RetroFan #32

Better hustle before this issue sells out!

May 2024 No. 32 $10.95

DISCO FEVER

Saturday morning swordplay with

We think we love him!

The puppet planeteers of PLANET PATROL

The Partridge Family’s Don’t be a blockhead -read our LEGO history!

DAVID CASSIDY

Buckaroo Banzai • Mighty Mouse • Sonny & Cher • Get abducted to Roswell & more!

Featuring Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Mark Voger • Michael Eury Thundarr the Barbarian © Ruby-Spears Productions. Planet (Space) Patrol © ITV. LEGO® © The LEGO Group. All Rights Reserved.

The Best in POP Culture!

ZOWIE!

THE TV SUPERHERO CRAZE IN ’60s POP CULTURE

by MARK VOGER

HOLY PHENOMENON! In the way-out year of 1966, the action comedy “Batman” starring ADAM WEST premiered and triggered a tsunami of super swag, including toys, games, Halloween costumes, puppets, action figures, and lunch boxes.

Meanwhile, still more costumed avengers sprang forth on TV (“The Green Hornet,” “Ultraman”), in MOVIES (“The Wild World of Batwoman,” “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo”), and in ANIMATION (“Space Ghost,” “The Marvel Super Heroes”).

ZOWIE! traces the history of the superhero genre from early films, through the 1960s TV superhero craze, and its pop culture influence ever since. This 192-page hardcover, in pop art colors that conjure the period, spotlights the coolest collectibles and kookiest knockoffs every ’60s kid begged their parents for, and features interviews with the TV stars (WEST, BURT WARD, YVONNE CRAIG, FRANK GORSHIN, BURGESS MEREDITH, CESAR ROMERO, JULIE NEWMAR, VAN WILLIAMS), the artists behind the comics (JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA), and others. Written and designed by MARK VOGER (MONSTER MASH, HOLLY JOLLY), ZOWIE! is one super read!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-125-7 SHIPS JULY 2024!

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

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION (EXPANDED EDITION) by KEITH DALLAS & JOHN WELLS

NOW IN FULL-COLOR WITH BONUS PAGES! In 1978, DC Comics launched a line-wide expansion known as “The DC Explosion,” but pulled the plug weeks later, cancelling titles and leaving dozens of completed comic book stories unpublished. Now, that notorious “DC Implosion” is examined with an exhaustive oral history from JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, AL MILGROM, and other DC creators of the time, plus commentary by other top pros, examining how it changed the landscape of comics forever! This new EXPANDED EDITION of the Eisner Award-nominated book explodes in full cover for the first time, with extra coverage of LOST 1970S DC PROJECTS like Ninja the Invisible and an adaptation of “The Wiz,” Jim Starlin’s unaltered cover art for BATMAN FAMILY #21, content meant for cancelled Marvel titles such as Godzilla and Ms. Marvel, and more! SHIPS MAY 2024!

(144-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-124-0

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 • 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

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The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With

Issue #32 May 2024

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Columns and Special Features

Departments

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Retrotorial

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Voger’s Vault of Vintage Varieties David Cassidy

22

Too Much TV Quiz Men in Drag for Gags

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon Who Created Mighty Mouse?

RetroFad Disco Fever

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Retro Music Sonny, Cher, and Me

Retro Toys LEGO®

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Retro Travel Roswell, New Mexico

46

RetroFanmail

Retro Sci-Fi Planet Patrol

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Oddball World of Scott Shaw!

Monster-maker/Cartoonist Dave Ivey

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ReJECTED

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Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning Thundarr the Barbarian

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Retro Hollywood Buckaroo Banzai – Forty Years Later

RetroFan™ issue 32, May 2024 (ISSN 2576-7224) is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to RetroFan, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614.

Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: RetroFan, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $73 Economy US, $111 International, $29 Digital Only. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Thundarr the Barbarian © Ruby-Spears Productions. Planet (Space) Patrol © ITV. LEGO® © The LEGO Group. LEGO cover photograph credit: Alan Chia/ Wikimedia Commons. 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 Paula Finn Katherine Kerestman Shaqui LeVesconte Andy Mangels Joe Meno Will Murray Scott Saavedra Scott Shaw!

DeWayne Todd Mark Voger DESIGNER Scott Saavedra PROOFREADER Eric Nolen-Weathington SPECIAL THANKS Buzz Dixon Mark Evanier Hake’s Auctions Heritage Auctions Rick Hoberg

July 2024 No. 33 $10.95

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RETROFAN

I am “asportstual.” No offense to you hootin’-and-hollerin’, decked-out-in-your-team’s-regalia, sports-lovin’ RetroFan readers, but I was a chubby kid who spent most of his youth on the couch.

Sure, I’d occasionally run around outside, but team sports were the kryptonite to my Superman.

Only when forced by those I once regarded as the tormentors of the junior high school faculty, the Physical Education teachers, would I participate in team sports (and I was always the last one picked when choosing sides).

My late dad, as big a New York Yankees fan as you’ll ever find, wanted me to be the next Mickey Mantle. I just wanted to read comic books, watch TV, and listen to music. My dad might’ve been disappointed that I didn’t play baseball, but then again if I had, I might not have taken the career path that led me to helm this fine publication. Really, somebody’s gotta be the ringleader of this wild and crazy crew of RetroFanatic writers. Might as well be me.

But growing up with a baseball-mad dad meant that while my eyes might’ve been on the latest issue of The Brave and the Bold or The Amazing Spider-Man, there was often a Yankees or an Atlanta Braves (Dad’s second favorite team) game on the tube in the background. And there was one time during my youth that I did indeed succumb to a sports mania: when Hammerin’ Hank Aaron became Major League Baseball’s home run king.

It was fifty years ago this month (April).

The Yankees’ legendary Babe Ruth had long held the record of 714 home runs. The Braves’ Hank Aaron had been creeping up on the Babe’s record, tying it on April 4, 1974. Four days later, on April 8, 1974, during an Atlanta Braves/Los Angeles Dodgers game, Aaron made the record books when walloping his career 715th homer off of Dodgers pitcher Al Downing. I remember watching it live, with Dad and my little brother. Even my mom, who’d usually NEXT ISSUE pay no heed to Dad’s ballgames with her own nose cheerfully burrowed into a sewing project, watched this one. We were glued to the set with breathless anticipation as Hank’s bat cracked his record-shattering hit. My arm hairs still tingle when thinking about that great moment in history.

Mr. Aaron regrettably didn’t live to see this The Bionic golden anniversary of his achievement, but in his Duo! memory RetroFan raises its Hank Aaron Slurpee cup LINDSAY to salute this milestone.

WAGNER & LEE Ya know, I think our contributors have knocked MAJORS it outta the park this issue, too. In the pages ahead

By Herbie J Pilato you’ll meet one of the Partridge Family, an oddball You’ll flip over FANTASTIC FOUR cartoonist, and a couple of cartoon characters; on Saturday mornings MODESTY BLAISE explore bizarre sci-fi realms; meet Sonny and Cher’s : T LS most daring fan; and put on your boogie shoes. So O E Years H E rly get ready for another groovy grab-bag of the crazy, He Ea W Th cool culture we grew up with!

TV Westerns • Movie Icons vs. Axis Powers • San Diego Chicken & more!

May 2024

THE HEYDAY OF HOSTESS

Featuring Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Mark Voger • Michael Eury Lee Majors/Lindsay Wagner photograph courtesy of the Classic TV Preservation Society. Spider-Man and Fantastic Four © Marvel. Modesty Blaise © Modesty Blaise Ltd. Hot Wheels © Mattel.

Hostess Twinkies © Hostess Brands, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

VOGER’S VAULT OF VINTAGE VARIETIES

DAVID CASSIDY Triumph, tragedy, and the specter of Keith Partridge

He hung up Keith Partridge’s maroon crushed-velvet suit in 1974. Then David Cassidy spent the rest of his BY career eluding the specter of the fictional TV alter ego MARK he portrayed for four seasons of The Partridge Family.

VOGER The former teen idol recorded, toured, starred on Broadway, and mounted glitzy Vegas productions—yet he still encountered fans clutching Partridge (CENTER) David Cassidy called Keith Partridge Family lunch boxes. The problem: Though Cassidy “totally the antithesis of who I was.” But he played a fictional character, he really did sing all of never denigrated fans of the TV show that those Partridge hits like “I Think I Love You” (#1), “Doesn’t launched him to superstardom. (INSETS) Somebody Want to be Wanted” (#6), and “I’ll Meet You Cassidy in the Seventies. Publicity photo.

Halfway” (#9). Still, Cassidy was grateful for the early exposure, and maintained a sense of humor about his Partridge past.

The singer had larger concerns. After several DUIs in the 2010s, For Cassidy’s legions of fans, this revelation made his death he owned up to a drinking problem. “Getting behind the wheel seem even more tragic. But those fans can take comfort in the fact when you’re impaired is a horrible, horrible thing to do. Call a cab,” that Cassidy always expressed gratitude for their loyalty, so much he told me in 2011. so that he continued performing live through his turbulent final In 2017, Cassidy announced that he was living with dementia, years. Cassidy did this on his own terms, by not allowing himself to and died later that year at age 67. But it wasn’t dementia that took be overshadowed by Keith Partridge. (He never reprised the role in him—nor did he actually suffer from the debilitating malady that a reunion film project, for one profound example.) claimed his mother, actress Evelyn Ward, in 2012.

I spoke with the New York City native (born 1950) during five All came to light a year after Cassidy’s death, when an A&E interviews conducted between 1991 and 2011. In our final converdocumentary about him presented interview excerpts in which sation, Cassidy spoke about his drinking problem—by then, the cat the singer confessed that he lied about having dementia. The true was out of the bag—but was still concealing its severity. culprit that took Cassidy’s life? Alcoholism. “I did it to myself, man,” Recalling these interviews today is an exercise in spotting what he admitted in the interview. “I did it to myself to cover up the Cassidy was really trying to tell us about his sometimes troubled sadness and the emptiness.” life: being torn between divorced parents; sudden fame at 20; a RETROFAN

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difficult adjustment to the spotlight; and that pesky Keith Partridge, who clung to Cassidy like the Ghost of Pop Stardom Past.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

David Cassidy was born to Tony-winning actor Jack Cassidy and his then-wife Ward.

The couple divorced when their son was five, and David spent much of his childhood with his maternal grandparents, Frederick and Ethel Ward, in New Jersey.

“I grew up part of the time with my grandparents in West Orange (N.J.) after my mom and dad were divorced,” Cassidy explained. “I grew up in Manhattan, and then I went to school in West Orange. My mom was an actress, and she was on the road a lot.

“I was young. I was between five and eleven. I played Little League.

There was a field that’s still there. I had a lot of very religious influences, Christian religious. It was very blue collar and conservative and really solid. My grandfather and grandmother were both very involved in their own respective churches; my grandfather was Methodist, my grandmother was Episcopalian. I was the soloist in the junior choir. My grandmother was a pianist and soloist in the senior choir. I remember a lot of Bible school and public school. I remember it being really very solid.

“It probably was subconsciously something that—later on in life, as I went through becoming extremely successful early on—helped to keep me grounded.”

Cassidy fondly recalled summer visits to a certain seaside resort popularized by Bruce Springsteen.

“When I was a kid, the place my grandparents and my mother used to take me every summer was Asbury Park,” he said.

“That was a treat for me. We’re talking the mid-, late Fifties. One of my earliest memories was walking down the boardwalk. I have photographs of my grandparents and I on the boardwalk there. There used to be all kinds of great rides. I couldn’t wait to go on the rides and go swimming. Basically, it was the thing in the summertime that I looked forward to the most.”

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(TOP LEFT) Jack Cassidy, David’s father, was a Tony-winning actor with a love for Frank Sinatra records. Publicity photo. (TOP RIGHT) David Cassidy and his come-hither look in the happenin’ Seventies.

(LEFT) Evelyn Ward, David’s mother, relocated with David to her parents’ home after her divorce. Publicity photo. (BOTTOM) Shirley Jones, David’s stepmother, played his mom on The Partridge Family. Partridge Family © Sony Pictures Television.

Cassidy’s introduction to music came from his parents’ profession—and his father’s record collection.

“I grew up around musical theater with my mother and father, both of them,” he said. “My father did 40 Broadway shows; my mother did probably 20 of them.

