RetroFan #31

March 2024 No. 31 $10.95

Say, kids, what time is it?

IT’S HOWDY DOODY TIME!

Magic Memories of

This… is… the… ALVIN SHOW

ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY

By Herbie J Pilato

Saturday morning’s K-9 crusader…

RUN, JOE, RUN

Behind the scenes of the classic thriller

A Bewitched 60th Anniversary Celebration!

with NICHOLAS MEYER, MALCOLM McDOWELL & DAVID WARNER

Visit Camp Crystal Lake (if you dare!) • Peter Gunn • Girder and Panel Building Sets & more!

Featuring Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Mark Voger • Michael Eury

Elizabeth Montgomery photograph courtesy of the Classic TV Preservation Society. The Alvin Show © Ross Bagdasarian. Run, Joe, Run © William P. D’Angelo Productions. Time Af ter Time © Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved.

New from TwoMorrows!

ALTER EGO #187

ALTER EGO #189

BRICKJOURNAL #84

KIRBY COLLECTOR #89

KIRBY COLLECTOR #90

JOHN ROMITA tribute issue! Podcast recollections recorded shortly after the Jazzy One’s passing by JOHN ROMITA JR., JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, BRIAN PULIDO, ROY THOMAS, JAIMIE JAMESON, JOHN CIMINO, STEVE HOUSTON, & NILE SCALA; DAVID ARMSTRONG’s mini-interview with Romita; John Romita’s ten greatest hits; plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, & more!

STEFAN FORMENTANO masterminds the enormous LEGO city NEW HASHIMA, one of the biggest LEGO Fan community builds ever done! Plus builds by SIMON LIU, BLAKE FOSTER, and others! Also: Nerding Out with BRICKNERD, BANTHA BRICKS: Fans of LEGO Star Wars, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS!

KIRBY CONSPIRACIES! Darkseid’s Foourth World palace intrigue, the too-many attempted overthrows of Odin, why Stan Lee hated Diablo, Kang contradictions, Simon & Kirby swipes, a never-reprinted S&K story, MARK EVANIER’s WonderCon 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel (with MARV WOLFMAN, PAUL S. LEVINE, and JOHN MORROW), an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

WHAT IF KIRBY... hadn’t been stopped by his rejected Spider-Man presentation?

DC’s abandonment of the Fourth World?

The ill-fated Speak-Out Series? FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics crusade? The CIA’s involvement with the Lord of Light?

Plus a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other columnists, a classic Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, & more!

Cover inks by DAMIAN PICKADOR ZAJKO!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships April 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Aug. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Summer 2024

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Focuses on great early science-fiction author EDMUND HAMILTON, who went on to an illustrious career at DC Comics, writing Superman, Batman, and especially The Legion of Super-Heroes! Learn all about his encounters with RAY BRADBURY, MORT WEISINGER, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, et al—a panoply of titans! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

BACK ISSUE #147

BACK ISSUE #148

BACK ISSUE #149

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #32 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #33

Great Hera, it’s the 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF BACK ISSUE, featuring a tribute to the late, great GEORGE PÉREZ! Wonder Woman: The George Pérez Years, Pérez’s 20 Greatest Hits of the Bronze Age, Pérez’s fanzine days, a Pérez remembrance by MARV WOLFMAN, a Wonder Woman interview with MINDY NEWELL, and more!

With a stunning Wonder Woman cover

by Pérez!

DC SUPER-STARS OF SPACE! Adam Strange in the Bronze Age (with RICHARD BRUNING & ANDY KUBERT), From Beyond the Unknown, the Fabulous World of Krypton, Vartox, a Mongul history, the Omega Men, and more! Featuring CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, DAN JURGENS, CURT SWAN, PETER J. TOMASI, MARV WOLFMAN, and more! Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO & MURPHY ANDERSON!

’80s INDIE HEROES: The American, Aztec Ace, Dynamo Joe, Evangeline, Journey, Megaton Man, Trekker, Whisper, and Zot! Featuring CHUCK DIXON, PHIL FOGLIO, STEVEN GRANT, RICH LARSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS, DOUG MOENCH, RON RANDALL, DON SIMPSON, MARK VERHEIDEN, CHRIS WARNER & more superstar creators. Cover

by NORM BREYFOGLE!

WILLIAM STOUT is interviewed about his illustration and comics work, as well as his association with DINOSAURS publisher BYRON PREISS, the visionary packager/ publisher who is also celebrated in this double-header issue. Included is the only comprehensive interview ever conducted with PREISS, plus a huge biographical essay.

Also MIKE DEODATO on his early years and FRANK BORTH on Treasure Chest!

STEVE GERBER biographical essay and collaborator insights, MARY SKRENES on co-creating Omega the Unknown, helping develop Howard the Duck, VAL MAYERIK cover and interview, ROY THOMAS reveals STAN LEE’s unseen EXCELSIOR! COMICS line, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of early hardcover super-hero collections), more with MIKE DEODATO, and the concluding segment on FRANK BORTH!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

2024 RATES

SUBSCRIPTION RATES

Print subscribers get the digital edition free!

Alter Ego (Six print issues) Back Issue (Eight print issues) BrickJournal (Six print issues) Comic Book Creator (Four print issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four print issues) RetroFan (Six print issues)

Poly mailer, backing board

ECONOMY US

Faster delivery, rigid mailer

PREMIUM US

Non-US orders, rigid mailer

INTERNATIONAL

DIGITAL ONLY

$73 $97 $73 $53 $53 $73

$100 $130 $100 $70 $70 $100

$111 $147 $111 $78 $78 $111

$29 $39 $29 $19 $19 $29

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

No print issue

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com Don’t miss exclusive sales, limited editions, and new releases! Sign up for our mailing list:

https://groups.io/g/twomorrows

Download our Free Catalog of all our available books and back issues! https://www.twomorrows.com/media/TwoMorrowsCatalog.pdf

13

41

The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With

Issue #31 March 2024

70

Columns and Special Features

Departments

3

Retrotorial

Retro Television Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery

23

13

37

Voger’s Vault of Vintage Varieties It’s Howdy Doody Time!

23

2

20

Too Much TV Quiz TV characters’ hairstyles

37

Retro Fad Hula Hoops

Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

The Alvin Show

41

61

Scott Saavedra’s Secret Sanctum Girder and Panel Building Sets

51

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon Peter Gunn

78

RetroFanmail

80

ReJECTED

61

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning D’Angelo Productions

3

70

Retro Sci-Fi Time After Time’s Nicholas Meyer, Malcolm McDowell, and David Warner

51

RetroFan™ issue 31, March/April 2024 (ISSN 2576-7224) is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage 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: $73 Economy US, $111 International, $29 Digital Only. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Elizabeth Montgomery photograph courtesy of the Classic TV Preservation Society. The Alvin Show © Ross Bagdasarian. Run, Joe, Run © William P. D’Angelo Productions. Time After Time © Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2024 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

BY MICHAEL EURY

Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow CONTRIBUTORS Michael Eury Kellie Gormly Andy Mangels Will Murray Herbie J Pilato Scott Saavedra Scott Shaw!

Anthony Taylor Mark Voger DESIGNER Scott Saavedra PROOFREADER Eric Nolen-Weathington SPECIAL THANKS Mark Arnold Andrew Bullock Hake’s Auctions Heritage Auctions Tanya Jones VERY SPECIAL THANKS Malcolm McDowell Nicholas Meyer David Warner (In Memoriam)

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

2

RETROFAN

Publisher John Morrow and I, when developing this magazine some six years ago, originally planned to anchor RetroFan to Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties pop culture. That decision was predicated both upon the eras of our mutual childhood and adolescent years and our imagined target audience of readers who were similarly saying goodbye to middle age but were interested in “the crazy, cool culture we grew up with.”

But we’ve since discovered we can’t ignore the Fabulous Fifties, the decade whose innovations— particularly the evolution of television into mass-media omnipresence and the emergence of rock ’n’ roll—shaped what was to follow.

At first I hesitated when I started receiving pitches from writers wanting to cover material from the Fifties in RetroFan. But I soon gave in.

And I’m glad I did.

What little I experienced firsthand of the Fifties was while I was in diapers. So the stories behind the TV, toys, films, fashions, and music of that decade are new to me, as they no doubt are to most of you.

Just about everyone reading this magazine has heard of Howdy Doody, the long-running children’s show from the earliest days of television. But most of us grew up with Captain Kangaroo and Shari Lewis, or Mister Rogers and Big Bird, so this issue’s coverage of one of the first kids’ shows is remarkably fresh to us. Same with Peter Gunn, Blake Edwards’ jazzy, noirish P.I. drama, which most RetroFan’s readers know only through reruns or streaming, if at all. Even my own “RetroFad” column this issue involves the Fifties, when the Hula Hoop craze started (although that topic was inspired by another of this issue’s features, on The Alvin Show—and if you don’t already know the connection between the two, you will after reading the articles).

Yet we’re not examining pop culture only through black-and-white lenses this issue, as you’ll find lots of colorful Sixties and Seventies material ahead, as well as a visit to Camp Crystal Lake, ground zero for the Eighties’ slasher film Friday the 13th. Who needs a time machine when you’ve got RetroFan? Amid this issue’s contents I confess my admiration of the cover-featured star of the beloved sitcom Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery. I grew up watching her as TV housewifewitch Samantha Stephens, and was enchanted by her earnestness and beauty. “Samantha” was one of my first TV crushes, the one I never quite got over (sorry, Ellie May Clampett). I recall feeling personally saddened when NEXT ISSUE Ms. Montgomery passed, as if I’d lost a friend. Many of you felt the same way. And I’ve also been told by several of my 60-ish male friends that they also never got over their childhood crushes on this amazing woman.

Elizabeth Montgomery also put a spell on Hollywood journalist and producer Herbie J Pilato, a guest to our pages this issue. His portrait of the late actress is intimate and inviting—you’ll feel as if you were sitting next to him during his encounters with the star of Bewitched.

This issue RetroFan is proud to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bewitched, as the enduring sitcom premiered on September 17, 1964. “Sixty years?” you shrug, or maybe sigh? Yes, you are getting old.

But you’re getting old among friends, your fellow RetroFans.

So get ready for another groovy grab-bag of the crazy, cool culture we grew up with!

March 2024

RETRO TELEVISION

A

60th Anniversary Celebration PART ONE

What It Was Like to Meet ‘Samantha’

(BACKGROUND) The eternally bewitching Elizabeth Montgomery.

I’ll never forget the day I first heard Elizabeth Montgomery’s voice on my “Big ’80s” answering machine, trailing off and on tape, in bits and pieces, with a chipper, near stuttering rhythm. For months, I was attempting to contact the iconic star of Bewitched, which originally aired on ABC-TV from 1964 to 1972. William Asher, her former husband and the show’s core producer/director, had been playing matchmaker for us, recommending that she speak with me.

“You really should talk to Herbie,” Asher told Elizabeth on more than one occasion. “He is sincerely concerned with this entity known as Bewitched.”

“He never tells me that I should talk to anyone,” Elizabeth would later tell me upon our first meeting.

But she talked with me.

Elizabeth welcomed me into her hushed world. I was enamored with the rise, demise, and rebirth of Bewitched, and she was intrigued. She marveled at my appreciation of not only her most famous show, but her

Classic TV Preservation Society (CTVPS).

My Magical Encounters with Bewitched Star Elizabeth Montgomery

BY HERBIE J PILATO RETROFAN RETROFAN

March March 2024

3

retro television

varied accomplishments, talents, and charitable ways. Initially reticent then unrestrained, she, for the first time in 20 years, offered in-depth conversations about her life and career. She explained during the first of what would become four interviews in the spring and summer of 1989: “It’s a strange thing... I loathe to chat away about me. I’ve never liked it. I always hate interviews. I just want to act, and do the best job I can. Hopefully, people will appreciate it. That’s what my job is. It isn’t sitting down and talking about me. If I were a gardener [which she fancied herself as around her home in Beverly Hills], I would be out there trying to make gardens as pretty as I could, and not expect people to come up to me and ask a lot of questions. What it boils down to is this: It’s always easier for me to talk about other things than it is to talk about me.”

Elizabeth described our conversations as “cathartic.” She spoke of performing her legendary Bewitched role as Samantha Stephens, the witch-with-a-twitch; her famous father, film and TV idol Robert Montgomery; her childhood; years of education; early motion pictures, stage, and television appearances. She addressed what it meant to be an actress; her friendships with President John F. Kennedy (who was assassinated on November 22, 1963—the day rehearsals began for Bewitched) and Carol Burnett (her co-star in the 1963 movie Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed? and her frequent opponent on games shows like TV’s Password, which Elizabeth loved to play).

Elizabeth also discussed her Bewitched co-stars, including Dick York and Dick Sargent (who shared the role of Darrin Stephens, Samantha’s mortal husband), Agnes Moorehead (who played Endora, Samantha’s feisty supernatural mother), and David White (who played Darrin’s selfabsorbed but lovable ad-man boss Larry Tate). She talked about being “Queen of the Witches” on Bewitched, and her post-Bewitched small-screen films (for which she was deemed Queen of the TV Movies, long before Jane Seymour, Jaclyn Smith, Lindsay Wagner, or Valerie Bertinelli).

Elizabeth addressed all she did and did not understand about herself and her massive following; all she gave, all she became, all she hoped to be, all she was: a wife, a mother, a friend, a TV legend, a pop-culture icon, a courageously bold endorser of human rights.

THE FIRST TIME

Bewitched’s Samantha Stephens, one of TV’s first independent women, takes a stand. CTVPS.

My initial interview with Elizabeth transpired on April 18, 1989, three days after her 56th birthday, following months of leaving messages with her answering service, and never receiving a response.

But then one day, upon noticing the flashing light on my answering machine, I pressed play and heard: “Hi. It’s Lizzie Montgomery. We’ve been missing each other.

Well—you’ve been missing me. I’m finally back for a while. I will give you a call again. You call me. I’ll call you. Hopefully, we’ll be in touch. [pause] This is crazy. [pause, with a smile in her voice, then adding] Okay. Bye-bye.”

Firstly, it was astonishing to me she referred to herself as “Lizzie” in such a casual, familiar way, as if we had known each other for years—which, in a way, we did. But the crazy reference was a nod to the mere fact that I wanted to write about Bewitched and, that upon phoning me, she

retro television

heard on my machine the Bewitched theme, punctuated by the nose-twitch xylophone sound from the show’s opening credits, pristinely timed with the phone beeper signal instruction to leave a message. Because this transpired in the pre-high-tech, non-smartphone days, it was quite a challenge to coordinate and record that audible welcome.

At the time, I was living in Santa Monica, California, in a tiny studio apartment. The moment Elizabeth had phoned, I was doing my laundry in the shared utility room of my apartment building.

After folding my clothes, I returned to my apartment, called her back, and simply said, “I’m so very sorry that I missed your call. I was doing my laundry.”

To which she replied, “As well you should.”

We both chuckled, and from that moment on, we became friends.

Elizabeth was simply “terrific,” a word that both she and Samantha frequently used. She was a wonderful person; down to earth, and unaffected by the Hollywood machine.

I made that observation from the moment I drove up to her gated mansion in Beverly Hills, reached over to the guestannouncement speaker, rang the bell, and heard her say, “Hello.”

“Hi,” I replied. “It’s Herbie J Pilato.”

“Oh, yes. Come on,” was her response (which later became, “Oh, goody,” whenever she heard it was I in the driveway).

I then continued up the long private road to her front door with four new tires on my 1981 Buick Regal, because I wanted the car to look nice. I passed a large tennis court, and a well-manicured garden, and closed in on a somewhat disheveled garage that housed a new Rolls Royce with a license plate that read, Bent Liz (as in Bentley).

“How funny,” I thought. That was so in tune with the amiable personality that I had come to know by then, if only through watching Bewitched and talking with just a few of Elizabeth’s former Bewitched co-stars (some of whom refused to talk with me until she said, but we’ll get to that later).

I soon approached her front door, rang the bell, and there she was: Elizabeth Montgomery, the love of my TV life—and of my magical dreams.

I was simply stunned upon seeing this simply stunning woman. There’s just no other way to say it. But then she said, “Hi,” forthrightly, and in placing her hand out in kind, added, “…pleased to meet you.”

In reply, I went on to explain my Bewitched obsession. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m sure it went something like this: “Well—the show is really much more than just a sitcom about a witch. She’s first and foremost a woman, who happens to be a witch. And she loves this regular guy for who he is, and not for what he could do for her. And together they prove that any marriage can work, despite their differences, or whatever diverse challenges come their way. That’s really what the show is about… prejudice… looking past differences, and concentrating on what makes people the same.”

It was Elizabeth who now appeared stunned. She sat back and replied simply with an, “Oh… okay,” and we became friends. My words were earnest, and she knew it. And we went on to have a wonderful two-hour conversation about Bewitched and her early life and career, with three more two-hour sessions to follow.

GIFTED

To ensure that our first encounter was memorable, I had prepared a few gifts for Elizabeth, planning to offer them after our initial discussion had ended. I did not want her to feel overwhelmed. I had heard of her sensitivity to and fear of the press, due to being raised in the public eye as the daughter of famed movie and film star Robert Montgomery. As it turned out, I became the first journalist to whom Elizabeth granted an in-depth interview in over 20 years.

So, it was only upon completion of our monumental conference that I turned to Elizabeth and said, simply, “I have something for you.”

I proceeded to take out from the black duffel bag I’d brought along a gold-framed inscription of a letter I wrote to her, which I had commissioned a calligrapher to prepare, along with a fine-crystal unicorn (poor William Asher just got brownies) that I had purchased. I knew that Samantha was fond of unicorns. But it wasn’t until speaking with Bewitched writer Richard Baer who

AND THEN IT HAPPENED

Elizabeth welcomed me inside the front door. I followed her into the living room, and then… it happened.

I can’t believe it happened.

But it happened.

I did something really silly.

I tripped over her coffee table.

Fortunately, I didn’t break anything—the table or my legs. But I at least broke the ice. Elizabeth giggled like a little girl at my gaffe, and we eventually sat down, and the first question she asked me was, “Why are you doing this?”

In other words, she was wondering why I had decided to write a book about a TV show that ended its original run some 17 years before; a production that she had long-distanced herself from for as long a time.

Elizabeth’s title set-up cel from Bewitched, produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions for the show intro. Bewitched © Sony Pictures Television. Courtesy of Heritage.

RETROFAN

March 2024

5

retro television

informed me that Elizabeth, too, in real life, was also fond of the mythical creatures. She had collected marble, plastic, glass, and wood unicorns of every shape and size for years.

Consequently, upon seeing the sparkling new crystal unicorn before her, Elizabeth gasped and said, “Oh, my… You know, don’t you! You know!” But before she could continue, I reached into my bag and pulled out the plaque with the special lettering.

The words explained how I felt. I immortalized in permanent sentiment everything I had always wanted to say to her, closing with, “Miss Elizabeth Montgomery… I state in truth and with much conviction, that the world remains blissfully, lovingly, and enchantingly Bewitched forever, simply due to the fact that YOU are magic.”

Upon reading the former phrase (which unbeknownst to me at the time, would become the title of my second Bewitched tome), Elizabeth turned to me, as if in slow motion, and wrapped her arms around me with a sweet and gentle embrace.

ENCHANTED

Once Elizabeth embraced me, I was under her spell, in person, this time, nearly floating out the front door, upon making my exit. But as I began to walk towards my Buick with the new tires, I turned slightly back to Elizabeth and observed her standing in the doorway, holding that unicorn and plaque.

At that moment, I could have sworn some form of white mist began to form around her figure, as she stood waving goodbye. It was a tremendous sight.

I then got in my car and, in a daze, began to slowly journey back down her long driveway, kept repeating, “I just met Elizabeth Montgomery.”

In what seemed like only seconds, I was back in my little apartment in Santa Monica, which was at least 20 minutes away from Elizabeth’s sprawling home in Beverly Hills.

But just as I opened my door, the phone rang.

“Hello,” I answered, still somewhat in a daze.

“Hi, Herbie. It’s Lizzie.”

I freaked out, silently. “Oh… hiiiii,” I stuttered, clueless as to why Elizabeth Montgomery would be phoning me not even one halfhour after our first meeting.

“Just calling to confirm our appointment for next week,” she said.

“Uh, uh, uh… okay,” I continued to stumble. “How about the same time? Four o’clock. That okay with you?”

“Perfect. Oh, how fun. See you then.”

With that, I hung up the phone.

Was I dreaming? Was I drunk?! Was I alive?!!

I didn’t have time for the answers. The phone rang a second time.

“Hi, Herbie. It’s Lizzie again.”

“Uh… hiii.”

“Yeah, I was just wondering,” she began to say, “…what are the lyrics to that song I sang as Serena [Samantha’s look-a-like cousin] in the episode where I wore the blonde wig?” [“Hip, Hippie Hooray” was the episode’s title.]

“Uh… uhm… uhm… I have to check my notes,” I said.

“Oh, okay.”

But just before we hung up, I said, “You know something? I’m really glad you called back.”

6

RETROFAN

March 2024

Hollywood historian and biographer Herbie J Pilato proudly displays his two Montgomery books, Twitch Upon a Star (2012) and The Essential Elizabeth Montgomery (2013).

Twitch is now available in audio book form from Tantor Media. Photo: Dan Holm.

“You are?”

“Yes. Remember when I said that I didn’t want you to feel overwhelmed with the gifts, and everything?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I was wrong. I think you should be overwhelmed. But in a good way.”

“Oh, I am. I am! After you left, I thought to myself, You know… it really must have been difficult for him to meet me?”

That it was—and Elizabeth knew it but again, she respected my appreciation because I respected her talent. “I’ll see you next week,” she said with that giggle of hers and hung up.

SHE KNEW PEOPLE

Before Elizabeth and I met a second time, I had placed calls to “Second Darrin” Dick Sargent and David White, who had played Larry Tate, Darrin’s self-absorbed boss on Bewitched. I needed to contact them to properly complete The Bewitched Book, but they

retro television

refused interviews with me unless I could confirm Elizabeth’s involvement. So, I called her one day and asked if she would speak with them.

“Yes, absolutely,” she said, and then to my surprise, asked, “Do you have their numbers?”

I gave them to her, we said goodbye, and about one half-hour later, the phone rang. It was Dick Sargent.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking to speak with a… Herbie… is it…

Pee-lah-toe?”

“That’s right,” I replied. “This is he.”

“Yeah. Hi, Herbie. This is Dick Sargent. I just got the strangest phone call from Elizabeth Montgomery, who I haven’t heard from in years. She said you’re doing some kind of book about Bewitched?”

Before I could respond, Call Waiting interrupted.

“Hold on, Mr. Sargent. I’ve got to catch the other line… Hello?”

“Herbie. It’s Lizzie. Did Dick call you?”

“Yes,” I said, “…I’m on the line with him right now.”

“Oh, goody,” she responded, just like a little kid.

I returned to speak with Dick Sargent. We set up an appointment, hung up, and then it hit me: I was just on the phone with Samantha and Darrin—and at the same time!

That fascinated me because so much of Bewitched had to do with Darrin calling Samantha at home to see if everything was all right; if whatever magical mayhem that had been caused by Endora or the like had subsided. Now, in some surreal way, it seemed I was living inside an actual episode of Bewitched.

But more of the blur between fantasy and reality was yet to come.

‘LOOK AT HIS FACE! LOOK AT HIS FACE!’

When I went to interview Elizabeth in person for the second time, she informed me that she was expecting a messenger at 4:30 PM, which was shortly after we had planned to meet.

Sure enough, at 4:30 PM, the doorbell rang. She excused herself and went to answer. About one minute later, she returned and, following behind her, was none other than David White.

My jaw dropped, and Elizabeth relished that fact. “Oh, look at his face, David! Look at his face!” She could not stop giggling that giggle of hers and was so delighted that she had surprised me with David’s visit.

But more amazement was waiting in the wings. As David and I began to chat, Elizabeth excused herself, this time to fetch us some drinks (an assortment of fruit juices). In a moment of silence in her wake, David looked around the patio, and intoned, “Beautiful house, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I replied, still a bit in awe of the fact that I was sitting with Larry Tate in Samantha’s backyard. “Yes, it is.”

David then added, “Haven’t been here in 15 years.”

Shortly after he spoke those words to my utter shock, Elizabeth returned, sipping orange juice, with grapefruit juice for me, and handing David the same.

The three of us went on to share a wonderful afternoon. I couldn’t help but believe that I had done a good thing; that I was responsible for reuniting two old friends.

But before I could continue patting myself on the back, David was ready to leave. And Elizabeth and I began to walk him to his car, which was a Toyota Supra. I joked with him, suggesting that such a vehicle was too youthful a model for someone his age (then 70-something) to drive.

Upon hearing that remark, he just glanced over at Elizabeth, and with the spot-on comic-timing that he used on Bewitched (a delivery that William Asher had described as quicksilver), David just smirked, and drove away, leaving both Elizabeth and me with additional smiles.

‘DO YOU LIKE ZUCCHINI?’

Elizabeth was stunning in her later years. CTVPS.

As Elizabeth and I watched David White trail down that long driveway, the same path that introduced me to the real world of Elizabeth Montgomery, she turned to me and asked, out of the blue, “Do you like zucchini?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you like zucchini?”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

“Oh, goody.”

At that point, Elizabeth lunged a few feet ahead into her garden, which was the center of the circular driveway in front of her home.

She reached down into the patch, pulled out a significant-sized zucchini from its roots, handed it to me, and said, “Here… this is for you.”

Before I could respond, she leaped back into the patch and selected a second zucchini, this one even larger than the first.

“Here,” she repeated, handing me yet another fresh plant of the earth, “…take another one.”

This time, I was the one who was overwhelmed. I was standing with Samantha in her front yard, picking vegetables from her secret garden.

It was a magical moment in time that I will clearly never forget.

RETROFAN

March 2024

7

retro television

A

60th Anniversary Celebration PART TWO

the immortal life and career of elizabeth montgomery

Elizabeth Montgomery with her father Robert Montgomery between scenes on Robert Montgomery Presents. CTVPS.

8

RETROFAN

March 2024

BY HERBIE J PILATO Elizabeth Montgomery died of cancer on May 18, 1995, at only 62 years of age. Had she lived, the beloved pop-culture icon would have turned 90 years old on April 15, 2023.

That’s hard to fathom for an actress who on Bewitched remains eternally youthful in the eyes of millions of television viewers.

The daughter of film and television star Robert Montgomery and Broadway actress Elizabeth Allen, Elizabeth followed in the spotlight footsteps of her parents. But it was a relatively rocky road to the top. She had a complex relationship with her father.

He never fully believed she paid her professional dues and felt she had achieved fame much too easily via their family name which he worked hard to retain.

After his father, Henry Montgomery (a rubber company executive), had committed suicide, Robert toiled as a railroad mechanic and an oil tanker to salvage the family honor before he re-found wealth and prestige by way of Hollywood.

The infant death by meningitis of his first daughter, Martha, born before Elizabeth, had ultimately ignited and then did very little to close any emotional distance between him and Elizabeth.

As a result, Elizabeth spent a good deal of her pre-and-post–Bewitched life seeking her father’s approval, only to further incite his fury by later surpassing his popularity with her portrayal of Samantha and subsequent edgier roles in post-Bewitched TV movies.

Robert was a strict and demanding father, and he and Elizabeth rarely agreed about anything. It did not much help matters that he was a conservative Republican and she was a liberal Democrat.

Robert initially discouraged Elizabeth’s acting pursuits, but eventually welcomed her several times on his Robert Montgomery Presents anthology series (in which she made her TV debut with an episode titled “Top Secret”). But once Bewitched made her a bigger star on television than he ever was on the big screen, the elder Montgomery began to resent his daughter.

retro television

(LEFT) Elizabeth as a young teen with parents Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allen. (MIDDLE) Elizabeth with her younger brother Robert “Skip” Montgomery, Jr. (RIGHT) Elizabeth at 17. CTVPS. The tension mounted when he divorced her mother, who Elizabeth adored, and married yet another Elizabeth: Elizabeth "Buffy" Grant Harkness, an heiress.

Heartbroken for her mother, Elizabeth tried to keep peace in the family by inviting her father to play Samantha’s magical dad on Bewitched. But he declined, which placed a further wedge between father and daughter. She also was less than thrilled as to how the elder Montgomery treated her younger brother, Robert "Skip" Montgonery, Jr., who was also an actor.

With a father seemingly impossible to please, Elizabeth became a rebel of sorts, marrying four times. Her first husband was New York socialite Fred Cammann, who her father adored. But the union lasted just one year. Her second spouse was troubled actor Gig Young, who her father abhorred, mostly because Gig was 20 years her senior.

However, there were other issues with Young and, amid rumors of physical abuse, Elizabeth wisely divorced him, and none too soon. Years later, Gig committed suicide after killing his fifth wife, Kim Schmidt.

In 1963, Elizabeth met William Asher on the set of the film Johnny Cool, in which she starred and he directed. They fell in love and wed and, during the Bewitched years, had three children: Billy Asher (a luthier), Rebecca Asher (who followed her father in directing), and Robert Asher (a carpenter).

In 1974, Elizabeth met actor Robert Foxworth on the set of the TV movie, Mrs. Sundance. The two made two more small screen films (Face to Face, 1990, and With Murder in Mind, 1992) and remained together until her demise, though they married only in the last two years of her life.

Beyond Bewitched, Montgomery made more than 200 appearances on stage and screen. She received the Daniel Bloom Theatre Award for Most Promising Personality of the 1953–1954 season for her performance as Janet Colby in Late Love (which opened on Broadway on October 13, 1953).

(LEFT) Elizabeth was an accomplished stage actress before turning to TV and film. (RIGHT) Resting between scenes of The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), her first feature film. CTVPS. RETROFAN

March 2024

9

retro television

life as a housewife) on-screen, repetitive themes abounded in Montgomery’s charmed, yet complex life behind the scenes.

And while Bewitched would later be replicated by TV shows like I Dream of Jeannie [see RetroFan #18—ed.], Nanny and the Professor, as well as the short-lived late-1970s Bewitched spin-off Tabitha, which featured Lisa Hartman as the grown-up edition of Samantha’s daughter (originally played by twins Erin and Diane Murphy), in retrospect, another one of Montgomery’s early TV guest-star appearances foreshadowed to some extent her role on Bewitched.

In a relatively risqué race-oriented episode of 77 Sunset Strip titled “White Lie,” which aired October 25, 1963, Montgomery portrayed Charlotte DeLavalle, the conflicted half-white/half-black granddaughter of a (LEFT) Elizabeth in her Emmy-nominated episode of The character named Celia Jackson, who was played by the Untouchables, which featured her future Bewitched co-star David iconic African-American actress Juanita Moore.

White. (RIGHT) Elizabeth in her famed “Two” episode of The Twilight “White Lie” addressed the theme of prejudice, which Zone. CTVPS. Moore had experienced in real life, and had explored with her Oscar-nominated performance as Annie Johnson in the 1959 groundbreaking motion picture Imitation of Life.

Besides Johnny Cool, Montgomery’s feature films include 1955’s The theme of prejudice was also at the core of Bewitched: As The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (with Gary Cooper and Jack Lord), a witch in a mortal world, Samantha felt out of place. But at the and 1963’s Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (co-starring Dean Martin same time, she and Darrin loved each other despite their cultural and Carol Burnett). differences and displayed one of television’s first mixed marriages.

Beyond her multi-Emmy nominations for Bewitched, MontThe episode “Sisters at Heart,” Elizabeth’s favorite episode gomery also garnered Emmy nods for roles in TV shows such as (which premiered on Christmas Eve, 1970), involved the friendship The Untouchables [see RetroFan #21—ed.], in which she played a between Tabitha (as played by Erin Murphy) and her friend Lisa, prostitute in “The Rusty Heller Story” (alongside future Bewitched co-star David White), and in groundbreaking TV movies A Case of who happened to be African American (as played by Venetta Rape (1974) and The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975).

