played to the wicked hilt by Agnes Moorehead, in “The Night of the Vicious Valentine,” and Boris Karloff as an oil-rich Maharajah in “The Night of the Golden Cobra.”

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There were hostile Indian tribes, supposed reincarnations of John Brown and Cortez, weird cults, secret armies, zombies, exploding duplicates, and even a lost city of Aztecs. Fiendish deathtraps, mad villains, and beautiful women were all integral parts woven into the tapestry of The Wild, Wild West.

Although the focus on before-their-time geniuses and disaffected military officers became almost formulaic, a few segments went off in totally unexpected directions, like the surreal “The Night of the Man-Eating House,” in which Arte dreams that he and West are trapped in a decaying antebellum mansion possessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman. The last scene of the episode showed the pair approaching the very house Artemus had dreamt about.

“The Night of the Lord of Limbo” dealt with the time-travel experiments of crippled Colonel Vautrain (Ricardo Montalbán). In this story, West is transported to an alternate timeline where he is forced to duel Arte and then preside over his death.

“The Night of the Returning Dead” featured Sammy Davis, Jr. as a psychic who used his abilities to unmask a murderer (Peter Lawford).

LIFE AFTER CANCELLATION

Unfortunately, even breaking the formula was not enough to save the show past its fourth season. Although WWWest had never been a ratings blockbuster or a pop-culture fad like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. [see RetroFan #15—ed.], it still stacked up impressive numbers, even when Ross Martin had to leave the show for a number of episodes due to a heart attack. He was replaced by

SCOTT SAAVEDRA’S SECRET SANCTUM

Michael Dunn The role of a lifetime: Michael Dunn as the brilliant and petulant Dr. Miguelito Loveless from The Wild, Wild West. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA This may sound familiar to some readers. You are a young kid and your rear end has fallen asleep. You are rump-dead because you’ve been sitting on the floor for hours watching television and you had—just had—to be up close to the set to change channels and tune the UHF knob. Seeing me, or any of her kids with faces positioned nearly against the television screen, would prompt my mom to tell her little rug-potatoes to move back or we’d hurt our eyes. We’d comply, but just barely. Nearly all of her now-adult children wear glasses at least part of the time. So… yeah.

I’d sit there and watch the shows, often in reruns in the afternoon, that we now talk about here in RetroFan. As I recall there were two things I especially loved to see: a Star Trek episode that was new to me, and a show featuring a favorite occasionally occurring character. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy seeing the stars of the shows.

Who doesn’t love Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore or Andy Griffith and Don Knotts? Nobody. That’s just Entertainment Science.

However, every time, say, the egotistical, loudmouth boss Alan Brady (played by show creator Carl Reiner) turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show, it was a must-watch-I’ll-get-some-fresh-air-

later-Mom situation. Same for the sorta-not-all-there Mayberry businessman Floyd the barber (Howard McNear) and his appearances on The Andy Griffith Show. But one of my topmost favorite occasionally occurring characters was The Wild, Wild West’s persistent villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless, who very memorably vexed Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon in ten out of 104 episodes. The actor who brought the complex and fun creation of Dr. Loveless to excellent life was Michael Dunn, making an impact with far fewer appearances that some of the others in my gang of favorites. Floyd the barber (whose last name was not actually “the barber,” but Lawson) was an unfocused conversationalist in 80 of 249 episodes. And Alan Brady rattled Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) in 32 of 158 episodes.

Michael Dunn, like many good performers, was just worth watching. Certainly, nobody could play frustrated genius quite like him. Part gentleman, part spoiled tyrant. But as a youthful TV-viewing fanatic I used to worry about Dr. Loveless/Michael Dunn. Due to his dwarfism, Dunn’s body didn’t grow straight and he appeared to struggle to do fairly commonplace things like walking. Dunn presented such a deep humanity via his RETROFAN

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scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

performances that he seemed more real to me than many other TV actors. I assume the empathy of youth is part of the explanation and, of course, his unusual height probably factored into my fascination as it did for others. Dunn was right at the top marker for dwarfism at 3' 10", and he was plenty aware that his size was an attention-grabber.

Eventually, though, I stopped seeing Dunn on television, put more attention to my comic books and MAD magazines, and my thoughts just moved elsewhere. Turns out that having a regular nostalgia-centric magazine column forces one to look backwards and refocus on memories that I never expected to revisit.

And Michael Dunn came to mind.