My mom was a singer, an actress, and a dancer. She had done a lot of theater.

“My father had such an incredible presence and such a great talent. My brothers and I, who are very close—Sean, Patrick, Ryan, and I—often talk about how incredibly gifted he was. He taught me a lot about having a work ethic and about values. He was brought up very poor. He understood that hard work and discipline is what it takes. He’s in my life every day.”

As were his musical tastes. “My dad was a big, huge [Frank] Sinatra fan,” Cassidy continued. “He had every album.

The greatest single live recording, in my opinion, is Sinatra at the Sands (1966) with the [Count] Basie Band. It’s still my favorite live album. I remember hearing it when I was 14 or 15 years old. Sinatra introduces this young arranger-conductor, Quincy Jones. At some point in the recording,

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

Sinatra says, [paraphrasing], ‘You’ll have to forgive the construction going on here at the Sands. We really apologize. You know, it’s really expensive now to build here in Las Vegas. It’s actually $35 a square foot.’ Which is a beautiful statement.

“It’s still the best live album I’ve ever heard, I think, other than the seven, eight, nine minutes he goes off on [columnist] Dorothy Kilgallen. It’s such a time warp. What? Dorothy Kilgallen? Wasn’t she on What’s My Line? These are things that I remember as a child.”

Another profound musical influence on Cassidy happened on February 9, 1964, the night the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Recalled Cassidy: “I saw the Beatles on the Sullivan show on Sunday night. Monday, I begged my mother and my stepdad to take me to the music store. I bought a Fender—what was my first guitar? I’m trying to remember. A Fender Jazz Master? No, a Fender Jaguar.

“I started learning to play guitar. I played drums. I had a couple of friends of mine. We started to play. We were all learning Beatles songs off the first album and the second album. I was actively involved in some really bad garage and blues bands.”

L.A./NEW YORK SHUFFLE

When Cassidy and his mother migrated West as he was on the cusp of his teens, it was a right-place/right-time situation for the lad.

“I lived in Southern California during the Sixties as a teenager,” he said. “It was an amazing time to be alive. I was pretty much on the cutting edge of what was going on all over the place. I was accused of being a hippie by a lot of people. I tended to be a rebel.

I went to three different high schools; I was kicked out of two of them. I was pretty wild during my teenage years.”

Said Cassidy of his romantic pursuits at the time: “I was a very adventurous guy. I was not a very naive guy. I was somebody who was pretty active when I was young. And it was a time, fortunately, that you didn’t have to worry about what people have to worry about now.”

There were drugs, too, in those days.

“But it was a different thing,” Cassidy said. “It’s not like it is now. It was fun.

Turn on, tune in, drop out—that kind of thing. It was still very innocent, and kind of about a love thing. It had nothing to do with machine guns, South America, billions of dollars, and murder. It was a totally different concept and a different time. People’s attitudes about it were much different.”

But this period wasn’t all peace and love for Cassidy.

“I can remember when I moved to Los Angeles, I really longed for just a real, grounded, no illusion—just something very

loving, supportive, and very genuine. I never felt like I belonged in L.A. or in Hollywood.

“I graduated from high school after working with the L.A. Theater Company my last year in high school. I moved back to New York and took a job in the mailroom. My father had a guesthouse. They [Jack Cassidy and second wife Shirley Jones] were doing a Broadway musical at the time.

“After about three, four, five months, I got myself an agent. I went on a lot of interviews. I’d moved back to New York; I thought it was the right place for me to start, because my parents were both very involved in the theater. By fate, someone from the film company went to New York to see young actors. I had landed a pretty good role in a musical that bombed called The Fig Leaves Are Falling (1969).

“I flew out to Los Angeles to do a screen test. From that test, I got a number of dramatic shows like Marcus Welby, Ironside, Bonanza, Medical Center—all of those really successful one-hour dramas. In a very short period of time, actors can become kind of relevant and hot. At the end of that season, they do pilots. I had to do a number of different auditions for a half-hour situation comedy with music.”

COME ON, GET HAPPY

In 1970, Cassidy auditioned for this mysterious sitcom. He recalled: “They knew I could sing and play guitar; they did film for screen tests. Even though the network and the studio didn’t care, I started off playing [the Jimi Hendrix song] ‘Voodoo Chile.’ Because at first, there wasn’t any music [for the sitcom]. Nobody knew what the music was going to be like! So even though they knew I could sing and play, I was cast as an actor, as was everybody else.

“It was fascinating how it evolved, and how quickly it evolved, just by fate. It was obviously God’s intent. I feel very fortunate to have had all of the stars align to do that. Because I was able to not only become very successful, but to touch people’s lives and bring light into their lives.”

(BELOW) One big happy. Clockwise from top left: Shirley Jones, Dave Madden, Cassidy, Susan Dey, Suzanne Crough, Danny Bonaduce and Bryan Forster in The Partridge Family. The Partridge Family © Sony Pictures Television.

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(LEFT) The fake band’s very real second album, Up to Date (1971). (RIGHT) The gang’s all here— even the dog and the bus­— on the picture sleeve for the #6 hit “Doesn’t Somebody Want to be Wanted” (1971). © Bell Records.

The Partridge Family © Sony Pictures.

Cassidy was cast as the eldest sibling of a Cowsills-like singing family opposite his real-life stepmom, Oscar-winner Jones [see RetroFan #8 for the Cowsills’ story.—ed.]. Also portraying the titular clan in ABC-TV’s The Partridge Family (1970–1974) were Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce, Suzanne Crough and, depending on the season, Jeremy Gelbwaks or Bryan Forster. They traveled along in a psychedelic school bus—actually, it was a faux-Mondrian design—joined

by Dave Madden as their flustered manager.

It was a weird surprise for Cassidy that his stepmother would be playing his mother. But according to Jones, the situation presented a personal upside.

Jones told me in 1992: “I was always kind of the ‘wicked stepmother’ in David’s eyes, even though I tried in every way possible to win favor with him. He was very bitter about his father’s divorce. Only when we worked on Partridge—until we had a close, daily relationship on an adult level—did we get to know each other.”

Portraying Keith Partridge for four seasons could often be uncomfortable for Cassidy, who described the character as “totally the antithesis of who I was.” For one thing, Cassidy said he felt “uncool” appearing alongside the younger actors.

“I mean, when you’re 19, you want your other friends who are 19 and 20 to think that you’re cool,” he said. “You don’t want to be with 12- and 13-year-olds. Imagine! It was hard for me.

“Don’t get me wrong. I liked the people I was with. I believed in what I was doing. I knew that I was good. And I knew that the music we were playing was good.

But the music was pretty much focused on an audience that was younger than me. And I wanted to make records for people my age.”

Said Cassidy on maintaining the Keith Partridge haircut: “I never got it cut. I just would let it grow. You know, once every couple of months, I’d cut it, probably, as 6

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I can recall. But I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it, except getting up in the morning, taking a shower and having to spend half an hour drying it.”

On whether he still owned his maroon stage costume: “Oh, my crushed velvet? Um, sadly, I don’t. I sure wish I did, though. The crushed velvet was one of those magical outfits that went along with the bus and Mondrian that is that style.”

On the Partridge Family bus: “It was a 1958 International, I think.

It was a beat up, old, real seriously no-power, no nothing. It was a grinding old hunk of junk that they painted to look good. The inside of it was a mess. It was really a retired, beaten-up old school bus.

Because in those days, they didn’t want to spend more than they had to. I think they paid $250 for it, and I’m not exaggerating. You know, studio execs go, ‘Ah! Find some old school bus and we’ll paint it. Let’s not spend any money on this!’ That’s the way they did things in those days. A different world than we live in now.”

On being mobbed by fans: “They wrecked and destroyed five limousines when I played Madison Square Garden. They turned one of them over. I wasn’t in any of them, but when you get that kind of mass hysteria, that was pretty intense.”

On a favorite piece of memorabilia bearing his likeness: “There was a great piece in MAD magazine about ‘The Putrid Family.’ I was Teeth Putrid. It’s brilliant.”

Angelo Torres’ art from the Partridge Family parody in MAD #150 (1972). Cassidy called Torres’ depiction of him as Teeth Putrid “brilliant.” © EC Publications, Inc.

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1) Excellent likenesses of the TV cast by artist Don Sherwood grace the cover of Charlton’s comic book The Partridge Family #13 (1972).

2) Box art for Milton Bradley’s The Partridge Family Game (1971).

3) David is “Doing His Thing” in card #24 of Topps’ Partridge Family trading cards (1971).

4) The singing Partridges on Seeley Thermos’ Partridge Family lunch box (1971). The faux-Mondrian bus on the flip-side.

5) Ooh, spooky! The Ghost of Graveyard Hill (1971) is the fourth Partridge Family novel and Marked for Terror On the Partridge Family songs he sang: “People tend to look at that and say, ‘Well, it’s bubblegum’ or ‘It’s kids’ stuff.’ Some of the arrangements are so sophisticated and so hip, that it’s a wonderful thing to go back and listen to it.”

ARTISTIC EXPLOITATION

As a pop singer, Cassidy was frequently used as pin-up fodder for teen magazines aimed at pre-pubescent girls, such as 16, Tiger Beat, and Teen Keen. These magazines, charged the singer, fabricated interviews with him outright.

“It was completely and totally contrived and made up to promote an image that was selling a lot of magazines for them,” Cassidy said. “It was very frustrating. I would sit down and have an

(1973) is not a thriller by Robert Ludlum, but the tenth Partridge Family novel.

6) David Cassidy as Keith Partridge in art by Don Sherwood, from the cover of The Partridge Family #3 (1971).

7) That’s right, David Cassidy starred in his own comic book! As himself! David goes solo in a panel from Charlton’s David Cassidy #2 (1973).

8) Cassidy, tagged “Teenland’s Heartthrob,” strummed on the Oct. 29, 1971 cover of Life magazine. The Partridge Family © Sony Pictures.

interview with them and say, ‘Really and truly, my favorite music is Hendrix or [Eric] Clapton.’ They’d write, ‘David loves the Monkees.’

“I could tell them that I was into bondage, and they would have written, ‘David loves to go to sleep with his puppy at night.’”

What was Cassidy’s pick for the most ludicrous fan magazine headline about him? “That I love wearing David Cassidy love beads,” he said with a laugh. “‘David sleeps with his love beads.’ There were more of them—‘David near death.’ I try to block most of that stuff.

‘Be David’s lover.’ ‘Win a trip to Hollywood, be David’s lover.’”

The production company, too, used Cassidy as their cash cow.

His likeness appeared on Charlton comic books, Seeley Thermos lunch boxes, Curtis paperback books, Milton Bradley board games, Topps trading cards, and more.

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“When you have a company that owns your name and likeness,” the singer said, “they can make a David Cassidy doll—which they did—they can make David Cassidy lunch boxes, comic books, and all of that.

“I’m not obsessed with the fame part of it at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve had it for so long, but it doesn’t hold anything for me.

I’m thankful for being acknowledged, but for me, it’s always been about the work, not how famous I’m going to get or how rich I’m going to get. My father once said to me: ‘Do good work. The rest of it comes.’ That’s it. Talent is the thing that has always been a commodity. I think it still is.”

POST ‘PARTRIDGE’

After The Partridge Family, Cassidy put out several solo albums, including the respected The Higher They Climb, The Harder They Fall (1975), with its cover image of Cassidy and guitar soaring above a sea of fans, followed by its back cover image of the smoking remains of his stage costume. In the middle Seventies, Cassidy shaved off his hair and struck up a friendship with John Lennon.

“I wouldn’t say I was best friends with him,” Cassidy said, “but I had dinner with he and Yoko [Ono] a number of times. I jammed with him. He came over to my house on New Year’s Eve; I think it was 1975. We got drunk together in my bedroom and played songs all night. I got to sing all of Paul [McCartney]’s parts. That was the greatest musical night of my life. Because those guys are the reason that I picked up a guitar in the first place.”

In 1976, Cassidy’s father Jack—who suffered from bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and had been behaving erratically—was found dead after a fire that resulted from his dropping a lit cigarette in his sleep. He was 49.