Rogers).

Elizabeth was also lauded for mostly-silent-though-strongBewitched began rehearsals on November 22, 1963, the fateful willed roles, such as “The Woman” alongside another pre-superstar day President John F. Kennedy, an advocate for Civil Rights, was Charles Bronson (as “The Man”) in The Twilight Zone Adam-and-Eveassassinated—a horrific incident that occurred approximately one like episode, “Two” (which originally aired on CBS on September 15, year after that 77 Sunset Strip episode premiered.

1951).

Moreover, Montgomery and William Asher were good friends Montgomery donned brunette hair as that raven-haired, with JFK, as Asher served as director of the President’s famed fiercely independent “Woman,” which in one sense foreshadowed birthday bash at which Marilyn Monroe sang a breathy “Happy shades of her performance as Samantha’s twin cousin Serena Birthday.” on Bewitched. And It was an increasingly volatile era with race rioting, rampant while both Serena drug abuse, and the Vietnam War, against which Montgomery and Samantha are protested and as a result, received death threats. Into this considered liberated, tumultuous mix were the subsequent assassinations of Robert F. empowered females Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., each of whom, like JFK and (it’s Samantha’s choice Montgomery, were liberal-minded. to live the mortal Shortly before Juanita Moore died in 2012, she offered some perspective on it all by sharing what it was like to work with Elizabeth: (LEFT) Elizabeth with Efrem “She was talented… she was an actress… a fine Zimbalist, Jr. in the “White actress!

She left this world too young… she was so Lie” episode of 77 Sunset Strip. gifted… such a divine person… so easygoing. At that (INSET) Oscar®time of 77 Sunset Strip, we [as actresses] had limited nominated actress parts.

She told me concerning our parts, ‘Juanita, walk Juanita Moore with it… feel free and walk with it.’ She looked me right played Elizabeth’s in the eye and that’s what she said to me. And I had grandmother in the never had that said to me before—like she said it. And episode. CTVPS. we did just that in that episode—we walked with it.”

10

RETROFAN

March 2024

retro television

Moore, whose additional credits include the Elizabeth Montgomery 1966 feature film The Singing Nun (which also starred with each of her four Bewitched actress Agnes Moorehead), added: husbands. (CLOCKWISE “Everyone said that Elizabeth was stuck-up because FROM TOP LEFT) First of having her own show, but they [were] just jealous husband Fred Cammann. and very envious actors and nay-sayers. I think she Second husband Gig was good [as Samantha], and I think she could have Young. Third husband been better… if they [had] let her loose and allowed William Asher. Fourth her to stretch herself… and you saw that [when she husband Robert played] Serena [Samantha’s brunette twin-cousin]… but Foxworth. CTVPS. [because of] TV you have to tone [things] down.

“Elizabeth was learned,” Moorehead concluded. “She was ahead of all of them out there in Hollywood… Plus, In Violence, Elizabeth portrayed yet another non-Samantha-like she was a nice young lady. To me, she was just like my child… it’s a character: a TV news writer whose liberal views sparked a brutal bond we had, ya know. She was a gift!” street gang attack.

Other of Elizabeth’s co-stars includes husband and wife actors In an exclusive interview from 2011, Lin Bolen Wendkos, widow William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett [see RetroFan #9—ed.]. They to Paul, explained why she thought Elizabeth took such dramatic had known and worked with Elizabeth and her second husband Gig departures with her post-Bewitched roles: Young on Robert Montgomery Presents.

“She earned the opportunity to do so by playing a very commerDaniels, best known for TV stints on St. Elsewhere, Boy Meets cial [character] like Samantha.

In her mind, she may have wanted World, and Knight Rider (lending his voice for the KITT supercar), had to give something more of the talent that she was holding back. My also appeared with Elizabeth in A Case of Rape. Bartlett worked with husband worked with a lot of interesting actresses and Elizabeth both Elizabeth and Daniels in The Legend of Lizzie Borden, directed was definitely one of his favorites.

She was a magnetic personality

by Paul Wendkos, who later guided Elizabeth through the 1979 TV to look at.” movie, Act of Violence.

Of the Lizzie Borden part in particular, Bolen said, Elizabeth “captured that character in a way that I don’t think anyone else could have. She became that person she was playing. How many actresses on TV ever did that? Not many. She gave herself to that murderous spirit, and she did not stop until the end.

“Paul didn’t just stage a scene and then instruct an actor to walk through it. He let the actor find their moment before he staged the scene and Elizabeth played into that very well.”

Bonnie Bartlett described Elizabeth as “an extraordinary actress. She was a major TV star and she could have done almost anything. She was very serious about her work and extraordinarily professional. Every little detail was important to her.

(LEFT) Johnny Cool (1963), directed by future Bewitched director William “She was also a very cheerful person. She Asher, who she would fall in love with and marry. (RIGHT) Asher directs came to work with a good attitude, a really good Elizabeth in an early black-and-white Bewitched episode. Both, CTVPS. attitude. She really enjoyed being an actress.

RETROFAN

March 2024

11

retro television

(LEFT) Elizabeth as Samantha and Agnes Moorehead as her meddling mother Endora bedazzled viewers on Bewitched. (CENTER) Elizabeth clowns with Dick York, the first Darrin on Bewitched. (RIGHT).

Elizabeth with second Darrin, Dick Sargent, plus Erin Murphy (who played Tabitha) and David Mandell (who played Adam).

CTVPS.

Elizabeth relished starring in The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975). CTVPS. The Legend of Lizzie Borden © Paramount Television.

12

RETROFAN

March 2024

To have viewers accept her in such an un-Samantha role and subsequently respect the theatrical diversity that she would bring to such a part as an accomplished actress was “probably one of her greatest victories in life,” Foxworth said.

Robert Montgomery, however, thought the Borden storyline cut a little too close to home.

Borden despised her father and stepmother and brutally murdered them while, by the time that movie aired, Elizabeth had still not fully forgiven Robert Montgomery for divorcing her mother, Elizabeth Allen, and marrying her stepmother Elizabeth Harkness.

Upon learning Elizabeth Montgomery accepted and then relished her portrayal of the historic true-story role, Robert Montgomery blasted his daughter with a sardonic response.

“Oh, you WOULD!” he said.

Indeed, she would—and did.

Photo: Dan Holm.

“And I do know that Paul adored her, and loved working with her. He had that same kind of enthusiastic spirit that she had. The [Lizzie Borden] movie was one his favorite things that he had ever done.”

In another exclusive interview from 2011, acclaimed actor Ronny Cox, who costarred with Elizabeth in A Case of Rape, once said, “Elizabeth didn’t want to walk around for the rest of her life being Samantha.”

That definitely would have changed had Elizabeth not passed away so young. She had found a new regular TV role playing reallife crime-story reporter Edna Buchanan in a series of TV movies for CBS: Deadline for Murder (which aired posthumously in 1995) and The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1994).

The Buchanon films were so popular, CBS was planning more, potentially transforming them into a weekly series. Those plans never came into fruition due to Elizabeth’s untimely demise.

But as Robert Foxworth, her fourth and final husband, once said, “Elizabeth never wanted to get old.”

So, she didn’t.

However, Foxworth also once noted, specifically on A&E’s Biography of Elizabeth, that she was “thrilled” that she was able to surprise her fans and detractors with Emmy-nominated dramatic performances like that of Lizzie Borden.

Writer/producer HERBIE J PILATO is the author of the original Bewitched Book, which was published by Dell in 1992, revised

by Summit Publishing in 1996 as Bewitched Forever, and revised yet again in 2004 by Tapestry Press. In 2012, Taylor Trade released Twitch Upon A Star, Pilato’s biography of Montgomery, and one year later, The Essential Elizabeth Montgomery, his encyclopedia of her life and career. Pilato is also the author of several other media tie-in books, and produces television shows, including Then Again with Herbie J Pilato, his classic TV talk show that began streaming on Amazon Prime in 2019.

When Pilato met Elizabeth Montgomery in 1989, William Asher had been developing a new Bewitched spin-off series titled Bewitched Again. A few months before that meeting, Pilato had written a script for an intended TV reunion movie about the original Bewitched series. Elizabeth chose not to reprise her role as Samantha Stephens in that potential film, but she did agree to do so in just the pilot episode for Asher’s proposed new series.

In Bewitched Again, Elizabeth would have introduced a new witch who fell in love with a new mortal husband. But as opposed to Darrin on the original series, the male spouse on the new show would have welcomed and encouraged his wife to do magic.

Unfortunately, Bewitched Again, which was to be produced in the United Kingdom, lost its financing, and never materialized.

Y D O O D Y D TIME! W HO

VOGER’S VAULT OF VINTAGE VARIETIES

IT’S

re e w l l e arab oneers l C d n ob a e-show pi B o l a f

BY MARK VOGER Buf kiddi

When television was just a baby, it was often called a “visual medium.” (Back then, this was a novelty. Nowadays, everything is visual.) But the same could be said about radio, in the sense that we visualize what we hear with our “mind’s eye.”

In the late Forties, as young listeners heard a bumpkin character they called Howdy Doody on a children’s radio show titled The Triple B Ranch, they each formed a mental picture of what this Howdy looked like. So when certain lucky children were privileged to witness Triple B Ranch broadcasts in person at the studio, they were in for a letdown.

Where was Howdy?

“This was radio, so we didn’t have a dummy or a puppet or anything,” said the show’s host, Robert Emil Schmidt (1917–1998), better known as Buffalo Bob Smith. “So the kids would see the show and they’d say, ‘Gee, we’re disappointed. We wanted to see Howdy Doody!’”

One day soon, they would. Buffalo Bob and Howdy made the transition from radio to television with The Howdy Doody Show (1947–1960), a Western-themed kiddie program that may seem quaint and old-fashioned to modern audiences, but was immensely popular, and pioneering, in its day. Among the many precedents set by The Howdy Doody Show, it was television’s firstever network children’s program.

Smith, Howdy’s straight man and human buddy, earned a place in the hearts of millions of children of the Fifties as host of the show, which aired live on NBC. Howdy was visually realized as a gap-toothed, freckle-faced puppet whose name supplied the answer to the question Smith would ask his “Peanut Gallery” of young fans at the start of more than 2,000 episodes: “Hey, kids, what time is it?”

Populating the fictional town of Doodyville were characters both human and puppet: Clarabell the Clown, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, Chief Thunderthud, Trapper John, Flub-a-Dub, Zippy the Chimp, and many others.

RADIO DAYS

Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody entertained a generation of children. © NBC Television.

Like so many pioneers of early television, Smith launched his career in the medium of radio.

“I came to New York, to NBC, in 1946 to do an early morning radio show,” Smith told me in 1993. (I spoke with the entertainer on two occasions that year, once in person and once by telephone.)

“I was on every morning, Monday through Saturday, from 6 to 9.

In March of ’47, the boss said he wanted to clear the entire Saturday morning radio time—9 AM to 12 noon — for kids. This was radio, now. Frank Weaver did a half-hour. Weaver made a lot of great albums for kids. Ed Herlihy did a show for Horn and Hardart. Paul RETROFAN

March 2024

13

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

Winchell did a half-hour. And I did a half-hour. My half-hour was called The Triple B Ranch, and it was on from 10 to 10:30. The three Bs stood for Big Brother Bob.” Smith described the format of the show as a kind of comedy quiz show.

“I would have four kids from one school vying against four kids from another school,” he said. “The school kids would be there to root for their team. The whole show had a Western flavor. The kids got up on wooden horses. One horse would carry four kids from one school, and another horse would carry four kids from another school. If they had the correct answers, they stayed on the horse.

If not, they were knocked off like in the rodeo—bucking bronco.”

This is where the character Howdy Doody came in, though at first he had a different name.

Recalled Smith: “One day my writer said, ‘Gee, we need some more comedy on the show. Do you do any voices?’ So he went into the control room and I did several voices. He liked this Mortimer Snerd-ish, country bumpkin-type character I did. We called him Elmer. So we’d do a little comedy at the beginning of the show. I’d say, ‘Oh, here’s Elmer!

Hi, Elmer!’ And Elmer would say [in a cartoony voice], ‘Heh, heh, heh... well, howdy DOO-dy!’”

Basically, Elmer was a voice characterization done by Smith. “I just talked as myself,” he explained. “I was not a ventriloquist. Never was. It just developed. We’d do some corny hot dog jokes, and when it was all wound up I’d say, ‘Well, so long, Elmer,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, howdy doody!’”

In interacting with young listeners, Smith became aware that children not only wanted to see Elmer, but they didn’t call him Elmer. Rather, they called him by his inadvertent catch phrase: Howdy Doody.

“This gave us two ideas,” Smith said. “We won’t call him Elmer anymore; we’ll call him Howdy Doody. It’s a cuter name. And if the kids want to see him, let’s talk with the television people. We were getting good ratings on that morning show.”

SMALL SCREEN DEBUT

It turned out that the folks in NBC’s burgeoning TV division were already thinking along those lines. Smith happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The gang’s all here in artwork from Dell’s comic book Howdy Doody #2 (1950).

14

RETROFAN

March 2024

“In December [of 1947], we did talk with the television people, and they said they already had it in mind to do a kids’ television show,” Smith recalled. “They had some puppets in mind, but they said they would watch our radio show anyway. Well, when they saw the enthusiasm of these kids watching our radio show, they said, ‘Gee, this fits in with our plans just great. We have a puppeteer already hired. He’s got a lot of puppets. We’ll make another puppet. We’ll call him Howdy Doody. And you, Bob Smith, can host the show.’

“Now, this was on Tuesday, December 23, 1947. And I said, ‘Okay. When do you want to start?’ And they said, ‘Saturday.’

They said, ‘We’ve got some old silent films. We’ll call them “old-time movies.” You can do the narration on those.

We’ll have some kids. We’ll have some games and fun with the kids. And you host the whole thing.’ So that following Saturday—December 27, 1947—was our first Howdy Doody Show. It was called Puppet Playhouse in the beginning.”

But Howdy Doody, the marionette, was not on the show during those initial broadcasts.

“We got a puppeteer to start working on a puppet, and in the interim, we pretended Howdy was in my desk drawer,” Smith said with a chuckle. “The camera would take a picture

(LEFT) Cantankerous puppet Phineas T. Bluster earned his surname on The Howdy Doody Show.

(BELOW) A test pattern-style title card for the show. © NBC Television.

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

of my desk drawer. I’d say, ‘You in there, Howdy?’ and he’d say, ‘Heh, heh... yeah, but I’m too bashful to come out!’ Well, he was too bashful for three weeks.”

The Howdy Doody Show began as a Saturday morning program, but moved to weekdays in August 1948. For personal appearances, Smith had a duplicate of the Howdy puppet made that he would travel with, which he named Photo Doody.

“The Howdy that made all the appearances on the show was a stringed marionette,” he explained. “To bring him out [for personal appearances] would require a puppeteer, a puppet stage, a puppet bridge. It would be very difficult. So I just had another one made that we call Photo Doody, strictly for taking pictures.”

The inventive show straddled the past and the future. Its Western theme harkened to classic Americana, but cast and crew also pushed the limits of TV technology (however clunky at the time), using techniques like chroma key superimposition to thrill the kiddies.

CLOWNING AROUND

Among actors who played Clarabell the Clown were Bob Keeshan (who later toplined his own kiddie-show institution, Captain Kangaroo; see RetroFan #27); Bobby Nicholson (a trombonist who quit being Clarabell, if not the TV show itself); and Lew Anderson (a saxophonist who fronted his own eponymously named band).

“Lew’s been Clarabell since ’54,” Smith pointed out. “He’s done many more shows than all the rest put together times 10. Lew has a wonderful band in New York City, a 17-piece called Lew Anderson’s All-American Band. He’s got the greatest musicians in the world, I guess, or in New York, at least. They all play for Lew. He’s written over 200 arrangements. He does a lot of big, classy dates. He has some place where he plays every Friday night.”

Smith was asked if all of that respect in the music community made Anderson less amenable to wear Clarabell’s nose.

(LEFT) Ah, the good old days. Howdy and Bob smile on the cover of TV Guide (1954). © TV Guide. (RIGHT) Howdy is the cover boy for this 1952 issue of Chicago-based TV Forecast.

(RIGHT) Lew Anderson clowned around by day and played sax in watering holes by night. (BELOW) Judy Tyler was the longestrunning actress in the role of Princess Summerfall Winterspring. © NBC Television.

“Heck, no!” Smith came back. “We still do mall dates.

Oh, no, no, no. He loves being Clarabell. He’s a Jekyll and Hyde. Without the suit, he’s Lew Anderson. With the suit…

I’ll tell you one thing. He’s Clarabell.”

On this point: It was a bit of a time warp when, in 2003, I spoke with Anderson, who was in make-up and costume as Clarabell.

(This was during a personal appearance; I sometimes wondered if I was interviewing Anderson or Clarabell.) I soon learned that one of the most famous clowns on television had no aspirations to wear rubber noses or floppy shoes. It just happened.

Anderson recalled that he was “just a singer” when a career switch came out of the blue.

He explained: “When Bob Keeshan left the show, then Bobby Nicholson was the second one. And then Nicholson wanted to stop; he wanted to do something else on the show.

“Besides The Howdy Doody Show, Bob Smith had another radio show and television show, like a variety show with a vocal group and a band and all that stuff. I was in the vocal group.

The same production people were doing both shows—the director, producer and so on. They asked me if I wanted to do it.

I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.’ Because I was too old to watch it. They said, ‘Come on, we’ll put on the make-up over at the studio and see if the stagehands can tell the difference.’ So they did.

“Then they said, ‘Can you do any magic tricks?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Can you do any juggling?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can you do any dancing?’

‘No.’ ‘What can you do?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And they said, ‘Perfect.

You’ll start in two days.’ ” I asked the actor-musician what it was like to work in the medium of television when it was still in its infancy.

“Well, you’re right, it was in its infancy,” Anderson said. “At NBC, Howdy Doody was the first thing on. There was a test pattern all day until 5:30 at night when the Howdy show started. Of course, people took to it because it was such a new idea of viewing, especially for the kids. It was like having a babysitter. The kids would all gather at somebody’s house, and parents knew where their kids were.”

RETROFAN

March 2024

15

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

According to Anderson, he was able to shine as the mute clown—Clarabell honked a horn, à la Harpo Marx—by following Smith’s lead.

“He and I got along very well,” Anderson said, “because he had a predominantly musical background, and I did too. That’s all I’d been doing before. So we took to each other. It was easy for us to do appearances and so forth. He had a way of charming people.

He was good at remembering people’s names the first time he met ’em. If he saw ’em two years later, he remembered their names!

People appreciated that.

“He was interested in the scripts and the songs. We did a lot of music on the show. He wasn’t a boor about it or hard-nosed or anything. Nobody ever got mad on the show or yelled or screamed or any of that stuff, because we’d say, ‘Come on, now. Stop that.’ The whole show was very easy to work, from the production people to the cast.”

The shows were broadcast live, so yes, bloopers happened.

“There were things that went wrong,” Anderson said. “We were live as the devil all the time, so some things were bound to happen.

They usually did. Or we got laughing so hard that we couldn’t go on.

But we always managed to pull it off.

“Our rehearsals were something else. All the people at NBC used to come down just to watch our rehearsals, because they were usually a little off the wall. Bob and Ray”— the comedy team of Bob

Elliott and Ray Goulding—“and whoever else was working there with the network would watch the Howdy show rehearse.”

The immense popularity of The Howdy Doody Show became apparent to Anderson when he “stumped”—that is, traveled for personal appearances—on behalf of the network.

“I never realized the power of our show or the importance of the show to certain people until I started going out for NBC,” he said.

“They were opening a lot of new stations at that stage in television, you know, along the network line. So once in a while, I went out to see people in different cities that were opening stations.

“That’s when I found out. We were just mobbed! They came to see Howdy and Clarabell more than the other big stars. So that’s when we first found out the impact the show had on kids.”

DOODY SWAG

The mass marketing of children’s entertainment goes back to Jackie Coogan paper dolls in the Twenties. But the trend really came to the fore during the Fabulous Fifties. A concurrent craze was built around the Disney series Davy Crockett starring Fess Parker. (Coonskin cap, anyone?) It’s no coincidence that Davy and Howdy were both Western-themed; the old-timey genre still ruled children’s entertainment, before the anything-goes Sixties came along and everything went kablooey.

If a buck could be made, Howdy was there. His speckled face appeared on Welch’s Grape Juice, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, Royal

(LEFT) Howdy, Clarabell, and Flub-a-Dub grace the box of Milton Bradley’s Howdy Doody’s T.V. Game (1950). (RIGHT) Howdy grins at players on the spinner from game. © Milton Bradley.

(ABOVE) There were at least ten Howdy Doody Little Golden Books throughout the Fifties. Other formats included (CENTER) a Big Golden Book and (RIGHT) at least two Tell-A-Tale Books.

16

RETROFAN

March 2024

(ABOVE) The mouth was moveable on this plastic Howdy Doody puppet from Tee-Vee Toys (1950s). (RIGHT) Peter Puppet’s Howdy Doody marionette (1950s) was close in form to the real Howdy.

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

A REAL PRINCESS At 96 episodes, Judy Tyler (1932–1957) was the longest-running actress in the role of Princess Summerfall Winterspring on The Howdy Doody Show. Milwaukee native Tyler left the show to pursue a film career, and judging from some early achievements, she was well on her way. In 1957, Tyler landed two starring movie roles. She played the titular heroine in Howard W. Koch’s Bop Girl Goes Calypso—now, that’s a promising title—and was Elvis Presley’s leading lady (if not exactly a love interest) in Jailhouse Rock. But Tyler never lived to see the latter film’s release.

Filming for Jailhouse Rock ended on June 14, 1957. On July 3, Tyler and her husband Gregory Lafayette were driving along Highway 30 in Wyoming when Lafayette swerved to avoid one car and collided with another. Tyler was killed instantly; Lafayette died the following day. A passenger in the other vehicle also perished.

On the Elvis History Blog, Presley’s friend, disc jockey George Klein, is quoted: “He took it pretty tough.” Presley told a reporter for The Commercial Appeal of Memphis: “Nothing has hurt me as bad in my life. … I don’t believe I can stand to see the movie we made together now, just don’t believe I can.”

(ABOVE) Kagran Corporation’s Howdy Doody Puppet Show (1952). (ABOVE RIGHT) Hey, kids, eat lots of ice cream! Relax, Nutrition Police. Howdy also sold carrots. (CENTER) Howdy picnics with Princess Summerfall Winterspring on Adco’s lunch box (1955).

(RIGHT) In Fifties television, it was not unusual to see a given show’s host do double duty as a pitchman. Here, Smith hawks Nabisco’s Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys. © NBC Television.

(LEFT) Elvis Presley snuggles with Judy Tyler in Jailhouse Rock (1957). © Paramount Pictures. (RIGHT) Tyler played the title bopper in Bop Girl, also known as Bop Girl Goes Calypso (1957). © United Artists.

Chocolate Pudding, Blue Bonnet Margarine, Hostess Cupcakes, Little Chief Apples, Burry’s Cookies, King Cone Corp.’s TV Popcorn, and, fittingly, Wonder Bread. From Doughnut Corp. of America alone there was Howdy Doody ice cream, twin pops, fudge bars, and something called Clarabell Banana Bars.

Howdy’s face was plastered on things you’d never expect, such as adhesive bandage strips, Kunkel’s shoe polish, California carrots, and Kagran’s slipper socks.

Many of these tie-in products were noted in a mailing to potential commercial partners bearing the slogan “Meet Howdy Doody, the super-popular salesman on strings.” A chilling sentence from that mailing: “It is even conceivable that your TV-tutored 2-year-old clearly enunciated ‘Howdy Doody’ before learning to say ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy.’” Yikes!

But the forms in which Howdy and his fellow Doodyville denizens were most at home were toys, dolls, puppets, and games like Milton Bradley’s Howdy Doody’s T.V. Game and puppet sets from Tee-Vee Toys, Kagran, and Peter Puppet Playthings. There were Howdy Doody crayons, puzzles, coloring books, Shura-Tone “phonographs” (a.k.a. record players), Kohner Bros. cast figures, Model Headware Co.’s “novelty” hats, Rushton’s plush toys, cardboard masks, Howdy Doody’s Electric Doodler, and records such as Howdy Doody and the Air-O-Doodle and Howdy Doody’s Christmas Party.

Howdy did exceptionally well in print.

Dell Comics put out 38 issues of the Howdy Doody comic book (1950–1956), while Western Publishing put out at least ten Little Golden Books. There was also a Sunday comic strip from United Feature Syndicate (1950–1953).

When this kind of money is involved, legal challenges will happen. There was a skirmish RETROFAN

March 2024

17

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

Howdy’s record albums: (LEFT) Howdy Doody and the Air-ODoodle (1949) and (CENTER) Howdy Doody’s Christmas Party (1951).. (RIGHT) The Story of Howdy Doody was, by 1974, an exercise in nostalgia. Howdy Doody © NBC Television.

between the network and puppet maker Frank Paris over the rights to Howdy. Following Smith’s 1998 death, there was a battle over the rightful ownership of Smith’s original Howdy puppet. What are ya gonna do?

WORKING FROM HOME

The grind of daily television took its toll on Smith. On Labor Day 1954, he suffered a myocardial infarction. “It was called a heart attack back then,” he quipped.

Smith was hospitalized for six weeks, during which at least two actors briefly filled in for him: Ted Brown (calling himself Bison Bill) and George “Gabby” Hayes (Roy Rogers’ old sidekick).

Following Smith’s release, his doctors advised against resuming his full schedule. When sponsors pushed NBC for Smith’s return, he was faced with a dilemma. The network came up with a solution: If Buffalo Bob couldn’t come to the studio, the studio would come to Buffalo Bob. “They got together and built a studio in my home [in New Rochelle, New York],” Smith said. “They called it Pioneer Village.

And although the show was still done from New York City—the RCA Building—they’d pipe me in and say, ‘Let’s see what Buffalo Bob’s doing in Pioneer Village!’ We told the kids I was on a secret mission, you see.

“I would report on what was going on. One day, Clarabell might come out and be on the show with me in New Rochelle to do a bit.

Another day, Chief Thunderthud, Zippy the Chimp. I guess one of the characters was on, oh, once a week or a couple of times a week. I did the show from Pioneer Village from January 17 until the following Labor Day, 1955, when I came back to New York City every day.”

Smith’s first day back on the job was a landmark: the first Howdy Doody Show to be broadcast in color. According to Smith, it was also the first television show of any format to be broadcast daily in color.

“At the time, the color television set was becoming an entity,” Smith recalled. “Gen.

Dell Publishing put out 38 issues of the comic book Howdy Doody from 1950 through 1956.

18

RETROFAN

March 2024

Sarnoff [then-NBC chairman David Sarnoff] thought, ‘Gee, who better to have the kids sell the parents on getting a color television set than Howdy?’ Gen. Sarnoff always said that Milton Berle and The Howdy Doody Show sold more television sets than any two shows ever on television.”

TEARJERKER

The final episode of The Howdy Doody Show on September 24, 1960, was a bittersweet affair. It opened with Smith going through souvenirs from the show while packing up to make way for his replacement, The Shari Lewis Show. (From the distance of decades, the newer show—an upbeat human interacting with puppets—doesn’t seem like a radical departure from Howdy.)

When Smith addressed the children watching, he didn’t sugarcoat the situation. “Well, kids,” he said with a sad smile, “this is our 2,343rd Howdy Doody Show. And kids, it’s also our last Howdy Doody Show. And you know, after almost 13 years, The Howdy Doody Show will end today.” Smith spent the rest of the hour bidding farewell to humans (Clarabell, Corny Cobb) and puppets (Windy the dog, Mambo the elephant, Hyde and Zeke the bears, Tommy Turtle). Smith often appeared to be on the verge of tears.

A “big surprise” was hinted at throughout the episode, which was unveiled in its final moments: Clarabell can talk! Smith urged his co-star to speak; the camera dollied in as Clarabell’s eyes fluttered; and in a cracking voice, he choked out “Goodbye, kids.”

Then one of the saddest songs on the planet, “Auld Lang Syne,” played on a celesta as the credits rolled. The final Howdy Doody Show is the very definition of a tearjerker.

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

According to Anderson, it was corporate accounting, not a drop in popularity, that killed the show.

“Oh, we knew why it happened,” he said.

“The networks and the sponsors were going for a different audience. They were going for syndicated audiences so they could use the same material, the same kind of shows that appeal to kids.

Of course, they rammed it down their throats. That was the reason why. Actually, CBS with Captain Kangaroo was the last network kids’ show. They knew that financially, it wasn’t going to work forever.

That’s what happened with most of the kids’ shows, especially ours.”

What did fans tell Anderson when they met him at personal appearances?

“They say how important we were to their ‘growing up’ years,” he said. “I just got a letter today from a couple in Virginia saying that they first got a television set because they got so used to Howdy Doody, they sacrificed everything they had to get it. They say what an impact the show had on their lives growing up, and they wish they could have a show like that today. That’s what almost all of them say. That’s very gratifying, of course. We’re glad that something was got out of that thing.”

Smith played himself on a 1975 episode of Happy Days in which Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) enters a Howdy Doody lookalike contest—not a stretch. A TV revival, The New Howdy Doody Show (1976–1978), teamed Smith and Anderson with Marilyn Arnone (wearing Seventies hot pants and bangs) and pianist Jackie Davis (who once recorded with Ella Fitzgerald). The show was silly and anachronistic, but you already guessed that.

BARNEY WHO?

I asked Smith his opinion of the current crop of children’s programs at the time of our discussions in 1993. For instance, what did Smith make of the giggly purple dinosaur Barney?

“I’ve never seen Barney,” he deadpanned. “I don’t even know what Barney is.”

How about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? They were a lo-o-ong way from Doodyville.

“Well, I don’t think they’re going to have revivals for them in 40 years, like they do for Howdy.”

At the time, the TV icon was keeping busy at 76. Smith stepped before the TV cameras once again, appearing live on the QVC Network—then a prominent cable TV shopping channel—to promote autographed offset black-and-white prints of himself and Howdy in a sensitive penciled likeness by artist Glen Fortune Banse, who became Smith’s agent for personal appearances.

“We sold 600 prints in 15 minutes,” Banse (who died in 2018) then told me of the QVC segment. “We got to be good friends. I knew the autograph circuit. The man never realized what his signature was worth.”

At autograph shows and fan conventions, white-haired Smith still resembled his old self while wearing his trademark Western costumes trimmed with fringe, and cradling Photo Doody as he greeted the grown up Baby Boomers he once entertained.

“Some of the gals have tears in their eyes. Some of the fellas want to give me a big hug,” Smith said of meeting his lifelong fans.

“It’s just—what can I say?—a great reunion. I don’t think any of us realized what an integral part of the kids’ lives The Howdy Doody Show played. We really enjoy meeting our alumni. They have the greatest stories.

(TOP) Looks like Buffalo Bob Smith has found the perfect Howdy in a 1975 episode of Happy Days. © ABC Television.

(ABOVE) Smith belts one out with Marilyn Arnone on The New Howdy Doody Show (1976–1978). © Memorylane Syndication.

“One gal came up with her mother and said, ‘Go on, Mom. Tell him!’ So Mother told it that there were four kids in the family. And whenever it was Howdy Doody time, if you ever walked into the living room, you’d know if one of the kids misbehaved. Because he’d be the one with his back to the television set! In other words, if one of the kids did something wrong, Mother didn’t have the heart to take Howdy away from him altogether.”