ESCAPE FROM THE DUST BOWL

Michael Dunn was the stage name of Gary Neil Miller (for reading ease he will be referred to by his better-known stage name). He was born in Shattuck, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1934, as the effects of the Dust Bowl—both the name of a geographic area and the historic dust storms and drought that occurred there—battered the Southern Plains. When he was four, Dunn and his parents moved to Dearborn, Michigan. In an interview with TV Guide (July 8, 1967), Dunn claimed to know, also at age four, that he “was a dwarf.”

(Dunn frequently referred to himself as a midget or dwarf, terms more commonly accepted then.) This seems young to have such a self-revelation. Dunn, however, was an unusually bright child, able to read by age three. He showed musical talent early on as well.

Dunn’s dwarfism was not medically diagnosed until he was five. But it wouldn’t be his height so much as the related medical problems that proved to be his greatest obstacle. Well, that and social antipathy toward anyone

Phoebe Dorin played one of Dr. Loveless’ minions, Antoinette (seated at the piano). Dorin was in six episodes of The Wild, Wild West until Dunn asked to replace her with his new wife (who didn’t make the cut). This ended Dorin and Dunn’s long partnership and deeply hurt Dorin, but they did eventually reconcile. Note James West's discomfort with having to listen to the music. Dorin would later say that Robert Conrad “adored” Dunn. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

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“different.” He had dislocated hips that made walking increasingly painful as he got older, his spine curved in a way that made him appear barrel-chested, and his lung growth was constrained due to the size and shape of his ribcage, which brought extra work for his heart.

His parents wanted their only child to learn to function in the world, so they refused to send him to any sort of “special school.” The future Dr. Loveless proved to be more than up to the challenge despite having to navigate a world that was not designed for people his size. To Dunn, an obstacle was something to go around or ignore.

He could see humor in his size.

One oft-told tale had Dunn and his young friends going to the movies, where the small youth asked the person in the ticket booth if his height qualified him for “half price.” It did not.

Dunn’s early years were happy. He loved baseball as a sport to study and as an activity.

He could play the piano, but hated to practice. He enjoyed singing. He had a fairly high Dunn, writing under his birth opinion of himself (which family name, pens a heartfelt thank-you to and friends would note as well, everyone who helped get him a car usually without rancor). In an to ease his travel difficulties. From interview with the New York a 1952 issue of the University of Post in 1965, Dunn explained Miami’s student magazine, Tempo. that he felt he read more than © University of Miami.

THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!

No License Required SoCal’s CARtoons, CYCLEtoons, Drag Cartoons, and more!

BY SCOTT SHAW! Southern California was the birthplace of two unique American cults, custom cars and surfing. Both had been around a long time before they blossomed in the early Sixties, and after they became key themes of multiple Top 40 hits by SoCal musicians like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, many more young Americans found themselves hoping that their parents might move to Southern California.

I grew up in San Diego and was also influenced by both cults.

My love of hot rods and outlandish custom cars was propelled by the grotesque characters, designs, and rebellious vibes of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Stanley “Mouse!” Miller, and William Campbell’s plastic model kits and T-shirts. I was obsessed with Finks, Weird-Ohs, Silly Surfers, Frantics, and a slob named “Fred Flypogger” [and if you need proof of Scott’s obsession, see his Oddball World column in RetroFan #10!—ed.]. My interest in surfing had nothing to do with the sport itself. I was riveted by two surfing mascots: Rick Griffin’s “Murphy the Surfer” in Surfer magazine and Mike Dormer and Lee Teacher’s “Hot Curl the Surfer,” a seaside statue that became a national fad with its own line of model kits.

They were all popular with many kids my age, so I taught myself how to draw them so I could draw monsters and surfers on my classmates’ book covers for a few cents to bolster my allowance. In eighth grade, I even stole Mouse!’s exclamation point to attach to my own name.

I went to custom car shows at the downtown San Diego’s Community Concourse to meet Big Daddy and see the latest

(ABOVE) Detail from the cover of Petersen Publishing Co.’s Hot Rod Cartoons #1 (Nov. 1964). Art by George Lemmons.

custom cars. I read every issue of Car Craft magazine to see the latest artwork by Robert Williams in ads for Roth’s T-shirts. I put together so many plastic model car kits that I filled a tall cabinet with leftover parts. I undoubtedly reduced my IQ a few digits thanks to my unintentional inhaling of who-knows-how-many tubes of Testor’s model kit cement and bottles of Testor’s enamel model paint.