David carried on. In 1978, he starred in NBC-TV’s ten-episode police drama David Cassidy: Man Undercover. (Despite the title implication, Cassidy didn’t portray himself. But watching him play a tough-talking detective is a trip unto itself.) In 1982, he starred on Broadway in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Cassidy moved to England in 1984 for a three-year stay, scoring a gold album. In 1990, British prog-rockers Asia recorded “Prayin’ 4 a Miracle,” a song co-written by Cassidy, his future wife Sue Shifrin, and Asia bassist John Wetton.

That same year, Cassidy did Blood Brothers with his brother Sean Cassidy on Broadway, performed it on London’s West End, and headlined 8

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(ABOVE) The cover and back cover to Cassidy’s solo album The Higher They Climb (1975). The back cover finishes the sentiment: The Harder They Fall. © RCA Records. (LEFT) Ooh, racy!

Annie Leibovitz took this photo of Cassidy, which was then considered suggestive, for the May 11, 1972 Rolling Stone cover. © Rolling Stone.

Voger’s vault of vintage varieties

the national tour. Cassidy then wrote and produced The Rat Pack Is Back (which he said was inspired by listening to Sinatra At the Sands as a teenager). That revue played Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Mohegan Sun. Cassidy followed it up with At the Copa, which he produced and starred in.

How many performances had Cassidy given in musical theater? “It would be hard for me to try and put it all together,” he said. “But I know I did over 2,000 in Las Vegas in six years. I did over 700 in Blood Brothers alone. I would have to say it’s in excess of 3,000. From a concert standpoint, I would have no way of knowing.

It’s in the thousands, though.”

For my money, the funniest thing Cassidy ever did was his self-deprecating turn in a 2003 episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which he played a former teen idol who reinvents himself as a Vegas-style headliner.

“That was a tribute to my father,” Cassidy said. “I’ve met so many individuals, it was kind of like an omelet of all the celebrities who’ve lost their minds that I’ve met over the years, singers and actors. It was really fun. I love being able to send up. There’s a saying in the U.K.: ‘Taking the p*ss out of myself.’ Satirizing fame and celebrity is something I love doing, even when it’s aimed at myself.”

THE FINAL CURTAIN

(ABOVE) Cassidy covered the Association’s swoony hit “Cherish” in 1971. © Bell Records. (BELOW LEFT) Cassidy takes aim in the ten-episode wonder David Cassidy: Man Undercover. (BELOW RIGHT) The show’s rather generic title card. © Columbia Pictures Television. (BOTTOM) Dig the hair. Cassidy poked fun at himself in a “meta” turn as Boone Vincent, a former teen idol, on a 2003 episode of Malcolm in the Middle. © Fox Broadcasting Co.

The fact that Cassidy was so vital and creative for such a sustained period—all those musicals, all that touring—made his seemingly out-of-nowhere downfall all the more shocking. The first public sign of trouble came with a DUI arrest in 2010, which Cassidy then explained away as a lapse in judgment.

The singer told me in 2011: “I had come from a funeral. I was with a buddy of mine. I dropped him off at the airport. I made a horrible mistake. It was a great wakeup call for me, and a lesson for me, and something that I’m grateful for. Unlike most people, I was on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and on a crawl on CNN. That’s the downside of celebrity.”

But after two more DUIs in 2013 and 2014, it became clear that this guy had a problem.

Cassidy went into rehab, swearing to family, friends, and the media that he was sober. His third wife Shifrin divorced him in 2016.

Then came Agoura Hills, California. During a 2017 gig at the Canyon, Cassidy rambled, slurred, forgot lyrics, and reportedly fell. A damning fan-shot video from the show went viral, and social media pundits had a field day speculating about Cassidy’s sobriety (or lack thereof).

The fact was, Cassidy’s world was unraveling, and his health rapidly plummeting. Around this time, he announced that he was living with dementia. During an appearance on the Dr. Phil show, a visibly impaired Cassidy was still pushing that narrative.

Later that year, on November 21, 2017, the singer went into a coma and died of organ failure in a Florida hospital. At his bedside were his brothers Sean, Patrick, and Ryan, and his children Beau and Katie. Cassidy’s daughter quoted the singer’s sad final words: “So much wasted time.”

A month after Cassidy’s death, while promoting her memoir Forever (Backbeat Books), British pop singer and Page 3 model Samantha Fox accused Cassidy of sexually harassing her in the RETROFAN

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(ABOVE) Months before his untimely death at 67, Cassidy pleaded his case on TV’s Dr. Phil. © Harpo Productions.

(BELOW) Cassidy said of his Partridge years: “I think that depicts a very, very happy time in a lot of people’s lives. It certainly does in mine, too.”

ladies’ restroom of a restaurant in 1985, after the two finished shooting a video for Cassidy’s song “Romance.” Fox said she put a stop to Cassidy’s advances with a knee to the crotch. Of course, Cassidy was no longer around to respond to the charge, but Fox told interviewers she wasn’t “piling on” in the wake of his death.

Rather, the timing was tied to the publicity tour for her book.

There was another posthumous revelation: Cassidy’s dementia disclosure, it turned out, was just more subterfuge. Cassidy confessed the true cause of his decline to producer Saralena Weinfield, who had been working on the A&E documentary David Cassidy: The Final Session.

Cassidy told Weinfield in a taped phone interview: “I have a liver disease. There is no sign of me having dementia at this stage of my life. It was complete alcohol poisoning. The fact is, I lied about my drinking.”

So... how do you solve a problem like David Cassidy?

The singer’s tragic end is an inextricable aspect of his life story.

But we don’t have to think about it every time “I Think I Love You” comes on the radio.

For his part, the singer spent much of his post-Partridge career striving to ensure that Keith Partridge would not become his sole legacy. Though he sang Partridge Family songs on the stage, he kept his vow never to participate in a reunion TV movie with the sitcom’s cast.

“I think it would permanently taint our impression of the whole thing,” he once told me. “When you finish something that’s that successful, it’s perfect.

To go back would be messing with it. I think that’s a mistake.”

That said, Cassidy never denigrated the more Partridge-focused members of his fan base—the ones clutching the lunch boxes.

“I think that depicts a very, very happy time in a lot of people’s lives,” he said. “It certainly does in mine, too.

I know it was a great time for all the people who saw it, dug it, loved me and the show. In its time.”

When many of us RetroFans reminisce about Cassidy, we go straight to not so much Keith Partridge, but to the guy with the perfect hair and crushed-velvet suit who reluctantly played him. In his Keith getup during the first half of the Seventies, Cassidy was undeniably an icon, like Elvis Presley or Bruce Lee. And those songs—from the familiar hits to deeper cuts like “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat” and “Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque”—still sound darned good.

If we wish to, we can reconcile the invincible, iconic David Cassidy of our imagination with the flawed human one.

MARK VOGER is the author and designer of six books for TwoMorrows Publishing, including Monster Mash (a Rondo Award winner), Groovy, Holly Jolly, and Britmania. He’s not kidding about “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat”—check it out!

Please visit him at MarkVoger.com.

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WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON

Who Created Mighty Mouse?

BY WILL MURRAY I guess I’ve known the Mouse of Tomorrow for as long as I’ve lived.

As far back as my memory goes, Mighty Mouse was always there. If there was a greater cartoon mouse, I never encountered him. Sure, Mickey Mouse has his supporters.

But in my estimation, Mighty Mouse towered over all other animated rodents.

I imagine that I first met the colorful super-rodent on TV sometime in the late Fifties, but no later than the early Sixties. He was a staple of early television. But his glorious history went back further than that. For Mighty Mouse was no cheap, limited-animated TV cartoon product, but a true star of motion pictures.

YOU OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES

Mighty Mouse was the product of Paul Terry’s Terrytoons cartoon studio, which was founded in 1929. Terry was a San Franciscan who came to New York City in 1910.

“I started out as a newspaper’s combination photographer and artist,” he related. “In the 1900s, I saw the first animated cartoon put out by Winsor McCay, and I knew then that’s what I wanted to do.”

The year was 1914. Over six months, Terry laboriously created his first animated cartoon, Little Herman, a takeoff of popular sleightof-hand magician Herman the Great, then sought a distributor.

“It was a beautiful spring morning and I had to borrow money for the train ride,” remembered Terry. “When I reached his office,

(ABOVE) Mighty Mouse had taken on his traditional appearance by the time animation house Terrytoons released this 1946 lobby card promoting his theatrical adventures.

But the cartoon crusader originally called Super Mouse had earlier gone through several permutations.

Mighty Mouse © CBS. Lobby card courtesy of Heritage. (LEFT) Future Terrytoons

head honcho, animation pioneer Paul Terry, in his studio in the Twenties.

the producer said he preferred to look at my picture with an audience! I rushed out into the street, but there wasn’t an adult in sight. I finally rounded up a group of youngsters. They weren’t too eager to come.

“As Little Herman appeared and went into a magic act, the kids tittered. Then they giggled. At the end they were howling with laughter. The producer roared, too, and Little Herman was sold on the spot.”

The experience would guide Terry in his future career.

“And that tipped me off to the idea to draw things that would appeal to kids; because if they laughed at it, the adults wouldn’t have to know if it was funny, or whether it wasn’t, because kids’ laughter is so infectious. I decided right then and there to make pictures for the kids. I probably didn’t know enough to make anything for adults, anyway.”

Terry next created Farmer Al Falfa in Down on the Phoney Farm.

This led to him producing and directing a series featuring the character for Bray Productions.

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Taking the character with him, Terry started Paul Terry Productions in 1917. World War I intervened. Off to Washington, he went. After that, Terry founded Fables Pictures with a partner.

Animated Aesop’s Fables were his main product. It was in 1921 that he produced the first cartoon featuring animated mice. The Mice in Council predated Mickey Mouse by seven years.

This partnership broke up in 1929 over the conversion to sound pictures. Terry wanted to keep his cartoons silent. But times were changing.

Terry claimed that he was in the middle of a party he had been throwing when the 1929 stock market crash happened. He said nothing to his guests. Partygoers continued to dance. Later, he went for a walk along the Hudson River line of the Bronx and threw away his last dime in order to “to start from scratch.”

And so was launched Terrytoons. “I thought it would be best to have a production with music taking the leading part and accordingly, adopted ‘Terrytoons,’” he later explained. “The name is tricky, since it combines the idea of cartoons and tunes.”

Terry’s cartoons were not considered on the same level as rival studios. “Cheesy” was the term most often used to describe them.

“Walt Disney is the Tiffany’s in this business, and I am the Woolworth’s,” he frankly stated.

OF MICE AND ANIMATORS

Terrytoons products lived up to their trademarked name. From the beginning, Phil Scheib composed the score for each Terrytoon, six to eight minutes of music every two weeks.

“Rhythm is so much in our business,” Terry explained, “everything done in the ‘Terrytoons’ must be accomplished in time, every action or movement of the character. Music also decides the length of the film, rather than the cartoon having the preference over the melody.”

Cel from the 1943 Super Mouse theatrical short Pandora’s Box. Looks like the Mouse of Steel also raided Superman’s closet! Mighty Mouse © CBS. Courtesy of Heritage.

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During the Depression decade, Terry’s New Rochelle studio produced a six-minute theatrical cartoon every two weeks without fail. Among his products were such forgotten creations as Gandy Goose and Dinky Duck.

Since the tradition in the field was cartoon animals, that’s what Terrytoons produced. Animated mice were Terry’s personal favorite. He claimed he never used people in his cartoons, only little animals because “No one takes offense with animals.”

Animator Jack Xander recalled, “He used to save drawings. Paul would file away runs, walks, actions, and so forth. If we had a mouse running across the scene, which most of Paul Terry’s stuff did, they might possibly opaque him a different color, but maybe not.”

When fellow animator Dan Gordon devised a gag involving a stereotypical “Terry mouse,” Terry looked it over and instructed, “Put two mice in.”

When Gordon asked why, Terry responded, “If one mouse is funny, two mice will be twice as funny.”

In one early Terry cartoon, a mouse version of Tarzan appeared.

But he did not catch on.

The path that led to the creation of Mighty Mouse was a crooked and convoluted one. It started when animator Isadore Klein returned from Hollywood in 1940 and started working for Terrytoons. Klein was hired to work in the animation department, but soon discovered he would be spending more time in the story department, helping develop new storylines.

“Paul Terry took an active part in the story work,” recalled Klein.

“He considered himself Mr. Story Department for Terrytoons, from whom all ideas originated. Other people’s ideas were merely fillers.

Nevertheless, he expected, and demanded, support from the ‘backfield.’”