MARK VOGER is the author and designer of six books for TwoMorrows Publishing, including Britmania, Monster Mash (a Rondo Award winner), Groovy, and Holly Jolly. Voger worked in the newspaper field for 40 years as a graphic artist and entertainment reporter, and lives at the Jersey Shore. Do yourself a favor and don’t ask him to discuss the sociopolitical implications of the Japanese monster movie Frankenstein Conquers the World (1966). Please visit him at MarkVoger.com.

RETROFAN

March 2024

19

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 hairstyle shown in Column One corresponds to a television character or host listed in Column Two. Match ’em up, then see how you rate!

Too Much TV 4

COLUMN ONE

3

8 7

6

20

RETROFAN

March 2024

RetroFan Ratings

You’ll flip over these TV ’dos!

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) Don Cornelius, host of Soul Train

1

B) Joe Mannix, Mannix C) Helen Roper, Three’s Company

5

D) Linc Hayes, The Mod Squad E) Steve McGarrett, Hawaii Five-0 F) Ginger Grant, Gilligan’s Island G) Mork (from Ork), Mork & Mindy

9

H) Vinnie Barbarino, Welcome Back, Kotter

2 10

I) Mary Richards, The Mary Tyler Moore Show J) Ann Marie, That Girl The Brady Bunch, Mannix, Mork & Mindy, The Mod Squad, Soul Train, That Girl © Paramount Global. Gilligan’s Island, Welcome Back Kotter © Warner Bros. Television. Hawaii Five-0 © CBS Television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show © MTM. Three’s Company © DLT Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.

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

RETROFAN

March 2024

21

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

BACK ISSUE #153

ALTER EGO #190

ALTER EGO #191

BACK ISSUE #151

BACK ISSUE #152

MITCH MAGLIO examines vintage jungle comics heroes (Kaänga, Ka-Zar, Sheena, Rulah, Jo-Jo/Congo King, Thun’da, Tarzan) with art by LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, FRANK FRAZETTA, MATT BAKER, BOB POWELL, ALEX SCHOMBURG, and others! Plus: the comicbook career of reallife jungle explorers MARTIN AND OSA JOHNSON, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

#191 is an FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA) issue! Documenting the influence of MAC RABOY’s Captain Marvel Jr. on the life, career, and look of ELVIS PRESLEY during his stellar career, from the 1950s through the 1970s! Plus: Captain Marvel co-creator BILL PARKER’s complete testimony from the DC vs. Fawcett lawsuit, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and other surprises!

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES! A who’s who of artists of NEIL GAIMAN’s The Sandman plus a GAIMAN interview, Sandman Mystery Theatre’s MATT WAGNER and STEVEN T. SEAGLE, Dr. Strange’s nemesis Nightmare, Marvel’s Sleepwalker, Casper’s horse Nightmare, with SHELLY BOND, BOB BUDIANSKY, STEVE ENGLEHART, ALISA KWITNEY, and others! KELLEY JONES cover.

MARVELMANIA ISSUE! SAL BUSCEMA’s Avengers, FABIAN NICIEZA’s Captain America, and KURT BUSIEK and ALEX ROSS’s Marvels turns 30! Plus: Marvelmania International, Marvel Age, Marvel Classics, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Marvel Novels, and Marvel Value Stamps.

Featuring JACK KIRBY, KEVIN MAGUIRE, ROY THOMAS, and more! SAL BUSCEMA cover.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Dec. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships May 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships June 2024

BACK ISSUE #154

BACK ISSUE #155

BACK ISSUE #156

KIRBY COLLECTOR #91

BIG BABY ISSUE! X-Babies, the last days of Sugar and Spike, FF’s Franklin Richards, Superbaby vs. Luthor, Dennis the Menace Bonus Magazine, Baby Snoots, Marvel and Harvey kid humor comics, & more! With ARTHUR ADAMS, CARY BATES, JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, SCOTT LOBDELL, SHELDON MAYER, CURT SWAN, ROY THOMAS, and other grownup creators. Cover by ARTHUR ADAMS.

BRONZE AGE NOT-READY-FORPRIMETIME DC HEROES! Black Canary, Elongated Man, Lilith, Metamorpho, Nubia, Odd Man, Ultraa of Earth-Prime, Vartox, and Jimmy Olsen as Mr. Action! Plus: Jason’s Quest! Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE DITKO, BOB HANEY, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE SEKOWSKY, MARK WAID, and more ready-for-primetime talent. Retro cover by NICK CARDY.

THIS ISSUE IS HAUNTED! House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Unexpected, Marvel’s failed horror anthologies, Haunted Tank, Eerie Publications, House II adaptation, Elvira’s House of Mystery, and more wth NEAL ADAMS, MIKE W. BARR, DICK GIORDANO, SAM GLANZMAN, ROBERT KANIGHER, JOE ORLANDO, STERANKO, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and others. Unused cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ & WRIGHTSON.

BRONZE AGE GRAPHIC NOVELS! 1980s GNs from Marvel, DC, and First Comics, Conan GNs, and DC’s Sci-Fi GN series!

With BRENT ANDERSON, JOHN BYRNE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, JACK KIRBY, DON MCGREGOR, BOB McLEOD, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. WRIGHTSON cover.

30th Anniversary issue, with KIRBY’S GREATEST VICTORIES! Jack gets the girl (wife ROZ), early hits Captain America and Boy Commandos, surviving WWII, romance comics, Captain Victory and the direct market, his original art battle with Marvel, and finally winning credit! Plus MARK EVANIER, a colossal gallery of Kirby’s winningest pencil art, a never-reprinted SIMON & KIRBY story, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships July 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Aug. 2023

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Dec. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Fall 2024

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #34 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #35 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #36

RETROFAN #34

RETROFAN #35

DAN JURGENS talks about Superman, Sun Devils, creating Booster Gold, developing the “Doomsday scenario” with the demise of the Man of Steel, and more! Traverse DON GLUT’s “Glutverse” continuity across Gold Key, Marvel, and DC! Plus RICK ALTERGOTT, we conclude our profiles of MIKE DEODATO, JR. and FRANK BORTH, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of DC/Marvel hardcover super-hero collections), & more!

An in-depth look at the life and career of writer/editor DENNY O’NEIL, and part one of a career-spanning interview with ARNOLD DRAKE, co-creator of The Doom Patrol and Deadman! Plus the story behind Studio Zero, the ’70s collective of JIM STARLIN, FRANK BRUNNER, ALAN WEISS, and others! Warren horror mag writer/ historian JACK BUTTERWORTH, alternative cartoonist TIM HENSLEY, & more!

TOM PALMER retrospective, career-spanning interview, and tributes compiled by GREG BIGA. LEE MARRS chats about assisting on Little Orphan Annie, work for DC’s Plop! and underground Pudge, Girl Blimp!

The start of a multi-part look at the life and career of DAN DIDIO, part two of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview, public service comics produced by students at the CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES, & more!

Take a ride with CHiPs’ ERIK ESTRADA and LARRY WILCOX! Plus: an interview with movie Hercules STEVE REEVES, WeirdOhs cartoonist BILL CAMPBELL, Plastic Man on Saturday mornings, TINY TIM, Remo Williams, the search for a Disney artist, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Saturday morning super-hero Space Ghost, plus The Beatles, The Jackson 5ive, and other real rockers in animation! Also: The Addams Family’s JOHN ASTIN, Mighty Isis co-stars JOANNA PANG and BRIAN CUTLER, TV’s The Name of the Game, on the set of Evil Dead II, classic coffee ads, and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER & MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Spring 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Summer 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Fall 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Aug. 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2024

THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!

Witch Doctors, Chipmunks, an d Crashcups

BY SCOTT SHAW! By the time I was ten years old, I not only owned a healthy “funnybook” collection, I’d convinced myself that I definitely was going to become a professional cartoonist. I also considered myself to be the Roger Ebert of animated cartoons, with annoyingly specific opinions of the “best” and “worst.” I kept track of the storylines on Rocky and His Friends. I drove everyone I knew crazy by obsessively imitating the “Nyah-hah-hah!” laugh of Beany and Cecil’s “Dishonest John.” I even determined the specific color scheme of The Flintstones (which I’d only watched in B&W!).

Due to my father being a Pearl Harbor survivor, I had a rough approximation of the history of animation, thanks to all of the WWII cartoons that were being shown on TV. My first favorite cartoons were classic theatrical Max Fleischer’s Popeye (possibly because my dad was by then a Navy officer) and MGM’s Tom and Jerry. (Every time I watch one of the classic T&J shorts of the Forties and Fifties, I get emotional because I worked for their creators, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, my boyhood heroes.)

But by 1957, I had already memorized almost all of the theatrical shorts on the air, almost all of which were created in the Twenties through the Forties. I was starving for some new cartoons that represented the present, therefore Bill and Joe’s The Ruff and Reddy Show immediately became one of my first TV favorite cartoons, as did Gene Deitch’s Tom Terrific on Captain Kangaroo and Jay Ward’s Rocky and His Friends. The live-action how-cartoons-are-made

A commissioned illustration of Alvin the Chipmunk by— whaddaya know—Scott Shaw! © Ross Bagdasarian. Alvin Show logo courtesy of Fandom.com.

segments with Walter Lantz on The Woody Woodpecker Show were even better than the “other” Walt’s similar presentations on Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Then came H-B’s Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, The Quick Draw McGraw Show, and Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil, and... well, y’know.

As a kid, they were my animated textbooks. I loved them all and still do. But after finally becoming an equally irritating cartoonist with extremely hard-to-please standards, there’s one other made-for-television cartoon series that made a mark on me.

Unlike most of the cartoons I grew up watching, its characters are still quite familiar with children and generations of adults. In many ways, its characters and their designs, clever voiceovers, scripts, and animation, as well as a somewhat “insider” vibe due to the built-in celebrity of the show’s three stars, made it the hippest and most experimental cartoon series of its time.

It was The Alvin Show, which aired on CBS in the early evening from October 4, 1961 to March 28, 1962. I was ten years old. And I’d already realized that this show was special.

COME ON-A ROSS BAGDASARIAN’S HOUSE

Ross Bagdasarian (January 27, 1919–January 16, 1972), full name Rostom Sipan Bagdasarian, was born into an Armenian-American family in Fresno, California. His family owned a vineyard and his first cousin was the prolific novelist, playwright, and short story writer William Saroyan, who received the Pulitzer Prize for “Drama” in 1940 and an Academy Award for “Best Story,” both for early iterations of his book, The Human Comedy (1943).

After graduating from Fresno High School in 1937, he visited his cousin William in New York City to seek work as an actor. Ross RETROFAN

March 2024

23

The oddball world of scott shaw!

spent “one miserable year in college and boredom really set in. I wanted to be an actor, and the man in charge, they called him ‘Prof,’ said I should start by painting some walls a deep green. I told him that I wanted to be an actor and then I quit.

After I quit college, I decided that if I was going to be an actor, the thing to do was to go to a place where they did some acting.

They didn’t do much acting in Fresno. It was a good place to stay and learn to pick grapes, but I wanted to act so I went to New York. This was in 1939 and I was 20 years old. I went straight to the Theatre Guild and after three days I got to see Theresa Helburn.

She was one of the directors of the guild.”

After appearing in the shows Love’s Old Sweet Song and his cousin’s The Time of Your Life, Ross and William made a trip back to California. “It was during this period that I drove back to Fresno with Bill Saroyan, and while we were in New Mexico I started singing a song that I had been thinking about. It was called ‘Come On-a My House.’

Saroyan liked it and helped me finish it.” After William premiered it in his off-Broadway musical The Son, Ross and his cousin recorded their song together, now peppered with spoken-word segments. The song was rejected by many record companies as being “too ethnic,” but it was eventually released by Coral Records in 1951; unfortunately, it failed to chart with the public and bounced around the music scene with a few different performers and bands for a few years.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Ross enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and became a staff sergeant after four years as a control tower operator. During his service, he spent time in England, France, and Spain (the latter country became an obscure influence on Bagdasarian’s future career). After returning home, Ross married Armenouhi “Armen” Kulhanjian (January 13, 1927–November 11, 1991) in 1946 and made a literally fruitless attempt to grow grapes like his father. The young couple decided to relocate south to Los Angeles in 1950, where Ross cleverly launched his career as a songwriter. Once there, Ross and Armen had three children, Carol Askine Bagdasarian (b.

July 4, 1947), Ross Dicran Bagdasarian, Jr. (b. May 6, 1949), and Adam Serak Bagdasarian (b. March 25, 1954).

Ross sent a copy of “Come On-a My House” to Mitch Miller, a powerful artist-and-repertory executive with Capit0l Records. Miller reacted by immediately contacting pop singer Rosemary Clooney, the aunt of actor George Clooney. She recalled, “Mitch had a demonstration record of it and he heard it one day and wanted to record it the next, and he was absolutely sure that it was going to be a huge success for me. Now, the fact that it was an Armenian folk song, he wanted an accent. I don’t know how to do an Armenian accent, so I used what I laughingly called an Italian accent because that was the band I sang with, an Italian band, Tony Pastor. It is a strange piece of material, but it took off like a house afire. It was the whole summer. That was the one that Mitch Miller called the sales department and said, ‘Ship 300,000 on consignment,’ and if he does that, everybody listens. And they did it.” It 24

RETROFAN

March 2024

(TOP) Detail from a poster for a Rosemary Clooney performance of Ross Bagdasarian’s “Come On-a My House,” which became a hit. Courtesy of Heritage. (ABOVE) Ross and Judith Evelyn listen to an album in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. © 1954 Patron, Inc. (LEFT) David Seville (stage name of Ross Bagdasarian). © Ross Bagdasarian.

launched Rosemary Clooney’s career, reaching No.1 on Billboard charts and was N0. 4 on Billboard’s year-end “Top 30 Singles of 1951.”

The song sold 750,000 records in one month. By summer’s end, William and Ross split more than $30,000.

Part of that money helped the cousins to rent a small office in Beverly Hills devoted to extending their variety of talents in entertainment, including Americanized Armenian. Saroyan said, “What we do with these songs is, we just grab them. If they ain’t in the public domain, why, we sort of ease them into the public domain. ‘Oh, Beauty’ had been ‘Akh, Yavroos’ in the original Armenian, and like the others and despite its merit, failed to replicate the success of ‘Come On-a My House,’ with its recitations of delights, including the most Armenian of produce

The oddball world of scott shaw!

(CLOCKWISE, LEFT TO RIGHT) The Music of David Seville (1957), David at work singing (or possibly yelling) into his reel-toreel tape recorder, and the 1959 UK issue of The Witch Doctor and Friends. © Ross Bagdasarian.

Donkey and the Schoolboy,” “The Gift,” and “Judy.”

In 1957, Liberty Records released an LP album, The Music of David Seville, including many of those tunes and with liner notes by William Saroyan. Other new songs followed, including “Camel Rock,” “Cecilia,” “Pretty Dark Eyes,” “Bagdad Express,” “Starlight, Starbright,” and “Bonjour Tristesse.”

By that time, Ross Bagdasarian was also regularly working as an actor in film and television, including The Greatest Show on Earth and Viva Zapata! (1952); The Stars are Singing, Destination Gobi, The Girls of Pleasure Island, and Stalag 17 (1953); Alaska Seas and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954); The Ray Milland Show, The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, Big Town, and Kismet (1955); Hot Blood, The Proud and Profane, and Three Violent People (1956); Studio 57 and The Devil’s Hairpin (1957); and The Deep Six (1958). These acting roles were bringing more money into the Bagdasarian household than the novelty songs were, but the combined total still wasn’t nearly enough to operate a family of increasing size for long.

‘THE WITCH DOCTOR’

items, pomegranate.” Meanwhile, Ross was writing songs, including “Hey Brother, Pass the Wine” for Dean Martin, “Not Since Nineveh” and “Zubbediya” for Kismet, and “Let’s Have a Merry, Merry Christmas” for Mercury Records, all in 1953. In 1955, Bagdasarian was signed by Liberty Records, originally to record as “Alfi and Henry,” then as himself, then back to “Alfi and Henry.”

“Their” most popular song was “The Trouble with Harry” (not coincidentally with the same title as the film by Alfred Hitchcock released earlier that year), which reached No. 44 on the Billboard chart and was a bigger hit in the United Kingdom, reaching No. 15.

Then, in 1956, Ross decided to become someone else.

MEET DAVID SEVILLE

In an effort to simplify and Americanize his name, Ross Bagdasarian created an alter ego named “David Seville,” based on the name for a son that he and Armen once fantasized about, “David,” and his service for the Army Air Forces in Seville, Spain.

From that point on, “David Seville” would be the name of the man who supposedly wrote, performed, and recorded the songs, characters, and stories that were hatched in Ross Bagdasarian’s fertile and prolific mind. Liberty’s “Armen’s Theme,” an instrumental tune that would eventually become a Muzak elevator standard, was Ross’ first recording to be attached with the name “David Seville.”

Novelty songs became David’s go-to gimmick: “Gotta Get to Your House,” “The Bird on My Head,” “Little Brass Band,” “The

In 1958, while living in Van Nuys, California, the Bagdasarians found themselves to be very close to broke. Out of sheer desperation, Ross spent the last of their $200 savings (adjusting for inflation, around $2,000!) on the latest state-ofthe-art reel-to-reel tape recorder he could afford. The idea was in part from the unusual voices created by reel-to-reel tape recorders for the Munchkins in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Attempting to come up with a silly song that could be audibly unique with the help of the tape recorder, he noticed a book on his desk: Duel with the Witch Doctor.

Without possessing the ability to read or write music nor play a single musical instrument, he quickly whipped up an unforgettable novelty tune unlike any other, “The Witch Doctor”: ♪♪ “I told the Witch Doctor I was in love with you I told the Witch Doctor I was in love with you And then the Witch Doctor, he told me what to do He said that OO EE OO AH AH Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang OO EE OO AH AH Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang!!!” ♪♪ After recording the song, Ross experimented with how to use the tape recorder to distort his voice. Using his wife and kids as an ad hoc focus group, he doubled the speed of his singing voice to achieve the wild, weird, and wacky voice of the Witch Doctor. Then he pitched the song to Liberty Records’ president Si Waronker, who loved it but had to convince his label president Alvin Bennett that kids were already eager for new rock ’n’ roll novelty tunes. He was right. “The Witch Doctor” sold close to two million records and immediately attained the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Top 40 starting on April 1958 and lasting for three weeks. It was the No. 4 song for 1958 RETROFAN

March 2024

25

The oddball world of scott shaw!

The start of something big: The Chipmunk Song 45 (1959) from Liberty Records. “Alvin’s Harmonica” is the B-side. © Ross Bagdasarian. Courtesy of Worthpoint.

reindeer or elephants and he was driving along near the Sequoias and one day a chipmunk actually jumped out on the road and dared he and his 4,000 pound car to drive by and as he picked himself out of the road after laughing hysterically at this little chipmunk, he figured it’s going to be three singing chipmunks.” (That’s a cute run-on story, as were the “official” origins of Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker, but having worked in entertainment for decades, I suggest that we take these corporatized stories with a healthy pinch of salt.)

Here’s how Ross explained it: “In September of 1958, I decided to try for a Christmas novelty song. I thought of a melody on my way to work, and I went right to the studio and whistled it into a tape machine, so that it wouldn’t be forgotten. Since I can’t read or write music, I whistle into tape machines.

and was nominated for the year’s Grammy for Best Children’s Recording. Ross performed “The Witch Doctor” live on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on May 4, 1958, the first of six appearances on the variety program. Due to a few tech glitches, the presentation was somewhat flawed but still a lot of fun.

Finally, Ross Bagdasarian/David Seville was/were established as a songwriter.

Using a similar process to control a voice’s speed, David Seville had a minor hit with Liberty Records’ “The Bird On My Head”; it reached No. 34 in June 1958. Ross appeared on The Dick Clark Beech-Nut Show to perform it and “The Witch Doctor,” with puppets designed and operated by Morey Bunin. David had two more releases from Liberty, “Little Brass Band”/”Take Five” and “The Mountain”/”Mr. Grape,” most of which appeared in David Seville and His Friends’ The Witch Doctor LP record (Liberty, 1958).

‘THEY SOUNDED LIKE CHIPMUNKS’

By that time, David Seville’s material was one of Liberty Records’ top moneymakers. In the summer of 1958, the brass at Liberty contacted Ross to ask him to come up with another novelty song for the upcoming holiday season. But what to do in an industry that was already swollen with Christmas music?

Fortunately, his youngest child unintentionally sparked Ross’ imagination. Little Adam was driving his family crazy, constantly asking if it was Christmas yet because he knew that meant a lot of presents were on the way. That was a refreshingly honest theme that even impatient and greedy kids could relate to. ♪♪ “Christmas, Christmas time is near Time for toys and time for cheer We’ve been good, but we can’t last Hurry Christmas, hurry fast.” ♪♪ Now that he had a theme and some lyrics, Ross was scouring his mind for the perfect characters to sing them. According to his son Ross, Jr., “...He wanted to use that sped-up sound for some characters and didn’t know whether they should be singing alligators or 26

RETROFAN

March 2024

When reader Scott Foltz heard that Alvin and the Chipmunks were going to be a topic of an article this issue, he generously offered to share photos from his biggerthan-a-chipmunk-sized collection. We begin with items from the pre–Alvin Show merchandise, with more neat stuff to follow. Thanks, Scott. © Ross Bagdasarian.

The oddball world of scott shaw!

More early Chipmunks merchandise courtesy of super Alvin fan, Scott Foltz. © Ross Bagdasarian.

“Then I wrote the words and decided that the singers should be animals or maybe even insects. I don’t know why, but that’s what I decided. I recorded the song with the half-speed little voices (my own) and sang an introduction in my normal-speed voice. When I finished the first recording, the voices sounded like butterflies—or mice—or rabbits, but most of all, they sounded like chipmunks. The brass of Liberty Records listened with me and we all agreed that something was missing. Everybody liked the melody, so I wrote some new lyrics and called the song ‘In

a Village Park,’ the more I could hear the chipmunks singing ‘Christmas, Christmas time is near, time for toys and time for cheer.’ So I recorded it again, this time with no words, as an instrumental. This, too, was nowhere.

“I decided against doing anything further and gave up the whole project, but the project wouldn’t give me up. By the end of November, the chipmunks in my head were driving me crazy, so I decided to try it again, but this time to give the chipmunks some kind of identity, I gave them names and had a conversation with them. The record was finally finished after three months and four versions. All I can say is that I love Witch Doctors, Chipmunks, and—most of all—tape machines.” (That sounds much more like the creative process to me.)

SECRETS OF THE SINGING CHIPMUNKS

Alvin and David ’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (1958) was a knock-out. © Ross Bagdasarian.

One thing is certain: Ross based the names of those three singing chipmunks on the names of the executives who ran Liberty Records.

“Alvin” was named after Liberty Records’ president/director/”music business wizard” Alvin “Al” Bennett; “Simon” was named after Liberty Records’ founder/chairman Simon “Si” Waronker; and “Theodore” was named after audio engineer/record producer/ Liberty Records co-founder Theodore “Ted” Keep. The tune originally titled “Christmas, Don’t Be Late” became “The Chipmunk Song” and was completed on November 7, 1958. An amazing 4,500,000 copies of the Liberty 45 RPM record were sold over the first seven weeks. It was also awarded three Grammys: “Best Selling Children’s Record,” “Best Comedy Performance,” and “Best RETROFAN

March 2024

27

The oddball world of scott shaw!

(LEFT) Animation pencil art of David Seville and Alvin.

Courtesy of Heritage.

(BELOW) Two Alvin Halloween masks: (LEFT) Early Alvin and (RIGHT) Animated Alvin. © Ross Bagdasarian. Courtesy of Scott Foltz.

Engineered Record.” “‘The Chipmunk Song’ was so overwhelmingly popular that it sold in stores that had never before sold records, such as lingerie shops and flower stores,” remembered Ross. “It was a wonderful sight to see stacks of my records piled high in a cigar-store counter and selling it as fast as the clerk could take the money.”

It wasn’t easy. Bagdasarian had an extremely complex process for recording the song. First, after having set down a melody, he recorded it with a simplified orchestra—two saxophones, four rhythm instruments—at normal speed. Then on a second tape, he recorded two pianos playing at half speed. Played back at normal speed, the pianos had a tinkly mandolin-like sound.

Bagdasarian made a third tape of his own normal voice at normal speed, shouting, “Alvin! Stop that!” and the like. The fourth tape was Simon, the lowest voice of the three chipmunks in the song.

His lines were recorded in a normal voice at half-speed, then played back at normal speed to produce a squeaky tone. By this time, the control booth at the recording studio was filling up with tape like a cauldron of spaghetti, so the first four tapes were combined on a fifth. The sixth tape was a variation for Theodore, the laughing chipmunk: ‘Ha... Ha... Ha...’ spoken carefully at halfspeed in a tone pitch slightly higher than Simon’s. The seventh was Alvin’s, also at half-speed and pitched highest of them all. An eighth track was added for the harmonica, normal speed. Finally, one master tape combined all of the others in one glorious conglomeration.”

But Alvin’s plea for a hula hoop—an extremely popular fad at the time [see this issue’s “RetroFad” column which follows—ed.] is the ridiculous cherry on the top of this aural sundae.

David Seville was invited to appear once again on The Ed Sullivan Show on December 21, 1958. That meant Ross needed puppet representations of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, so he turned to cartoon director Bob Clampett, creator of the puppet show Time for Beany (1949–1955) and ironically, his animated series Beany and Cecil (1962). [Editor’s note: If you missed Scott Shaw!’s deep-dive into Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil in RetroFan #29, zip to twomorrows. com to order a copy today!] Clearly, Alvin and the Chipmunks were just getting started, with three successful sequels—“Alvin’s Harmonica,” “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” and “Alvin’s Orchestra”—and three LP albums in their first two years (see sidebar).

28

RETROFAN

March 2024

Of course, David Seville’s big hit attracted cover versions, including “The Chipmunk Song,” narration by Paul Sherman; “Chipmunk Song,” by the Grasshoppers; and “The Chipmunk Song,” by the Bunnyhoppers. There were also two blatant imitators, “The Nutty Squirrels” (who had their own TV show!) and “The Happy Reindeer.”

David Seville and the Chipmunks returned to The Ed Sullivan Show on December 13, 1959. This time, the puppets were designed

by Morey Bunin, but there were some new designs lurking around the corner for them all.

UPA AND FORMAT FILMS

The late Fifties/early Sixties was the era of early evening/primetime network cartoons: Jay Ward’s The Bullwinkle Show (NBC, 1959), Warner Bros.’ The Bugs Bunny Show (ABC, 1960), Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones (ABC, 1960) and Top Cat (ABC, 1961), and Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil (ABC, 1962), with more on the way. However, the very first prime-time original cartoon show was UPA’s influential The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show on CBS in 1956.

UPA (United Productions of America) was a Hollywood animation studio founded in 1941 by former Walt Disney Productions employees. As an “Industrial Film and Poster Service,” UPA started by producing industrial and political promotions and WWII training films for the military. Once segueing to the production of theatrical shorts, the studio became best known for its cartoons featuring Gerald McBoing Boing (created by Theodore Geisel,

The oddball world of scott shaw!

a.k.a. Dr. Seuss), the nearsighted Mr. Magoo, Dick Tracy, and a lot of artistically experimental shorts. UPA also produced two animated feature films—1001 Arabian Nights (1959) and Gay Purr-ee (1962)— but its best-known production remains Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962).

As with the major Hollywood studios, UPA found itself in financial straits and cutting back in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and company owner Stephen Bosustow began to alienate himself from his staff. On October 26, 1959, UPA’s Herb Klynn, Bud Getzler, and Jules Engel announced the formation of their own animation company, Format Films. Much of the UPA staff went with them.

Primarily producing animated TV commercials, UPA eventually subcontracted to make 100 Popeye shorts for televised syndication.

[Editor’s note: Blow me down! Check out RetroFan #12 for our article about Popeye’s television cartoons.]

Ross Bagdasarian had been occasionally dropping by Format Films, sometimes huddling with Leo Salkin. They were working together on rough storyboards for “The Good Neighbor,” a pilot cartoon short featuring Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and David Seville.

Herb Klynn had a connection at CBS and invited some of the network’s executives to come by the studio. A few weeks later... well, let’s hear it from the “kid” at the studio, Bob Kurtz: “For the Chipmunk characters themselves, Leo Salkin did the first rough drawing,” according to Kurtz. “He did storyboards with the characters. They don’t look anything like what we know them to be now, but they were great drawings. I had been there when Leo had done the network presentation so when we were starting to design the show, I did my own variation of what Leo had drawn.

“Herb Klynn, again, very knowledgeable, was bringing in outside character designers to design the new Chipmunks. Herb was trying to control Ross and Ross is not controllable. What Herb would say to Ross is, ‘Well, this guy’s got ten years’ experience and this guy’s got 15 years’ experience.’ And Ross would say, ’I don’t care how much experience he has. These drawings suck.’

“I was constantly in meetings with Ross and he would just say what was on his mind. As Ross was passing my desk, he saw me doing one of the early storyboards on the Chipmunks. I think Ross

Storyboard for the pilot episode of The Alvin Show (1961).

Art by Bob Kurtz. © Ross Bagdasarian. had just come from a character design presentation by Herb and he’d gotten really mad at what he was shown, so Ross looked at my drawings and of course, I’m the kid of the group, and Ross says, ‘Why can’t they look like this?’ There were about six people around including Ross’ brother-in-law, who was a producer in Ross’ company. There were a lot of people standing over me, which was uncomfortable.

“Herb said, ‘Okay, draw Alvin.’ With all them leaning over me, I started to draw. Needless to say, no artist likes to have people hover over them while they draw. I quickly drew Alvin and his brothers Simon and Theodore and David Seville. They whipped each drawing out of my hands as I finished them.

“Ross said, ‘That’s it! That’s what I want!’”

On August 10, 1960, it was announced a deal with the Bagdasarian Film Corporation that had been signed to produce The Alvin Show for $43,000 per episode. The staff grew quickly, especially because the studio had also been subcontracted to animate a few Calvin and the Colonel episodes for prime-time ABC.

THIS… IS… THE… ALVIN SHOW

The Alvin Show premiered on CBS at 7:30 PM (6:30 PM Central) on Wednesday, October 4, 1961. Each episode—26 in all—was composed of two seven-minute segments, the first about the adventures of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, and the second one about inventors Clyde Crashcup and Leonardo; two 3½-minute musical segments starring the Chipmunks; plus a few interstitial sequences and Jell-O commercials, also with the Chipmunks.

Thanks to Ross, the show was unique in every way.

David Seville is an unattached songwriter who lives in a suburban neighborhood with three 2½-feet-tall talking and singing chipmunks that behave like eight-year-old boys. Alvin is the original “Bart Simpson,” a lovable sociopath who enjoys messing with authority figures and other adult “squares.” His lanky brother RETROFAN

March 2024

29

The oddball world of scott shaw!

Promotional drawings © Ross Bagdasarian.

Courtesy of AnimationResources.org.

FAST FACTS

THE ALVIN SHOW David Seville whispers into Alvin’s ear in this promotional photo published in Radio Times magazine, circa 1961. © Ross Bagdasarian.

Simon is an intelligent nerd who’d rather read than play ball, and chubby Theodore giggles a lot and likes to adopt strays. Easily irritated David attempts to raise the Chipmunks, but it’s obvious that Alvin’s the one in control, since he and his brothers have become celebrities, complete with female fans of all ages.

But this oddball family is normal when compared to the eccentric people (and animals) around them, including “the private nose,” detective Sam Valiant; Stanley, the anxious eagle that’s afraid to fly; and Mrs. Frumpington, whose primary initiative is to wipe rock ’n’ roll off the face of the Earth.