However, I didn’t know a thing about how a car ran or what it was like to ride a wave. I couldn’t even drive. I was a goofy 14-year-old who was trapped in that Sargasso Sea of powerlessness of pre-adolescence and being eaten alive by my own insecurity, hormones, and goals. I needed someone or something to glue me together.

Of course, that mental cement came from teaching myself how to draw, studying the work of my favorite professional cartoonists in print and animation. At the time, there was no better example of the best humorous illustration than MAD magazine, which became like one of my floppy textbooks to me. MAD was rapidly rising in its success while gathering a flock of imitators, mostly with decidedly underwhelming material.

But there was one black-and-white comic magazine that really got my attention, due to the cover presence of a cartoonist whose style and name were familiar to me from many of Hanna-Barbera Productions’ cartoons. His name was Willie Ito and the magazine was Petersen Publishing’s CARtoons. I’d seen Willie’s name in H-B shows’ credits, and after seeing his printed work, the first thing that came to my naive brain was, “If Willie Ito is this good, how come his Hanna-Barbera cartoons aren’t better?”

Little did I suspect that I was absolutely in the crosshairs of the magazine’s newly targeted market.

© Petersen Publishing Co., LLC. Digital editing by SMS.

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The oddball world of scott shaw!

‘HOT ROD’ REVS IN!

Hot rods was already a genre in comic books. When the American survivors of WWII came home, single males finally had a chance to act like the teenagers they were before they were drafted.

Now that metal and rubber drives were a thing of the past, junkyards were once again full of automobiles in varying conditions.

That’s when hot rodding bloomed, and, of course, there were comic publishers who wisely exploited the new trend. Fawcett (Hot Rod Comics), Ziff-Davis (Speed Smith the Hot Rod King), Hillman (Hot Rod and Speedway Comics), Charlton (Hot Rods and Racing Cars, Speed Demons), Archie (Archie’s Mechanics), Gold Key (Mod Wheels), and DC (Hot Wheels) all published car-themed comic-book series at one time or another. (Marvel’s U.S. 1 doesn’t count because it’s about trucks.) They all had one thing in common: none of those funnybooks were intended to be funny.

However, there was a very popular comedic character that appeared in Hot Rod magazine, cartoonist Tom Medley’s “Stroker McGurk.” Medley was in the first wave of hot rodders, and his

appealing strip premiered in the second issue of Hot Rod. Tom was the first cartoonist ever to specialize in drawing gag cartoons about hot rods. His material was in the format of a Sunday comic strip and targeted adult readers who were also rodders. His character “Stroker McGurk” was the opposite of the outlaw, street-racing juvenile-delinquent stereotypes who appeared in all forms of mid-century American entertainment.

First appearing in Petersen’s Hot Rod magazine, the likeable, clever, and relatable nice guy Stroker supported the concept of hot rodding as a respectable hobby.

Hey, what if there was an entire magazine full of cartoons like that?

CARtoons was the brainchild of engineer/cartoonist Pete Millar and gag cartoonist/animation writer Carl Kohler, who both lived in Southern California. After noticing that EC’s four-color MAD comic book had evolved into the more respectable and profitable black-and-white MAD magazine, Millar thought that a publication composed entirely of automotive humor might catch on. In 1959, the Millar and Kohler pitched the concept to Robert Einar “Pete” Petersen, the owner of

(INSET) Cartoonist Tom Medley’s hot-roddin’ Stroker McGurk, a character that originated in Hot Rod #2. This metal sign featuring Stroker is one of several merchandising items featuring his likeness. © Stroker McGurk, LLC. CARtoons covers by the title’s creative big daddies, (LEFT) Pete Millar (issue #10, Feb.–Mar. 1963) and (RIGHT) Carl Kohler (issue #13, Aug.–Sept. 1963). © Petersen Publishing Co., LLC.

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The oddball world of scott shaw!

(LEFT) Ed “Big Daddy” Roth runs into difficulties while airbrushing a T-shirt on the cover of CARtoons #14 (Oct.–Nov. 1963).

Cover by Wes Bennett. (RIGHT) The ample belly of “Unk” (based upon Carl Kohler) offers one hill-uva track obstacle for the slot-car-racing Varmints on issue #28 (Apr. 1966). Cover by Mike Arens and Jim Collender. © Petersen Publishing Co., LLC. were experts on what kids enjoyed. They also hired young cartoonists with ties to underground comix and experienced mainstream comics creators with incredible legitimacy. And then there were the pro cartoonists whose specialty was depicting cars, auto parts, tools, and kinetic warping of vehicles to infer high speeds. The majority of the contributors wrote their own stories. Combining all of these different aspects of the cartooning industry, CARtoons had no “house style,” but an impressive assortment of written and visual automotive humor, now primarily aimed at a younger readership that had yet to qualify for a driver’s permit.