Rodents ruled the cartoon roost. Yet about a year prior to Mighty Mouse, Terry abruptly blackballed the species.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

cartoon license, this fly’s strength could be multiplied many times over. I warmed up by sketching a fly wearing a Superman-type of cape holding up with one arm an enormous pole, which, related to his size, seemed like a telephone pole. He was really balancing an ordinary pencil. In a second sketch this fly in Superman cape was flying against the front of an automobile, causing the radiator to buckle and bringing the car to a forced halt. I did not discuss this with the other story men, Foster, McKee, Morrison, and Stahl. I just pinned the sketches on the board.

“These two sketches attracted Terry’s attention when he came into the room. He asked for an explanation. I told him about the big hit a new comic strip called Superman was making and described the basic idea of that strip. Terry looked impressed, agreed that I had a good idea, but instead of a fly, we will make it a mouse—A SUPERMOUSE! (His mind must have suddenly visualized a supermouse hero for all his cartoon mice of the past!)

But wait, it was not Terry’s conception, this hero protector of ordinary weak mice, even though it was suggested (by way of the superfly) by a member of his own staff. Thereupon, after briefly discussing the possibilities of this new character, Terry said, ‘The hell with it. Let’s forget it.’”

Thinking the idea had been vetoed, Klein returned to his animation desk.

“However,” continued Klein, “on the following Monday, Tom Morrison came in to see me at my animation desk. He was laughing

“His ideas were often about (LEFT) The little guy mice and cats,” related Klein. looks more like the “Mouse characters appeared Mighty Mouse we know in many of his cartoons long and love in this poster before I worked for Terry. One for 1943’s Super Mouse day he came into our room episode, Super Mouse Rides with a big announcement: ‘No Again. (RIGHT) In 1945, more mice! To hell with mice!

Terrytoons’ Super Mouse We are through using mice in was rechristened Mighty our cartoons!’ A short time after Mouse—but his costume that proclamation, Hanna and still parroted Superman’s Barbara made their big hit with in this theatrical poster. their cat and mouse cartoon Mighty Mouse © CBS. Courtesy series, Tom and Jerry. Then of Heritage.

Terry’s interest in the household rodents was revived.”

Klein, who considered himself as the man who “sparked” the creation of Mighty Mouse, recounted the character’s genesis in detail: “We were putting up ideas for a cartoon, at the start of a new cartoon story. It crossed my mind that a ‘takeoff’ of the new [at that time] comic strip sensation Superman could be a subject for a Terrytoons cartoon. Since most of the animated cartoon characters of that period were humanized animals and insects, I decided on a super-fly. I had read that a fly, for its size, had super strength. With RETROFAN

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and said, ‘Terry brought in your idea of Supermouse without mentioning your name. He tacked up some of his ideas on the board, we are going to work on it.’

“Later that day, I went into the story room, and sure enough the boss’ scratchy sketches were on the board with a mouse in a Superman-type cape, in some sort of a rescue action, saving some poor mice from a big villainous cat. I remarked, ‘I see where Terry has improved approved of my ‘takeoff’ on Superman.’”

Paul Terry’s version, recounted a decade later, ran differently: “Well, I recognized the inherent values in mice about 15 years ago. Their very smallness made them the perfect heroes for animated animal cartoons. A basic rule of cartooning is that the hero has to be the underdog… people have to feel sympathy for him.

“So one day I took this little church mouse and put him in a very tough situation. I got him out in the open with hundreds of kitty cats chasing him, see, and then to get him out of danger I had him grab a lot of fruit from the market he was passing by—and he grew so big and strong that all of a sudden he just took off and flew through the air.

“And that’s how Mighty Mouse was born.

People loved him from the start because he was so little and apparently helpless, but underneath it all had heroic tendencies.”

THE TINY TITAN OF TERRYTOWN

For Paul Terry, Mighty Mouse was a lifesaver.

Terrytoons was being distributed by 20th Century Fox. Fox had notified Terry of their intent not to renew his contract. Without Fox, Terrytoons would be out of business.

That deadly decision was reversed after Terry delivered The Mouse of Tomorrow, starring… Super Mouse (now two words)!

In that premiere cartoon, released in October 16, 1942, a small village of mice lives in fear of predatory cats. After the rodent population is captured, one nameless mouse escapes and slips into a closed supermarket where he is free to scrub with Super Soap, and eat Super Soup and Super Celery.

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(TOP LEFT) Who’s this pipsqueak? Supermouse, that’s who! His premiere panel, from Coo Coo Comics #1 (Oct. 1942). (TOP RIGHT) Supermouse’s creator, cartoonist Kin Platt. Photo courtesy of Will Murray. (LEFT) Supermouse went on to star in his own title. Issue #1 (Dec. 1948) cover art by Carl Wessler.

Tunneling into a wheel of Super Cheese causes it to spin, and then explode, revealing Super Mouse in his replica red-and-blue Superman costume.

Instinctively understanding his newfound superpowers, he flies to the rescue of his fellow mice and clobbers the predatory cats. At the end, the narrator exclaims, “What a mouse, what a mouse!” It’s copy of a then-popular phrase, “What a man!”

This prototype of Mighty Mouse bears little resemblance to the yellow-and-red-clad version that would come along a few years later. Scrawny, his long-whiskered face and buckteeth are more suggestive of a rat than a mouse. Animator Art Bartsch is credited with having designed Super Mouse. Roy Halee, Sr. was the first of many voice actors to speak—and sing—the part.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

The sequel, Frankenstein’s Cat, was a takeoff on the Boris Karloff’s 1931 film, Frankenstein. According to the narrator, no felines had been seen in the neighborhood for a year and the birds and mice cavort happily.

But an evil wind blows one little yellow bird off course into a dark castle, in which lives a clunky, black-and-orange creature called Frankenstein’s cat.

Chasing the bird, it begins to rise in the landscape. In answer, a little store mouse eats his way through a wheel of limburger cheese, transforming into Super Mouse, who performs all sorts of feats of derring-do, including a swordfight on a winding castle stair that pays tribute to Errol Flynn’s turn as Robin Hood.

In the end, Frankenstein’s cat is defeated.

In the shorts, Super Mouse is given no concrete identity other than an ordinary unnamed mouse that becomes super via different means in different narratives. The third episode, He Dood It Again, opens with Super Mouse living on a high shelf in a supermarket.

After nearby Sol’s Diner closes down for the night, its mice come out to frolic. When this attracts mice-hunting cats, they send out an SOS and Super Mouse once again comes to the rescue.

In this episode, the character is first referred to as a “mighty” mouse, but the name will not catch on for several episodes yet.

The fourth episode, Pandora’s Box, is the first depicting Super Mouse as living in the past. This will be a recurring motif, alternating with contemporary stories, set in what would later become known as Terrytown.

Here, the setting is somewhere in Europe’s past, and revolves around a mouse maiden named Pandora, who opened the mythic box that releases bat-winged flying cats, who begin terrorizing the mouse population.

Pandora’s boyfriend responds by taking vitamin A through X, turning into Super Mouse and beating up on the bad cats with great enthusiasm.

Aside from being a loose adaptation of the Aesop’s Fable of the same name, The Lion and the Mouse completely departs from all previous Super Mouse incarnations, suggesting that the filmmakers had no interest in continuity, seeing the property not as an individual, but as an adaptable conceit for telling animated stories.

(ABOVE) Mighty Mouse’s first comic book appearance, in Marvel’s Terry-Toons #38 (Nov. 1945). Cover artist unknown.Mighty Mouse © CBS. Courtesy of Heritage.

(FAR LEFT) Terrytoons animators Carlo Vinci and Conrad “Connie” Rasinski.

Courtesy of Animation Resources (www.animationresources.org).

Shown in the insets are (TOP INSET) Isadore “Izzy” Klein and (BOTTOM INSET) Gene Deitch.

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A nameless mouse that is captured by a lion and released after he promises to help the lion if ever needed, seeks refuge in a jug of hard cider, and quickly becomes drunk. When hunters go after the lion, the mouse stirs from his inebriated state and inexplicably transforms into Super Mouse, after which he performs his usual feats of super-bravery.

They end as friends.

Super Mouse never seems to encounter any serious setbacks in these early cartoons. He always comes in late in the action, and invariably triumphs through a combination of brute strength and various superpowers, which vary from episode to episode. Sometimes he can shoot force from his fingertips. Super-hypnotism and X-ray vision are also called into play. His weakness: noxious fumes, among them Limburger cheese, whose odor can overcome him.

This is the problem with the series. The muscular mouse is merely a deus ex machina, always late to the fight, but is invariably triumphant, regardless.

There may have been complaints because in the next cartoon, Super Mouse shows up immediately, emerging from what appears to be a comet. He signs autographs and otherwise shows off. But he’s nowhere to be found when a trio of cats invades the rodent happy hunting ground.

When he does swing into super-action, it’s the usual routine round of cat bashing. Problem solved.

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Mighty Mouse and his Terrytoons pals, as seen in theatrical posters from (LEFT) 1946 and (RIGHT) 1957. By the time the latter poster was issued, the characters had transitioned to television. Mighty Mouse and related characters © CBS. Courtesy of Heritage.

(INSET) Mighty Mouse leapt to television in 1953 on CBS-TV’s children’s program Barker Bill’s Cartoon Show.

MIGHTY MOUSE IS BORN!

With his eighth cartoon, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Super Mouse becomes Mighty Mouse, but is otherwise unchanged. He’s still wearing Superman’s red-and-blue uniform, set off with pristine white gloves borrowed from Mickey Mouse.

Why did Paul Terry order the character renamed? It’s a mystery.

Isadore Klein suspected that it was legal pressure from Superman trademark holder DC Comics. But others believed that it was the result of a similar character, Supermouse, debuting in publisher Ned Pines’ Standard Comics’ Coo Coo Comics the summer before Super Mouse’s debut. Unlike Terry’s character, he receives his powers from a distillation of thunder, lightning, sun atoms, and a teaspoon of sugar he mistakes for strawberry soda. After dipping a piece of cheese into this concoction, he eats it becomes Supermouse.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

The original artist behind Standard’s Supermouse was a former Terrytoons staffer named Milton Platkin, who was professionally known as Kin Platt. It was widely suspected that Platt purloined the idea, but it may have been a coincidence.

It’s been asserted that Terry didn’t want his cartoons promoting a comic book character, nor did he care to be involved in a lawsuit over the name, probably because Supermouse predated his cinematic concept by three months. So Terry changed his character’s name.

Terry also made a deal with Timely Comics publisher Martin Goodman, who launched Terry-Toons Comics in 1942. Super Mouse never appeared in its pages, but Mighty Mouse showed up beginning in 1945. Stan Lee wrote many early Mighty Mouse scripts for the company that would eventually become Marvel Comics. When Mighty Mouse was given his own title, Lee gave him a girlfriend named Mitzi Mouse and pitted him against a villain he called Dr. Doome.

With Eliza on the Ice, a 1944 adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the uniform colors abruptly change. In his bright red duds, he looks like Captain Marvel.

It wasn’t until The Sultan’s Birthday that the ultimate yellowand-red Mighty Mouse costume debuts. In this episode, for the first time Mighty Mouse is portrayed as living not in a supermarket on Earth, but in a star in the sky. It’s from the star that the Mouse of Tomorrow hurdles Earthward when he learns of danger threatening Terrytown’s rodent population.

Conrad Rasinski redesigned Mighty Mouse, giving him a big barrel chest, making him more robust, and removing all resemblance to a rat. Given the lack of continuity, one might argue that Mighty Mouse is an entirely different entity than Super Mouse.

Mighty Mouse and the Pirates in 1945 modifies the format by turning the cartoon into an opera with dialogue lines sung instead of spoken. This became the pattern of the series going forward.

Mighty Mouse didn’t sing in that first operatic effort, but he did in the follow-up, Gypsy Life. The Bat-cats from Pandora’s Box return in this story. This Terrytoon earned Mighty Mouse his first and only Academy Award® nomination. That elevated Paul Terry’s industry profile. One newspaper called him “a top chucklesmith.”

The Mouse of Steel has long been a staple of comic books, including (LEFT) 1953’s special edition Three Dimension Comics and (RIGHT) 1957’s launch of the TV tie-in title Mighty Mouse Fun Club Magazine. Mighty Mouse © CBS.