Then there’s self-absorbed inventor Clyde Crashcup, who was based on a silly character that Ross and his cousin William Saroyan had created during their youth, a guy who blindingly “invented” things that already existed. Leo Salkin designed him to resemble his former boss, Stephen Bosustow; he also designed Clyde’s whispering sidekick Leonardo. Other than crashing the opening sequence, Crashcup and company didn’t intersect with the Sevilles.

So, what makes The Alvin Show so unique and noteworthy, anyway?

The cartoon’s aspect of being “inside entertainment” was refreshingly unusual. And there was a minimum of physical violence, long before the networks were controlling that. The humor was modern, often with a psychological bent. The stories themselves were interesting, taking a new approach to a standard situation or a standard approach to a new situation. The art direction was sophisticated and appealing, with simple and appealing character designs with a contemporary vibe and backgrounds with smart details. The kids were 30

RETROFAN

March 2024

f No. of seasons: One f No. of episodes: 26 f Original run: October 4, 1961–March 28, 1962 f Created by: Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. f Produced by: Herbert Klynn (Executive Producer), Jules Engel (Producer), Leo Salkin (Associate Producer) f Theme song: “The Alvin Show Theme” by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., with Neil Hefti and Carl Stalling f Network: CBS (original run)

PRIMARY VOICE PERFORMER CAST f Ross Bagdasarian: Alvin, Theodore, Simon, David Seville, Leonardo, Sam Valiant, Stanley the Eagle, Buffalo Bill, Gondoliero, Hawaiian Bird, Henrietta, and other additional voices f Shepard Menken: Clyde Crashcup, Angry Egyptian Man, Crowd Member f June Foray: Mrs. Frumpington, Daisy Belle, Leonardo’s Mother, Little Girl, Alvin’s Girlfriend, Angel Alvin, Bentley Van Rolls the Third, Billy Brown, Buffalo Gal, and other additional voices f Johnny Mann: Simon’s Singing Voice, Herbie, Jim the Taxi Driver, Man on the Street, Mr. Chairman, and other additional voices f Don Messick: Chuck Wagon, Cousin Lester, Mailman, Mrs. Northside, Sam Merlin, Sam Sweetheart, and other additional voices f Lee Patrick: Mrs. Frumpington (singing) f Leo Salkin: Leo the producer f Tedd Keep: Ted the sound engineer f Also featuring Joe Besser, Bill Lee, Larry Storch, Paul Frees, Mort Marshall

SPIN-OFFS AND REMAKES: f A Chipmunk Christmas (NBC animated telefilm originally aired December 14, 1981; a Bagdasarian Productions/Chuck Jones Enterprises co-production, it was the first program to feature the voices of Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. as Dave Seville, Alvin, and Simon, and Janice Karman as Theodore) f Alvin and the Chipmunks (Five-season animated television cartoon co-produced by Bagdasarian Productions and Ruby-Spears Productions, and DIC; ran from 1983–1987)

The oddball world of scott shaw!

often in control and the theme encouraged the young viewers to aspire to that. The Clyde Crashcup sequences were so unique and smart/silly, many of the audience preferred it to the Chipmunks.

But first and foremost, The Alvin Show was hipper, cleverer, and more subversive than any other cartoon series during this wave of prime-time cartoon series… …And that’s entirely due to Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. “I worked very closely with Ross Bagdasarian,” reflected Bob Kurtz. “I was constantly working with him, because I was one of the young writers and he liked working with me. We would talk a lot. Ross was a strong, opinionated person, but really a pleasure to work with. Ross always had his own viewpoint of what he wanted. Ross was completely involved. In all the story meetings we presented directly to Ross. That’s who signed off on the show and he was there all the time. He was a force. He had a lot of energy. He controlled the tracks. When they recorded, we were never around.

They recorded off the premises, so the recording aspects I know nothing about other than what Ross would tell me. Voice talents June Foray and Shep Menken would often come into the studio and talk with us.”

A local newspaper, The Valley Times, sent a reporter to Format Films in 1961 during the production of The Alvin Show. The journalist, Allen Rich, was impressed, writing: “Producing an animated cartoon is a very painstaking and costly proposition. Competent artists and animators are paid between $250 and $300 a week. Completion of an Alvin takes more than four months from story department to camera. The budget is somewhere between $65,000 and $70,000 for each episode. The length of time in production is quite surprising when you consider that regulation one-hour filmed TV dramas are turned out, so far as the actual production at the studio is concerned, in five or six days. [Herb] Klynn’s Format Studios have moved three times in the past several years, each time to a larger plant. He now employs 160 animators, artists, and others, and most of them are working on Alvin, the studio’s No. 1 project.”

From a production standpoint, the series was cleverly planned to use The Alvin Show’s budget in the most efficient way possible.

Most of the crew had worked at UPA, a studio that often resorted to fusing creativity with frugality, so they knew what to do. For example, the robes that the Chipmunks wear cover their legs, creating fewer lines for animators to draw to show motion. Leonardo always whispers, so his lips don’t need to synch with the track.

And overall, the clever sense of cool design was easier to achieve than sophisticated animation. The song sequences were particular money-savers. Half of the songs were in public domain and most of the others were owned by Ross Bagdasarian. With lyrics to follow, very little scripting was needed. And since the segments were music-based, visuals could often be re-used with repeated lyrics and lip-synching was often unnecessary.

More Alvin Show merchandise courtesy of generous Alvin fan Scott Foltz. © Ross Bagdasarian.

CHIPMUNK FEVER

According to Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., “By 1959, the Chipmunks had become a cottage industry. Even the front page of The Wall Street Journal heralded the squeaky-voiced trio.”

There were Alvin and the Chipmunks harmonicas, lunchboxes with Thermos bottles, plush dolls, Christmas cards, charm bracelets, slide puzzles, bubble gum, cufflinks, transfer tattoos, hand puppets, Halloween costumes, marionettes, chalk, balloons, card games, View-Master slides, tray jigsaw puzzles, cigarette lighters, coloring books, board games, activity books, key chains, kiddie RETROFAN

March 2024

31

The oddball world of scott shaw!

books, inflatable dolls, Christmas stockings, Kenner Give-A-Show Projector strips, sheet music, buttons, Soaky bubble bath figures, plastic banks, and so much more. Dell Comics published a number of funnybook series starring the gang from The Alvin Show: Alvin (28 issues, 1962–1973), Alvin and His Pals in Merry Christmas with Clyde Crashcup and Leonardo (one issue, 1963), Alvin for President (one issue, 1964), and Clyde Crashcup (five issues, 1963). Much later, Harvey Comics published five issues of Alvin and the Chipmunks from 1992–1994. There were even “singing greeting cards,” 45 RPM records with the Chipmunks warbling “Happy Birthday,” “Get Better Soon,” or “Be My Valentine” tunes. Custom car maven George Barris even designed a motorized vehicle called “Alvin’s Acorn” (and yes, it looked like a huge acorn on wheels).

In February 1962, Ross wrote, recorded, and released a song to exploit a new dance craze, “The Alvin Twist,” which charted at a respectable No. 40, a serious attempt at mainstream pop radio success, provided by L.A.’s top studio session musicians.

Ross Bagdasarian owned Bagdasarian Film Corporation as well as Chipmunk Enterprises, which sponsored Chipmunk-related

sales. By 1963, some 15 different companies were using or planned to use The Alvin Show’s characters. Billboard magazine estimated the total income from the Chipmunks’ record sales (including overseas sales) and record club sales to be around $20 million (around $171 million today, adjusted for inflation).

In 1963, Ross Bagdasarian finally returned to pouring the wine when he bought 230 acres of land near his old home in Fresno, California, and named it Chipmunk Ranch. He also purchased Sierra Wine Corp., a winery that supplied product, among others, to E & J Gallo Winery.

ONE-SEASON WONDER

The Alvin Show lasted only one prime-time season of 26 episodes.

So, why only one season?

Blame the time slot.

CBS was hoping that the series would attract older, more sophisticated children and younger, less snobby adults. But The Alvin Show wound up against Wagon Train on NBC and The New Steve Allen Show on ABC. By November 8, 1961, barely a month after the show’s October 4th premiere, Variety inferred that The Alvin Show might be in trouble. Then there were rumors that the cartoon series might be switched to a cheaper Sunday 6:30 PM time slot. Two days later, in the Hollywood Reporter, there was even talk of a meeting between Klynn and Bagdasarian about a Clyde Crashcup spin-off.

(LEFT) More Scott Shaw! commission art featuring the main cast of The Alvin Show. © Ross Bagdasarian. Art © Scott Shaw!

CHIPMUNKS LIBERTY RECORDS LPs BY ROSS BAGDASARIAN Let’s All Sing with the Chipmunks (1959) Sing Again with the Chipmunks (1960) Around the World with the Chipmunks (1960) The Alvin Show (1961) The Chipmunk Songbook (1962) Christmas with the Chipmunks (1962) Christmas with the Chipmunks vol. 2 (1963) The Chipmunks Sing the Beatles Hits (1964) The Chipmunks Sing with Children (1965) Chipmunks A-Go-Go (1965) The Chipmunks See Doctor Dolittle (1968) The Chipmunks Go to the Movies (1969)

32

RETROFAN

March 2024

© Ross Bagdasarian.

The oddball world of scott shaw!

(FAR LEFT) JELL-O was a sponsor of The Alvin Show and featured the Chipmunks in their commercials. (LEFT) Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing-Alongs VHS tape, with Scott Shaw!’s artwork on the cover. (BELOW) Valentine Chipmunks. © Ross Bagdasarian.

But on April 17, 1962, it was finally announced that CBS would move reruns of The Alvin Show to Saturday mornings in the fall. Unfortunately, Herb Klynn shut down Format Films in 1962, only to return in 1966 as Format Productions, which was behind CBS’ animated version of The Lone Ranger.

[Editor’s note: Hi-yo, Silver! See RetroFan #20 for Andy Mangels’ history of Lone Ranger cartoons.]

Continuing to record and promote more Chipmunk material, Ross also assembled two more solo LP albums: The Mixed-Up World of Bagdasarian (Liberty Records, 1966) and A Summer’s Day Delight (Monarch Music Corp., 1970).

In the mid-to-late Sixties, the individual segments of The Alvin Show were culled together and sold as a syndication package under the title Alvin and the Chipmunks. The original episodes of The Alvin Show began airing under the title of Alvin and the Chipmunks on NBC Saturday mornings in 1979 for a short period. To coincide with the new series on NBC in 1983, Viacom Enterprises distributed reruns of The Alvin Show to syndicated markets (mostly independent and future Fox stations; the rerun package was also carried nationally over WGN and WTBS at various times beginning in September 1983). Some stations continued to run the show at various times as late as 1993. Prior to its superstation runs, The Alvin Show was picked up in a few markets such as Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and in international markets such as in Australia and Brazil, among others. The Alvin Show made its way to Europe in the United Kingdom when the BBC began broadcasting the program as well. Nickelodeon picked up U.S. broadcast rights to The Alvin Show on March 7, 1994, after the last of a few independent stations pulled the show. The prints from the syndicated reruns were digitized and the Nickelodeon logo was added to several spots in the opening theme.

The show aired as part of Nickelodeon’s morning line-up for most of the next year. During this time, as well as for sometime after, the full episodes stopped airing and the individual Alvin and the Chipmunks and Clyde Crashcup cartoons and musical segments were inserted into episodes of Weinerville. In 1996, Nickelodeon stopped showing The Alvin Show segments altogether, and no television station has since aired them.

THE LEGACY OF BAGDASARIAN’S CHIPMUNKS

A lifetime smoker, Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. was found dead of a heart attack at his home in Beverly Hills on January 16, 1972, only 11 days before his 53rd birthday. He was cremated and inurned at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.

For many years, the only home video presence of The Alvin Show was two VHS tapes from Disney’s Buena Vista Home Video, Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing-Alongs: Ragtime Cowboy Joe (1993) and Working on the Railroad (1994), each compiling 11 of the series’ 52 song sequences, with an added “sing-along” gimmick. (I was pleased to draw the line-art for the packaging of both.) In 2009, Paramount Home Entertainment released a DVD of the first episode of The Alvin Show. In 2014, “The Brave Chipmunks” musical sequence was released as a bonus feature on The Chipmunk Adventure Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. In 2015, three complete episodes of The Alvin Show (#01, #04, and #10) were released together on Blu-ray and DVD. We’re still waiting for the rest.

Bagdasarian willed the Chipmunks franchise to his wife and three children. Ross Jr. said in an interview that he “worshipped” his father and felt a need to continue his work. He resumed the franchise with his partner Janice Karman in the late Seventies, after finishing law school, and became the complete owner when he bought the rights from his siblings in the mid-Nineties.

Twenty years after The Alvin Show’s original run, the Chipmunks returned to animation in a prime-time special, A Chipmunk Christmas, airing on NBC in 1981. More animated specials followed through the Eighties and into the Nineties. An onslaught of contemporary Chipmunk music renewed their popularity, as did new animated stories, starting with Ruby-Spears Productions’ Alvin and the Chipmunks in 1983. The most recent is Bagdasarian Productions/OuiDo! Productions’ Alvinnn!!! and the Chipmunks, running on Nickelodeon from 2015 through 2023. And to tell a bigger story, the Bagdasarians first brought Alvin and company to the big screen with the 1987 animated theatrical feature The Chipmunk Adventure.

The Bagdasarians took full advantage of home video entertainment with a variety of longer and more dramatic RETROFAN

March 2024

33

The oddball world of scott shaw!

’THE ALVIN SHOW’ EPISODE GUIDE

Episode 1 (original airdate: October 4, 1961) “Stanley the Eagle” “Oh Gondaliera” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Baseball” “I Wish I Could Speak French”

Episode 10 (original airdate: December 6, 1961) “Overworked Alvin” “Witch Doctor” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Flight” “The Chipmunk Song”

Episode 19 (original airdate: February 7, 1962) “Eagle in Love” “Sing a Goofy Song” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Do It Yourself” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”

Episode 2 (original airdate: October 11, 1961) “Sam Valiant, Private Nose” “August Dear” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Bathtub” “Alvin’s Orchestria”

Episode 11 (original airdate: December 13, 1961) “Dude Ranch” “Home on the Range” “Clyde Crashcup Invents First Aid” “Alvin for President”

Episode 20 (original airdate: February 14, 1962) “Theodore’s Dog” “Clementine” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Shoe” “Maria from Madrid”

Episode 3 (original airdate: October 18, 1961) “Squares” “Swanee River” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Wife” “The Magic Mountain”

Episode 12 (original airdate: December 20, 1961) “Jungle Rhythm” “Lily of Laguna” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Egypt” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”

Episode 21 (original airdate: February 21, 1962) “Haunted House” “Whistle While You Work” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Glass” “My Wild Irish Rose”

Episode 4 (original airdate: October 25, 1961) “Ostrich” “The Brave Chipmunks” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Baby” “Yankee Doodle Dandy”

Episode 13 (original airdate: December 27, 1961) “Bentley Van Rolls” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Self-Preservation” “Comin’ Through the Rye”

Episode 22 (original airdate: February 28, 1962) “Alvin’s Studio” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” “This Is Your Life, Clyde Crashcup!”

“The Band Played On”

Episode 5 (original airdate: November 1, 1961) “Good Neighbor” “The Little Dog” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Electricity” “Old MacDonald (Cha-Cha-Cha)”

Episode 14 (original airdate: January 3, 1962) “Good Manners” “Bicycle Built for Two” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Physical Fitness” “Ragtime Cowboy”

Episode 23 (original airdate: March 7, 1962) “The Whistler” “The Alvin Twist” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Boat” “The Man on the Flying Trapeze”

Episode 6 (original airdate: November 8, 1961) “Fancy” “Japanese Banana” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Music” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”

Episode 15 (original airdate: January 10, 1962) “Little League” “Buffalo Gals” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Chair” “While Strolling in the Park One Day”

Episode 24 (original airdate: March 14, 1962) “Sir Alvin” “Git Along Little Doggies” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Crashcupland” “Down in the Valley”

Episode 7 (original airdate: November 15, 1961) “Alvin’s Alter-Ego” “The Pidgin English Hula” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the West” “Chipmunk Fun”

Episode 16 (original airdate: January 17, 1962) “Hillbilly Son” “Spain” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Bed” “Pop Goes the Weasel”

Episode 25 (original airdate: March 21, 1962) “Disc Jockey” “Funiculi, Funicula” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Birthdays” “Polly Wolly Doodle”

Episode 8 (original airdate: November 22, 1961) “Sam Valiant: Real Estate” “Working on the Railroad” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Stove” “Stuck in Arabia”

Episode 17 (original airdate: January 24, 1962) “Alvin’s Cruise” “Alvin’s Harmonica” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Telephone” “If You Love Me (Alouette)

Episode 26 (original airdate: March 28, 1962) “Eagle Music” “On Top of Old Smoky” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Self-Defense” “America the Beautiful”

Episode 9 (original airdate: November 29, 1961) “Camping Trip”” “Good Morning Song” “Clyde Crashcup Invents Jokes” “I Wish I Had a Horse”

Episode 18 (original airdate: January 31, 1962) “Lovesick Dave” “Coming ʼRound the Mountain” “Clyde Crashcup Invents the Time Machine” “Three Blind-Folded Mice”

(ABOVE) Three screen caps from The Alvin Show: (LEFT) Alvin directs the show’s opening sequence. (CENTER) David trys to get some work done. (RIGHT) Clyde Crashcup and loyal, whispering Leonardo. © Ross Bagdasarian.

34

RETROFAN

March 2024

Each episode also featured three one-minute interstitials, usually with Alvin doing something intentionally outrageous such as taking his bull to the china shop, or Alvin dressed as a magician about to destroy a tower of crystal glass and operating a wrecking ball.

The oddball world of scott shaw!

animated exploits for the Chipmunks. In 1996, the Chipmunk characters were licensed to Universal Studios. This led to a VHS edition of The Chipmunk Adventure (the last video featuring the MCA/Universal Home Video logo) and a series of direct-to-video animated features, including Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein (1989) and Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman (1990). However, in 2000, Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. sued Universal for breach-of-contract, citing that Universal failed to properly use the Chipmunk characters, supposedly leading to a loss of royalties for the Bagdasarians.

Eventually, computers concocted the Chipmunks, with CGIcreated chipmunks appearing in several films starting with Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007). Once the Chipmunks became stars on the big screen, the only place left to conquer was the world of video games, starting in 2007, with games based on Chipmunks movies and new adventures.

The major visual difference in this new era of the Chipmunks was the introduction of the female Chipettes—Brittany, Jeanette, and Eleanor—created by Janice Karman and initially designed

by Corny Cole. The Chipettes first appeared in the cartoon series Alvin and the Chipmunks in 1983. Their character designs were later revamped by Sandra Berez for The Chipmunk Adventure and the later seasons of the show.

The other major difference was subtler and more disappointing.

TV cartoons had changed, and not for the better. With the exception of Jay Ward’s George of the Jungle (ABC, 1967), there hadn’t been any truly funny animated TV cartoons since The Alvin Show. By the Eighties, almost all of children’s entertainment was depressingly bland and invariably reliant on a moral [and often, on promoting a licensed property—ed.]. Humor, not so much. And the new iteration of the Chipmunks really leaned into what was selling.

As of this writing, an astounding 42 Chipmunks albums have been created after the death of Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., including soundtracks from Alvin and the Chipmunks movies. Among them: The Very Best of the Chipmunks (1976), Chipmunk Punk (1980), Urban Chipmunk (1981), The Chipmunks’ 20 All Time Golden Greats (1982), The Chipmunk Adventure (1987), The Chipmunks and the Chipettes: Born To Rock (1988), A Very Merry Chipmunk (1994), Club Chipmunk: The Dance Mixes (1996), Alvin and the Chipmunks: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2007), and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2015) As noted earlier, The Alvin Show hasn’t been available to the public since it ran on Nickelodeon in 1996. Four (out of 26) episodes have been released on physical recordings. The amount of Chipmunk product that’s built up since Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. passed is staggering, although its quality isn’t nearly as impressive.

Comic book fun: Alvin and the Chipmunks (and David) enjoy (except David) off-screen antics in the Dell Alvin comics which ran from 1962 to 1973. Alvin and his Pals in Merry Christmas with Clyde Crashcup and Leonardo was published in 1963 and reissued in 1966.

Dell’s Clyde Crashcup series run five issues from 1963–1964. © Ross Bagdasarian.

RETROFAN

March 2024

35

The oddball world of scott shaw!

(LEFT) Alvin and the Chipmunks, released in 2007, was the boys’ first live-action film adventure. It starred CGI chipmunks and an actual Jason Lee. (BELOW) New Alvin (LEFT) meets old Alvin (RIGHT) in a 1987 episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks, “Back to Dave’s Future.” © Ross Bagdasarian.

Two final factoids: 1) Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. was best friends with fellow Armenian actor Mike Conners, the popular star of the CBS series Mannix (1967–1975). Ross appeared (without credit) on an episode of the detective show, as did his daughter Carol, five different times in all. 2) During the production of The Chipmunk Adventure, Bagdasarian Productions’ offices were located in the same two-story building in North Hollywood as a small animation company, Cornell-Abood, as well as Ralph Bakshi’s cartoon studio, which at the time was in production of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures (1987–1988). If you’ve ever wondered where Mighty Mouse’s “Elvy and the Tree Weasels” came from, well... now you know!

Children or chipmunks? A more human version of the beloved characters was seen in Alvinnn!!! and the Chipmunks series (2015), featuring the Chipettes. (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) Simon, Theodore, Alvin, Brittany, Eleanor, and Jeanette. © Ross Bagdasarian.

So, why are Ross Jr. and Janice sitting on the cartoon that led to their incredible success? Do they consider The Alvin Show to be embarrassing? That makes no sense; animation fans have been pleading for the opportunity to own the entire series for decades.

However, considering that most people who grew up with The Alvin Show still consider it to be one of the funniest TV cartoons of all time, are Ross Jr. and Janice worried that if the original iteration of “their” characters were available to the public, by comparison, the current product might be considered mediocre at best? (In their most-recent CG series, Alvinnn!!! and the Chipmunks, the Chipmunks resemble human children with triangular noses, not anthropomorphic rodents!) Or maybe it’s merely another case of music ownership. Let’s all hope that someday Ross Sr.’s grandchildren Vanessa and Michael will release the original ’munks to the wild.

Even Mrs. Frumpington would approve!

36

RETROFAN

March 2024

Thanks to Mark Arnold for his valuable book, AAAAALLLVIIINNN! The Story of Ross Bagdasarian Sr., Liberty Records, Format Films and The Alvin Show (Bear Manor, 2019).

For 50 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 Comic-Con International: San Diego, America’s biggest annual fan event. He can be reached at shawcartoons.com.

RETROFAD

BY MIC HAE Alvin wasn’t alone. The cartoon character’s “Me, I want a hula hoop” entreaties peppered “The Chipmunk Song” (a.k.a.

“Christmas, Don’t Be Late”), to the listener’s amusement and David Seville’s annoyance.

But you really can’t blame the bucktoothed li’l fella for his obsession.

When manufacturer Wham-O released its first hula hoop—officially branded Hula Hoop®, herewith Hula Hoop, minus the registration mark—in the summer of 1958, 25 million units were sold in just the first four months. That’s a whole lotta (hip) shakin’ goin’ on!

For a contemporary toy, the Hula Hoop was actually an updated historical relic. Hoops forged of vines, grasses, bamboo, and other vegetation had for centuries been employed across the globe in ceremonial dances.

Metal and wooden hoops from barrels, wagon wheels, and other sources had been used for everything from rolling knickknacks for children to medical aids and muscle-toning devices for adults.

It was a recreational fad of 1957 that ultimately whirled into the public eye what we now call the Hula Hoop. That year, the European press took note of a budding trend among Norwegian and Australian girls who were swinging cane rings around their bodies in what was dubbed “rock ring” or “wiggle rock” mania. Once an Australian

(TOP) Wham-O Hula Hoop promotional graphics from the product’s 1958 debut year, with its company mascot, the witch doctor “Whambo.” Hula Hoop® is TM & © Intersport Corp., DBA Wham-O (herewith Wham-O). (CENTER AND BOTTOM) Record players spun along with Hula Hoops as a variety of performers released hoop-inspired songs in 1958.

L E U RY

physical education teacher started using bamboo rings to encourage movement among her students, more than pelvises began rotating.

Tim Walsh, author of The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys (2004, Keys Publishing), writes that an observant Australian department store, Coles, began selling bamboo hoops but couldn’t keep them in stock due to mushrooming demand. Coles tapped Alex Tolmer, founder of the legendary manufacturing company Toltoys, to begin mass production of hoops. Tolmer, says Walsh, found the durable plastic Polyethylene to be the perfect hoop material and rushed these “exercise hoops” into production, selling 400,000 units in Australia that year.

Here’s where the Hula Hoop story began to spin faster.

An American named Joan Alexander, while on holiday visiting family in Australia, caught wind of this new fancy and shipped one of the exercise rings from the Land from Down Under to her home.

Once back in the States she showed the hoop to the folks at Wham-O. Wham-O, as most RetroFans know, is the toy company that introduced a range of perennial playthings, most famously the Frisbee® (which we tossed at you in RetroFan #13), but also the Slip ’n Slide, Super-Ball, Hacky Sack, and Silly String. Co-founders Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin launched the company in 1948, originally operating out of Knerr’s garage before growing into a Carson, California–based business that’s still going strong today.

RETROFAN

March 2024

37

RetroFad

(LEFT) Autographed original art to Johnny Hart’s B.C. comic strip of October 28, 1958. © Creators Syndicate. Courtesy of Heritage.

The appeal of the hoop for consumers of all ages was undeniable.

As reported on GroovyHistory.com, Americans at the time nursed a growing fascination with island culture.

U.S. soldiers’ journeys across the globe opened eyes wide to the hypnotic hip gyrations of grass-skirted beauties that told stories through their body movements. Hula dancing had been creeping into cinema for decades, from silent star Clara Bow’s 1927 movie Hula to cartoon characters Betty Boop and Minnie Mouse. To top it off, Hawaii was poised to become the 50th U.S. State (which it would on August 21, 1959). An exercise ring that makes you look like a hula dancer when you use it? pondered the folks at Wham-O. What else could this thing be called but a Hula Hoop?

Back in Melbourne, Australia, Toltoys’ David Tolmer, Alex Tolmer’s son, partnered with Wham-O’s Knerr and Melin to bring the newly christened Hula Hoop to the United States. Wham-O modified the product, fashioning 42-inch Marlex plastic hoops in vibrant colors.

In the summer of 1958, Wham-O’s Hula Hoop hit the market… but at first sales were sluggish. Knerr and Melin realized they’d have to do some leg-shaking of their own to introduce their Hula Hoop to the masses—and thus began an impressive and aggressive multimedia promotional campaign targeting consumers of all ages. Public “how to” presentations were made, with baton twirlers and other athletic types demonstrating everything from simple Hula Hoop movements to complicated but fascinating maneuvers. Complimentary Hula Hoops were given to children at playgrounds. Radio stations in cities and towns across the country sponsored Hula Hoop contests where masses of people would Hula Hoop together, and compete. People not only swirled Hula Hoops around their hips, but also around their necks, arms, knees, legs, and even foreheads.

With the product’s appeal to children largely implied, print ads in newspapers and magazines adroitly targeted adults—specifically women, as an early ad depicted an hourglass-waisted housewife shimmying a Hula Hoop around her perfect figure. It touted that the Hula Hoop’s “amazing action defies gravity” and claimed it “rotates perpetually with body-english” (Was “Body-English” a high school class back in the Fifties?). Hula Hoops could “spin forever” around “your waist, neck, [and] knees,” in “competitive games, acrobatic tricks, water sports, exercises, and [weight] reducing.”

38

RETROFAN

March 2024

(ABOVE) Hula Hoops made great visual gags for comic book covers, although Little Lotta #22’s (June 1959) cover couldn’t avoid the stereotypical fat jokes that accompanied its star’s adventures. © Classic Media, LLC. (LEFT) A colorized Three Stooges film short still was captioned with a “Hula Hoop” joke when Fleer released a 1959 Stooges trading card set. © 1959 Norman

Yet it was television, at the time still a burgeoning medium, that rapidly rolled the Hula Hoop into the public consciousness. In addition to TV commercials for the Hula Hoop, Wham-O’s Arthur Melin, sometimes with his wife Suzy, began appearing on Maurer Productions, Inc. Courtesy of Heritage.

TV talk and variety shows including the popular Dinah Shore Show, hyping and displaying the product. By the time Melin signed in as “Spud Melin” (“I only answer to Spud,” he said) as a guest with a mystery job on the quiz show What’s My Line?’s September 14, 1958 episode, his secret vocation (shared with the audience as “inventor and manufacturer of Hula Hoops”) was a crowd-pleasing revelation.

The U.S. of A. was gripped in a Hula Hoop revolution! And for a mere $1.98 a hoop, who could resist?

Not Alvin (who not only got that Hula Hoop he wanted but was later immortalized by Wayout Toys as a dancing Alvin Hula Hoop doll). Not bandleader Duke Ellington, famously photographed in 1958 grooving while hooping. Not “America’s oldest teenager” Dick Clark, whose American Bandstand TV dance show featured a hot Hula Hoop number.

Pop vocalist Teresa Brewer had a hit with “The Hula Hoop Song”—and so did sultry jazz singer Georgia Gibbs, who performed a different tune also titled “The Hula Hoop Song” on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 6, 1958. Yet another “The Hula Hoop Song” was released by Italian songster Teddy Reno… although on the record

RetroFad

racks it was further differentiated by its “Tempo Di Hula Hoop” title, in the artist’s native tongue. On Sunday, September 14, 1958’s The Steve Allen Show, funnyman Allen introduced his new record, “Hula Hoop,” which he performed backed up by a chorus and orchestra. If your music tastes skewed more toward The Lawrence Welk Show than American Bandstand, you could hop to the “Hula Hoop Polka” by Herb Wojnarowski and His Orchestra. Wind-up toys like the Hoopsie doll and mechanical Hula Hoop Monkey appeared on toy shelves. Personalities on television and in film were seen wiggling with Hula Hoops. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and Dracula Hula Hooped on the cover of Monster Parade magazine, while playful Little Audrey and freckle-faced Archie Andrews were among the characters Hula Hooping on comic book covers. In the October 28, 1958 edition of cartoonist Johnny Hart’s comic strip B.C., a stone-age Hula Hooper motivates caveman B.C. to prophesize, “This could change the course of history!”

Hart was right. And so was Wham-O with its anticipation of the impact of island culture, which included the Fall 1959 premiere of the sexy TV drama Hawaiian Eye (island fascination would continue in the next decade with Gilligan’s Island and Hawaii Five-0,

hoops’ hollow plastic tubing. When twirled, the Hula Hoops now made a telltale sound dubbed “Shoop Shoop” by Wham-O. The Shoop Shoop Hula Hoop spiked sales again, and Wham-O began co-marketing the item with its Frisbee, pushing them as a leisuretime duo perfect for teenagers’ beach frolicking. A prototypical infomercial was produced where boy and girl actors demonstrated how to Hula Hoop, including some mesmerizing stunts such as “The Stork” (standing on one leg) and the “Hokey Pokey”–ish “Stepping In” and “Stepping Out,” where one leg is moved in or out of the other leg’s swirling hoop. That mid-Sixties’ blip of popularity was short-lived, and before long Hula Hoop hysteria waned.

But the Hula Hoop itself didn’t. Chipmunks and crooners were no longer pining for one, but the Hula Hoop became a perennial product, earning a well-deserved 1999 induction into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame. Its permanence as a pop-culture commodity inspired the 1994 film comedy The Hudsucker Proxy from film auteurs the Coen Brothers, where Tim Robbins played a mail-room worker who created the Hula Hoop in a fictionalized version of the product’s origin; in some European markets the movie was released with the title Mister Hula Hoop.