Although MAD had what was arguably the most talented “usual gang of idiots” in monthly humor magazines, it was in every way a New York publication. But many of CARtoons’ readers and contributors felt that it was the MAD of the West Coast, specifically Southern California. Other than Western Publications, a.k.a. Gold Key Comics (which also had an office in NYC), CARtoons was the only mainstream comic that was published on the West Coast at the time, a noteworthy exception to the industry.

A skateboarding cover—and trouble ahead for Unk—on this original cover art, illustrated by Willie Ito and painted

by Don Gleason, for CARtoons #22 (Apr. 1965). Courtesy of Heritage. © Petersen Publishing Co., LLC.

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RETRO INTERVIEW

Interview with

Norman Lear

BY PAULA FINN

[Editor’s note: This interview is an excerpt from Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy by Paula Finn (copyright © 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved).]

Norman, before we start, how much time do we have?

We have three days.

That will barely scratch the surface! [laughs] Can you talk first about your father’s influence on you and how that led to some of the most poignant scenes in your shows?

You know, I just finished my memoir last Friday and sent it east to the publisher, so oh my God, have I covered that question— because that is the central question of the book. But I’m happy to talk about it. I spent my life unconsciously seeking to make up for a father who let his son and everybody else down. He was a rascal; he went to jail because he was such a rascal. And I’m using the word “rascal” because I adored him! [laughs] So I don’t want to call him a crook.

But I couldn’t stop loving him, so I fought all my life to make up for him. That’s about it in a nutshell.

I was a kid of the depression, so I watched my father and his brothers go belly up. There was never anything. And my own father was one of these guys who

Norman Lear, creator of many of television’s most influential comedies including All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons, in his office in Los Angeles, California, June 2018. © Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News.

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retro interview

was gonna have a million dollars in ten days to two weeks. And I did a show about that called P.O.P. with Charlie Durning, who played my father. The theme also came up in an All in the Family episode where Mike and Archie are locked in the basement of Archie’s Place [“Two’s a Crowd,” S8/E19]. And for the first time, Archie talks about how his father abandoned him. He says to Mike, “He goes out, works his fingers to the bone to put food on the table—and you think he’s a bad guy?” Yeah. That was me. [laughs] Did you write that particular scene?

I worked on all of the shows; I don’t remember who got writing credit on this episode, but that exchange between Mike and Archie was solid out of my background.

And how did All in the Family come about for you originally?

I had read about the English show Til Death Do Us Part from some publication, I can’t remember the name of it. I saw some reference to it, and I thought, “Holy sh*t. I grew up with that!” How could I never have thought of that! Because my father used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met.

And I would scream at him, “You know you’re putting a whole race of people down just to call me lazy?” And he’d say, “That’s not what I’m doing; you’re the dumbest white kid I ever met!”

How would you describe the character of Archie Bunker?

He was afraid of the future, afraid of the new, afraid of what disturbs what he knows.

Let’s talk about the writing. In general, what kind of guidance did you give your writers?

What I used to say to the writers working on all the shows was, “Pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the house, to your families. And read at least two newspapers a day.” I suggested the NY Times and the LA Times. And the Wall Street Journal if you can make a third, just so you know what’s going on. Because we’re going to be writing about what’s affecting us in our lives, so start with the relationships. The expression I always used was, “Scrape the barrel of your experience.” And that’s what’s gonna feed us.

And also, for every character that entered, I wanted the writer to know what was on that person’s mind: what was making them unhappy, what was making 48

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Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker and Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker, in a Seventies publicity photo from All in the Family. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. All in the Family © CBS.

them happy—whether the person had to tie a shoelace or had indigestion or didn’t get enough sleep last night or needed to fart or was upset with his child or—I wanted the writer to know what was on the character’s mind, not just what they said to the convention of speaking as they were entering a room but what was behind that. In other words—something is on his mind, whatever it is. Know what’s on the character’s mind.

Do you believe that humor comes from pain or is a defense against it?