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“I can do anything with [Mighty Mouse],” Terry boasted in 1945.

A recurring antagonist like Oil Can Harry was important to “Just imagine, the possibilities are unlimited. Yes, Mighty Mouse challenge the often-invincible super-rodent. “The tougher you can do anything. He has the strength of thousands of mice.” make it for him to win, the more important it was when he did win,” Terry often closed the drapes on his office windows and worked Terry pointed out. around the clock. He was also famous for napping on his office Another formidable foe was introduced in 1949. Julius “Pinhead” couch for hours on end, all while his animators toiled away.

Schlabotka was a giant feline endowed with tremendous strength.

“I don’t do much drawing myself anymore,” Terry admitted. “I Mighty Mouse bested him in The Catnip Gang and again in Law and did enough, beginning in 1915 to last me a lifetime. Now I devise, Order. After that, Pinhead seemed to have had enough and was originate, and let my boys do the manual work.” Terry’s name seen no more. appeared on the many licensed Terrytoons comic books, some of which were drawn by his staff artists.

Struggling to break the mousevs.-cats formula, the story men and animators had their hero come to the rescue of beleaguered rabbits, sheep, and other animals. Wolves and vultures replaced felines as the bad guys.

Many Mighty Mouse exploits were loose adaptations of famous stories or films. The Dead End Cats and Swiss Cheese Family Robinson were among the most obvious. Without explanation, the character showed up in the Wild West, King Arthur’s era, and Prehistoric times. In a retelling of the Trojan War set in ancient times, where the wooden horse conceals sneaky alleycats, Mighty Mouse hurtles down from Mount Olympus to save Troy.

Terry evidently saw the character in mythical, not concrete terms.

“If you go back through history,” he mused, “when a person is down and there’s no hope, you say, ‘It’s in God’s hands now.’… So, taking that as a basis, I’d only have to get the mice in a tough spot and they say, ‘Isn’t there someone who can help?’ ‘Yes, there is someone; it’s Mighty Mouse!’ So down from the Our hero returned to Saturday mornings with 1979’s New Adventures of Mighty heavens he’d come… And lick the evil Mouse, promoted in 1980 cel. Mighty Mouse © CBS. Courtesy of Heritage. spirit, or whatever it was, and everything would be serene again. It was a patternmade thing.”

In 1951, Terry’s rambling studio released its 1000th Terrytoon, Absent from that pattern was any semblance of continuity.

Hansel and Gretel, starring Mighty Mouse. Pressed about his goals, Exactly who was Mighty Mouse? His ordinary mouse identity was Terry replied, “To make 1000 more. I never want to retire. If a never given a name. At his core, he was Everymouse. fellow sets a time that he’s going to retire—whether at 35, 55, or In 1945’s Krakatoa, yet another origin is offered. An anonymous 65—he’s through as of the time he mentally decides he’s going to mouse scientist drinks a potion that transforms him into Mighty retire.”

Mouse. There’s still another in The Cat’s Tail. One stormy night, a shadowy figure leaves a mouse infant on the doorstep of a childless HERE I COME TO SAVE THE DAY! (OR MAYBE NOT) Asked if Terrytoons had made him a millionaire, Terry deflected, “It mouse couple. Possessing a prodigious appetite, he grows up to has given me several millions in contentment. Anybody who goes be super-strong and super-fast, ultimately becoming known as out for dollars alone is crazy.”

Mighty Mouse. Terrytoons were typically absent of background Yet that same year, comic books adapting Terry’s cartoon explanations and details. Mighty Mouse just is! characters reached an estimated 80 million printing. When the 3-D With A Fight to the Finish, a new cycle of Mighty Mouse advencomics craze kicked off in 1953, Mighty Mouse headlined the first tures commences, inspired by old silent film cliffhangers. In these, experimental title. It sold 1.2 million copies.

Mighty Mouse must continually save Pearl Pureheart from the In 1953, Terry made the leap into television, then in its infancy. wolf-like cat known as Oil Can Harry that had previously appeared He packaged for CBS a weekday program called Barker Bill’s Cartoon in Thirties’ Terrytoons.

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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

Show. Barker Bill was recycled from old Terrytoons cartoons as its animated TV host. Running twice a week for 15 minutes, the show aired Terrytoons’ aging cartoon library. Ratings were decent.

Then, in April 1955, Terry added Mighty Mouse cartoons into the mix. Ratings took a jump. In response, Mighty Mouse began to appear more often. Ratings continued to soar.

As a direct result of this, CBS offered to buy out Terrytoons lock, stock, and celluloid. And the Mighty Mouse Playhouse was born. It premiered on Saturday morning, December 10, 1955.

Baby Boomers fondly remember the Playhouse theme song, which begins: ♪♪ Mister Trouble never hangs around, When he hears this mighty sound: “Here I come to save the day!” ♪♪ The significance of this new show was twofold. A major network decided to stake out Saturday mornings for little kids.

Other networks and syndicators leapt into the new gold mine. And the Saturday morning cartoon show block was created—just in time for the first Baby Boomers to start watching TV. “We’ve got the top-rated daytime show on television,” boasted Terry, then 68 years old. “It’s due to the power of the cartoon. I think the cartoon is one of the best mediums of information and education. It can put over ideas without personalities—it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

This turn of events was both fortunate and well timed. The theatrical cartoon market was dying.

“We never made a great deal of money,” Terry insisted. “The great boon, as far as I’m concerned, was when television came along and made all this old stuff valuable again. Otherwise, you never would have heard of Terrytoons. It was just a hand-to-mouth

(TOP) Production cel from 1987’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, autographed by (BOTTOM) Fritz the Cat animator Ralph Bakshi, who was behind the cartoon’s revival. Mighty Mouse © CBS. Cel courtesy of Heritage. business. You made a living. Sure, you paid your bills and had enough to go ahead for another year, like most businesses do. But we kept laying these negatives up, and then television came along; they were hungry for material. They’ve done better in television than they ever did in the theaters.”

Once again, Mighty Mouse had saved the day—for Paul Terry.

After selling out to CBS, Terry continued to hold forth in his New Rochelle building as head of the Terrytoon division of CBS. A wrought-iron statue of Mighty Mouse guarded his Larchmont home doorstep.

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19

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

(TOP LEFT) Offbeat New Adventures characters like Batman parody Bat-Bat and (TOP RIGHT) super-villain the Cow were designed by (RIGHT) animator John Kricfalusi, best known for (INSET) Ren and Stimpy. Mighty Mouse © CBS/Bakshi Productions. Ren and Stimpy © Spumco.

Not everyone was happy with Paul Terry’s latter-day success.

The TV voice of Mighty Mouse, Tom Morrison, walked in the day the CBS deal was announced.

“Paul, I just read in the paper that you sold Terrytoons to CBS for five million. Can that be true?”

“That’s none of your g*dd*mn business!” Terry exploded.

To the press, he was more sanguine. “It was an arms-length deal.

I didn’t really want to sell, but I guess I had reached that age.”

Over the years, Morrison and others were promised 10% of the company, but received nothing. Terrytoons vice president Bill Weiss received a five-year contract as studio manager of Terrytoons as a reward for his years of service, but remained disgruntled.

Director Mannie Davis lamented in 1970, “He got everything. He got all the money; he got all the glory; he had everybody’s talent— he inherited all that for himself. He kept it extra; he’s going to take it with him when he dies. I might sound a little bitter, but I am.”

Animator Gene Deitch, who took over the studio for CBS upon Terry’s retirement and decreed that no new Mighty Mouse cartoons be produced, remembered the Terrytoons founder this way: “Terry by that time was pretty much out of it, and believed that the style of humor of the early part of the century was still valid. Perhaps he was right, but I didn’t think so at the time. He was mainly delighted to be a millionaire, and how he had outfoxed everyone at the studio.”

‘MIGHTY MOUSE’ AFTER PAUL TERRY

The Mighty Mouse Playhouse aired until 1967. The last three theatrical cartoons were produced after Mighty Mouse made the transition to television. The final two reflected a Space Age theme in keeping with 1959–1961 headlines.

In these, Terrytown is called variously Cheesetown and Mousetown. To the very end of Mighty Mouse’s theatrical career, continuity was meaningless.

Paul Terry died in 1971. Although a pioneer in animation, predating Walt Disney’s first efforts, Terry, who is credited with 20

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May 2024

introducing the animation cel, was a reluctant innovator. He resisted going into sound and color, and had an early aversion to continuing characters. Ultimately, in order to stay up with the times, which were constantly changing, he had to give in. Once Terry caved to cartoon reality, he prospered.

“He didn’t want to experiment,” explained Jack Xander.

In 1979, Mighty Mouse resurfaced in Filmation’s The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle. It lasted two seasons.

A running serialized storyline spun off into a 1982 theatrical film, Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Race.

The Mouse of Tomorrow returned to CBS via a back door in 1987.

Terrytoons veteran animator Ralph Bakshi, famous for his X-rated Fritz the Cat movie, was pitching concepts to a CBS executive for a Saturday morning cartoon show. After all of his original ideas were shot down, he claimed to own the rights to Mighty Mouse.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

Bakshi didn’t. Looking into it, he learned that CBS had bought the Terrytoons library decades before, and managed to work out a deal.

Bakski and his director, John Kricfalusi, radically reinvented Mighty Mouse, giving him a secret identity (Mike Mouse), a new girlfriend, and a sidekick named Scrappy Mouse, along with a host of comic book–inspired villains such as Bat-Bat, the Cow, and others. Oil Can Harry and Pearl Pureheart were also resurrected.

Bakshi’s approach was zany, satirical, and experimental. When an artist drew an episode, he wasn’t expected to stay on-model.

He was given the freedom to render in his own style. As a consequence, each episode had an individuality not usually seen in corporate cartoons.

“It’s kind of fun to take a cheesy character and make fun of him,” quipped Kricfalusi.

Mighty Mouse was a hit until he ran afoul of censorship. In one episode, he sniffs a crushed flower. The scene was flagged as suggestive of snorting cocaine. At first it was removed, then it was restored by Kricfalusi.

But when the Mighty Mouse episode “The Littlest Tramp” aired, it drew the wrath of the American Family Association, which accused Bakshi of promoting drug use via Mighty Mouse.

A media scandal ensued. The scene was cut again, but the damage was done. Mighty Mouse was branded a user of drugs, even though it was obvious to anyone watching the scene that he was simply sniffing a flower. Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures was cancelled in mid-season.

Marvel Comics resurrected the character briefly, modeling their stories after Bakski and Kricfalusi’s unique take. Mighty Mouse has not been seen since Dynamite Entertainment’s 2017 comic book miniseries starring the character..

It’s sad, for Mighty Mouse opened the door for Courageous Cat, Underdog, and every other anamorphic cartoon super-hero since.

I have hopes that one fine day he will again come hurtling down from his nameless home star to save the day.

In later years, Izzy Klein remarked that, “Terry never directly acknowledged that I sparked the Mighty Mouse character.” Except once.

Klein recalled a Terrytoons staff restaurant party.

“Terry did most of the talking… He said, among other things, that in 1942 the prospect of a renewal of a release contract with 20th Century Fox looked very bleak. That 20th Century was losing interest in the Terrytoons cartoon product. Then we, Terrytoons, came up with Mighty Mouse. Their interest was rekindled, and a new contract was signed. Mighty Mouse had saved the studio. When Terry said, ‘When we came up with Mighty Mouse,’ he nodded in my direction. I doubt if anyone was aware of that nod except myself.”

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

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21

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 female character in Column One corresponds to the actor who played “her” in Column Two. Match ’em up, then see how you rate!

Too Much TV COLUMN ONE

1) Sheneneh Jenkins 2) Jethrine Bodine 3) Hildegard Desmond 4) Geraldine Jones 5) The Siren of the Nile 6) Rita Fairbanks 7) The little old lady gambler who “looks like Mizz Cox from second grade” 8) Vera DeMilo 9) Good Cavekeeping’s Housewife of the Year 10) Ugly Wanda 22

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May 2024

I

Feel

RetroFan Ratings

Life’s never a drag when these gals show up!