(LEFT) Inserting ball bearings into Hula Hoops produced a “Shoop Shoop” sound that gave Wham-O’s product a second lease on life in the mid-Sixties. © Wham-O. (RIGHT) Do you know what they call The Hudsucker Proxy in Italy?

Mister Hula Hoop! Joel and Ethan Coen’s mythical take on the Hula Hoop’s creation was released in 1994. © Warner Bros. Poster courtesy of Heritage.

among other shows). Over the Hula Hoop’s first two years of production, Wham-O marketed 100 million of these things. Not all of the hoops sold during this furor were official Hula Hoops made by Wham-O. Manufacturers clamoring for a fast buck released Hula Hoop knock-offs, which Wham-O couldn’t combat since it did not originally own the patent on the product (which they did finally obtain in 1963). However, Wham-O did trademark the “Hula Hoop” name in 1958. The Hula Hoop’s popularity spread to other countries, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan particularly caught up in the frenzy.

With such a meteoric rise, the Hula Hoop’s success could only spiral out of control. After peak production periods of 50,000 hoops per day, Wham-O was inundated with Hula Hoops and stopped production in the early Sixties.

Wham-O shrewdly reintroduced the Hula Hoop in 1965, moving its previous stagnant stock by inserting ball bearings into the

Over the years, Wham-O has introduced Hula Hoop variations including Glow in the Dark and LED-lit hoops. The company has, according to brand-development agency Becker Associates, sold over 300 million Hula Hoops.

As with the Hula Hoop fad of the late Fifties, the modern Hula Hoop consumer isn’t always a child. “Hooping,” as it is now called, has become a cultish pastime among adults, with some “hoopers” dancing with rings of fire or with multiple hoops. “Smart hoops” with programmable computers are available with special-effects options. Hula Hoops also remain in use as exercise aids. A workout called Hulazumba got its start in 2017. And according to GoodRX.com, “Using a weighted [H]ula [H]oop may help you burn calories, strengthen your core, and improve your fitness.”

Despite the Hula Hoop’s significance in U.S. pop culture, the fad’s connection to Australia, its country of origin, remains. From November 19 through 23, 2019, an Australian woman named Jenny Doan set a world record for a 100-hour Hula Hooping marathon, a feat that makes our heads spin!

Special thanks to sources Wikipedia, Tim Walsh, GroovyHistory.com, Becker Associates LLC Madehow.com, PopBopRocktilUDrop.com, Wonderopolis.org, and GoodRX.com.

RetroFan editor-in-chief MICHAEL EURY is too much a klutz to engender anything other than a laugh while Hula Hooping.

RETROFAN

March 2024

39

The Best in POP Culture!

THE

TEAM-UP COMPANION

by RetroFan’s MICHAEL EURY

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics—DC’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS, Marvel’s MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes. Go behind the scenes of your favorite team-up comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from NEAL ADAMS, JIM APARO, MIKE W. BARR, ELIOT R. BROWN, NICK CARDY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE GERBER, STEVEN GRANT, BOB HANEY, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, PAUL LEVITZ, RALPH MACCHIO, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARTIN PASKO, JOE RUBINSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated readers during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. By BACK ISSUE and RETROFAN editor MICHAEL EURY. (272-page SOFTCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-112-7 • NOW SHIPPING!

CLIFFHANGER!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

CINEMATIC SUPERHEROES OF THE SERIALS: 1941–1952 by CHRISTOPHER IRVING Hold on tight as historian CHRISTOPHER IRVING explores the origins of the first on-screen superheroes and the comic creators and film-makers who brought them to life. CLIFFHANGER! touches on the early days of the film serial, to its explosion as a juvenile medium of the 1930s and ‘40s. See how the creation of characters like SUPERMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPY SMASHER, and CAPTAIN MARVEL dovetailed with the early film adaptations. Along the way, you’ll meet the stuntmen, directors (SPENCER BENNETT, WILLIAM WITNEY, producer SAM KATZMAN), comic book creators (SIEGEL & SHUSTER, SIMON & KIRBY, BOB KANE, C.C. BECK, FRANK FRAZETTA, WILL EISNER), and actors (BUSTER CRABBE, GEORGE REEVES, LORNA GRAY, KANE RICHMOND, KIRK ALYN, DAVE O’BRIEN) who brought them to the silver screen—and how that resonates with today’s cinematic superhero universe. NOW SHIPPING! (160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-119-6

HERO-A-GO-GO!

by RetroFan’s MICHAEL EURY

HERO-A-GO-GO celebrates the camp craze of the Swinging Sixties! RETROFAN magazine and former DC Comics editor MICHAEL EURY authors this lively collection of nostalgic essays, histories, and theme song lyrics of classic 1960s characters like Captain Action, Herbie the Fat Fury, Captain Nice, Atom Ant, Scooter, ACG’s Nemesis, Dell’s super-Frankenstein and Dracula, the “split!” Captain Marvel, and others! Featuring interviews with BILL MUMY (Lost in Space), RALPH BAKSHI (The Mighty Heroes, Spider-Man), RAMONA FRADON (Metamorpho), JOE SINNOTT (The Beatles comic book), JOSE DELBO (The Monkees comic book), and many more!

(272-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1 • NOW SHIPPING!

IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

Just when you thought it was safe to walk the streets again, FROM THE TOMB (the UK’s preeminent magazine on the history of horror comics) digs up more tomes of terror from the century past. IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB (the second “Best of” collection) uncovers atomic comics lost to the Cold War, rarely seen (and censored) British horror comics, the early art of RICHARD CORBEN, GOOD GIRLS of a bygone age, TOM SUTTON, DON HECK, LOU MORALES, AL EADEH, BRUCE JONES’ Alien Worlds, HP LOVECRAFT in HEAVY METAL, and a myriad of terrors from beyond the stars and the shadows of our own world! It features comics they tried to ban, from ATLAS, CHARLTON, COMIC MEDIA, DC, EC, HARVEY, HOUSE OF HAMMER, KITCHEN SINK, LAST GASP, PACIFIC, SKYWALD, WARREN, and more from the darkest of the horror genre’s finest creators!

(192-page Trade Paperback) $29.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-081-6 • DIGITAL EDITION: $10.95 NOW SHIPPING!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

SCOTT SAAVEDRA’S SECRET SANCTUM

Girder and Panel Building Sets

BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA

In the Plaything category of Stuff I Really, Really Liked As A Kid, building toys (also known as construction or engineering toys) were the Best (BEST!). I was especially drawn to stuff you could do on your own (Me Time was important when you’re a bookish kid with six siblings). Building toys really fit the bill, and I played with plenty. And LEGO bricks (invented in 1949)… well, who hasn’t encountered them?

They kept me busy into adulthood and parenthood. [We’ve got a LEGO history coming up in the next issue of RetroFan, #32—and LEGOmanics are also invited to check out TwoMorrows’ Brick Journal mag!—ed.] While structures could be made with any number of construction toys, there was only one during the RetroYears that attempted to replicate the actual construction process itself and create something that actually looked like a modern structure: Girder and Panel building sets.

Girder and Panel building sets came out of Kenner Products (best known as just Kenner). Kenner was a toy company founded in 1946 by three brothers: Albert, Phillip, and Joseph Steiner.

Albert was the president of the company, with Kenner being the

name of the Cincinnati, Detail of art from an early Ohio, street on which their Girder and Panel Building offices were located. The Set planning book. Collection of first big hit for the young the author. toy company was 1949’s Captain Space Bub-LRocket. Captain Space is seen on the package blowing into the tip of the Bub-L-Rocket, creating “galaxies of bubbles—without refueling!” Captain Space brags on the back of the package that he himself designed the bubble gun “as a precision toy.”

But you can’t rest on any laurels in the toy business, and new concepts are constantly needed. For the company’s 1957 Spring line, Kenner was introducing the Jungle Blow-Gun set, Squirt Beanies, and something called the Squirt Write. Fortunately, Kenner had something even more exciting in the pipeline. Company president Albert Steiner had a lucky epiphany while observing an office tower slowly rising up in the city. He felt that the skeletal girder construction process, finished off with exterior glass and steel, RETROFAN

March 2024

41

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

had possibilities as a toy. The general concept was handed over to the then-head of Kenner’s Research & Development department, James “Jeep” O. Kuhn, to flesh out.

Kuhn was highly regarded and is often credited as the inventor—though other Kenner people were involved—of the Easy-Bake Oven (in 1963), which was a hit with girls and some boys (who doesn’t like cake and cookies made to order?). When he was eight years old, Bobby Flay (now a well-known chef) opted for an Easy-Bake Oven over the G.I. Joe action figure his father wanted to get him. And since I like easily baked goods, I say, “Good on him.”

I mainly used my G.I. Joe’s face as a base for sculpting monster “make-up” with modeling clay.

“Jeep” (the nickname is a mystery to me) Kuhn had a number of patents. One was for doll eyes that could follow a child around a room (creepy). Another was for an “optical personal inspection instrument” which was intended

(ABOVE) Advertisement announcing the first three Girder and Panel sets as seen in this page detail from the American Toy Promotion section of the June 6, 1957 issue of Hardware Age. (RIGHT) Box face to the Girder and Panel Building Set #1 (1957). TM & © Bridge Street Toys, LLC. Box from the collection of the author.

42

RETROFAN

March 2024

The Steiner brothers, founders of Kenner Products Co. (LEFT TO RIGHT) Albert, Joseph, and Philip. Albert was the company president.

(ABOVE) James “Jeep” O. Kuhn, Vice President of Kenner’s Research & Development Department.

to “examine a body orifice or any other body site otherwise not visually accessible.” (In case you sit on something you shouldn’t, I guess.)

So… Kenner’s Girder and Panel Building Sets debuted in 1957 with three offerings, each one with more pieces than the last. No. 1 (Junior set) was $2.50—$26.88 in 2023 dollars. No. 2 (Standard set) was $4.00—$43.51 in 2023 dollars, and No. 3 (the DeLuxe) was $6.00—a whopping $65.27 as I write this. Each allowed the construction of modern-looking structures. They were purely building-making building toys unlike, say, LEGOs, which could make all

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

kinds of things as long as they had square corners (in those days). These sets were successful enough that A Brief Origin of Building Toys more were soon added.

Children, during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, when The next three were Bridge and Turnpike sets (1958), they weren’t toiling in the fields and factories or selling newspapers which added roadways into the mix. The two motorized on dirty street corners, played outside. Most did not have toys as versions of these sets (1960) were Kenner’s bestsellers we know them; some playthings were literally stuff picked up off in the Girder and Panel line-up. the ground (sticks, twigs, Moving from office buildings etc.) or whatever a clever Thomas Eakins’ “Baby at Play” (1876) shows an upper and roads to something more friend or relative could put class child with toys of the day including two types of educational, Kenner offered together. It was the chilwood blocks, alphabet squares, and architectural pieces. up two Hydro-Dynamic sets dren of the well-to-do that Courtesy Wikimedia.

(1961) designed to encourage had professionally made young engineers to understand toys. As manufactured fluid dynamics. Not many toys became cheaper and toys could make that claim. more plentiful following This was followed by three the Civil War, they became Build-A-Home sets (1962) in available to more and more response to the post-war home children. In an effort to construction boom. The largest give toys a greater purpose of these (set #16) created a than just, you know, being multi-home subdivision for all fun, attempts were made to the little urban-sprawl enthusihave playthings stimulate asts in toyland. Accessories for Build-A-Home included the mind. This is where building toys really shined. doghouses and television antennas.

Building blocks were alluded to in print as early as 1594. Practical Moving from the then-present to a short jump (one Education (1789) called blocks “rational toys” because they could teach hoped) to the then soon-to-be future, Kenner produced children about gravity and physics. It was written by Richard Lovell two Skyrail sets (1963). The Skyrail was like the famed Edgeworth, a politician and inventor, and his daughter Maria (one Disneyland monorail system first introduced in 1959 of 22 children), an author of romantic novels and children’s literabut without trestles for support. In my memory these ture. My maternal grandparents only had “acceptable toys” (nothing sets were a bit difficult to get put together right, but I related to popular culture) on hand including a big pile of wooden was observing a neighbor’s set-up in (limited) action building blocks, likely my first construction toy. These blocks were and it may have been an operator problem. I wasn’t old when I was young and had a gorgeous patina of age before I allowed to touch the controls. So, who knows? knew what patina meant (I would have guessed “dirty”). For a group Between 1964 and 1965, Kenner made some parts of young, antic children, wooden blocks were stack-and-whack toys changes and upgrades, now calling the Girder and (build it up, knock it down) and that’s mainly what we did with them.

Panel sets “Modern-As-Tomorrow” and ones with roadThere was so much learning about gravity and physics. Probably too ways “Freeway USA.” The last major Girder and Panel much. change made by Kenner before a temporary cool-down Plastics became a popular toy material after World War II. But of the line was the motorized Girdbefore and after the war, construction sets were also made of wood, stone, paper, cardboard, masonite, steel, and rubber.

There were distinctly engineering creations like wooden Tinker Toys, created in 1914 by a stonemason, and the metal Gilbert Erector Sets, invented by a former magician in 1913. These sets could create outlines of buildings but nothing that looked like an everyday live or work-in structure (though there was briefly an Erector Skyscraper set in 1935 with cardboard facade pieces). Lincoln Logs were the 1918 invention of Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John, also an architect. While children could build more or less actual structures like Abraham Lincoln’s family home, it used building techniques that were firmly rooted in the past, unlike Girder and Panel sets which were definitely of their moment.

Lincoln Logs, a classic building toy, featured construction methods used by “our forefathers” as indicated by the box (circa 1920). © Basic Fun! Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Worthpoint.

RETROFAN

March 2024

43

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

erMatic Building Sets (1965), which added the ability to make amusement park rides like a Ferris wheel and new parts to allow for a greater range of engineering play with less focus on modern structures.

Kenner had a pretty solid run as a toymaker. Most RetroFans likely recall the aforementioned Easy-Bake Oven, the Spirograph (1966), Stretch Armstrong (1976), and if you haven’t heard of the Death Star-sized popularity of the original Star Wars action figures (1978), then you probably live in a galaxy far, far away (just not the one with Darth Vader in it). All of these toys have been available to one degree or another decades beyond their introduction, the Girder and Panel Building Set included. But it was a bit of a rocky road.

In 1967, General Mills (yeah, the breakfast cereal company) bought Kenner. Rainbow Crafts, home of Play-Doh, was a division of General Mills, having been purchased in 1965. Rainbow Crafts was folded into Kenner, which in 1985 was merged into the Parker Brothers division (bought by General Mills in 1968) 44

RETROFAN

March 2024

(TOP) Examples of the possibilities when combining multiple Girder and Panel Building Sets from planning book included with each box. Collection of the author. (ABOVE) Girder and Panel Build-A-Home & Subdivision Set. TM & © Bridge Street Toys, LLC. Courtesy of Worthpoint.

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

becoming Kenner Parker Toys, Inc. Two years later, Kenner Parker was bought by Tonka (yeah, the giant metal toy trucks company).

Hasbro (of G I. Joe fame) bought Tonka, Parker Brothers, and Kenner in 1991. Parker Brothers, as a company, ended in 1998.

Tonka vehicles are still being made in metal (METAL!). However, they are not made by Hasbro but licensed from them by Basic Fun! Inc. Sadly, Kenner became defunct in 2000.

Happily, that wasn’t the end of Girder and Panel sets. During the General Mills period, Girder and Panel sets reappeared in 1974 under various configurations and names. One set, Little Learners Girder and Panels featuring World Famous Buildings with—a proportionally too big yellow exterior—Working Elevator, was the largest of the lot at 1,226 pieces. For comparison the first Girder and Panel set had 104 pieces. The World Famous Building was Chicago’s Sears Tower (now named the Willis Tower, but locals don’t call it that and neither do I). Having been to the Sears Tower, I can state with complete confidence that there is not (NOT!) a giant yellow elevator running down the side of the building. The completed set was the line’s tallest coming in at a respectable five feet tall.

Fun Fact: Back in the early Eighties I was having drinks (you know, adult stuff) on a business trip with two friends I knew from high school at the Sears Tower when a very (VERY!) elegant woman came up to one friend and said that he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. And that was the first time I ever had to call for my own taxi to get back to our shared hotel room to sleep on a cot. I also saw Jim Belushi making a movie and a dead body. Chicago!

All right, back to toys…

Girder and Panel sets ended their Kenner-branded run in 1979 as KENSTRUCT Building Sets.

A full page of Girder and Panel fun from the 1965 Sears Wishbook. TM & © Bridge Street Toys, LLC. Courtesy of christmas. musetechnical.com.

(LEFT) Promotion for the Girder-Matic motorized building set (1965). (RIGHT) Girder and Panel Hydro-Dynamic Building Set (1961).

TM & © Bridge Street Toys, LLC. Catalog page courtesy of christmas.musetechnical.com. Girder-Matic page courtesy of Worthpoint. Hydro-Dynamic box courtesy sciencehistory.org.

RETROFAN

March 2024

45

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

Other Building-Making Construction Toys AMERICAN PLASTIC BRICKS

American Plastic Bricks were a product of the Halsam Products Company. Originally, the company made wooden dominoes and “Safety” Blocks (wooden alphabet blocks with rounded corners). In the Thirties, at the request of Montgomery Ward (then a major retailer), Haslam manufactured a squared-off version of Lincoln Logs called American Logs (which ended up selling better in places that still held President Lincoln in low regard).

Halsam created American Blocks, an interlocking brick-building toy in 1939. Originally, it was made of wood like nearly everything else they produced. After the war, a plastic version was created by their new Elgo Plastics division. The edges of the red building pieces were designed to look like laid bricks. It was clearly a toy made for creating buildings. Notably, unlike some other construction toys, American Plastic Bricks were advertised to both boys and girls.

Haslam was bought out by Playskool in 1962. Eventually, Milton Bradley took over Playskool in 1984 and closed down the Playskool factory where American Plastic Bricks had once been made.

MINIBRIX

While Halsam’s Elgo American Plastic Bricks predated LEGO, it was the British building toy Minibrix that preceded them both, having been created in 1935. Minibrix, made of rubber rather than plastic, was the product of the Premo Rubber Company, a maker of rubber shoe heels. Minibrix’s focus was on structures and was produced into the Seventies.

AMERICAN SKYLINE

American Skyline was another Halsam plastic creation.

The focus of this construction toy was skyscrapers and other city structures. American Skyline ran from the late Fifties to the Sixties, ending after the Playskool purchase of Haslam.

BLOCK CITY

Block City was the product of the Tri-State Molding Company and similar to American Plastic Bricks. Block City was marketed 46

RETROFAN

March 2024

not only as a toy for the whole family but as a tool to help mom and dad plan their new home. Block City ran from 1955 into the Eighties (possibly). Meanwhile, Tri-State Molding Company has plastic containers in the collection at MoMA.

SUPER CITY

The Super City building system (1967) had a wide variety of accessory pieces and sets.

There were Building Extenders, garage doors, balconies, revolving doors, a magazine rack display diorama, a helicopter, and more. The Super City Roadway Accessory set had “Action Highway Track” for use with Ideal’s Motorific line of battery-powered slot cars (batteries and cars sold separately), trees, and model people. The Super City Landscape Set had trees, traffic signs, a mailbox, and a fire hydrant.

Ultimately, the Super City constructions were more attractive, more modern-looking, and sturdier (in my memory) than their Girder and Panel counterparts. But in the end, the consumers spoke and what they wanted was girders and panels. The main complaint about Super City was that it was too complicated, too difficult for little fingers to use (not to mention the inclusion of some very small parts). As Kenner boasted of their early Girder and Panel Building Sets: “Simple—Only 3 Basic Parts.”

Super City began disappearing from shelves in 1968.

BUILDING BLASTERS

And in a complete reversal of intention, Kenner put out “building toys” called Building Blasters in 1989. The various sets—Fuel Depot, Condemned Warehouse, Suspense Bridge (get it?), and Oil Rig—were similar in design to Girder and Panel sets. Basically they were building toys in the stackand-whack mode. Some box art may have promised balls of fire, but the reality was the sound of plastic pieces hitting the ground. Instead of gravity and physics, kids were getting a lesson in “buyer beware.” Boom.

American Plastic Bricks, Minibrix, and Block City are from the collection of the author. American Skyline and Building Blasters courtesy of Worthpoint.org.

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

(FROM TOP TO BOTTOM) 1975 Little Learners World Famous Buildings set—this is the smaller of the two sets— made impressively tall buildings. Canada’s Irwin Toys produced some sets for the U.S. market, including the City Scape model. Bridge Street Toys brought back Girder and Panel sets like the Hydrodynamic model and new sets like the Boston Manor. TM & © Bridge Street Toys. LLC. Box art courtesy of Worthpoint. Hydrodynamic package and Boston Manor are promotional images.

But wait, there’s more! Apparently, the “Girder and Panel” trademark became abandoned. Asking the U.S. Trademark office if it could take over said trademark as its own, was Irwin Toys, a Canadian company. Due to trade laws of the time, Irwin Toys made its money by importing and distributing popular American toys in the Great White North. It took over the Girder and Panel line in 1992 and created new versions not previously seen in the U.S. In fact, the new versions were barely seen in the U.S. at all. However, as trade laws changed and U.S. toy companies could now produce toys in Canada rather than go through a middleman, Irwin Toys ran into financial problems, liquidating in the early 2000s. And yet, we’re still not done with the Girder and Panel sets!

Bridge Street Toys was specifically created by chemical process engineer Paul Flack to bring back Girder and Panel to inspire his young son and other kids the way he was inspired by the toy. Bridge Street’s sets updated colors, created new configurations, and brought back older models like the Hydrodynamic sets (this time without the hyphen). Sets were assembled in the family garage.

The first Bridge Street Girder and Panel product came out in 2005 and the last in 2010. Bridge Street’s Facebook page appears to have last been active in 2013.

Paul Flack wasn’t the only kid inspired by Girder and Panel.

Noted architect Charles Renfro declared in a New York Times 2019 interview with writer Emily Spivack that he was very influenced by the Girder and Panel Building Sets. He keeps an unadorned tall, single tower construct in a window of his New York townhouse to celebrate the toy’s impact on him. Renfro, who first knew he wanted to be an architect when he was eight, realized as he began studying architecture that the Girder and Panel sets “were instrumental in teaching me the principles of modernism and making me the architect I am today.”

Building toys have not gone out of fashion, which is nice. Of course, vintage Girder and Panel sets from different eras can be found online, friendly to a variety of budgets. I even bought one in anticipation of writing this article. The simplicity of the toy was great for kids but doesn’t really hold my interest anymore. I will say this: Girder and Panel sets could make buildings taller and faster than most any other construction toy, the only limit being the willingness to put in the effort and—no getting around it—having enough pieces.

But that’s always how it is with building toys.

SCOTT SAAVEDRA is a Retro Explorer operating from his Southern California–based 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/ RETROFAN

March 2024

47

RETRO TRAVEL

Camp Crystal Lake Tours and the

‘Friday the 13th’ Trail in New Jersey

BY KELLIE B. GORMLY It’s a warm, starry August night under the towering trees deep in the northwestern New Jersey woods, where Denise Kneller, I, and a few dozen Eighties horror buffs have settled into our camp chairs for an outdoor big-screen movie.

This is no ordinary summertime fun-in-the-park night, though.

We are watching the original 1980 slasher classic Friday the 13th, right at the fictional Camp Crystal Lake where most of the movie was filmed. Indeed, just behind where we sit is the site of the opening scene where camp counselors are singing and playing guitars; it’s a dining pavilion. If you walk a little farther, you can climb the steps of a storage shed to the loft where Mrs. Voorhees—until the end, the mysterious and unseen serial killer—offed her first two victims, the counselors who slipped away from the singing for a little hanky-panky. And we just spent a few hours touring the Boy Scout–owned site called Camp NoBeBoSco in real life, and explored several cabins featured in the movie, and the iconic mini-lake and shore where the final shockers happen. The cabins at the nearly century-old camp in the Kittatinny Mountain region are filled with props, like weapons and a rubber snake, that recreate movie scenes.

Now, watching the movie outside at Camp Crystal Lake, the less rational side of me is almost expecting to hear the Friday the 13th lurking-killer calling card—“Ki Ki Ki, Ma Ma Ma,” pronounced something like “Ch Ch Ch, Ha Ha Ha”—waft from the trees.

“Oooh, this is SO cool!” I keep whispering to Kneller, like the giddy 13-year-old girl I was who discovered scary movies for the first time in 1980-something.

We just met moments ago. But at Camp Crystal Lake events— run by Crystal Lake Tours, a company made of Camp NoBeBoSco alumni who conduct the spring, summer, and fall tours—you quickly meet new people who share your same cult passion for Eighties horror.

I went for the first time in September of 2021: a three-hour daytime tour. I came back in August of 2022 for a nighttime tour plus the on-site movie screening. As I write this, I am preparing for my third trip, where I will meet Denise, her two sisters, and 48

RETROFAN

March 2024

(ABOVE) Detail from the poster of the 1983 horror classic, Friday the 13th. Its shooting location is the subject of this issue’s Retro Travel section. Don’t go into the woods!

(BELOW) Camp Crystal Lake doesn’t allow photos to be published of its facility to preserve its eerie appeal, so until you’re able to visit in person you may do so vicariously through these chilling Friday the 13th lobby cards.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) A sharp-looking prop from the movie. © Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Heritage.

her daughter for a repeat of the movie-night tour. It is a heavenly, geek-out, bucket-list item for any fan of classic horror, and especially the original Friday the 13th film. And many people, myself included, make the trip to Camp Crystal Lake and the surrounding sites on the Friday the 13th trail in Warren County, New Jersey, an annual ritual.

“You know what? It was just fantastic,” says Denise, 50, a preschool teacher from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “We enjoyed it so much. I just can’t tell you how much we raved about it when we got back.

“I think it was much more than what I expected,” says Denise, who got her first tour ticket as a birthday gift in 2022. “It wasn’t just

walking around and looking at some empty buildings. They had all the re-enactment stuff there. If you were a big fan, you knew exactly what they were talking about.”

On the Crystal Lake Tour, you will get a map of the surrounding area with marked spots of other filming sites, located in nearby Hope and Blairstown. Don’t skip this part: It is absolutely half the fun of the whole retro experience, and the vicinity will feel eerily familiar in many spots. Friday the 13th fans are easy to identify when they are exploring, says Lisa Iulo, owner of Hope Junction Antiques.

She and her husband, Charles, bought the space 18 years ago, and at the time, she didn’t know that it appeared early in the film as the general store and eatery where the doomed Annie asked for directions to Camp Crystal Lake. Coffee drinkers looked at Annie like she was crazy; that cursed camp is known as “Camp Blood!”

“Little by little, I would find out from other people about Friday the 13th,” says Lisa. She is not a horror fan, but she thinks her business’ place in pop-culture history is exciting. “I didn’t really think too much of it. But then, as years passed and they started to make a bigger deal of it, I just started getting people coming in.”

Lisa lives right across the street from her antique store, and she smiles when she looks out the window and sees fans, often dressed in black, browsing. She sometimes opens the store, even if it would otherwise be closed, just for them. Ever since the Crystal Lake Tour events started in 2011, tourism has boomed; Lisa gets customers from as far away as Australia. She sells rocks hand-painted with slasher Jason’s face, along with Camp Blood/ Camp Crystal Lake signs.

Some old-timers in the region have memories of the filming of Friday the 13th in 1979. Nancy Smith of Columbia, New Jersey, about 20 at the time, was working as a waitress at a truck stop along Route 46. Future superstar Kevin Bacon—who plays the doomed Jack Burrell, who gets killed early in the movie with an arrow in the throat—came in to eat breakfast with several Friday the 13th castmates one day. Kevin wrote his name on a napkin, handed it to Nancy, and boldly said: “You’d better hold on to this. I’m going to be famous someday.”

“I threw it away,” she recalls with a chuckle. “I was a girl working for tips.”

Kevin’s prediction turned out to be true. As for Nancy, she is not a horror fan and didn’t see the appeal of the movie or the significance of the actor at the time.

But a few years later, when she saw the famous Kevin Bacon in Footloose? Nancy started telling her story about the Friday the 13th alumnus who became a household name.

Even though Jack, his alter ego, didn’t last long.

KELLIE B. GORMLY is an award-winning, veteran journalist who writes for top publications including The Washington Post, Smithsonian, History.com, and Woman’s World. Kellie is a total retro geek and loves all things vintage pop culture, so she especially loves doing stories like this one, and meeting other fans during her adventures.

AUTHOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS for RETRO TRAVELERS CRYSTAL LAKE TOURS

The heart of the Friday the 13th trail in Warren County, New Jersey, is the tour of Camp Crystal Lake, otherwise known as Camp NoBeBoSco for Boy Scouts.

Crystal Lake Tours offers several types of tours, including shorter and longer ones, and daytime and nighttime adventures.

Tours usually are offered only in May, late August, September, and October, outside of the children’s camping season. Tours fill up fast, so follow the website and sign up for ticket alerts. crystallaketours.com.

‘FRIDAY THE 13TH’ TRAIL

The other sites are within a 15-mile radius of the camp, in and around the townships of Hope and Blairstown. I highly recommend staying at The Inn at Millrace Pond, a charming Hope inn that is unrelated to the movie but goes back to 1769. www.innatmillracepond.com And be sure to check out these other Friday the 13th spots: f Remember the scene at the beginning of the movie where the truck driver drops off a hitchhiking Annie at a cemetery—a location we now know is an ominous “Easter egg” about death to come? That is the Moravian Cemetery, located on High Street in Hope. You can park across the street and see the iron gate—a spot that looks exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. f Annie met Enos the truck driver at a general store, which is now Hope Junction Antiques on High Street. This is also the spot where Annie encounters Crazy Ralph, who creeps out the incoming camp workers with ominous but true “You’re all doomed!” warnings. You can stand outside the real estate office next door and see where Crazy Ralph rode off on his bike. f In Blairstown, eating a meal at the Blairstown Diner on Route 94 is a must. The eatery is very proud of its film history as the site where Camp Blood owner Steve Christy spent the evening of that horrific Friday the 13th in June 1980, before he returned to camp and met a grisly fate at the hands of Mrs. Voorhees. Both the outside and inside of the Blairstown Diner look familiar, and the casual fare is tasty. A giant map on the wall is marked up with the home cities of faraway visitors. www.blairstowndiner.com f After your diner meal, you can walk over to the Blairstown historic core and follow Annie’s footsteps along Carhart Street, where the First National Bank building and the adjoining tunnel she walks through look just like the movie set. That bridge Annie walks over is just a few steps away from the building.

For more information about this region of New Jersey and some of these sites, visit explorewarren.org.

RETROFAN

March 2024

49

19942024 UPDATE #1

TwoMorrows 3

www.twomorrows.com • store@twomorrows.com

IT ROSE FROM THE TOMB An all-new book written by PETER NORMANTON

Rising from the depths of history comes an ALL-NEW examination of the 20th Century’s best horror comics, written by PETER NORMANTON (editor of From The Tomb, the UK’s preeminent magazine on the genre).

From the pulps and seminal horror comics of the 1940s, through ones they tried to ban in the 1950s, this tome explores how the genre survived the introduction of the Comics Code, before making its terrifying return during the 1960s and 1970s. Come face-to-face with the early days of ACG’s alarming line, every horror comic from June 1953, hypodermic horrors, DC’s Gothic romance comics, Marvel’s Giant-Size terrors, Skywald and Warren’s chillers, and Atlas Seaboard’s shocking magazines. The 192-page full-color opus exhumes BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s darkest constructs, plus artwork by FRANK FRAZETTA, NEAL ADAMS, MIKE KALUTA, STEVE DITKO, MATT FOX, WARREN KREMER, LEE ELIAS, BILL EVERETT, RUSS HEATH, THE GURCH, and many more.