I think, when it’s best, humor comes from some understanding of the foolishness of the human condition. There’s a wonderful Huffington Post piece tonight by Marty Kaplan, who runs the Lear Center. I just read it a little bit ago. He writes about a game called Flappy Bird that so many

people were playing, and it was the biggest success. Someone in the Far East put it online, and then they took it down, so there was a big ruckus about that. And Marty wrote—and I’m adding the word “foolishly”—about the amount of time that people foolishly spent on that game.

Missing the opportunity to see everything that was in their life at the moment and if what is surrounding all of us isn’t of more value than the time we spend on these games. That’s his suggestion—that there’s more just in nature than playing a game like that.

So to answer your question, I think humor comes from a basic understanding of and ability to see the foolishness of the human condition. How much so many kids and others are missing in their immediate surroundings because they’re glued to a TV set or an iPhone or to a game.

ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING

Zorro

BY ANDY MANGELS Zorro swings his lightning-quick blade while atop his trusty steed Tempast (Tornado) on this promotional cel set-up.

(INSET) Zorro's first appearance. Zorro TM & © Zorro Productions, Inc.

Welcome back to Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning, and prepare for a swashbuckling adventure with swords, masks, pendejos, and pirates as we take a trip to the Pueblo of Los Angeles in the 1700s!

There, clad in a black costume, cloak cape, mask, and hat, a mysterious hero named Zorro fights against injustice—and for the rights of the people against tyrants who would rule them—astride his horse, Tornado. With three slashes of his sword, he leaves behind a “Z” mark etched onto all who oppose goodness, fairness, and decency! Like our last two RetroFan subjects, Tarzan and the Lone Ranger, Zorro has been a staple in multimedia since his 1920 movie debut. But as with the other heroes, Zorro has only rarely experienced Saturday morning superstardom… but when he did, he changed the fate of American animation forever!

Grab the reins of your horse and the pommel of your sword as we ride into a look at Zorro’s history, including his few Saturday morning heroics!

ORIGINS OF ZORRO

Zorro’s origins date back to 1919, when the character first appeared, cover-billed, in the August and September issues of pulp magazine The All-Story, which promised a new hero in “The Curse of Capistrano” by author Johnston McCulley. “When romance

and rapiers ruled in Old California,” the cover script stated, and indeed, a pretty woman watched as a masked hero with sword and pistol charged to her defense.

In the story, set in some vague period post-1781, Señor Zorro (“Mr. Fox”) is a dashing hero who avenges the helpless, aids the oppressed, and punishes cruel politicians. The villain of the tale is Captain Ramon, and both of them vie for the attention of the lovely Lolita Pulido, a noblewoman who has fallen on tough times. Also wooing her is Don Diego Vega, a dull fop who is the son of one of the richest landowners in the area. By the end of the story, readers knew what Diego’s mute manservant Bernardo and ally Friar Felipe knew: that Diego and Zorro are one and the same!

The inspiration for Zorro has been traced to multiple sources, including the tales of Robin Hood, Reynard the Fox, and The Scarlet Pimpernel series of books by Baroness Emma Orczy. He also carries traces of real-life characters such as a Mexican-California bandit in the 1800s named Joaquin Murrieta, also known as “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”; an Irish rebel named William Lamport, who was executed in the Mexican inquisition in 1659; and Estanislao, a Native American of the Yokuts tribe who led revolts against both California Missions and the Mexican government in the early 1800s.

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andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

Then, too, there was the Masked Rider, the black-clad masked Mexican hero who was created for a silent 1919 Western film serial

by Arrow Film Corp. While McCulley’s Zorro story is credited with impressing early silent-film action-star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and his new wife Mary Pickford enough that on their honeymoon, they decided to make it Fairbanks’ first film under his own banner, it is significantly clear that The Masked Rider played a part in the visuals for the new Zorro.

Fairbanks made a deal with United Artists, and the silent adventure-romance film The Mark of Zorro was released on November 27, 1920.

Not only was The Mark of Zorro a box-office smash, but it defined an entire genre of swashbuckling films to follow, making stars of Errol Flynn and others.

The film kept many of the elements of the original story, including pitting Zorro/Diego against the corrupt Governor Alverado, Captain Juan Ramon, and Sergeant Pedro Gonzales. More importantly, it established a look for Zorro that defined him to the present day: all black, from a wide-brimmed sombrero cordobes down to black boots and a black horse. Only the lower half of his face is visible, with his silver rapier—with which he carves the initial “Z” into the faces of criminals—the only other flash of color… not that audiences seeing the film in black-and-white would know.