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) Milton Berle, The Milton Berle Show B) Peter Scolari, Bosom Buddies C) Don Knotts as undercover Barney Fife, The Andy Griffith Show D) Martin Lawrence, Martin

Pretty

E) Jim Carrey, In Living Color F) Jamie Foxx, In Living Color G) Flip Wilson, The Flip Wilson Show H) Fred Flintstone as Wilma Flintstone, The Flintstones I) Max Baer, Jr., The Beverly Hillbillies J) Eric Idle, Monty Python’s Flying Circus The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies © CBS Television. Bosom Buddies © Paramount Global.

The Flintstones © Hanna-Barbera Productions.

The Flip Wilson Show, The Milton Berle Show © NBCUniversal Television. In Living Color, M*A*S*H © 20th Century Television. Martin © You Go Boy! Productions. Monty Python’s Flying Circus © Netflix. All Rights Reserved.

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23

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

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RETRO TOYS

before

BY JOE MENO

When LEGO was Wood!

Most of you are familiar with a LEGO® set. The LEGO Group, now the largest toy company in the world, is a company with stores, theme parks, and television shows worldwide. All of this has happened through LEGO’s basic product: the LEGO construction system. However, the LEGO Group started without the LEGO brick, or even toys. The company’s history is a bit more interesting and covers nine decades and four generations. Here’s a look at the first two generations and the early days of the company.

FIRST-CLASS QUALITY CRAFTSMANSHIP

The company was started when then-journeyman Ole Kirk Kristiansen moved in 1916 to the small town of Billund in Denmark, buying the Billund Maskinsnedkeri (Billund Woodworking and Carpentry Shop). Billund was a small community, and Kristiansen marries Kristine Sørensen. They have four children: Johannes, Karl Georg, Godtfred, and Gerhardt.

Before Ole Kirk’s purchase, the carpentry shop built houses in the summer and furniture in the winter. Other items

Author Joe Meno sits happily at the desk of the LEGO master, Ole Kirk Kristiansen.

produced included cabinetry, coffins, and bodywork for carts. All of these items were made with first-class quality craftsmanship

by Kristiansen and his workers when he took over. Other larger projects began to come in, such as farm buildings, and the dairy at Billund and another at the neighboring community Randbøl.

Ole Kirk won a building contract for a church in Skoldberg.

However, the contract yielded only a little profit. His reply: “Oh, well—it was for a good cause.” This quote gave a quick glance at Ole Kirk’s character. He was a man of faith and lived his life to a basic principle: to look after what has been granted to him as well as possible. In his work, he kept the highest standards, and outside of work, he was involved with community and church activities.

Faith gave Kristiansen optimism, and with hard work and determination, helped him weather hard times.

Adversity is something that everyone experiences, and for Ole Kirk, these instances proved to be life-changing. In 1924, his sons Godtfred (four years old at the time) and Karl Georg (at age five), while playing in the workshop, tried to light a fire in a glue heater. Nearby wood shavings caught fire, and the workshop and their home burned to the ground.

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retro toys

With architect Jesper Jespersen, a new home was designed.

Using a Danish style of architecture (the Better Building Practices style) that was used between 1915–1940, Ole Kirk’s house was rebuilt in 1924. The building had the distinction of being the most advanced building in Billund at that time and also the first building in town to have cement sidewalks. Two cement lions were placed at the front door to the home, which quickly gained the title of the Lion House.

Another fire, this time caused by a lightning strike, happened a year later, destroying the workshop and commissions again. Ole Kirk had to rebuild once more. By this time, it’s 1925, and the shop grew with new commissions and contracts. Ole Kirk’s reputation spread, and while the next few years were bright, the stock market crash of 1929 hit Europe, leading to price collapses in wheat, butter, and pork in Denmark. Construction dried up, and unemployment and bankruptcies spiked.

Ole Kirk’s shop felt the effects of the downturn, and by 1931 was in financial trouble. With his primary income sources in construction and furniture dried up, he turned to making scaled-down items and wooden toys to sell.

‘PLAY WELL’

That year, a new worldwide toy craze— yo-yos—hit the scene in Denmark, and Ole Kirk quickly set up his shop to meet the demand. At the same time, a lumber merchant visited the woodshop and enamored by the quality of Kristiansen’s work, made an advance order for the coming Christmas season. Things appeared to be turning around for Ole Kirk and the nowrenamed O Kirk Kristiansen’s Woodwork & Toy Factory, but it was not to be. Once again, adversity made itself known.

In the summer of 1932, Ole Kirk’s wife, pregnant with their fifth child, had a miscarriage and later died, leaving him to take care of his four sons. It was also learned that the merchant that ordered for Christmas also went bankrupt, leaving Ole

(ABOVE) Kirk’s Ball Track (Kirk’s Kuglebane) was a wooden toy designed for beach play. (RIGHT) An early success for LEGO was this wooden duck pull toy. A modern plastic version was released in 2020 (LEGO The Wooden Duck Set 40501).

LEGO and the LEGO logo are trademarks of the LEGO Group. © 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

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Kirk with a huge stock of toys. To recover what he could, Ole Kirk loaded his truck and set out to sell the toys, going from shop to shop and wherever else he could go. Kristiansen managed to sell most of his stock, but since times were tough, he ended up bartering for his toys. He returned with raisins, tapioca, and almonds, which gave his family a few treats for Christmas.

By then, the yo-yo craze had also ended, leaving Ole Kirk with a stockpile of yo-yos no one wanted. With the passing of his wife and mounting debts, Kristiansen was considering bankruptcy. A visiting

retro toys

lawyer, Flemming Friis-Jespersen, convinced him otherwise and gave Ole Kirk some time to recover and consolidate his business by filing a letter of indemnity on his Lion House for his creditors.

It also allowed Ole Kirk to hire a housekeeper. The previous housekeeper only lasted a year before she abruptly resigned.

The new housekeeper only lasted seven months before Ole Kirk married her. From the marriage he was able to settle debts from his wife and family. Ole Kirk Kristiansen’s Woodwork and Toy Factory regained its financial footing, but needed something else: a new name.

Flemming Friis-Jespersen recommended finding a name that was memorable for Kristiansen’s toy factory. Ole Kirk had gone to the annual trade fair in Fredericia twice and noticed that all the major firms at the fair had original names. Inspired by that thought, he gathered his eight employees and offered two bottles of his cider as a prize to the person who could name their factory.

The two best suggestions were LEGIO and LEGO, and both came from Ole Kirk himself. The first referred to legions of toys, but the other was a contraction of the Danish words Leg godt, which means, “play well.” The second suggestion was selected because it sounded good and could be pronounced by everyone. LEGO was first officially used by the company in 1936. Many years later, the company learned that LEGO in Latin means, “I assemble.”

The company wasn’t idle during this time, as toys were being produced by the workshops in Billund. The factory, now named LEGO, was producing a wide variety of toys, from pull-toys to wooden cars and vehicles. One of the most popular toys was a pull toy of a mallard duck.

Another toy was the first construction toy by the company, Kirk’s Ball Track. Meant to be used in a beach, the toy was a set of wood tracks and tunnels that could make a path from the top of a sand pile, allowing a ball to roll down the path.

This was also the first toy by the LEGO Company to have instructions.

The year 1936 was the last time that The LEGO Company participated in the trade fair in Fredericia, and it’s there that an assortment of wood cars were displayed. Called Billund Auto, their wheels were from old yo-yos; the yo-yos were sawed and repainted as car wheels.

It’s also at this time that Ole Kirk became a first adopter to technology, as he purchased the company’s first router in 1937,

LEGO’s first router, a woodworking tool used for more precision and speed. © 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

for a price that equaled one third of the LEGO company’s total profit from the previous year. This was a big risk that paid off, as the router could make precise cutouts and could add the rounded corners to the wooden toys being produced. This wouldn’t be the only risky investment that Ole Kirk would make.

The rest of the decade was marked by rising profits, as LEGO toys became more popular. Ole Kirk began looking beyond Denmark for selling.

One of Ole Kirk’s sons, Godtfred Kirk Cristiansen (who changed the spelling of his family name), began designing toys for the company in 1937 at the age of 17. He was part of the company since he was very young and would eventually lead the LEGO Company after Ole Kirk’s retirement.

Godtfred guided the company into the modern age with the use of plastics and more importantly, the creation of the LEGO brick.

Before that, though, adversity raised its head yet again. In 1940, Germany occupied Denmark.

However, something worse happened in spring of 1942. The LEGO workshop again burned down, along with all of its designs.

Once again, things had to be rebuilt, but this time things were a little different.

By selling the toys that were undamaged in a “Total Clearance Sale,” Ole Kirk was able to pay loans owed to his family and friends. The new factory was completed by the end of the year and is designed with more efficiency in production. Toy production increases because while there was a war going on, toys were still a necessity.

THE PLASTIC AGE

World War II turned out to be a profitable time for LEGO, as toy sales went up 30 to 40 percent annually. LEGO became one of the biggest and most highly regarded toy manufacturers in Denmark. With this, the stage was set for LEGO to step into a new medium.

After the war, LEGO was still producing wood toys, but interest was growing in a new material, after dealing with the shortages of wood and supplies. Plastic was starting to show up in consumer items in Denmark and Ole Kirk, being an early adopter, decided to buy an injection molding machine that ended up being one of the first in Denmark. Before it arrived, though, the person who sold the injection molder visited Billund and met Ole Kirk, presenting him a box of plastic brick-like blocks. The salesman suggested that LEGO could make something similar when the molding machine was set up in Billund.

The bricks were Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, from Great Britain. Kiddicraft was founded by Hilary Fisher Page in the Thirties. Page applied for a patent on the bricks, and in 1947 was granted one in England, France, and Switzerland. This was noted on the box of bricks that was presented to Ole Kirk. There wasn’t a patent for Denmark.

When LEGO designed what became their brick, they made three differences: sharp corners, flat studs, and an eight-millimeter RETROFAN

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retro toys

(TOP LEFT) LEGO goes plastic: an injection molder. (TOP RIGHT) A close-up of a component of the injection molder.

(ABOVE) The original Danish patent for LEGO bricks sits next to an extruded sample of the most successful construction toy on the planet. © 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved. module. In 1949, their first brick was produced. Sales for the bricks were lackluster, and in England, the Kiddicraft bricks didn’t sell well either. This proved too frustrating for Godtfred, who had been skeptical about using plastic. He was convinced that wooden toys would be better to sell, so he gathered his brothers (who all worked in the company) to convince Ole Kirk to refocus on the wood toys that LEGO was known for.

The meeting did not deter Ole Kirk. The bricks would continue to be manufactured, and given one more chance. The question remained: how could the bricks be marketed? It would take a few years and a ferry trip to happen upon the solution.

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The Fifties started with LEGO selling its first successful plastic toy: Ferguson tractors. The tractor had rubber tires and steering front wheels. Other plastic toys were being produced, and by 1951, half of LEGO’s toys were plastic.

The LEGO brick was originally called “Automatic Binding Bricks” and were only the 2” x 4” stud and 2” x 2” stud bricks and were hollow underneath. Slits were on the sides of the bricks also. The plastic used was celluose acetate. By 1953, the toys were renamed “LEGO Mursten” (LEGO Bricks).

LEGO’s toy assortment had grown to wood and plastic toys: 265 of them, to be exact. Godtfred, now Junior Managing Director of

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A/S LEGO, went to the 1954 British Toy and Hobby Fair in Brighton and learned that Kiddicrafts Self-Locking Bricks wasn’t a success internationally. While on a ferry, he started talking to a fellow Dane, Troels Petersen, who was a head buyer for the toy department at Magasin du Nord. Troels lamented about the state of the toy industry, upset that there was no system to it. This caught Godtfred’s attention—he had the same thought about LEGO’s products. LEGO had to focus on one idea: one product that was unique and lasting that could be developed into a wider range of toys that were easy to play with, easy to produce, and easy to sell. It wasn’t hard for Godtfred to figure out that one product—it would be the LEGO brick.

The system became a System of Play, where initial sets would lead to collecting the bricks and expanding the building possibilities of the bricks by buying more sets. More sets would equal more building, which would equal more sales. Godtfred could see this in action with his children, Gunhild, Kjeld, and Hanne, and used

them to advertise a series of LEGO sets in 1953, before his visit to the British Toy Fair.