Don’t turn your back on this once-in-a-lifetime spine-chiller—it’s so good, it’s frightening!

(192-page SOFTCOVER) $31.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-123-3 • SHIPS MARCH 2024!

ALTER EGO #188

All characters TM

& © their respecti

ve owners.

Double-size 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by ROY THOMAS

A special DOUBLE-SIZE (160-PAGE) ISSUE with twin (flip) covers—one for Marvel, one for DC—celebrating 25 years of ALTER EGO at TwoMorrows! The Marvel side includes DAVID ARMSTRONG’s Comic-Con mini-interviews with JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, JIM MOONEY, & GEORGE TUSKA—plus “STAN LEE’s Dinner with ALAIN RESNAIS,” as annotated by SEAN HOWE! On the DC side: ARMSTRONG’s short talks with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOHN BROOME, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JOE KUBERT, & MURPHY ANDERSON—plus a special photo-feature on GARDNER FOX, featuring his extended family! All this, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and more! SHIPS JUNE 2024!

(160-page COLOR magazine) $21.95 (Digital Edition) $9.99 Counts as TWO ISSUES toward your subscription!

BACK ISSUE # 150 Edited by MICHAEL EURY

Back Issue #150 is our oversized 100-Page Super Spectacular sesquicentennial edition, featuring Batmen of the 1970s!

Exploring the work of Bronze Age Batman artists Bob Brown, Dick Giordano, Irv Novick, Frank Robbins, Walter Simonson, Alex Toth, & Bernie Wrightson. Plus: revisit Frank Miller’s first Batman story! SHIPS MARCH 2024!

(100-page COLOR magazine) $12.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

Get the WORLD OF TWOMORROWS anniversary book • Just 20 @ www.twomorrows.com $

WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON

GUNN FOR HIRE

BY WILL MURRAY I don’t know what NBC executives were expecting when they launched Peter Gunn in the fall of 1958. That was the TV season in which 37 Westerns aired. Peter Gunn was clearly swimming upstream. Yet the show managed to break out of the stampede of cowboy protagonists and not only survive, but is today remembered as an innovative television program.

Blake Edwards was the creator. He had written a 1949–1953 radio show called Richard Diamond, Private Detective that was so successful it crossed over into TV for four seasons. Future Fugitive star David Janssen played the role that Dick Powell had made famous on radio.

Such success in two media prompted Edwards to think he could reimagine the cliché private eye for a new series, not a radio retread. He called him Peter Gunn.

HAVE GUNN, WILL SLEUTH

According to Edwards, Gunn was “a present-day soldier of fortune who has found himself a gimmick that pays him a very comfortable living. The gimmick was trouble. People who had major trouble will pay handsomely to get rid of it, and Peter Gunn was a man who will not only accept the pay but do something about it. He knows every element of the city, from cops to crooks. He also, of course, has his soft side and will occasionally take on a charity job for free.”

Gunn was an update of Have Gun, Will Travel’s Paladin, to which it was compared when the show was announced. However,

the producer had a problem.

Peter Gunn star Craig He couldn’t find an actor who Stevens. (BELOW) Peter might embody his concept of an Gunn creator Blake urbane investigator.

Edwards, in 1966. Edwards As the man who ultimately photo: G. K. Austin/Wikimedia. Peter Gunn © Spartan Productions. accepted the role recalled it, Edwards phoned him, saying, “Look, for six months I’ve been planning a TV series. We talked about it, remember? Well, I’ve searched high and low. I’ve tested stars, and I’ve tested unknowns.

Nothing. This morning, as my wife was walking out the dressing room, she suddenly said, ‘What about Craig Stevens?’”

Stevens knew Blake socially. His wife, Alexis Smith, had worked on Edwards’ comedy, This Happy Feeling.

“Craig, I didn’t think of you at the time,” pressed Edwards. “I didn’t parallel you with what I had in mind, but all along you were really my model. Will you do it?”

Stevens was reluctant, but Edwards pushed him.

“No trench coat, no sloppy hat,” Edwards said. “You are not to be a rough type of guy.

You should be more of a Madison Avenue type; calm, correct, impeccable, but able to handle a tough situation when it comes up. I don’t want this to be just another whodunit.”

Stevens recounted, “Both Alexis and I really admired this guy, so we waited anxiously for the script to arrive. When it finally came, there was a note attached, ‘Hope you dig this thing. Blake.’”

Stevens wired back: “Dig it the most.

Peter Gunn.”

RETROFAN

March 2024

51

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

“He knew exactly what he wanted,” Stevens recalled. “When I saw the first script, I was crazy about the show. It was fresh and had good dialogue, with a situation constructed around a basic theme. After all, how novel can you get with a story about a private investigator? But Blake has given it a gloss and color and character.

“He didn’t want a detective in rumpled clothes, or a trench coat,” added Stevens. “He wanted a conservative, crewcut type in custom-tailored clothes. The first question he asked me was whether I’d have my hair cut for the pilot film. Not that my hair was so long—it was just an average leading men haircut.”

Blake spent $75,000 making the pilot. It was optioned on first showing.

“It must have been a terrific pilot,” joked Stevens. “The client even wanted us to keep the same heavy, but we couldn’t do that or we’d have the same story each week.”

GUNN MOVES IN FOR ‘THE KILL’

This was Universal’s first foray into TV. “Edwards has had a reputation as one of the best young directors in Hollywood,” Stevens recounted. “He wanted to do something in television, but not just another show. When he told people what he wanted to do, they told him he was crazy. Live music, or at least originally scored music, on a half–hour show? The kind of camera work you expect in a major movie production? They laughed at him.”

Originally, the show was going to be called Gunn for Hire. But there were rights issues with the 1942 Alan Ladd film, This Gun for Hire. So it became Peter Gunn.

No matter what it was called, Peter Gunn was bound to be a hit.

Those rival Western TV heroes had their six-shooters aimed at each other. All Gunn had to do was stick to the city side of the action and let the Nielsen ratings sort it all out.

The first episode was called “The Kill.” It opened with a police prowl car pulling over the limousine of a vice lord who had been riding high since the Twenties.

Without apparent reason, the cops shoot the man and his driver dead, then drive off.

We meet Peter Gunn at Big Al Fusary’s funeral, where his successor, played by Gavin MacLeod, questions Gunn as to what he’s doing there, departing with a veiled threat. So does police Lieutenant Charles Jacoby, who apparently has known Peter Gunn for some time and has a brittle relationship with him.

Matters heat up when Gunn goes to River Street in the unnamed city in which he operates, and takes what will become his habitual table at a waterfront nightclub called Mother’s. As played by Hope Emerson, club owner “Mother” is a crusty old dame who confides in Peter that the new crime boss is after a piece of her action. She asks Peter to go talk to him.

During the scene, Lola Albright as Edie Hart steps onto the stage and belts out her first of many signature torch songs. Before Gunn leaves on his errand, they have an intimate conversation out back, and it’s clear that the singer is hopelessly infatuated with the handsome Gunn, an emotion which Craig Stevens’ character returns.

Visiting the new gang lord in the middle of a racquetball game, Gunn gets told no for an answer. This friendly overture leads to three sticks of dynamite being planted under the floorboards of Mother’s. Boom!

Fortunately, it’s after hours, and while Mother is in the hospital, her life hanging in the balance, Peter Gunn forces one of the gang 52

RETROFAN

March 2024

Not only was Peter Gunn a stylish updating of star Richard Boone’s TV Western Have Gun, Will Travel, but both series spawned comic books from Dell—with photo covers that are prized by collectors. Have Gun, Will Travel © Warner Bros. Peter Gunn © Spartan Productions.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

meant to be deconstructionist in its way. But we never see Gavin MacLeod again, the police having picked him up on conspiracy to commit murder charges.

Well, in a half-hour show, you have to expect a certain amount of compression of narrative. It seems to me that Peter Gunn should have closed the case, even if it wasn’t officially one of his cases.

WHO IS PETER GUNN?

There’s a certain ambiguity to the character. What is he? A private investigator? An ex-cop? A soldier of fortune in mufti? “The Kill” leaves those points without clarification. And that adds to the elegant mystique of Peter Gunn.

Even Craig Stevens wasn’t certain. “I wish you hadn’t asked that,” he remarked. “We’ve finished about 24 episodes so far and I’m not quite sure.”

Eventually, he figured it out. “I play a gun for hire,” Stevens later said. “I am a troubleshooter and make my living (as Gunn, of course) solving problems other people can’t solve. The role isn’t exactly a private eye type of character. Sometimes Gunn gets paid for his services, and sometimes he works solely to see the justice is done.

So he’s not a Thin Man, a Mike Hammer, or a [Have Gun, Will Travel’s] Paladin.”

If he’s a P.I,. this first outing leaves much to be desired. The major clue in the case—the murder of the tailor who made the fake police uniforms—was brought to Gunn’s attention by Jacoby.

The show might as well have been called Lt. Jacoby—guest-starring some guy named Gunn.

Gunn does significantly better in his next caper, “Streetcar Jones.” In the episode’s opener, musician Marty Swift falls off his piano stool when the curtain opens on his performance at a rival

(ABOVE) Actor Craig Stevens thought his career had bottomed out with 1957’s The Deadly Mantis, but before long (RIGHT) Peter Gunn would put him in the winner’s circle— and in advertising that traded on his TV popularity. The Deadly Mantis © Universal Pictures. Movie poster courtesy of Heritage.

lord’s henchmen back to Mother’s at gunpoint and threatens to kill him if Mother doesn’t make it through the night.

This has a strong psychological effect. He gives up his boss.

I’m not sure what Peter Gunn expected to happen when he forced the guy to phone his boss at gunpoint and demand $50,000 to be delivered immediately to Mother’s or he will turn state’s evidence. But the phony police car shows up, and the two fake cops from the teaser step out and gun him down in the street.

Where is Peter Gunn in all this? Having been hung up by him on the phone, Edie decided to find out what was going on. When Edie barges in through Mother’s’ back door, Gunn is distracted enough for the cowering crook to hit him over the head with a bottle. Out he goes.

Fortunately for almost all concerned, Edie had also called Jacoby, and the lieutenant and his uniformed officers cut off their escape, riddling the fake cops with lead.

It’s not the most impressive resolution for a tough private eye—or whatever Peter Gunn is supposed to be. Maybe it was RETROFAN

March 2024

53

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

nightclub, the Big Eye. There’s a knife in Marty’s back. He’s dead.

A rival musician named Streetcar Jones is jailed on suspicion of the murder, having threatened Swift, who is disliked in the local music scene due to his habit of lifting other people’s tunes.

Much of the action takes place at the Big Eye. Inevitably, Gunn gets beaten up by a couple of thugs when he gets too warm. Without doing much actual detecting, he manages to figure out who the real killer is, and ends up being escorted out of the Big Eye by the two bruisers who had pummeled him earlier in the story.

It looks like Peter Gunn is in for worse than a beating. But Lieutenant Jacoby springs up from a corner table, revolver in fist, and follows them out.

(RIGHT) Fans would soon Jacoby deals rough justice to the bad be swooning as Lola was guys and the true murderer is arrested in crooning each week on Peter the club. It’s a neater climax, but once again, Gunn. © TV Guide. (BELOW) Lola the hero has to be rescued. Maybe that was Wants You, Ms. Albright’s the point. Maybe this was Blake Edwards’ 1957 album. Courtesy of Heritage. way of pulling the rug out from all the all the old hard-boiled private eye clichés.

Gunn was suave, debonair, California cool, worldly, hip, and at home in all strata of society in that era of beatnik coffee houses. He seemed to know everybody, high and low.

“It started with his environment,” explained Edwards. “My whole intention was to populate the night world of Peter Gunn with strange, unusual characters.”

These ranged from a midget pool hustler played

by Billy Barty in the recurring role of Babby to any number of oddballs and ex-cons, most attached to what passed for the counterculture in those pre-hippie days. Many investigations wove through the nightclub scene. Gunn had only to take on a case and he’d know who to talk to in order to develop a lead. This helped since he had only 22 minutes to solve a matter.

Edwards partially modeled Gunn after Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, saying, “Chandler was one of my heroes. There’s a lot of Marlowe in Gunn.”

The character’s central affectations were Edwards’ own. Edwards smoked Lucky Strikes, so did his hero.

“Gunn and I hung out in jazz clubs,” the producer added. “I’d given up booze before the first episode was shot, and I thought that should be reflected in Gunn.

After all, I made him in my own image.”

Stevens gave all credit to his producer for establishing the Gunn persona. “You see, it was Edwards who remade me to play Gunn the way he thought I 54

RETROFAN

March 2024

(LEFT) Peter Gunn stars Lola Albright and Craig Stevens, in a 1960 photograph. © Spartan Productions.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

should. He told me to get the short haircut I have. He insisted upon on the neat, expensive suits I wear. Matter of fact, everything that goes into making Gunn what he is was Edwards’ idea. He gave me a personality. I did the acting.”

It was left to Stevens to work up a backstory. “Gunn came from a family of better than average means,” he related. “His father was a professional of some kind. In high school, Gunn distinguished himself without seeming to crack a book, and as the only basketball forward who could play 60 minutes without getting his hair mussed.

Then he went to an Ivy League university—Harvard—where he breezed through a liberal arts course, switching from the boxing to the chess team when he ran out of sparring partners and managed to be late for commencement.”

The contrast between Gunn and the different social groups he encountered meant that his tailored suits mattered.

“The clothes are a detail,” allowed Stevens, “but a fairly important one.

Peter Gunn is not the usual private eye.

He’s an educated man, who might be taken for a lawyer or a young executive.

We’re trying to create a distinctive visual impression of him—a silhouette that’s tall, trim, modern, and yet roomy enough to cover a gun and a hip holster.

“We had a top tailor working on it for several months,” he revealed. “You might call the result a cross between Wall Street and Madison Avenue. It makes Peter Gunn stand out from his surroundings when he enters a Skid Row dive or mixes with rough characters. On the other hand, he looks perfectly at home at a concert, or a garden party.”

THE MUSIC OF ‘PETER GUNN’

Music was an equally huge part of Peter Gunn’s appeal, thanks to composer Henry Mancini, who recalled that when first offered the job, mistakenly assumed he was going to score a Western!

Instead, Mancini became the man who introduced jazz into episodic television.

“The Peter Gunn theme actually derives more from rock ’n’ roll than jazz,” he admitted. “I use guitar and piano in unison, playing what is known in music as an ostinato, which means obstinate. It was sustained throughout the piece, giving it a sinister effect, with some frightened saxophone sounds, and some shouting brass.”

Beyond the pulsating theme, no one had ever fused live jazz with television storylines before.

“Hank Mancini writes all the music, and it’s an integral part of every scene,” explained Lola Albright. “The music adds to the excitement of the stories.”

“Blake Edwards has set up an extraordinary combination of moods in Peter Gunn,” praised Mancini. “When you stop to analyze it, you can’t find the boundaries where the music stops and the show takes over.”

Edwards worked closely with Mancini, according to Craig Stevens. “In his delineation of the characters in each episode, he tells exactly the style of their clothes and their haircuts. He details the kind of furniture he wants on the set and works out

(CENTER) Autographed publicity photo of “Peter Gunn Theme” composer Henry Mancini. Courtesy of Heritage. (SURROUNDING) The jazzy score from the show inspired several albums. with composer Hank Mancini the type of music he needs to express all the moods he has written—from ‘beat generation’ jazz joint stuff to ‘smoky-smooth’ background scores for love scenes.”

When an album of Mancini’s Peter Gunn music was released, it sold millions. Emmys and Grammys followed.

“The jazz audience is not a vast one,” acknowledged Mancini. “It’s specific and special. We’ve reached it—and beyond it. We’re onto a larger audience by associating jazz with story and characters.”

Not until Miami Vice [see RetroFan #29—ed.] would such a melding of narrative and music be again attempted. “It’s a struggle to stay fresh and original every week,” admitted Mancini, “but as long as the show can go, I can go.”

RETROFAN

March 2024

55

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

Another musical element was chanteuse Edie Hart. Many episodes would start, stop, or end with her singing a sultry jazz standard.

For the part of Edie, Edwards remembered, “We toyed at first with the idea of getting a name singer. But we soon realized it would be impractical to have a name singer cast in what is primarily a straight dramatic role. It wouldn’t be fair, either, to the singer or the audience. Once that idea was discarded, my first thought was Lola Albright. Lola had been going along well but not terribly well, if you know what I mean. But I’d always felt she had a potential that had never really been tapped. She’s sort of two beats off center in the way she talks and sings, and that’s what we were looking for.”

(TOP) Hope Emerson, as Mother, with Stevens. (ABOVE) Herschel Bernardi as Lt. Jacoby. (RIGHT) Billy Barty as Babby, with Stevens. © Spartan Productions.

56

RETROFAN

March 2024

Albright claimed that Blake Edwards had her in mind from the outset. “But he had no idea I could sing. I had just recorded my first album.”

Henry Mancini later reminisced, “She was perfect casting for that role because she had an off-the-cuff kind of jazz delivery that was very hard to find.”

CAST CHEMISTRY

Edie was another departure from TV formula.

“In many TV adventure series,” observed Albright, “the male lead has a different girl Friday every week—maybe several. We wanted something different and offbeat. A regular girlfriend is a change of pace in a private-eye show. Edie Hart is around to give dimension to the character of Peter Gunn.”

Craig Stevens clarified, “We didn’t plan on a running girl. Lola Albright appeared in the pilot as Edie. We were going to bring her back for two or three shows, then kill her. But Lola was so great the client insisted we keep her. Now, no matter how many girls appear in the script, we always go back to Edie.”

For television at that time, their love scenes were pretty steamy.

“Blake keeps a sharp eye on them to make certain there is nothing offensive in them,” Stevens noted. “They’re written with terseness, tenderness, a sprinkling of humor here and there and played in low key.”

“We use sex as a come-on,” Edwards allowed. “You promise a little, and don’t deliver a lot.”

“We try to make it clear that our characters are having a love affair,” Albright added, “and, at the same time, keep the network censors from getting ulcers.”

“But we’ll never make the mistake of letting her catch him,” Edwards insisted. “Never.”

“The fans wouldn’t stand for us even being engaged,” Stevens pointed out. “So that’s the way the script goes.”

“I liked the idea of developing a character like Edie Hart over a period of months,” Albright revealed. “It seemed a lot more rewarding than doing a characterization just once in a live show,

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

then forgetting about it. I tried to imagine what this girl would be like. She’s a girl who likes men and understands them. She was probably married once before, but it didn’t last. She knows how to make men do what she wants, without actually pressing them….”

Herschel Bernardi as Lieutenant Jacoby also wasn’t cast as a regular. But the chemistry between he and Gunn all but mandated rethinking.

“Lieutenant Jacoby is hard working, witty, and sardonic,” Bernardi observed. “He is fond of Peter Gunn, but the real rub is that he’s only making $126 a week for his work while Pete is picking up $5000 or $6000 per case for his. When you’re playing the part,

In the second season opener, “Protection,” Mother’s is again vandalized and needs to be renovated. In the role of Mother, Minerva Urecal replaced Hope Emerson, who had accepted an offer to do another TV series, dying soon after.

“They’re both the same type of gal,” the former Tugboat Annie claimed, “only Mother wears fancier clothes. They can both take care of themselves in their tough waterfront environments.”

[Editor’s note: Salty-tongued lady sailor Tugboat Annie originated in Saturday Morning Post stories before being adapted to movies in the Thirties. In 1956–1957, future Peter Gunn actress Minerva Urecal played the sailor in the short-lived Canadian television series, The Adventures of Tugboat Annie.]

In the next episode, “Crisscross,” Mother’s jazz club becomes upscale, with a waterside terrace on the other side of a sliding glass wall.

Now 40, Stevens had grown comfortable in the role. “This season, as Gunn, I’ve had more situations and entirely different scenes than I’ve ever had in straight TV acting or even in movies. I’m fascinated with the role.

Peter Gunn © Spartan Productions.

FAST FACTS

Minerva Urecal replaced Hope Emerson as Mother for the second season. © Spartan Productions. that’s the thing you must keep thinking about, that’s how you achieve that suggestion of friction between them.”

Bernardi played Jacoby as Gunn’s world-weary opposite number.

“The whole idea is to have me look tired, and poor—but never defeated.”

His character turned out to be as innovative as Albright’s. Reallife police applauded his refreshingly cliché-free portrayal.

“I really don’t know anything much about police work,” Bernardi admitted. “But the nice part was that it showed that we’ve done what we set out to do—we’ve humanized the policeman in a private-eye show.

“I was the worst cop in the world,” he quipped, “always getting the gun caught in the holster. I guess I broke half a dozen wristwatches putting the handcuffs on fellow actors. But the series had great style. Peter Gunn owed 32 suits. Jacoby was a two-suit detective.”

Actually, Craig Stevens maintained a personal wardrobe of some 40 suits—each one in duplicate so if one was damaged in a fight, he could switch to its fresh counterpart for a love scene.

On Friday, February 13, 1959, Herschel Bernardi broke his leg in a traffic accident. After missing five episodes, the character of Jacoby ends up hospitalized, too, thanks to a gangster’s bullet in “Bullet for a Badge.” Two episodes later, Edie lands in the same ward, the victim of a vengeful Gunn enemy—which proved convenient for filming.

PETER GUNN f No. of seasons: Three f No. of episodes: 114 f Original run: September 22, 1958–September 18, 1961 f Created by: Blake Edwards f Primary cast: Craig Stevens, Lola Albright, Herschel Bernardi, Hope Emerson, Minerva Urecal f Theme song: “Peter Gunn Theme” by Henry Mancini f Network: NBC (1958–1960), ABC (1960–1961)

SPIN-OFFS AND REMAKES: f Gunn… Number One! (a.k.a. Gunn) (Blake Edwards– directed theatrical film released June 28, 1967, starring Craig Stevens as Peter Gunn, Laura Devon as Edie, Ed Asner as Jacoby, and Helen Traubel as Mother) f Peter Gunn (Blake Edwards–directed television pilot film aired April 23, 1989, starring Peter Strauss as Peter Gunn, Barbara Williams as Edie, Peter Jurasik as Jacoby, and Pearl Bailey as Mother) RETROFAN

March 2024

57

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

Drawing Gunn Time! (LEFT) “Peter Goon,” scripted by Paul Laikin and drawn by Jack Davis, spoofed the show in Cracked #12 (Jan. 1959). Here’s page 1 of the original art. (ABOVE) A Season Three Peter Gunn illo by artist Rupert Thompson. (BELOW) Stevens, Albright, and Bernardi, by Screen Facts magazine cartoonist Al Kilgore, in a Peter Gunn promo. All, courtesy of Heritage. Peter Gunn © Spartan Productions.

“I’ve learned more in the few months that I’ve been working on Peter Gunn than I have in years,” continued Stevens. “The role is not one-dimensional as one might think. The scripts give me a great scope and cover a wide variety of acting chores. Most of the writing is done by Blake Edwards, who directs every other show in the series.”

“For a man who was a writer,” countered director Lamont Johnson, “his choice of scripts was pretty mediocre. He expected that the wonderful people that he had—Herschel Bernardi, Craig Stevens, and sort of kookie directors—would make something out of it. I would complain. ‘Blake, this last act is stupid! What are you doing?’ He says, ‘You’re the director. You fix it.’ He put you on your honor. And also on your imagination.”

The remarkable thing about Peter Gunn was that it revived the fortunes of its principal cast.

Stevens’ film career had just hit bottom when he starred in 1957’s The Deadly Mantis.

“I was in movies for 20 years,” he lamented, “and they’d throw a script on my lawn and say, ‘Just learn your lines. That’s all we 58

RETROFAN

March 2024

want.’ I pleaded to be allowed to play heavies. But always the second lead. I used to call them ‘Willards.’ I never got the girl.”

Stevens contemplated quitting showbiz.

“I guess it’s pretty well known that I was considered just another ‘B’ movie guy until Blake Edwards persuaded me to cut my hair and play Peter Gunn,” he explained. “Something in my vanity rebelled, but to be perfectly honest about it, I never should have had my hair long the way it was. I used to have those grand waves that I imagined actors were supposed to show off to the girls. The proof that it was wrong is that nothing ever happened to me professionally until I cut it.”

Herschel Bernardi was a type that producers called “dependable,” and owned what he called a “utility face.”

“But thanks to Blake Edwards,” he said, “I have made a major breakthrough in casting. Blake is an original thinker, and he was the first to let me play a cop. Up till then no one would have me as a

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

member of the law. I didn’t have the face. I was just right for parts for 50-year-old men, but I couldn’t go any lower. Now I’m a cop, and I play my own age. You know what actors hear nowadays when they apply for a cop part on a TV show? Producers say, ‘We need a kind of Lt. Jacoby type.’ I’m in fashion.”

Lola Albright was just another starlet in a surging sea of talent.

“I just wanted to be an actress,” she admitted freely. “I played bit parts in the movies for several years before I got a good role in [the 1948 film] Champion, but even after complementary reviews in that, and more than 200 TV appearances, my career didn’t seem to be going anywhere. My whole career had been sort of ordinary. Peter Gunn changed all that.”

GUNNED DOWN

Early in 1960, Peter Gunn seemed to be riding high. Rank imitations like Johnny Staccato popped up. There was talk of filming episodes in Europe, and a Peter Gunn feature was in development.

“They’ve imitated us so much on TV that we’ve just got to move our boy to the larger screen,” Stevens revealed, adding cryptically, “I may actually be Gunn in the movie—or maybe I’ll be some other character. But whoever I play will have the qualities people like about Gunn.”

Inexplicably, ratings began sliding.

“I didn’t expect us to stay at the very top, and I’m glad we’ve settled down as just a successful show,” observed Stevens. “After all, there’s only one direction you can take if you camp near the summit like a sitting duck.”

NBC cancelled the show. But ABC picked it up.

The first episode of Season Three was the Hitchcockian “The Passenger.” Several episodes were set in Central and South America for a change of place— and pace.

Minerva Urecal left the show, unhappy with her diminished part. Mother’s is replaced by a supper club called Edie’s and the maître d’ cuisine is named Leslie, played by James Lanphier. The episode that introduces them was called “The Maître D’.” Due in part to its jazz background, Black performers appeared more often on Peter Gunn than most shows of that era.

Everyone seemed content, although Herschel Bernardi expressed an interest in depicting Jacoby’s home life.

“I think it would add some interest to the show if I acquired a wife and some kids, and if Gunn came over and dragged me away from drying dishes, or mowing the lawn to work on the case,” he suggested.

Imitators and parallel shows mushroomed. 77 Sunset Strip, Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6—all Warner Bros. productions—ran an hour. Poor Peter Gunn was stuck at 30 minutes, so he never got to stretch his wings or investigate more complex plots.

That, perhaps, more than anything, explains why Peter Gunn, although a ratings success, lasted only three seasons.

(TOP) Edwards and Stevens weren’t yet done with the TV gumshoe when they brought back the character in the 1967 theatrical release Gunn… Number One! Poster courtesy of Heritage. (LEFT) Peter Strauss, in an ABC publicity photo for the 1989 Peter Gunn telemovie. © Spartan Productions.

Stevens later claimed that he and Edwards cancelled the series by mutual agreement when Edwards got busy with film projects, fearing the series would suffer in inferior hands.

In a classy and unusual move, they saved one first-run episode, “Murder on the Line,” for the final week when the show went off the air.

That seemed to close the book on Peter Gunn. After Blake Edwards’ film career took off, he dusted off his idea of a Gunn feature in 1967.

“I always felt that it had all the ingredients for a movie, and so did Blake,” Stevens noted. “It just was a question of timing—when all concerned could get together.”

Unfortunately, all other key roles were recast. Ed Asner became Lt. Charles Jacoby. Pearl Bailey was the new Mother.

RETROFAN

March 2024

59

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

“It’s a fascinating thing to find the character of Gunn again,” reflected Stevens. “There are some modifications of the TV personality, but he is essentially the same. His apartment is a little more plush than it was, but he still hangs out at Mother’s, the gin mill, with the pretty girl singer. But instead of Lola Albright, the girl will be Laura Devon in the movie version.”

When a mobster who once saved his life is murdered, Peter Gunn investigates with a vengeance, working his way through the Sixties counterculture.

“This is not a takeoff on the character,” Stevens promised. “I didn’t just want to use my image, which is what producers wanted of me in the past. This is Peter Gunn, and expanded. The movie gives us a wider range. It is still the same. Low key, but in color.

We’ve got our cameraman from the series, Joe Lathrop.”

Henry Mancini also returned. But found it a challenge. “I can’t go back and do the same score that I did for the TV series in 1959–60.

That has become almost a caricature nowadays. So, except for the theme music and the song called ‘Dreamsviille,’ I’ve been forced to concoct a brand-new score.”

“The six years that had passed since the TV Peter Gunn went off the air had seen swelling changes, not only in jazz, but in all phases of the pop music spectrum,” Edwards acknowledged.

Mancini had an uncredited role as a piano player.

Regrettably, Gunn… Number One!, as it was optimistically announced, flopped.

But that was not the end of Peter Gunn. In 1977, radio-turned-TV scriptwriter E. Jack Newman was asked to pen a 90-minute TV movie with Craig Stevens returning to the role. Regrettably, Blake Edwards’ film commitments interfered.

60

RETROFAN

March 2024

Another revival was floated in 1984 with Robert Wagner taking the part of Gunn. When the project finally went to camera in 1989, Peter Strauss had replaced him. Peter Jurasik was Jacoby, while Blake Edwards’ daughter, Jennifer, became the new Edie, again back at Mother’s. Edwards both wrote and directed this project.

Despite promising reviews and ratings, ABC inexplicably declined to move ahead with the planned TV series. The project marked the end of the long career of Peter Gunn.

“It didn’t work,” Edwards later admitted. “The guy who played Peter Gunn just wasn’t Peter Gunn.”

Since that time, several attempts to relaunch Peter Gunn were undertaken. None have jelled. Yet, despite its ultimate failure to thrive, Peter Gunn is better remembered than most of its imitators.

I imagine someone will one day revive Gunn, but without Craig Stevens, I wouldn’t bet on success. Peter Gunn was a man of his time and his brief era is long gone.

“A successful television series, like Peter Gunn, is all a matter of timing and taste,” reflected Craig Stevens in 1973. “The Gunn series had a perfect blend of intrigue, humor, and human drama that so far has not been matched by the recent series along that line. I doubt if Peter Gunn will ever return.”

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.

ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING

© D’Angelo Productions.

Run, Joe, Run’

William P. D’Angelo

Big John, Little John © D’AngeloBullock-Allen Productions.

BY ANDY MANGELS Welcome back to Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning, your constant guide to the shows that thrilled us from yesteryear, exciting our imaginations and capturing our memories. Grab some milk and cereal, sit cross-legged leaning against the couch, and dig into Retro Saturday Morning! This issue, you get a double-dip into two live-action Saturday morning shows with some impressive pedigrees… and I’m not talking just about the dog in Run, Joe, Run! It’s our look a two NBC series from DBA Productions!

WHO WAS DOING BUSINESS AS DBA?

Harvey Bullock

Raymond S. Allen

DBA was better known as D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions, and 1974 was D’Angelo’s debut to provide content for Saturday morning television… but not the trio’s debut at enticing kids to watch television! Although the company started as D’Angelo Productions, it eventually morphed into a trio of producers at DBA’s head: William P. D’Angelo, Harvey Bullock, and Raymond S. Allen.

• William P. D’Angelo cut his teeth in the Sixties as a writer, director, and producer for such series as No Time for Sergeants; Love, American Style; and Room 222, though his biggest success was as an associate producer for the mammoth hit series, Batman.