McCulley began to turn out The Further Adventures of Zorro in 1922 in Argosy All-Story Weekly, after which he wrote the novellas Zorro Rides Again (1931) and The Sign of Zorro (1941). Following many stories in Argosy and Cavalier, McCulley wrote over 50 short stories in West Magazine, from July 1944 to July 1951. Two final McCulley Zorro stories would later appear, including one posthumous one in 1959.

But while Zorro’s creator toiled away, the character was no longer solely his. Four film serials were produced from 1937–1949, and the feature films Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), with Douglas Fairbanks, The Bold Caballero (1936), with Robert Livingston, and the remake, The Mark of Zorro (1940), with Tyrone Power, kept the character alive. So too did Mexican versions in 1948 and 1959, and multiple films in Italy and Spain!

Oddly, although Zorro clearly influenced the rise of masked crimefighter comic-book heroes—young Bruce Wayne had canonically seen The Mark of Zorro just before his parents were gunned down in Gotham City in Batman’s classic origin—Zorro didn’t appear in comics himself until November 1948, when he debuted in Quality’s Hit Comics #55, albeit not in his traditional costume. He made a handful of further comic appearances prior to 1957, when Zorro’s entire legacy changed.

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Zorro has been portrayed on the big screen by (LEFT) Douglas Fairbanks, (RIGHT) Tyrone Power, and on screens big and small by (BELOW) Guy Williams. © Zorro Productions, Inc.

Walt Disney Productions licensed Zorro for a television series in 1957, premiering it on ABC primetime on October 10, 1957. The show starred Guy Williams as Don Diego de la Vega, a student who is brought by his landowner father from Madrid to his home in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula (later known as “Los Angeles”) in 1820. There, Don Diego hides his championship fencing skills and adopts the role of a foppish intellectual. Secretly, he takes up his father’s

RETROFAD

Valley Girls and Valspeak

BY MICHAEL EURY

After hot rods and hippies, and surfing and psychedelic art, you’d think that Americans would have tired of Southern California– spawned pop culture trends.

As if!

Then came the Big Eighties, when Ronald Reagan strode… well, out of California, into the White House. He and First Lady Nancy Reagan, familiar faces from both the silver screen and the boob tube, brought Hollywood pizzazz to the nation’s capital. Some might argue that the Reagans also offered a step up in social class from the Georgia peanut farmer who had previously inhabited

Whispered advice about boys—at The Mall!—in a scene from Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Lobby card courtesy of Heritage.

Fast Times At Ridgemont High © 1982 Universal.

the Oval Office (anybody remember Billy Beer?). Bolstered by television’s blaring of lifestyles of the rich and famous, a contagion of obsession with affluence and self-indulgence took hold. And its poster child was the Valley Girl.

Valley Girls were the image-obsessed, shopaholic teenage daughters of upper-middleclass parents of California’s San Fernando Valley, a.k.a. “The Valley,” the 260-square-mile region that’s home to many of Los Angeles’ residential suburbs.

The area was founded in September 1797 as the Mission San Fernando Rey de España. By the mid-20th Century, The Valley had become “America’s suburb,” a pastoral getaway from the hustlebustle of nearby Hollywood. The velvet-voiced Bing Crosby crooned about this wonderland to homesick G.I.s in his 1944 hit, “San Fernando Valley.” If its Spanish settlers could have foreseen that the region would, by the early Eighties, be home to no end of clothing boutiques, shoe stores, and shopping malls connected by smoggy, traffic-choked roadways, they no doubt would have considered such exploitation as “grody to the max,” or perhaps shrugged off 66

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this progress with a dismissive “whatever.” If they were fluent in Valspeak.

But that language, punctuated a vocal rise in pitch at the end of sentences and often accompanied by a flippant eye-roll or hair toss, epitomized the Valley Girl as she sashayed from store to store, armed with limitless credit cards and shopping bags brimming with designer shoe purchases that even Imelda Marcos would covet. The Valley Girl’s mecca was the mall—no, let’s make that The Mall—as SoCal’s multi-tiered gallerias became “the” place to be, and to be seen.

It was a movie that rocketed this lifestyle into the public consciousness: director Amy Heckerling’s sleeper smash of 1982, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, where much of the film’s teen soap opera (and comedy) occurred at a shopping mall. The mall in your Anywhere U.S.A. neighborhood might have lacked the dazzle of Fast Times’ Sherman Oaks Galleria, but in those pre-Walmart days virtually every community had some sort of shopping mall nearby.