Godtfred created ten guidelines for the LEGO System: 1. Unlimited play possibilities 2. For girls, for boys 3. Enthusiasm for all ages 4. Play all year around 5. Healthy and quiet play 6. Endless hours of play 7. Imagination, creativity, development 8. Each new product multiplies the play value of the rest 9. Always topical 10. Safety and quality The first LEGO System set was Town Plan No. 1, which followed the guidelines set by Godtfred. Children could buy sets to expand

A trio of images depicting the outside of the LEGO tractor box, inside of the box with unassembled pieces, and the final farm vehicle constructed. © 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

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their town and build new buildings. With these sets also were trees, people, and vehicles. The sets were designed in collaboration with the Danish Road Safety Council and helped teach traffic safety to children.

MAKING THE BRICK STICK

With the System of Play developed, there was only one thing that needed to be further developed: the brick itself. It turns out that while the bricks were easy to put together, they also fell apart just as easily. There wasn’t anything to keep bricks together.

The solution was created in 1957 with the addition of tubes in the bottom of the bricks. The tubes were a tiny bit larger than the space between the studs, so the studs get wedged and clutch—

If you only know LEGO as a maker of colorful construction toys then this display of LEGO vehicles is eyeopening. © 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

hence the LEGO description of brick adhesion as “clutch power.”

This innovation is what made the LEGO brick such a useful building medium and was patented in 1958.

Ole Kirk Kristiansen passed away that same year, and Godtfred Kirk Christiansen became head of LEGO. His brothers were also at LEGO running different departments.

1957 also marked the year that LEGO expanded beyond Denmark, with the opening of a sales company in Germany. The

‘ONLY THE BEST IS GOOD ENOUGH’

© 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

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Ole Kirk Kristiansen’s focus on quality was constant, whether he was building churches or toys. When his son Godtfred decided to paint a production run of wooden ducks with two coats of varnish instead of the usual three, he went back to his father to tell him how time and costs would be cut with this. Instead, Ole Kirk had Godtfred return the consignment from the train station (where they were ready to be sent) to paint the third coat of varnish. For Ole Kirk, quality meant everything, and that focus has continued ever since. For him, “Only the best is good enough.”

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expansions continued in 1959 with France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Sweden.

In 1960, yet another fire destroyed the workshop where LEGO wooden toys were made. A decision was made to stop making wood toys and to focus on the LEGO system. That year, LEGO company divisions opened in Finland and the Netherlands. In 1961, LEGO reached the United States and Canada with a license agreement with the Sampsonite Corporation, a luggage company.

LEGO’s focus on its brick began to bear fruit when it went international. Since then, two more generations of Kristiansens have led the company to the present. Without the vision of Ole Kirk Kristiansen and insight of Godtfred Kirk Cristiansen, though, the company would not be the powerhouse it is today. Quality and a system of play set the path of LEGO to eventual success.

Photos by Joe Meno.

JOE MENO is the editor of BrickJournal magazine, which spotlights all aspects of the building community, showcasing events, people, models, how-to articles, new product intros, and more. From TwoMorrows Publishing (where else?)!

(TOP) Early LEGO system sets. The LEGO Mosaic (Mosaik) was used to create art in a pre-video game 8-bit style.

(ABOVE) An announcement of LEGO’s building set debut.

[BrickJournal is not affiliated with the LEGO Group.]

© 2024 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.

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RETRO SCI-FI

Planet Patrol

“This is Earth, the year 2100.

“New York is the headquarters of Space Patrol, and men from Earth, Mars, and Venus live and work there as guardians of peace. This is the story of those men whose courage and daring make the universe safe for us all.”

– Extended opening narration from the first Space (Planet) Patrol episode, “The Swamps of Jupiter” We close in on a fiery roaring sun, then the planet Saturn, the ringed wonder of the solar system. A humming chord signals a craft flashing past us—also ringed, a circular hull wrapped around a cylindrical core inside a whirling sphere of energy. With a melodic four-note signature, the craft passes the Moon and heads for Earth.

With a cymbal crash, a stylised title zooms toward us… SPACE PATROL. Known as Planet Patrol in the U.S.A., to avoid confusion with the Fifties series Space Patrol, the British version was a marionette show similar to Fireball XL5. This had made its debut in the U.S. on NBC (ABOVE) Hop aboard a Hover Jet and join the Planet Patrol in action! (LEFT TO RIGHT) Slim the Venusian (sitting), Colonel Raeburn, Husky the Martian, and Captain Larry Dart. © ITV. All images accompanying this feature are courtesy of Shaqui Le Vesconte.

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in the spring of 1963, whereas Planet Patrol’s distribution was more sporadic. WPIX in New York was first to air it from January 1964, running the series several times until the fall of 1968. CKLW out of Ontario, Canada, started in the fall of 1964, with KHJ in Los Angeles following in the fall of 1965, as did KCMB in Honolulu.

ROMANTIC BEGINNINGS

Planet Patrol was the brainchild of author/producer Roberta Leigh.

This was a pseudonym for Rita Lewin, who began writing romance novels in the Fifties. When she had a son, Jeremy, she started writing bedtime stories for him. With independent commercial television (ITV) about to start in the U.K. in 1955, Leigh pitched these as a puppet series, The Adventures of Twizzle, about broken or lost toys forming their own Stray Town. Having no experience of production, she approached AP Films to make it. This company belonged to Gerry Anderson and Arthur Provis and, with work being lean, they agreed to take it on. The 52-part series had a meagre budget of £450 per episode but was a success, repeated by various U.K. regions until the early Seventies. The follow-up Torchy the Battery Boy, about a toy which rescues others from abusive children, was commissioned and aired from 1959, to even more acclaim and success.

In some ways, Torchy laid the foundation for Planet Patrol—the eponymous battery-powered hero had a rocket which took him to the star Topsy-Turvy Land, where toys came to life. Leigh was

(LEFT) Planet Patrol creator Roberta Leigh (1926–2014), a pseudonym used by romance novelist Rita Lewin. © ITV. (ABOVE) Broadcasting trade journal from January 1964, touting the new Planet Patrol series.

interested in space and conceived Planet Patrol purely as a television series. Inspired by a translated Russian book on space travel, Leigh’s vision of the solar system in the year 2100 was an alliance between Earth, Mars, and Venus. The Martians were tall and well-built with spiked hair, while the Venusians were petite with silver hair and pointed heads. Policing this United Galactic Organization (UGO) was Space Patrol, who flew the Galaspheres seen in the opening titles. Each was crewed by three men, one from each planet, with the focus being Galasphere 347 (024 in the pilot and early episodes).

In charge was the bold bearded Captain Larry Dart, voiced by the American-born comedy writer and actor Dick Vosburgh. He was aided by the ever-hungry Martian engineer Husky, whose favorite delicacy was Martian sausages, and the meticulous Venusian navigator Slim, both voiced by the versatile Ronnie Stevens.

Stationed in a futuristic skyscraper was the head of the UGO, Colonel Raeburn, voiced by Canadian actor Murray Kash. From his rotating desk, Raeburn kept a watch on the planets, assisted by his beautiful efficient Venusian secretary Marla. Her precise sing-song tones were provided by Kash’s wife, Libby Morris, both of whom has moved to the U.K. in the Fifties and became big names on British television and radio. For scientific matters, Raeburn called upon the quirky Irish Professor Haggarty, whose eccentric brogue was provided by Stevens. “Don’t call me Pop!,” he would often exclaim of his daughter Cassiopeia, who preferred to be called Cassie, another part for Morris. Despite Leigh’s romance novels being praised for featuring strong-minded modern women, Leigh’s future was decidedly male-dominated. Only a brief appearance by a female French President in “Time Stands Still” gave any modicum of balance. Later episodes saw actress Ysanne Churchman join the voice cast and take on the roles of Marla, Cassie, and some of the alien characters.

Rounding out the regular characters is the one best remembered. Gabbler (short for Gabbladictum) was Husky’s Martian parrot, first appearing in “The Slaves of Neptune.” Haggarty teaches it to speak English, turning it into an unruly conceited chatterbox. Libby Morris’ performance was a wonderfully comedic tour-de-force, as seen in episodes such as “The Forgers” and “The Robot Revolution.” Gabbler had its uses, inadvertently providing solutions in some episodes. “I told everyone I was clever, but no-one believed me,” it laughs in “Force Field X.” “If only I knew what I’d said!”

TOEING THE LINE

Planet Patrol attempted to steer a fine line between fantastic adventure and scientific realism. Leigh enlisted science author Colin Ronan as a “space consultant” to keep matters within the boundaries of the possible—more or less. The Earth of 2100 used undersea farms for food, with a robot workforce (“The Robot Revolution,” “The Miracle Tree of Saturn”), and had weather control (“The Cloud of Death”). Venus is an idyllic if hot world, while Mars is largely a desert with drought and energy issues (“The Buried Spaceship,” “The Glowing Eggs of Titan”). The Moon has a base, Station One, and an observatory (“The Cloud of Death,” “Explosion on the Sun”), but by 2100 has been largely mined out (“Mystery on the Moon”). Asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, such as Pallas, are used as communication relays (“The Shrinking Spaceman”) although occasionally become a threat when hit by comets (“The Wandering Asteroid”). A number were still uncharted, and useful sources of minerals (“The Unknown Asteroid”).

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the outer planets meant voyages of weeks or months. Pluto was a staggering 176 days away. The crew used a timer-controlled freezer unit which put them in suspended animation for the flight, with an on-board robot as auto-pilot.

But what awaited our heroes on these outermost worlds?

The pilot episode, “The Swamps of Jupiter” (which did not always air first), revealed the largest planet to be home to a scientific expedition. When contact is lost, Dart and crew investigate and find two Martian hunters killing the native seal-like Lumis for their furs. The wrong is righted, and Dart befriends a Jovian who they dub “Joe,” possessing a large spherical body, faceted eyes, and a twin entwined neck.

The alien races—or “weirdies,” as Leigh dubbed them—were usually the most fascinating aspect of Planet Patrol, and she attempted to make each unique and distinct. The Jovians were placid and child-like, while the Saturnians were four-armed reptiles with large tails, who keep visitors to their world away with an energy defense system we see as the planet’s spectacular rings.

Uranus turns out to be home to a race of large aggressive plants, seemingly all that survives from some ancient atomic event that Cassie ponders may have been a war in “The Dark Planet.” Later episodes see them evolve into the Duos, who are intelligent but no less malignant. The effete telepathic Neptunians are the most advanced, with mind control powers that enable them to enslave crews bound for Pluto. This outermost world has been colonised

by Martian miners, although “The Buried Spaceship” reveals coal in the tunnels, hinting at long-extinct life—a sadly undeveloped idea.

“The New Planet” revealed a tenth world far beyond Pluto.

In a twist of genius, Leigh posited it being habitable owing to

geothermal heat—a process that we now know may mean the moons of Jupiter and Saturn could harbor life as well—and peopled by giants who learned English from a past lost mission.

To enable the Galasphere crews to survive on these outer worlds was the Molung —short for mobile lung. This cylindrical helmet acted as a filter for poisonous gases, such as on Jupiter, or could be used in space or underwater as a protective helmet.

Communication with other species was via the Elektran, a chest-worn disc that translates languages programmed into it “by a system of microdots.” When contact is made with the Saturnians in “The Rings of Saturn,” it was necessary to “decode” their speech first so that their language can be added to it. Being telepathic, the Neptunians could understand human language and be understood in return without the need for one, as stated in “The Cloud of Death.”

The occasional interstellar traveller found their way here, too. In “Message from a Star,” signals from Alpha Centauri are a harbinger for a visitation by Irya, a one-eyed teleporting inhabitant of the planet Delta. It builds a power unit that enables Galasphere 347 to exceed the speed of light and reach its planet, but at a cost.

As the Galasphere was not designed for such velocities, its meson drive fails, marooning Dart and his crew there. A solution is found enabling them to return, with Irya making a second appearance in “Destruction By Sound,” when it requires help defeating an evil artificial super-brain.

In “The Planet of Light,” Dart encounters the Luminas, living filaments from Sirius. Before the Horta rock creature in Star Trek, these silicon-based beings also could not live in an oxygen atmosphere, providing drama for Slim when his backpack is damaged during a visit to their planet Lumen.