• Harvey Bullock is the name of one of the Gotham P.D.’s most famous characters in the Batman comics, but it’s also the name of a writer and series creator since 1954, who worked on The Real McCoys, Rango, Gomer Pyle USMC, and many of the same shows that Raymond Allen wrote for.

• Raymond S. Allen (born Morris Saffian) had been a writer in Hollywood since 1956, toiling on scripts for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Andy Griffith Show, The Danny Thomas Show, a 1964 Archie TV film based on the comics, The Flintstones, Hogan’s Heroes, and Love, American Style.

As D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions, the trio individually or collectively produced six live-action Saturday morning shows RETROFAN

March 2024

61

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

for NBC mornings: Run, Joe, Run (1974–1975), Westwind (1975–1976), McDuff, The Talking Dog (1976), Big John, Little John (1976), Monster Squad (1976) [see feature article in RetroFan #29—ed.], and The Red Hand Gang (1977).

Although this output would seem to rival Filmation and Krofft for live-action Saturday morning shows, none of the DBA Productions shows were terribly popular, and several didn’t even air all of their episodes prior to cancellation.

LASSIE + RIN-TIN-TIN + THE FUGITIVE = RUN, JOE, RUN

Dogs and Hollywood have had a long love affair. In 1905, the short British film Rescued by Rover starred a collie that helped save a kidnapped baby; that film had major impact on the tyro film industry, including being the first film to pay its actors! Strongheart was a German Shepherd that headlined six adventure films from 1921–1927, becoming the first “canine film star.”

Pete, the ring-eyed American Staffordshire Terrier pup, appeared in Buster Brown and Our Gang theatrical shorts and films from 1927 through the World War II era.

Rin Tin Tin was a German Shepherd, rescued on the French battlefields in World War I, and brought back to America, where he became the silent film star of 27 movies, and the star of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin from 1954–1959. Lassie, a Rough Collie, starred in their first Hollywood film, Lassie Come Home, in 1943, and 11 later sequels, plus a TV series from 1954–1973, and an animated series from Filmation, Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, in 1972. Benji, a mutt shelter dog that debuted in his own film in 1974, had previously been seen in Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Beverly Hillbillies.

Other famous dogs onscreen included Toto the Cairn Terrier in The Wizard of Oz (1939); Old Yeller, a lab/ mastiff mix whose 1957 film made millions cry [RetroFan will be interviewing Old Yeller co-star Beverly Washburn next year in issue #38—ed.]; and the animated stars of The Lady and the Tramp (1955)… not to mention Mickey Mouse’s dog Pluto (debuting in 1930) and whatever the heck Goofy (debuting 1932) is supposed to be. Many of these dog films and series were seen regularly on syndicated TV stations on the weekends, the perfect time for kids to either cuddle up with their own dogs to watch, or beseech their parents for a puppy.

Producer Bill D’Angelo told the Los Angeles Times in a July 1974 interview how his own dog show—Run, Joe, Run—came to be, saying, “Richard Landau brought this idea to me about four years ago when I was producing Love, American Style. Okay, it’s The Fugitive, it’s Run for Your Life. But they were Les Misérables. The part Whiting plays, the trainer, I think of as Ahab in Moby Dick. Joe is his white whale. Not that he wants to kill him or lock him up. The dog just doesn’t understand…

“We tried for years to sell this as a prime-time show but no network was interested,” D’Angelo continued. “Last winter, Joe Teritoro [vice-president of children’s programming] at NBC asked if I’d do it as a kid show. I’d never done a kid show, but this was a chance to open my own shop: D’Angelo Productions. So here we are. I don’t expect to stay in kid television, but it’s a fantastic place to work. No 62

RETROFAN

March 2024

The role of Joe in Run, Joe, Run was played by German Shepherd first-time animal actor Heinrich (D’Angelo). © D’Angelo Productions.

network committees. I have a problem, I go in and talk to Teritoro.

You don’t know what it means to produce on a television show where you talk with a real person instead of a committee of vice presidents.”

Teritoro told the Associated Press in May 1974 that he had “concern for what my own children watch,” and thus had ordered more live shows. For Run, Joe, Run, he said, “We had a similar concept presented to us in animation. But we went with the live-action show because the appeal is that of a real dog.”

Veteran screenwriter Richard H. Landau created the series, with the plot that a German Shepherd named Joe, training in the Army’s K-9 corps after serving in Vietnam, was accused of attacking his master. Joe was scheduled to be euthanized, but he escaped, and a $200 bounty was put on his head. Pursuing him was his trainer, Sergeant Will Corey (Arch Whiting), who knew that Joe was innocent, and was trying to find Joe before the establishment did.

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

The plots for Run, Joe, Run, were strikingly similar to ABC’s 1963–1967 series The Fugitive, in which a man falsely accused travels the country, helping people along the way [RetroFan will pursue The Fugitive in issue #39!—ed.]. Joe was pursued by bounty hunters, but still found time to help a railway station guard, help a youth get back into school, join the fire department, become part of a dolphin act, save an American Indian boy from a bear attack, solve a jewel heist, aid a mute boy and a blind girl, and keep one step ahead of bounty hunters!

THE DOG, THE MEN, AND THE MOUSE

Casting the lead dog was simple; Joe was played by D’Angelo’s own 16-month-old German Shepherd, Heinrich, who already had Hollywood in his blood; his mother was owned by William Self, head of production at 20th Century Fox where D’Angelo had previously worked. “It’s not nepotism,” D’Angelo told the Los Angeles Times.

“We interviewed lots of dogs before Heinrich got the job.” He also related that the casting was causing strife at home. “Heinrich belongs to my kids. The other day at 3:30 a.m., my 7-year-old, Billy, set his alarm and got up to see Heinrich off to work and tell him: ‘We don’t feel bad about your being away. Your career comes first.” For stunts and heavy running, Heinrich was doubled by a similar-looking German Shepherd named Augustus von Schumacker, or “Gus.” Heinrich’s trainer was animal specialist Karl Miller, who said in a June 1976 interview that, “With a dog this young, no matter how smart he is, he’s just a kid, and you have to be patient with him. I was sure he had done well in his training, but the scary part came when I took him on the set the first week.” Joe had a problem not being playful on set and greeting everyone, but by week two, he had calmed down.

“It’s amazing how fast he caught on. In another year he’ll be a real ‘old pro.’” Head cameraman Alan Stevensvold added that, “He’s such a beautiful animal, I have to keep reminding myself he’s still a puppy so I won’t pat him and distract him. He still has a tendency to run to the last one who patted him.”

Miller later revealed one of his secrets of training Heinrich to TV Guide. “Audiences expect a [S]hepherd’s ears to stand up all the time. If you took enough time, you could teach him to keep them up. Or you could prop them up. The mouse is easier.”

(ABOVE) Title card to Run, Joe, Run. (LEFT) Arch Whiting as Sgt. William Corey and his co-star Heinrich as Joe. © D’Angelo Productions.

RETROFAN

March 2024

63

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

The second season of Run, Joe, Run featured a new human co-star, Chad States as Josh McCoy. © D’Angelo Productions.

The mouse he was referring to as a gray and yellow mouse Miller kept in a cage, which he would jiggle to perk Heinrich’s ears up.

Why were they down? Because Shepherds are friendly, and instinctively let their ears flop back when petted… something the co-stars often needed to do in the scenes.

Cast in the lead role of Sgt. William Corey was six-foot-one actor Arch Whiting (real name: Harold Joseph Archambault), whose main role to that point had been as radio engineer Sparks on Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but who had also worked as a producer on The Ed Sullivan Show and cinematographer on feature films. Whiting’s name was brought up to the series’ casting director, who said, “Whiting would be great as Corey, but I think he just left for the Cannes Film Festival and you start shooting on Monday!” In those olden days before cell phones, a quick call to Whiting’s home caught him as he was about to walk out the door to leave; intrigued by the series offer, he unpacked his bags and signed aboard!

Whiting was interviewed by talk show host Bobbie Wygant about the series in 1974. Discussing Miller’s training, Whiting said, “I don’t give him any commands myself. They’re all given off-camera by Karl, and the dog responds beautifully.” He also revealed that his personal dog, Ragmop, was a “poolie” (a poodle/ collie cross) that he had found in the street and adopted. Whiting 64

RETROFAN

March 2024

gave Wygant a more precise history of the series than the show itself gave, saying, “Joe is an attack-trained war dog… He and I spent three years together in Vietnam and we came back to the United States for debriefing. And there was an incident where the trust between the two of us was broken. The love is still there, but the trust has been broken. And I’m just trying to get the trust back. And I keep chasing him. We have confrontations… and he turns and runs because he just doesn’t trust me anymore.”

A co-star in one episode was 11-year-old actress Michele Riskas, whom Joe rescued in a forest because she was blind and lost.

“Working with Joe was great,” she told the press, “but they made me work with a snake and it was… ugh! It was awful. The snake was frozen and it never moved. But… ooh… I hated it.”

Production on Run, Joe, Run began in the Los Angeles area in early June. One episode was shot on the Agoura ranch owned by Governor Ronald Reagan. The cast and crew had to be extra careful because the area they shot in was dense with poison oak. As for the scripts, child psychologist Barbara Mills reviewed each one prior to shooting. Production of the 13-episode first season wrapped in August, with more than enough time to complete it prior to debut.

Run, Joe, Run, debuted on NBC on September 7, 1974, alongside two other debut shows: the Krofft live-action series Land of the Lost [see RetroFan #24—ed.] and the Hanna-Barbera animated series Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. In its early time slot, the dog series was up against two animated sitcom spin-offs: ABC’s The New Adventures of Gilligan and CBS’s Partridge Family 2200 A.D. For promotional purposes, on October 13th, “Joe” was the canine Grand Marshal of the 7th Annual Hollywood Dog Parade. Sometime in 1975, Heinrich was also named “German Shepherd Dog-of-the-Year” by the German Shepherd Dog Club.

Popular enough to score a second season, Run, Joe, Run was overhauled for the new set of 13 episodes. As the opening narration

FAST FACTS

RUN, JOE, RUN f No. of seasons: Two f No. of episodes: 26 f Original run: September 7, 1974–September 25, 1976 f Created by: Richard H. Landau f Studio: D’Angelo Productions f Network: NBC

PRIMARY CAST f Paul Frees: Narrator f Arch Whiting: Sgt. William Corey (Season One) f Chad States: Josh McCoy (Season Two) (TOP) Ad detail from TV Guide for NBC’s 1974 Saturday line-up. © D’Angelo Productions.

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

Chad and Joe have a heart to heart while having a light meal in a diner. Note the illustrations on the upper right of the diner wall of a coyote and a roadrunner (an inside joke, perhaps?). © D’Angelo Productions.

shared, “Before he can prove Joe’s innocence, Sergeant Corey is ordered back to active duty. Then, Joe meets Josh McCoy, a new and permanent friend who doesn’t know about Joe’s past. Together they work their way across the country, finding new friends and adventures wherever they go.” Actor Chad States was cast as Josh McCoy, and although he didn’t appear much past the opening credits, Arch Whiting was given a co-starring credit. States has few Hollywood credits, and appears to have disappeared from the industry after 1978.

Run, Joe, Run’s second season debuted on September 6, 1975, and ended on September 25, 1976 (although some markets still showed it until at least December, including NBC stations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota). The series did also air in Australia and Great Britain. It has never been rerun, and may never have even been syndicated, probably due to only having 26 episodes.

TWO ACTORS—ONE ROLE

While D’Angelo Productions produced the first two Saturday shows solo—Run, Joe, Run, and Westwind—the third series was produced by the newly formed D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions. It was Big John, Little John, another live-action series, this time with a bit of a magical twist. DBA hired writer/producer Sherwood Schwartz—the creative force and Emmy-winner behind The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island—and his son, Lloyd Schwartz, to

Lloyd Schwartz

Sherwood Schwartz create the new series, and he conceived of a storyline in which a 40-year-old schoolteacher on vacation in Florida accidentally takes a sip from the fabled Fountain of Youth. The effect it has on him is to cause him to occasionally and unexpectedly transform into the 12-year-old version of himself within seconds! This is tough as not only does he have a wife, he has a 14-year-old son who loves to tease his new younger father.

Cast in the lead role of Big John Martin was Herb Edelman, a 42-year-old Broadway actor who had come to Hollywood and RETROFAN

March 2024

65

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

worked almost continuously in film and television. Balding and plain-looking, Edelman was hardly anybody’s idea of a leading man, but that made him perfect for the harried man who was at the core of the Saturday morning show. And at six-foot-five, he certainly fit the “Big” part of his sobriquet! “I’m really excited about it,” Edelman said of Big John, Little John in an August 1976 interview.

“There’ll be some impromptu comedy and a great many serious stories for youngsters.”

Little John Martin was cast with 12-year-old Robbie Rist, a blondhaired moppet that seemed to be everywhere on television thanks to commercial work. With his bowl haircut and round glasses, Rist was the spitting image of popular folk/country singer John Denver.

Rist was most famous for his role as the ill-fated Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch; introduced in the final six episodes as a way to bring in a new young cast member, Oliver was despised by Brady fans and had the unlucky job of reciting the last lines ever of the popular sitcom. The Brady Bunch series’ creators “used me for Big John, Little John, so I don’t think they had a problem with my skills,” Rist would later joke on the Classic Conversations podcast.

“It was a weird show, totally,” Rist said in a 2015 interview with Paul K. Bisson for Cyborgs: A Bionic Podcast. “I think it’s a whole thing about puberty. That’s the whole underlying theme… is how much of a pain in the ass puberty is. I mean, The Exorcist is about puberty, too. So, The Exorcist, Big John, Little John, yeah. [laughs] I’ve talked to Lloyd Schwartz. I think that in a Freaky Friday kind of way, Big John, Little John would make a great movie now. Now you just make Herb

66

Edelman a workaholic who sneaks away from his family to make a cell phone call that he’s not supposed to, gets lost, drinks from the Fountain of Youth… Boom! It writes itself.”

The third main member of the cast, and the one who got to react to the changing ages of her husband the most, was Joyce Bulifant, cast as wife Marjorie Martin. She had been a recurring character on the 1966 Dr. Kildare series, then appeared often as Marie Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore show, from 1971–1977. Mike Darnell played the son, Ricky Martin, and he was the only other person on the show who knew the truth about what was going on with his father. Bulifant had worked for the DBA producers before on Love, American Style, while Rist had previously appeared in an episode of Run, Joe, Run. Not only had Bulifant worked with the producers, but she almost worked with the Schwartzes on something bigger: she was their pick for mom Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch! Having signed a seven-year contract for the series, while she was trying on wardrobe choices for Carol, the Schwartzes had to break the news to her that the network was forcing them to use Florence Henderson instead. “Sherwood said, ‘The next thing I do, you’re gonna be in,’” Bulifant told on the Classic Conversations podcast. “And I was. It was a show called Big John, Little John. It was a Saturday morning show with Herb Edelman. But man, I was in it. He kept his word!”

That wasn’t the only connection the show had for Bulifant. Big John, Little John’s final episode was written by Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and James S. Abrahams, the brilliant writers/directors/

Robbie Rist as Little John Martin. © D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen

Herb Edelman as Big John Martin.

Productions (DBA).

© DBA.

RETROFAN

March 2024

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

producers behind some of the Seventies and Eighties comedy films. In 1980, they cast Bulifant as Mrs. Davis in the legendary film Airplane! Mrs. Davis is the mother of the tragically ill daughter Lisa, who has an unfortunate run-in with a singing stewardess and a guitar.

The transformation of Big John to Little John and back again was nowhere near as exciting as that of Billy Batson to Captain Marvel. A close-up of Edelman’s face, in front of a grayish wall, dissolved into a second shot of him with a younger hairpiece on, then two more shots of younger, unnamed actors, before the shot changed to Robbie Rist, blinking rapidly in front of the same gray wall. It was a laughable effect, and was nowhere near as charming as seeing Rist wander around in the suit and hat of his older self, six sizes too big for him. Although it was only in the transformation scenes, Edelman’s hairpiece was used regularly in the series; Rist’s strawberry blond hair was died darker to better match Edelman’s.

On the show, Little John is explained to the students Big John teaches, and to his primary, as a visiting nephew; comedy generally followed though when Little John would appear, as his clothes never fit, and the disappearance of Big John would have to be explained somehow, usually in wildly improbable ways. The series succeeded though in allowing Little John to understand the problems and feelings of Seventies youth.

In a website interview with Joe Oesterle, Rist spoke about his co-stars: “Herb Edelman was an amazing character actor, but he probably wouldn’t get work in TV today. He’s not scrubbed-looking enough. Barney Miller was a great show. Great comedic actors—but the cast of Barney Miller could not get work on a TV show today.

(LEFT) Joyce Bulifant as Marjorie Martin, wife of Big John and, one presumes, Little John as well. (RIGHT) Olive Dunbar was the principal at the school where Big John was a teacher. (BELOW) Big John’s son Ricky, played by Mike Darnell, teases his dad in his Little John form. © DBA.

RETROFAN

March 2024

67

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

Come on. David Schwimmer played the ‘ethnic guy’ on Friends. Is he that ethnic? Television is homogenizing everything about our culture.”

Big John, Little John debuted on September 11, 1976, along with other new NBC shows Muggsy, The Kids from CAPER, and two other new D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions, McDuff, The Talking Dog and Monster Squad. Big John, Little John was up against CBS’s animated mystery show Clue Club and ABC’s The Krofft Supershow.

Critics were kind, however; a Washington Post review said, “NBC’s Big John, Little John is funnier than most of the situation comedies that make it to prime time… [Rist] is hilarious flopping around in oversized suits and hats… The program isn’t only cute; it has a solid basis in the generation gap. Big John learns about children’s attitudes from being Little John.”

Unfortunately, Big John, Little John, came in third in ratings. By December, Sonny Fox had been installed as NBC’s new vice president of children’s programming, replacing Joe Teritoro. Fox told the press, “I think next year we’ll all be more heavily into the animation form again.” Liking Big John, Little John, he moved a cartoon series in front of it, hoping it would help, but the show seemed fated to lose.

Even a double-appearance by both Edelman and Rist on Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon in September 1977 didn’t help.

Although Big John, Little John was cancelled for the Fall 1977 season, airing last on September 10th—it remained on the air in

FAST FACTS

BIG JOHN, LITTLE JOHN f No. of seasons: One f No. of episodes: 13 f Original run: September 11, 1976–September 10, 1977 f Created by: Sherwood Schwartz f Studio: D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions, Redwood Productions

PRIMARY CAST f Herb Edelman: Big John Martin f Robbie Rist: Little John Martin f Joyce Bulifant: Marjorie Martin f Mike Darnell: Ricky Martin f Olive Dunbar: Principal Bertha Bottomly f Kristoff St. John: Homer f Cari Anne Warde: Valerie f Stephen H. Cassidy: Stanley (TOP) Ad detail from TV Guide for NBC’s 1976 Saturday line-up. © DBA. (LEFT) Little John and Marjorie share an awkward moment. (BELOW) Big John is a science teacher who begins to understand his students better by seeing them through Little John’s eyes. © DBA.

68

RETROFAN

March 2024

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

A sampling of the limited merchandice based on Big John, Little John and Run, Joe, Run. © D’Angelo Productions and D’Angelo-Bullock-Allen Productions.

some markets—including Florida and Alabama—through early November. It never made it to syndication, but was offered in the British market and Guam.

THE LEGACY OF THE SHOWS

Sadly, almost the entire Saturday morning output of D’AngeloBullock-Allen Productions is impossible to find in America, and for some shows, anywhere in the world.

Most of the principal cast and crew of Run, Joe, Run have passed away. Heinrich himself passed in 1978 from degenerative myelopathy (which had been brought on by a fall while filming the feature The Courage of Kavik the Wolf Dog). The concept of the show—itself borrowed from The Fugitive and Les Misérables—would be seen again in the CBS comic-based series The Incredible Hulk.

Some Run, Joe, Run merchandise was released. Kenner released a companion toy to their own Duke dog line with a dog action figure for Run, Joe, Run, “The Super Action Dog with Canyon Slide!” ViewMaster released a set of stereo film reels, adapting the first season episode, “Little Big Bear Hunter.” Whitman publishing released the Run, Joe, Run Coloring Book. The oddest bit of licensing was the Run, Joe, Run Ben Cooper costume, which consisted of a vacuuformed plastic dog mask and a flame-retardant bodysuit which had the title, dog, and yelling soldier on the top, and olive-drab pants on the bottom.

Run, Joe, Run is not available on DVD or home media anywhere in the world, nor any streaming sites. Although many episodes used to be on YouTube, they have all been taken down except for one: “Sunken Treasure” is on actor Robbie Rist’s personal YouTube channel.

As for Big John, Little John, three members of the principal cast are still alive: Bulifant is retired and in her late eighties; Rist has worked as an actor, musician, and producer for years, including in 2013’s Sharknado, for which he also co-wrote and produced the music. But he’s best known for his voiceover work, including as the voice of Leonardo in the 1984–1986 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films; and older brother Mike Darnell was the king of reality TV at Fox for 19 years, and was the president of unscripted and alternative television at Warner Bros. until retiring in July 2023.

Fans looking to watch Big John, Little John have a few options— the pilot is on YouTube and the Internet Archives, but more importantly, the UK’s Fabulous Films released Big John, Little John: The Complete Series as a two-disc set in October 2009, with a rerelease in October 2012. The discs are readily available on Amazon and some online retailers, although they are in PAL format and may not play on some DVD machines.

Of the six live-action Saturday morning shows of D’AngeloBullock-Allen Productions, we’ve now covered three of them: Monster Squad (in RetroFan #29), and Run, Joe, Run and Big John, Little John here. If there’s enough interest, in the future, I may cover Westwind, McDuff, The Talking Dog, and The Red Hand Gang.

Let the editor and I know if you’d like that!

We’ll see you in the next issue of RetroFan as we take a muchrequested look at the cool history of Thundarr the Barbarian!

Unless otherwise credited, artwork and photos are courtesy the collection of Andy Mangels.

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 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, released by Abdo Books in 2021. He is currently working on a series of graphic novels for the online game Planet Xolo, three Kickstarter graphic novels, and a book about the stage productions of Stephen King, as well as Bookazine projects (available at any grocery store checkout) on Ant-Man, Iron Man, The Little Mermaid, Chadwick Boseman, and Aquaman. 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

March 2024

69

RETRO SCI-FI

n r u t i e B R nn e m i T n dn

Revisiting Time After Time with Writer-Director Nicholas Meyer and Actors Malcolm McDowell and David Warner

BY ANTHONY TAYLOR

my novel in which Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud, was the number one bestseller in the United States (much to everybody’s surprise, including mine).

“Karl contacted me and said that he was writing a novel,” Meyer continues, “which in his words was ‘loosely inspired’ by The SevenThe tagline for Nicholas Meyer’s fantastic film Time After Time Per-Cent Solution. He said, ‘I have 65 pages and an outline, could you barely hints at the humor, action, pathos, romance, and drama read it and tell me what you think?’ In those days I had time to do within. The author of the bestselling Sherlock Homes pastiche, that sort of thing, so I read his 65 pages and I gave him notes and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer had aspired to direct motion told him what I thought, omitting my headline pictures since he was a boy after seeing Michael thought, which was that the idea—which I never Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days. The young would have had in a trillion years, by the way— auteur indeed directed a nearly shot-for-shot was much more a cinematic, a visual idea, than remake of the movie on Super 8mm film over it was a literary one. The idea being two guys a five-year period, with the help of family and in Victorian outfits running around a modern friends. A meeting with a future collaborator world, which I just thought was irresistible. while at the University of Iowa led to the genesis “I told him all the ‘book things’ that he might of the beloved 1979 film about H. G. Wells and want to think about, and then I went on about Jack the Ripper at odds in then-modern day San whatever my business was at the time, except Francisco. that I couldn’t get this idea out of my head. As Meyer recalls, “I was an undergraduate at I say, I would have never thought of it myself, the University of Iowa in the department of but I couldn’t stop thinking about it now that theater and film, and I kind of wandered into the I’d heard it. Sometimes it takes me a while to writers’ workshop via the playwriting program. figure things out. Maybe three months later Karl Alexander was, I think, in the graduate I woke up at four o’clock in the morning and student part of it, and he had a play produced thought, ‘You’re an idiot! Why don’t you simply there that I saw. I didn’t know him at the time option his book, write your own screenplay, and as Karl Alexander, I knew him as Karl Tunberg, Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven- try to get it made?’” which was his actual name. He was named for Per-Cent Solution published Meyer’s realization of the appeal of two his uncle, who was a big mucky-muck in the in 1974 by E. P. Dutton. Unless men from another time experiencing a society Writers’ Guild [of America] in Hollywood. He had otherwise noted, all images accompanying that they lived outside of presented endless written the screenplay for Old Yeller, and received this article are courtesy of Anthony Taylor. opportunities for humor, drama, and social the final screen credit for Ben-Hur, for which he commentary, and informed the collaboration was not the final author… but he got around, Mr. between the two writers. As they developed the story, Meyer Tunberg. One of his requests to his nephew was that he change his contributed ideas that Alexander incorporated into the novel name, so that there would be no chance for being confused for his and vice-versa. At the end of the process, Meyer knew that the uncle in whose honor he had been named. So I knew Karl glancscreenplay was his opportunity to jumpstart his directing career, ingly from the theater department at the University of Iowa, and I hadn’t heard from him in quite a while. I left Iowa in 1968, and I and only made it available for sale to the studios on the basis that heard from him sometime in 1974 when The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, he would direct the film. His gamble paid off.

“A brilliant scientist. A criminal genius. A delightful romance. And a daring chase across time — the most exciting, mysterious, and challenging dimension of all!”

70

RETROFAN

March 2024

(LEFT) The iconic poster to Time After Time.

(RIGHT) David Warner as Jack the Ripper in modern day San Francisco. © Warner Bros. Poster courtesy of Heritage.

With the movie green-lighted by Warner Bros., to be produced

by Orion Pictures, Meyer turned his attention to pre-production duties and casting. He had several people in mind for the leads. His first task was to find the perfect Herbert Wells.

“My original idea was for an actor named Derek Jacobi,” Meyer recalls. “I had seen and loved him in I, Claudius, which I thought was one of the most amazing things ever to air on television. But of course, nobody at Warner Bros. had ever watched anything on public television, so they’d never seen I, Claudius, so Derek Jacobi didn’t count.

“I don’t know where the idea for Malcolm [McDowell as H. G. Wells] came from, but I do know that when I suggested him they said, ‘But he always plays the bad guy.’ So I said, ‘Yes… and now he’ll play the good guy. And don’t we call that acting?’ I actually knew Malcolm in another context besides A Clockwork Orange. When I started out in the business in the very early Seventies, I was in the publicity department of Paramount Pictures in New York.

We were publicizing a movie that Paramount was releasing called If, starring Malcolm. That was his American film debut, so I saw

(ABOVE) Time After Time, the novel by Karl Alexander, published by Delacorte Press, preceded the film. (LEFT) Screen capture of Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells. © Warner Bros.

RETROFAN

March 2024

71

retro sci-fi

him as someone slightly less horrific than the guy in A Clockwork Orange, which may have emboldened me. We met for tea at a tea shop on Madison Avenue sometime in the Seventies and we got along quite well.”

At the time he was offered the part, Malcolm McDowell was in the midst of making a very different kind of film in Italy. He got the call on the set of Caligula, the notorious hybrid historical drama/porn film produced and co-directed by Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione.

“I was sitting in Rome when I got the script for Time After Time wearing just a diaper,” McDowell laughs. “I was about to go out and do the business with a bride AND the groom. And thank God I read Time After Time and I realized I wasn’t a porno actor… I was a real actor! And I had something to look forward to! When this film came out, I was in one of the top ten best movies of the year, Time After Time, and the worst! The other was Caligula. I think that’s quite a record! And I’m very proud of it.”

Meyer had hoped to cast Edward Fox as Dr. John Leslie Stevenson, a.k.a. Jack the Ripper, but he was unavailable. The director turned his attention to David Warner, recent co-star of The Omen. Warner Bros. had someone else in mind. Someone very different.

“I loved David Warner from the first time I saw him, which I believe was as Mr. Blifil in Tom Jones,” recalls Meyer. “I also saw him in a film called Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, directed by

(ABOVE) Film newcomer Mary Steenburgen and McDowell. (LEFT) H. G. Wells introduces his friends to his latest creation, a time machine. David Warner as Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (Jack the Ripper) takes a keen interest. (BELOW) A design sketch for Wells’ time machine. © Warner Bros.

72

RETROFAN

March 2024

retro sci-fi

Karel Reisz, a rather delightful, crazy movie. And so that’s what I thought about for the part, and Warner Bros. was very keen on Mick Jagger. I thought I could believe Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper, but I’m not sure I could believe him as a Harley Street surgeon, his character in the movie, so I said no. Warners said, ‘So you won’t even meet with him?,’ and that’s when I realized sort of how you have to play this game; that in order to say no, I would have to meet with him, so I did. He was in the midst of a tour, he was exhausted, I was awkward, but I think we had a beer in his hotel room and then I left and said I still wanted David for the part.” The two leads were old friends and mutual admirers.

McDowell elaborates. “I was thrilled when David was cast as Jack the Ripper because—and I’m going to embarrass him now—I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of his work, I think he’s one of our great actors in England. And I think he’s not an obvious actor; he hides his craft brilliantly well and he never appears to be acting. Now that, of course, is the mark of a really great actor, and for the ones who don’t truly know, they like to see people chewing scenery. I was a walk-on in his Hamlet [Royal Shakespeare Company, 1965, directed by Peter Hall], and David was a huge star.”

McDowell continues, “David was a kid himself and he was thrust into the limelight playing this new kind of way of doing Shakespeare. [I]t was the post-Beatles era and he was all tied into that by the press, of course. You know, he had throngs of young girls waiting outside the stage door. And because he and I were sort of friends, even though I was sort of a lowly fellow, David was always very nice to me and always had that sort of twinkle in his eye and so I used to follow him out of the stage doors and inquire which of these young girls—they weren’t that young—would like to have a drink with David after the show, ’And by the way, darling, who is your friend?’ So thank you for that, David!” McDowell laughs.

When asked if the actors researched their parts for the movie, the two come to an instant consensus.

“Not a jot! There’s no point,” Warner says. “You’ve got the script there and it tells you what to do. I’m not very good at doing research, and maybe that shows in some of the stuff I’ve done, but it’s mostly a useless exercise.”

McDowell agrees. “I called the BBC archives,” he reveals, “and asked if they had any recordings of H. G. Wells. Normally I don’t

Preliminary promotional design by C. Winston Taylor, illustrator of many film posters including The Beastmaster and iconic Earthquake poster. © Warner Bros.

Courtesy of Heritage.

do research, that’s a very American sort of ‘method’ thing, but… well, Daniel Day Lewis, he lived with a musket… and what did he do when he played in My Left Foot??”

McDowell was surprised by what he heard on the BBC recordings. “They sent a recording of Wells from a radio interview in 1928.

I put the record on in great anticipation, thinking that this character I’m about to play is going to reveal itself! And from the crackling of this interview on a 78 [RPM] recording came this southeast London, high-pitched whine. [effecting Wells’ vocal style] ‘So Haitch Gee Wells, ’e talked like that!’ And I thought, ‘How the f*** am I gonna do that?!’ So I decided to play him with just my normal English accent.”

When asked if he had ever seen the George Pal movie The Time Machine (1960), McDowell’s eyes light up.

“A fabulous movie, which I just caught about a year ago,” he replies. “So I didn’t see it before we shot Time After Time.

Thing is, you don’t want to be seeing stuff beforehand, because you’re not going to be copying. You’re going to come obviously with a fresh look at something. As David said, we’re very instinctive, both of us actors. We have that in common.

We work on our instinct and what we are given in the script.