The Mall became the nucleus of Eighties teen and youth culture.

“Stranger dangers” for kids might have lurked on the streets, but The Mall was a safe haven where parents could drop off their younger kids for an entire day without concern for their welfare. It was where teens could go to hang out, to shop, and—for those working-class adolescents lacking the daddy dollars necessary to ascend to actual Valley Girldom—to work after school as a retail store clerk or food court server.

The Valley Girl, her pouty lips sparkling with gloss and her well-toned bod clad in neon-hued fashions, developed a language all her own. Her predilections were “awesome,” “gnarly,” “bitchin’,” “tubular,” “righteous,” and “fresh.”

Her dislikes would “gag me with a spoon,” “barf me out,” “gross me out,” or be “grody to the max.”

Emotional situations (usually a cute, rich boy looking her way) that would “freak her out” with an “Oh my god!” gasp might spark a fellow Valley Girl to advise her to “take a chill pill” or “don’t have a cow.”

If she agreed with you, the Valley Girl’s support was signaled by a “totally” or “fer sure.” If forced into compliance, she would acquiesce with a “whatever” or “okay, fine.” If she could no longer tolerate you, or

SUPER COLLECTOR

Remembering

Robb Versandi

Editor’s note: Normally, our “Super Collector” column is a guest article about the passion behind the writer’s collection or the challenges of finding certain rare items.

But in this edition we are saddened to report the March 22, 2022 passing of the Bronx-born Robert J. “Robb” Versandi (1941–2022) of Tierra Verde, Florida. A talented cartoonist, Robb boasted a scholarly knowledge of toys, comic and cartoon art, and films. After a successful career as an advertising executive, he operated two collector-oriented businesses, Toys Around the Clock and Art Around the Clock.

Awhile back, Robb, a RetroFan subscriber, sent me photographs of some of his prized memorabilia with the note, “Here are some random photos of my collections. Perhaps they might be of interest to your readers.” Dagwood, Dick Tracy, Disney, Dracula—I’m certain these photos will be appreciated by RetroFans.

And thus, with a heavy heart RetroFan remembers Robb Versandi through his pop-culture collections. We extend our deepest condolences to his widow, Susanna Johnston-Versandi, to his family, and to his friends.

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WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON Here’s He-Man! An early Masters of the Universe (MOTU) promo poster.

Courtesy of Heritage. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe © Mattel, Inc.

BY WILL MURRAY An alliance between a toy company and an independent animation studio led to the wildly popular syndicated television program He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and a billion-dollar merchandizing phenomenon that continues to this day.

The concept burst upon the world in 1982 as a Mattel Toys playset. Previously, Mattel had passed on licensing Star Wars toys—consequently losing a small fortune in revenue. So the company went looking for something similar in order to reclaim market share.

Conan the Barbarian had been a hit film in 1982, and before that Thundarr the Barbarian had run for two seasons as a Saturday morning cartoon on ABC, ending in 1981. The “sword and sorcery” sub-genre, pioneered by pulp writer Robert E. Howard in the Thirties, was enjoying a revival in virtually all media. Howard’s

Conan, King Kull, and related characters were selling millions of paperbacks and Marvel comic books.

Initially, animated commercials were planned to promote the Mattel action figures.

But when Mattel’s Tom Kalinske pitched the new line to Toys R Us, he was rebuffed.

“Boys don’t read,” was the cold response.

On the spot, the Mattel executive explained that a He-Man cartoon series was in the works. But one wasn’t. He had to act fast.

Filmation executive producer Lou Scheimer took the call. “The Mattel deal actually started right after we did [the sci-fi cartoon series] Blackstar. They came to me and they had this product. They had this deal with the Conan people. I didn’t know they had this guy coming out of the forest with a sword, and [they] wanted to know if I could sell it to the networks. I said yeah, I would try. I really didn’t like the story; it was pretty much a long toy commercial.”

The project might not have gone anywhere except for fact that Westinghouse acquired Filmation, improving the company’s financial strength.

Scheimer said, “We went back to Mattel and told them if they let us develop it the way we think is appropriate, give us a shot at it, we would try to sell it into syndication.

And, on top of that, I got Westinghouse to finance it!”

Fortunately, FCC chairman Mark Fowler had just relaxed the rules to permit toy-based cartoons so long as the toys were not advertised on the show they inspired, freeing up Group W and Filmation to launch the show.

Scheimer oversaw the redevelopment of the characters and conceptualized the series. The first working title, “Lords of Power,” was rejected as sounding too religious. Originally, the Mattel concept had called for a “He-Man Trio,” consisting of a hero who would dress as a barbarian, a soldier, or a spaceman. This proved cumbersome, so the focus shifted to the barbarian as the star.

Designer Roger Sweet produced the first prototype, making He-Man resemble a helmeted Viking. This was rejected for a more friendly blond-haired look.

Mattel had commissioned writer Donald F. Glut to script a quartet of He-Man mini-comics that created a backstory and introduced additional characters destined to become subsequent toys. But Scheimer thought Glut’s grim post-apocalyptic concepts unsuitable for his vision of a kid-friendly program.

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WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON

“I went back to Mattel with the concept of Prince Adam, a father, son, mother, a family,” Scheimer explained. “Well, they didn’t know what to do with it, but we made a deal with them to give us creative control.

We financed it, and it was a good deal for us—the money that came in from syndication, which was good back then—but it was all luck. If the show hadn’t worked, it would have been death. We ended up doing about 223 episodes. That’s a lot of stuff!”

During this period, Mattel turned to DC Comics for cross-promotion. Out of this collaboration emerged a Masters of the Universe (MOTU) miniseries preceded by an issue of DC Comics Presents where Superman visited Eternia to help He-Man in his ongoing struggle against Skeletor, and a 16-page preview of the miniseries, which further developed the nascent MOTU milieu. The preview was included as a free insert in select DC titles cover-dated November 1982.

“We received very little input from Mattel,” writer Paul Kupperberg recalled.

“They really hadn’t developed much beyond character names and powers and some basic background information; the details were left up to us.”

REJECTED BY THE NETWORKS

It was not the smoothest launch. Scheimer expected to sell the series to one of the three major networks for airing in the Saturday morning TV time period. All three passed, one objecting to Filmation’s pro-social approach. It was a blessing in disguise.

“If we were doing it for a network,” the producer later admitted, “they would be pounding for more action, more stuff on screen— keep those kids watching! By going into syndication, we were able to get more content, humanity, real personality, fun into the shows.”

The lifting of the FCC ban on TV cartoons based on toys was another key development. Although the restriction no longer applied, executives understood that they still had to be careful how they presented the series.

“This is because when Filmation decided to do He-Man,” explained scripter Mel Gilden. “[T]hey went in knowing that the various TV watchdog groups would be watching He-Man very closely. It’s a guy with a sword, after all. He was basically Conan with magic. And so what Filmation did was impose their own standards. They hired a child psychologist and carefully went over each script to ensure there wasn’t anything in it to forestall any problems that they might have had right at the source.”

Lou Scheimer’s background animating the likes of Superman [coming in RetroFan #25–ed.] and Star Trek [see issue #1–ed.] served him well. “We created a super-hero character who has a family, responsibilities and an alter ego. He gets into situations that try him as a human being, and that gives us an exciting, enter72

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Model sheets for He-Man and some of his MOTU cohorts.

Courtesy of Heritage. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe © Mattel, Inc..

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICKproblems.

THE LINK ORDER THIS taining way to present kids with certain WeTO worked hard ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! on getting values into the shows. It’s easy to do a violent show, but who wants to? The figures look inherently violent, and I didn’t want action for the sake of action. First of all, it’s not right. And second, it just doesn’t work. Kids want some content, some inherent social value. We try not to have He-Man hurt any living creature, and the good guys always win. He-Man is heroic, but not omnipotent. He does make mistakes.”

It worked. Debuting as a five days a week program, in September 1983, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe grabbed young viewers and didn’t let go.

“The year we went on the air, our ratings were phenomenal,” claimed Scheimer. “Advertisers loved it, because with no significant children’s programming off-network, they had been RETROFAN #22 Surf’s up as SIXTIESIt BEACH MOVIESapparent make a RetroFan splash! relegated to the Saturday-morning ghetto. became Plus: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ZORRO’s Saturthat this was a much better market for us, both day morning cartoon, TV’sfinancially THE WILD, WILDand WEST, CARtoons and other drag-mags, VALSPEAK, and more fun, fab features! creatively.”

Like, totally! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY,that SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MARK Sixty-five episodes were produced first year.SCOTT It was a magic VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY. number because it meant any single episode aired only four times (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 in a calendar year. https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_152&products_id=1676