What the characters had for breakfast; we don’t give a crap!

It doesn’t help us in the scene—we’re looking at what’s happening in the scene, where it’s going, what the moment is. The moment may not be a line of dialog, by the way, it could be between the dialog, between the lines.”

Director Nicholas Meyer on location in San Francisco for Time After Time. © Warner Bros.

RETROFAN

March 2024

73

retro sci-fi

Newly arrived in his “future,” the time-traveler discovers a museum exhibit in his honor. Similarly, the movie Time After Time earned audience respect after its initial release. © Warner Bros.

For H. G. Wells’ love interest Amy Robbins, one actress blew everyone else who auditioned out of the water: Mary Steenburgen.

She also blew co-star McDowell out of the water, so to speak.

Malcolm recalls, “Time After Time means different things to me, of course. Because I did the movie, I got two children from that because I married Mary Steenburgen, who was brilliant in the movie and beautiful. Listen, I think it’s very evident from the movie how my relationship with Mary was continuing nicely. But we had a really nice time shooting it.” McDowell and Steenburgen divorced in 1990.

Once everything was in place, shooting began. Reflecting on his experience as a first-time director, Meyer recalls approaching the job humbly.

“It was a complete learning experience for me, trying to figure this out, so when I interviewed people to shoot the movie, to edit the movie, to do the props or anything else, I always had the same speech; ‘I know nothing. You’ll have to teach me. You’ll have to not mind teaching me. And then you’ll have to not go crazy if I still want to try it my way at the end of it.’ And anybody who could withstand the catechism, I said, ‘Fine—we’ll make you a member.’ And I was very lucky because not only did I surround myself with capable people, starting with the actors—everybody—but they were all out to help me. My more egregious mistakes didn’t wind up in the movie, and the ones that didn’t work, I could cut them, and so forth and so on. I came out of the theater. I had tried to be an actor, I wasn’t a good actor. I’d been a theater director. I had directed a play a week on the radio, so I was good with actors. I was a good writer… but while I was playing with a Smith/Corona portable electric 74

RETROFAN

March 2024

[typewriter], Steven Spielberg was playing with a camera, and the difference is obvious. Steven Spielberg is a real filmmaker—maybe the realest—and I was just fumbling my way hoping that the thing would stay in focus and that I was pointing the camera at the people who were talking. That was about the best that I could do.

Learning the value of words versus pictures is very important. The movie would certainly be a lot better, or a lot more professional, let’s say, if it had been directed by somebody with more camera savvy than I had.”

David Warner and Malcolm McDowell shared nothing but praise for Nicholas Meyer. “We did have great fun. I think it was Nick’s first film as a director, and he did a great job,” recalls Malcolm.

According to David, “I remember on the very first day of shooting, Nick said to the crew and us, ‘Look, guys, I’ve never made a movie before, this is my first directorial effort. So if there’s anything you can help me with or want to advise me to do, please do so.’ Which I thought was a great way of relaxing everybody and saying that if he makes a mistake, he doesn’t mind someone telling him. There are some first-time directors who think they know it all and sometimes make great mistakes. At least Nick did that, say, ‘Please give me ideas,’ which I admired him for.”

Principal photography took place around the city of San Francisco, California, which became nearly a character in its own right due to the use of distinctive locations. This is not an altogether unknown phenomenon, as the city has had a similar effect on other films such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Bullitt, and even So I Married An Axe Murderer. “I put all things in San Francisco that I loved into the script,” says Meyer.

retro sci-fi

Time After Time is a movie of many moods: (TOP) Wells’ attempts to understand contemporary life are comical. (CENTER) Jack the Ripper threatening Steenburgen’s character Amy Robbins is in the thriller mode.

(BOTTOM) And, of course, there is the romance between Wells and Robbins in the film (and the behind-the-scenes romance between Steenburgen and McDowell). © Warner Bros.

“We had this great chase sequence,” recalls McDowell, “and we shot for a whole night outside the rotunda at the fine arts building, the Palace of Fine Arts. So we were running around all over the place. I was running all over the place after Mary as I remember, but that’s a different story. I’ve always loved San Francisco since. If we made a few more Time After Times, we’d have sparkling careers,” laughs Malcolm.

David agreed. “Yes, well, it was all downhill after that. No, seriously! You can make a film like Time After Time, of which I am really, really proud to have been in and also working with Malcolm, and Nick Meyer and Mary and everyone, and I think it is rather a special movie. But at the time, it didn’t really take off, did it? I mean, it’s a cult movie now, but at the time it didn’t really hit…”

The film was the darling of the critics for sure, but it failed to set the box office on fire. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote,

“A movie that’s as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining. There’s a lot to be said for an adult’s movie with the shimmer of a child’s new toy.” Daily Variety said, “A delightful, entertaining trifle of a film that shows both the possibilities and limitations of taking liberties with literature and history.

Nicholas Meyer has deftly juxtaposed Victorian England and contemporary America in a clever story, irresistible due to the competence of its cast.”

So why didn’t the film connect as tightly with paying moviegoers? McDowell has a theory.

“I asked to see the studio questionnaires that they put out for their marketing, because I thought that they marketed the film very badly because they made it a sort of chase movie about Jack the Ripper being chased, which I thought was a misrepresentation of the film,” McDowell says. “So when I read these things that the studio prepared for the public to fill in, they said things like, ‘Have you ever heard of H. G. Wells?’ ‘NO.’ ‘Have you ever heard of Jack the Ripper?’

‘YES.’ Right. So this is a Jack the Ripper movie. Now, this is insane, because of course, Jack the Ripper is a very important element, but the whole film is not a chase movie, and it’s not a gory movie in any way, so Jack the Ripper fans would go see the movie and be disappointed. It’s a love story, and that’s how they should have sold the movie, and because they didn’t do that it fell flat on its face. And it was really sad, because I saw it with a couple of audiences at the time, the theaters were jam-packed and the audiences absolutely loved that movie. When it didn’t take off, I was absolutely amazed that they’d screwed it up, but you know they do it all the time, so… what else is new?”

Meyer disagrees.

“Here’s what I saw happen. Before the first preview it was well understood by everyone including me that Warner Bros. hated the movie. My editor, Donn Cambern, had been on a plane with another Warner Bros. editor and in conversation he was asked what he was working on and he said Time After Time. The other fellow said, ‘Oh! That’s the one they hate.’ They hated it so much that they RETROFAN

March 2024

75

retro sci-fi

couldn’t be bothered to go out of town for a preview, as was usually the custom back then. So the preview was in Woodland Hills, which is a suburb of Los Angeles. By this time, having fought off all their efforts to change the movie, to change the soundtrack, to get rid of the Warner Bros. shield [logo] and the Max Steiner fanfare to begin the movie, at this point I thought I was going to my execution.

I thought, ‘One movie and your career is kaput!’ To everybody’s astonishment, that preview went through the roof. When the WB shield and Max Steiner music started, people began cheering. And by the way, that shield has been on all their movies ever since. At the end of the screening, the studio executive who had a sheaf full of notes that he had been brandishing in front of my face before the movie started—I looked over at him and he was tearing the notes up and throwing them into the air like confetti.

“The next preview was at the Toronto Film Festival, and not one of the executives had a ticket to go to Toronto,” Meyer continues. “But the same fellow told me, ‘Don’t worry; we’ve seen what’s real.’

In Toronto the film was an even bigger success; it was a bigger audience, it was not an ‘industry’ audience, people just went nuts. Time After Time scored higher than any movie Warner Bros. had released in the previous three years. So now they came down with a case of overconfidence. They were so sure this was going to be a giant hit that they were just going to plaster it everywhere. This despite the fact that Mary [Steenburgen] had only been in one picture, no one really knew David Warner, and Malcolm… you know, these were not people who could carry a picture at this point in their careers. And this was a movie that needed time to build, it needed to go slow and gather word of mouth, which was then very important. And it didn’t get that.

It was just out there suddenly and the audience had no time to discover it before it left theaters.”

When asked if Malcolm McDowell’s theory might be partially correct, Meyer hesitates.

“I don’t know. The fact of the matter is that Time After Time is five movies in one. It’s a romance, it’s a thriller, it’s a comedy, it’s a science-fiction film, and it is a rather mordant social commentary.

And all these five facets are organically entwined in its premise. I don’t think that they marketed it wrong; I think they distributed it wrong.”

Whatever the reason, the studio considered the film a flop and moved on to the next thing on their slate. But then something unexpected happened. The little movie that didn’t became the little movie that could. Time After Time was licensed to HBO for 76

RETROFAN

March 2024

home viewing, repeated several times a day for months, and a strong viewership made the pay channel executives take notice.

The film began to be put into late-night time slots, where it continued to do well. Then the home-video revolution began in earnest. The film was released on videocassette and became a steady rental for many early video stores, prompting them to buy more copies so it would be available on shelves when customers asked for it. This in turn prompted Warner Home Video to produce more copies, keeping the title in print for years. The film became a well-loved favorite, spawning a fan base of giant proportions.

Nicholas Meyer can’t pinpoint the moment he began to understand the groundswell of support for his wayward movie, but he understands the appeal.

“I think that what I like about the movies of mine that I do in fact like, is that they’re sort of… built to last. And whether you’re talking about [Meyer’s Star Trek II:] The Wrath of Khan, or The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, or, God help us, The Day After, these are sturdy things as opposed to disposable things. I think that every one of them, for better or worse, was deeply felt and not just checking a bunch of demographic boxes. I feel so lucky that Time After Time found its audience and that people are continuously and continually rediscovering that movie and are showing it to friends. But I don’t know how it happened, and I don’t know when it happened.”

Why has the film achieved Nicholas Meyer today. first cult, then classic status?

Photo by Leslie Fram.

It appeals to viewers on so many levels. Thematically, it covers the struggle between optimism versus cynicism in the face of the most devastating disappointment that Wells could imagine; what he believed would be a utopia has in fact turned out to be a gritty, ugly place. In Stevenson’s hotel, Warner turns on the television to scenes of real-life violence and says to Herbert, “I belong here completely. Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today… I’m an amateur.” To his credit, Herbert’s faith in humanity wavers but never collapses. His response to the utter heartbreak of finding the future to be everything he abhors in society is summed up in two lines from the typewriter of Nicholas Meyer.

“The first man to raise a fist is the man who’s run out of ideas,” and “Every age is the same, it’s only love that makes any of them bearable.”

And do these themes still resonate with the writer?

“It’s my belief that artists are not the best judges of their own work. Somebody once said to Dame Margot Fontaine after the ballet, ‘Oh, I so enjoyed that! Tell me, what were you doing up there?’ And she had the presence of mind to say, ‘Well, I’m very

retro sci-fi

sorry, I explained what I was doing while I was doing it and if you didn’t understand me, then I failed.’ I don’t think I’m venturing a very controversial opinion when I note that the weight of human history sustains my belief that things aren’t getting better, they seem to be getting worse; all we have is more buttons to push. I think every age is pretty much the same and I guess, speaking personally, I think we’ve always wound up making a fist when we’ve run out of ideas. And as far as I’m concerned, it seems that love is the only thing that has any chance of making these horrible circumstances any better, though maybe money helps—if you have a lot of money. But I think most people don’t have a lot of money, so… is love second best? I don’t know,” posits Meyer.

(LEFT) Actor Malcolm McDowell, (CENTER) this article’s author Anthony Taylor, and actor David Warner, from a Dragon Con panel. (RIGHT) Did you know that in 2017 ABC-TV aired a shortlived weekly series based upon Time After Time? © Warner Bros.

“I think artists lose all proprietary authority over their creations when they’re complete,” he continues. “We put messages in bottles, we throw them out into the world, and we hope someone will find the bottle and decode what’s inside. But what we actually have put inside gets put there, at least a large amount, on the basis of intuition… a kind of gut-like thing, you write in a state of flow. Then you look up and it’s hours later and you’re like, ‘Gee… where did that come from?’ Tracing back through all the other influences is almost an impossibility.

Things that may have affected you, both as a person and as an artist, may be unrecognized and ingested without a conscious awareness and then regurgitated in a similar fashion. So I’m either an optimist functioning in a pessimistic framework, or a pessimist functioning in an optimistic framework. I think it’s more or less the same thing. I think that the work of art I am most strongly aware of identifying with is George Bizet’s opera, Carmen. Carmen is this strange combination of irresistible exuberance—from the opening note, everything is crazy-wonderful—but it has a heart of totally fatalistic darkness, which is equally inescapable.”

David Warner, who passed away on July 24, 2022, has the final word.

“The film is a love story. The whole reason Jack the Ripper is there is to consolidate these two people [Herbert and Amy] getting together. It was mis-sold as Malcolm said, and it’s a wonderful love story.”

ANTHONY TAYLOR is a writer, film critic, and the author of The Art of George Wilson (2024) from Hermes Press. His reviews and articles have appeared in magazines such as Screem, Fangoria, RetroFan, Famous Monsters of Filmland, SFX, Video WatcH*Dog, and many more. His retro film on HD media column Apes on Film can be found at ATLRetro.com and NerdalertNews.net. His on-stage interview with Malcolm McDowell and David Warner at Atlanta’s Dragon Con, from which their quotes originated, can be viewed on YouTube.

RETROFAN

March 2024

77

Any RetroFan reader who goes nuts with joy BEFORE reading the issue is okay in our book, Mike!

Thanks for sending this photo. Hope you continued to smile ear-to-ear as you read the issue.

I just bought RetroFan #27 from a Barnes and Noble yesterday, and I love it. I thought the Bob Keeshan interview was really enjoyable, and I loved reading about how it came to be.

My parents used to watch Captain Kangaroo on Channel 2 CBS in the Seventies. I didn’t even know about the teen monster films, and I think I should check them out.

I’ll probably get a subscription in the future!

JAYDEN MONTGOMERY Like your parents, I watched Captain Kangaroo when I was a kid. The Captain was our generation’s Mister Rogers, Big Bird, Barney, Teletubbies, whatever!

So glad you discovered our magazine. Hope you do indeed subscribe. Thanks for writing!

I enjoyed your martial arts movies article [in issue #27’s “RetroFad” column]. That’s a refreshing topic that rarely gets covered. I also appreciate that you didn’t tie Quentin Tarantino into it, something that almost every writer feels they have to do when summarizing any Sixties or Seventies film movement. It’s aggravating when writers imply that something isn’t great on its own merits until a famous contemporary director tells us he appreciates it. Keep up the good work.

CHRIS ROBINSON Thanks, Chris! The difference between RetroFan’s coverage of “vintage” topics and what you find in mainstream media is, much of our audience grew up with this stuff and don’t need to be convinced of its merit. Even something as seemingly trivial as a Funny Face drink mix packet or a memory of a Stuckey’s lunch during a family vacation is hallowed ground for us.

78

RETROFAN

March 2024

In the latest issue of RetroFan [#27]… Wha--?!

Page 79 was the first page I opened TO! Total shock! I’m honored that my summer 1966 photo has been immortalized for posterity! You’ve never seen such a skinny, hopeless superhero than myself! Ha-ha!

That photo resonates with us fans. That’s the Retro and Fan part of this. I love it!

RICHARD KOLKMAN Readers, Richard is referring to his childhood photo he submitted, of him in his 1966 Ideal Toys Batman plastic cowl and cape, which appeared on page 79 of issue #27’s RetroFanmail column. Richard, you’re right—it’s the special blend of “Retro” and “Fan” that not only makes this magazine special, it also binds us.

Holy Nostalgia, Batman!

RetroFan #27 was another interesting issue.

Just adding a sidenote to your Martial Arts article. The Boy Wonder, Burt Ward, was featured on the cover of Black Belt magazine, which I have attached.

Thanks for producing this magazine and Back Issue.

Have a good day.

MICHAEL SCOTT THIEL Michael, it’d be tough for me NOT to have a good day now that you’ve shared this cool magazine cover with us! TV’s Batman’s third and final season had recently ended when this edition of Black Belt magazine was released with the series’ co-star, Burt Ward, as its cover feature. Thanks for submitting this scan.

Robin TM & © DC Comics

Just received my latest issue, super-excited!!!!

Thanks, guys!!!

MIKE WALKER

RetroFan #27: Check out that cover! With that many goodies to look forward to, I knew this would be a great issue before I even peeked inside.

The highlight for me was the Bob Keeshan interview. I’ll invoke the Old Man’s Mantra and say that they just don’t make them like him any more. I grew up with the Captain and Mr. Green Jeans; their gentle demeanors proved that you don’t have to have flashing colors and screaming

characters to get a kid’s attention. While I inexplicably found Dancing Bear to be a bit disturbing, I always laughed at those ping-pong ball gags. And to this day I remember (and use) the Captain’s “Magic Words”: please and thank you!

I really enjoyed Will Murray’s look at The Rockford Files, one of those under-appreciated TV shows. I remember buying a cassette of assorted music only because the Rockford Files theme song was on it.

I lived through the days when everyone thought they were the next Bruce Lee, so I liked “Kung Fu Conquers the World.” It was one of those fads that you really had to be in the zeitgeist of the day to get it. It brought to mind a high school incident where a guy was picking a fight with another guy. He said, “Meet me at lunch behind the school, and for your sake, you’d better know a hell of a lot of karate.” Everyone knew this guy was kind of a blowhard, but this claim was especially laughable since he was five-foot-three and weighed 310 pounds. The other guy laughed it off and gave him a pass on the fight, which no doubt convinced the portly fellow that his bluff worked and everyone in school now regarded him as a Lightning-Fast Fists-of-Fury Death Machine.

Finally, Scott Saavedra’s retrospective on dangerous toys… Holy cow, how did the readership of RetroFan ever survive their childhood?

I still have a set of Lawn Darts (inherited from my in-laws). One gentle toss landed on a Frisbee and cleanly poked a quarter-inch hole through it. Chemical sets, sharp objects, hot metal surfaces… But, hey, as long as the kids were having fun…

RF is always a pleasure! Keep up the good work!

MICHAL JACOT Thanks, Michal! Ye ed is looking forward to your return as a writer to our pages. Your piece in issue #28 on TV Guide Fall Previews editions was a ton of fun.

I’ve greatly enjoyed Andy Mangels’ articles about the Super Friends in RetroFan. How did [Super Friends producers] Hanna-Barbara Productions get the rights to Captain Marvel/Shazam! for the live-action Legends of the Superheroes specials but not have the rights to include him in the Super Friends TV series?

CHRISTOPHER KRIEG Good question, Chris! “Retro Saturday Morning” writer Andy Mangels replies: Rights issues are a tricky thing, and NPP [National Periodical Publications, DC’s official name at the time]/DC’s rights were the Wild West in those days.

Shazam! and Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.

Thanks, Andy!

Inset into Andy’s reply above are screencaps of Legends of the Superheroes’ Captain Marvel, as played by Garrett Craig, the third live-action “Shazam!” actor of the Seventies; and Howard Morris, beloved by so many as The Andy Griffith Show’s rock-throwing rebel Ernest T. Bass, as Cap’s cackling menace, Dr. Sivana.

(Garrett Craig and Howard Morris are not to be confused with the decade’s other Garrett who played a superhero: Garrett Morris, who played Ant-Man in a hilarious Saturday Night Live superhero spoof on an episode originally aired March 17, 1979, hosted by Superman: The Movie’s Lois Lane, Margot Kidder. That SNL episode also gave us one of the show’s, and Dan Aykroyd’s, funniest characters ever: Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute. Useless trivia, perhaps? Not here in RetroFanLand!)

Re RetroFan #27: Lots of topics I hadn’t thought of in a very long time.

“Danger in Happy Toyland” was great; all sorts of potential tragedies in ill-considered gift items for a kid. Even if it had warnings and directions, who reads those as a six-year-old? Blowguns and radioactive isotopes were new to me.

I do, however, recall being burned a time or two with the Creepy Crawlers set. Or the one you missed, a year after, Creeple Peeple.

My favorite of the lawsuit-provoking toys, easily, was the Wham-O Super-Ball.

It took on a new allure when the principal got on the P.A. system and warned our school about the peril they posed. That, to me, immediately made them coolest toy in second grade!

Don’t think I ever saw the Super Friends episodes covered this time. Still, I very much enjoyed the abundance of Alex Toth art.

Wonderful work.

I cracked up at two aspects. First, “ABC’s Standards & Practices censorial department was nervous about Challenge because it would contain actual conflict between the heroes and villains.” Imagine that! Secondly, “...S&P wrote that ‘destroying the world’ was an imitable act, which was bad for young viewers who might want to copy it.” Did these folks suffer a freak head injury with a Super-Ball?

Likewise, never saw The Rockford Files. But I was so impressed with the previously unseen Gray Morrow group shot of the Seventies detectives! Terrific! So many were captured perfectly!

Didn’t realize he was that fine of a caricaturist.

Jack Lord on a surfboard was my favorite!

I sort of recognized Stuart Margolin, even with a beard, as the same actor who appeared in snippets, between segments, on Love, American Style.

I was too young at the time to be a Teenage Monster. I was only in my terrible twos. I did catch the Werewolf and Frankenstein ones rerun on TV as a pre-teen. By then, I was more thrilled to see Gary Conway, Whit Bissell, and Guy Williams, whom I recognized from Irwin Allen’s TV shows.

Do enjoy the bizarre notion of monsters being more sympathetic or identifiable if they’re younger and more local. Trading castles and crypts for campus connections.

Some of the other entries in the genre didn’t teen-age well: Teenage Caveman, with Man from U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn, and Teenagers from Outer Space. Cracked up at the promotion line: “Hoodlums From Another World on a Ray Gun Rampage!” How can someone say no to that?

You neglected to list how many Oscars those won.

© Mattel.

Filmation Studios had the live-action Captain Marvel rights for Shazam! in 1973 when HannaBarbera started Super Friends. It probably wouldn’t have even occurred to H-B to license the animated rights then because they had Superman.

By the time of development of Challenge of the SuperFriends in early 1978, Shazam! was still under Filmation’s control, which is why the originally planned villains like Sivana were not included. By mid-1978, NPP/DC was able to license the live-action Captain Marvel rights away for the Legends of the Superheroes show for a brief time to HannaBarbera, but by late 1979/early 1980, Filmation had gotten those rights back for the Shazam! animated series.

The brief usage may have been a swap deal, as both Filmation and Hanna-Barbera shared animated rights for Batman and Robin during 1977, and Filmation even planned to bring back Adam West and Burt Ward for live intros and perhaps more, but as we know, H-B beat them to the punch in 1979 with the Legends specials. Batman and Robin were a case of “joint custody” that may have allowed them to also share Captain Marvel for the one project.

If you’re interested, I covered Legends of the Superheroes in RetroFan’s companion magazine, Back Issue #25; the animated Captain Marvel in Alter Ego #30 (also from TwoMorrows); and the live-action Shazam! series in RetroFan #4! And there’s a lot more about Filmation’s business in my book, Creating the Filmation Generation, written with Lou Scheimer. They’re all available digitally or in print on the TwoMorrows website!

My favorite, however, was the look at Jack Kirby’s comedy comics. Plenty to choose from.

His three-pager from the Fantastic Four Annual #5 was represented, as was his work in Not Brand Echh (NBE). As it was, essentially, self-parody, it was even funnier.

What I don’t understand, to this day, is why Marvel significantly tampered with his inks in NBE #5–7 to where it no longer really looks like Jack drew them. He did such a brilliant job in #1 and 3, it was such a tremendous letdown to see the three later ones so heavily revised.

Too bad Earl the Rich Rabbit and Lockjaw the Alligator were so short-lived. Would have been nice to see them, as so unusual, to have been explored and developed more. Then again, Jack did have some fun with animals again, later, with Kamandi. True, most were played straight but Jack did add some comedy, on occasion, when it fit the mood. The Watergate apes (#15) and Captain Pypar, the Bulldog Britannic (#27), for example. Fighting American was always fun.

Clever idea; bad timing.

The duo-shade page from Crazy, Man, Crazy is one I don’t recall seeing prior. Very unusual, and actually pretty impressive.

Loved the photo cover of Kirby as a crook.

So much, in fact, that I had to track one down 15 years ago. Too funny not to have it.

Finally, What If? #11, with the Bullpen Fantastic Four. If not an outright return, this was so in the ballpark that it’s very much appreciated. It wasn’t an outright comedy but playful nonetheless. A one-time surrogate FF team mixing the established characters with the beloved Bullpen figures. It’s not beyond criticism, but it was great fun and Jack, thankfully, doing one last story in that magical realm.

JOE FRANK

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

March 2024

79

ReJECTED! Not every great idea is successful, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the also-rans, the nearly-made-its, and the ReJECTED. We’ve all made mistakes. And some of us wish we’d lived in a different time. One of the great "what would you do?" thought puzzles is...

BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA

What I’d Do With a Time Machine Bleep!

Blorp!

1. Pick up a few copies of Action Comics #1.

2. Stop my younger self from wearing an Angel Flight outfit.

3. Go and watch some real dinosaurs.

4. Stop my younger self from asking comic book legend Jack Kirby why he draws square thumbs.

5. Pick up all (not some, not most) of the comic books.

6. Have a word with my younger self about Galactica 1980.

It's not worth the lost time.

80

RETROFAN

March 2024

A tip of the hat to thatsbelievable on Instagram. I totally swiped his groove. But that’s okay because they’re funny.

1979

Get RetroFan back issues!

Many early issues are close to selling out!

Order online, or by mail include $4 US postage for the first magazine, and $2 for each additional magazine on the same order.

See inside front cover for subscription rates.

RETROFAN #9

RETROFAN #4

RETROFAN #5

RETROFAN #7

RETROFAN #8

Interviews with the SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!

Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” MAJOR MATT MASON, MOON LANDING MANIA, SNUFFY SMITH AT 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features!

With a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: interview with LARRY STORCH, The Lone Ranger in Hollywood, The Dick Van Dyke Show, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with the ’60s grooviest family band THE COWSILLS, and TV’s coolest mom JUNE LOCKHART! Mars Attacks!, MAD Magazine in the ’70s, Flintstones turn 60, Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, Honey West, Max Headroom, Popeye Picnic, the Smiley Face fad, & more! With MICHAEL EURY, ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

RETROFAN #10

RETROFAN #11

RETROFAN #12

RETROFAN #13

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with ’70s’ Captain America REB BROWN, and Captain Nice (and Knight Rider’s KITT) WILLIAM DANIELS with wife BONNIE BARTLETT! Plus: Coloring Books, Fall Previews for Saturday morning cartoons, The Cyclops movie, actors behind your favorite TV commercial characters, BENNY HILL, the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, 8-track tapes, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Celebrating fifty years of SHAFT, interviews with FAMILY AFFAIR’s KATHY GARVER and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’s GERI “FAKE JAN” REISCHL, ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH, rare GODZILLA merchandise, Spaghetti Westerns, Saturday morning cartoon preview specials, fake presidential candidates, Spider-Man/The Spider parallels, Stuckey’s, and more fun, fab features!

HALLOWEEN ISSUE! Interviews with DARK SHADOWS’ DAVID SELBY, and the niece of movie Frankenstein GLENN STRANGE, JULIE ANN REAMS. Plus: KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER, ROD SERLING retrospective, CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST, TV’s Adventures of Superman, Superman’s pal JIMMY OLSEN, QUISP and QUAKE cereals, the DRAK PAK AND THE MONSTER SQUAD, scratch model customs, and more!

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!

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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

RETROFAN #14

RETROFAN #15

RETROFAN #16

RETROFAN #17

RETROFAN #18

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!

An exclusive interview with Logan’s Run star MICHAEL YORK, plus Logan’s Run novelist WILLIAM F. NOLAN and vehicle customizer DEAN JEFFRIES. Plus: the Marvel Super Heroes cartoons of 1966, H. R. Pufnstuf, Leave It to Beaver’s SUE “Miss Landers” RANDALL, WOLFMAN JACK, drive-in theaters, My Weekly Reader, DAVID MANDEL’s super collection of comic book art, and more!

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.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

RETROFAN #19

RETROFAN #20

RETROFAN #21

RETROFAN #22

RETROFAN #23

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, singer B. J. THOMAS in one of his final interviews, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more! 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.

Surf’s up as SIXTIES BEACH MOVIES make a RetroFan splash! Plus: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ZORRO’s Saturday morning cartoon, TV’s THE WILD, WILD WEST, CARtoons and other drag-mags, VALSPEAK, and more fun, fab features!

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

Meet the stars behind the Black Lagoon: RICOU BROWNING, BEN CHAPMAN, JULIE ADAMS, and LORI NELSON! Plus SHADOW CHASERS, featuring show creator KENNETH JOHNSON. Also: THE BEATLES’ YELLOW SUBMARINE, FLASH GORDON cartoons, TV’s cult classic THE PRISONER and kid’s show ZOOM, COLORFORMS, M&Ms, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

RETROFAN #24

RETROFAN #25

RETROFAN #26

RETROFAN #27

RETROFAN #28

Interviews with Lost in Space’s ANGELA CARTWRIGHT and BILL MUMY, and Land of the Lost’s WESLEY EURE! Revisit Leave It to Beaver with JERRY MATHERS, TONY DOW, and KEN OSMOND! Plus: UNDERDOG, Rankin-Bass’ stop-motion classic THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Christmas gifts you didn’t want, the CABBAGE PATCH KIDS fad, and more!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet Mission: Impossible’s LYNDA DAY GEORGE in an exclusive interview!

Celebrate Rambo’s 50th birthday with his creator, novelist DAVID MORRELL! Plus: TV faves WKRP IN CINCINNATI and SPACE: 1999, Fleisher’s and Filmation’s SUPERMAN cartoons, commercial jingles, JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE comic books, and more fun, fab features! Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

The saga of Saturday morning’s Super Friends, Part One! Plus: A history of MR. T, TV’s AVENGERS (Steed and Mrs. Peel), Daktari’s CHERYL MILLER, Mexican movie monsters, John and Yoko’s nation of Nutopia, ELIZABETH SHEPHERD (the actress who almost played Emma Peel), and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER, & MICHAEL EURY.

Interview with Captain Kangaroo BOB KEESHAN, The ROCKFORD FILES, teen monster movies, the Kung Fu and BRUCE LEE crazes, JACK KIRBY’s comedy comics, DON DRYSDALE’s TV drop-ins, outrageous toys, Challenge of the Super Friends, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

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

The BRITISH INVASION of the Sixties, interview with Bond Girl TRINA PARKS, The Mighty Hercules, Horror Hostess MOONA LISA, World’s Greatest Super Friends, TV Guide Fall Previews, the Frito Bandito, a Popeye Super Collector, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

TwoMorrows.

RETROFAN #29

RETROFAN #30

RETROFAN #32

RETROFAN #33

The story behind BOB CLAMPETT’s Beany & Cecil, western queen DALE EVANS, an interview with Mr. Ed’s ALAN YOUNG, Miami Vice, The Sixties’ Wackiest Robots, Muscle-Maker CHARLES ATLAS, Super Powers Team—Galactic Guardians, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

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

The Brady Bunch’s FLORENCE HENDERSON, the UNKNOWN COMIC revealed, Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, a Barbie history, RANKIN/BASS’ Frosty the Snowman, Dell Comics’ Monster Super-Heroes, Slushy Drinks, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Featuring a profile of The Partridge Family’s heartthrob DAVID CASSIDY, THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN, LEGO blocks, Who Created Mighty Mouse?, BUCKAROO BANZAI turns forty, Planet Patrol, Big Little Books, Disco Fever, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the Bionic Duo, LEE MAJORS and LINDSAY WAGNER! Plus: Hot Wheels: The Early Years, Fantastic Four cartoons, Modesty Blaise, Hostess snacks, TV Westerns, Movie Icons vs. the Axis Powers, the San Diego Chicken, and more!

Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships April 2024

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships June 2024

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at

www.twomorrows.com

PRINTED IN CHINA

The Future of Pop History.