Meet the cast of Planet Patrol: (LEFT TO RIGHT) Joe the Jovian, Colonel Raeburn, his Venusian secretary Marla, Captain Larry Dart, Husky the Martian, Slim the Venusian, Cassie (short for Cassiopeia) Haggarty, Professor Aloysius O’Brien O’Rourke Haggarty, Gabbler (short for Gabbladictum) the Martian Parrot, and one of the Space Patrol robots. © ITV. 34

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retro Sci-Fi

Publicity photos for Planet Patrol characters (LEFT TO RIGHT) Gabbler, Haggarty, and Marla. © ITV. From an even more distant system is “The Talking Bell,” the mushroom-like visitor from Betelgeuse. While almost wholly alien, being neither flesh and blood, metal or plastic, the moral “Mr. Bell” is prepared to sacrifice itself by transferring its life energies to sustain a trapped Dart until he can be rescued.

REACTIONS TO ‘PLANET PATROL’

Planet Patrol was by no means a perfect series, although within months of its debut on WPIX it was being promoted as the top-rated children’s show in the area. It captured the imagination of young viewers with its mix of intriguing atmosphere, semi-educational morality, and character humor. It strove to overcome the limitations of its meager budget, reputedly less than any of Leigh’s previous series. For instance, one of the best episodes, “The Robot Revolution,” is clearly made up of just two of them, attempting to embody New York being overrun by hundreds of the rogue automatons.

The way Leigh and her co-producer Arthur Provis, who had left AP Films to work with the writer, optimized production was to film all the scenes on one set across three blocks of 13 episodes, rather than strike and rebuild them each episode. Keen-eyed viewers may notice the same circular set for Contamination Control and the Rest Room was cleverly redressed to provide other locations such as the Radio Room and Moon Observatory. The filming itself was done in the large upstairs gallery of St. Michael’s Church Hall in Clapton, London, which with its 19-foot high arched ceiling was ideal for the puppeteers’ bridge.

Another stand-out factor were the “electronics” by Fred C. Judd.

An exponent of electronic music, Judd created a part-ethereal part-technological score which can be compared to Bebe and Louis Barron’s avant-garde soundtrack for the film Forbidden Planet. Judd gave each planet its own soundscape. The opening and closing

scenes of future New York were accompanied by a pounding machine-like rhythm. The robots had their own whirring tempo like clockwork toys. In “The Robot Revolution,” this familiar and perhaps reassuring sound to young viewers suddenly becomes as distinctively menacing as the Martian war machine ‘rattle’ in George Pal’s War of the Worlds, as they close in on Raeburn’s office.

Some plots are over-simplistic, while others managed a respectable degree of drama. Fireball XL5 was written by experienced television dramatists. Leigh’s scripts were (no pun intended) worlds away from her original Twizzle, Torchy, and other unpublished children’s stories. Some handled situations quite mature and dramatic for their intended young readership. One can only speculate that Leigh had more restrictions imposed by television regulation, which was certainly the case with her earlier Sara & Hoppity puppet series where some escapades and behaviour were considered as setting bad examples to young viewers. This required some episodes to have scenes rewritten and refilmed late in its production, possibly in parallel with production of the Space Patrol pilot.

Among the best episodes of Planet Patrol was “The Invisible Invasion,” which introduced the Duos, revamped from the Uranian plant puppets to save costs. From a spaceship hidden in the sea near Space Headquarters, they use their ability to control minds to subvert authority, paving the way to colonize Earth. It is one of Haggarty’s inventions, a hair-restoring helmet, that protects him and saves the day.

“The Slaves of Neptune” is an early classic. Martian colony ships have been disappearing, and when Galasphere 347 investigates, it too comes under influence from the planet Neptune. This shows Leigh on top dramatic form and its tense atmosphere must have gripped children at the time.

“The Buried Spaceship” makes good use of science when Galasphere 347 falls into a frozen crevasse on Pluto. The miners struggle RETROFAN

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(ABOVE LEFT) The Galasphere 347. (ABOVE RIGHT) Inside the ship, the Galasphere 347 crew. (LEFT TO RIGHT) Captain Dart, Husky, and Slim. (LEFT) Slim and Captain Dart on Hover Jets. © ITV. While filmed early in production, “Volcanoes of Venus” should conclude the first season of 26 episodes. Slim returns home but seems to side with his traitorous Uncle Gallia, who is planning to overthrow the Venusian President. With Slim resigning from Space Patrol, it is not until a tense encounter with Dart that his loyalty is revealed, willing to sacrifice himself by using a small bomb to destroy the rebel camp.

‘PLANET PATROL,’ BEYOND THE SERIES

to dig out the craft but time is against them as its power is failing, and Dart and his crew cannot even use the freezer unit to survive until they are rescued. As sequel to another episode “The Fires of Mercury,” which saw energy being transmitted from the innermost planet to help the miners survive the bitter Plutonian winter, the series often had an internal continuity that children would have loved to follow.

“The Human Fish” had an early ecological theme, with Tula Fish on Venus evolving rapidly to become intelligent and hostile. Cosmic radiation has built up in the oceans, caused by dumped polluting waste. Sadly, an intriguing idea is not followed through as even with the waste destroyed and radiation dispersed to safe levels, the fate of the evolved Tulas was never revealed.

“The Telepathic Robot” sees Professor Haggarty develop one which can be controlled by thought waves. He builds “Lizzie” for Colonel Raeburn, but while testing it on a mission to a newly discovered planet nearer to the sun than Mercury, it runs amok when Raeburn becomes delirious with a fever. The planet has been claimed as “a holiday resort” by the Neptunians. When they capture the Galasphere crew it is up to “Lizzie,” now controlled by a recovered Raeburn, to rescue them.

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At the time, Leigh was the only woman television producer with her own company National Interest Pictures, predating Verity Lambert (Doctor Who) and Sylvia Anderson (Space: 1999), wife of Gerry who had started AP Films. Leigh apparently felt strongly about the Andersons’ success, whose backing by ITC’s Lew Grade enabled them to craft their Supermarionation series to gain worldwide success she was denied. While Twizzle and Torchy were sold overseas by their British backers Associated-Rediffusion and ABC-TV respectively, it appears Leigh sold Planet Patrol herself through various agents.

There was no American Planet Patrol merchandise, Even in the U.K., collectibles for Space Patrol were meager. The best-known was a color centerspread strip drawn by Bill Mevin, which ran for a year in the weekly TV Comic. This revealed that Martians had green skin, while Venusians were blue, even though colour photos seen in the TV Comic Annual 1966 revealed the puppets to be normal fleshhued. Two comic books were published, adapting the episodes “The Water Bomb” and “Secret Formula,” while another strip appeared in The Beezer for twenty-six weeks from 1966 to 1967, drawn by Terry Patrick. Considering her career as an author, Leigh only published one belated Space Patrol storybook in 1965, The Secret Weapon, which contained two color illustrated tales. This was preceded by a seven-part text adaptation of the episode “The Evil Eye of Venus” in the listings magazine TV Times in 1964. Four edited episodes were released on 8mm, thought for years to be all that survived on film.

Candy cigarettes with collectible cards on aspects of real space travel, and a few toys and activity books, rounded out the rest.

retro Sci-Fi

After one last (known) screening of Planet Patrol in Idaho circa 1970–1971, the series disappeared from the United States, although it apparently resurfaced in South and Central America as Patrulla del Espacio in the Sevenites. It aired as Space Patrol in Malta and Rhodesia, and faired well in Australia, clocking up five runs between 1964 and 1972. Japan aired the series as Supesu Patororu, airing in 1964 and 1966.

After Planet Patrol, Leigh embarked on a color pilot called Paul Starr. In terms of format, it could be considered “Planet Patrol Mark II,” and documentation suggests it was originally considered as a spin-off set in the same universe and timeframe, allowing models, sets and puppets to be reused. But a line excised from dialogue originally set it in the year 3000, so space travel was faster, increasing the pace of stories. Further drafts, outlines, and completed scripts repopulated the solar system with new alien races. This was probably a good move as Planet Patrol, being made in black and white, was fast approaching its sell-by date with color television rapidly on the increase.

Paul Starr and his Asian assistant Lightning are agents for the Space Bureau of Investigation. This operates out of an undersea base, from which they launch their versatile Solarscope craft. The S.B.I. Chief has been assigned Dr. Lesley Mann to help with his workload. In the pilot, Lesley seems little more than a glorified secretary, but the unmade scripts reveal her to be a capable scientist, even accompanying Starr on some missions. As with Leigh’s unpublished stories, and unvetted by television channels and regulators, some scripts come over as astonishingly adult. “The Last of the Vikings” deals with a drug distributed in milk deliveries, making millions into addicts. Harsh justice is meted out to the villains in “The Fiends of Juno,” mauled by oversized rodents, while “King for a Day” deals with animal experimentation and is unclear about the fate of Chuckles, a monkey who gains super intelligence. Unlike Leigh’s previous series, these were not particularly wholesome or moral stories. One can only ponder if they would have got made had a series been green-lit.

In 1965, Leigh wrote and produced a 26-part animated educational series called Picture the Word for Rediffusion. In subsequent years she helmed two 13-part color puppet series: Send for Dithers, about an incompetent handy man; and Wonder Boy and Tiger, about a boy and his oversized cat that roam the world looking for people they can help. This was apparently produced to support a weekly comic called Wonder which Leigh edited for Esso petrol stations for a six-month run during 1968. However for reasons unknown, both series had an extremely limited distribution on British television, and it may have been they were produced for the cinema matinee market. Seeing the commercial value in comics, Leigh edited another weekly called Fun ’n’ Games for the supermarket chain Tesco. With strips drawn by top artists and based on the products they sold, this enjoyed a more successful year-long run from late 1969.

1966 had seen Leigh branching into live-action television with The Solarnauts, starring John Garfield, Derek Fowlds, Martine Beswick, and John Ringham. This was again very much in the mold of Planet Patrol, and commissioned by the British ABC-TV to export to the USA. Produced by the same film company that made The Avengers, the half-hour pilot. “Cloud of Death.” is a respectable pacy

What little Planet (Space) Patrol merchandising produced in the mid-Sixties included home movies, activity books, comics, and even candy smokes! Space (Planet) Patrol © ITV.

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(ABOVE) From 1964, a Space Patrol centerspread comic strip from Polystyle Publications’ TV Comic #675. Art by Bill Mevin. (LEFT) In late 1966, The Beezer, a British weekly comic, premiered a two-page Space Patrol color strip drawn by Terry Patrick, running for 26 weeks beginning with issue #558. The image is a “Next Week” preview from issue #557, and depicts the opening frame, albeit just from the original black-and-white art. Like U.S. comics, the color was done separately. © ITV. effort by British standards, although Leigh’s uneven script lets it down. When this failed to sell, Leigh enlisted writer John Brunner to work on a revised format called Space Command. Brunner’s hard-edged science-fiction approach for a prime-time show diverged markedly from Leigh’s family-friendly stance, with her reworking well-worn stories from Planet Patrol once more. Around 1970, she gave up on television production and ‘returned’ to writing romances, although she had still been publishing serials and novels under her other pseudonym Rachel Lindsay. She clocked up over a hundred novels by the Nineties, and attempted reviving her children’s book character Mr. Hero as an animated series, about a boy’s shadow that comes to life.

Planet Patrol was thought lost for years, but in the Nineties, Tim Beddows of Network Video urged Leigh to check whether she had prints. In a locked storage unit, it was found she had all 38

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39 episodes on 16mm film. These were released on VHS and DVD, enabling the series to be seen for the first time in 30 years. More recently, a complete Blu-ray set has been released, restoring the prints as best they could.

Rita Lewin, a.k.a. Roberta Leigh, passed away in December 2014, three days before her 87th birthday.

SHAQUI Le VESCONTE, previously seen in RetroFan in issue #25’s Space: 1999 article, has had features published in the British magazines Comics International and Infinity. Shaqui has worked for Anderson Entertainment, run by Gerry Anderson’s son Jamie, on their Comic Anthologies as Consultant, Editor, and Writer.

RETROFAD

BY MICHAEL EURY Sex, drugs, and—no, not rock ’n’ roll, but Disco. And let’s add fashion to the mix.

When recalling the contagion we know as Disco Fever, one can’t easily separate the glam, glitter, and gettin’-it-on from the throbbing dance hits that temporarily transformed the world into a boogie wonderland.

Prior to the Sixties, “Disco” was not yet in the vernacular, outside of an obscure comic book character named “Disco, the Boy Detective” appearing in an obscure 1940 comic book titled Hyper Action Comics. (It is unknown if Disco ever got down and boogied.) Some old-timers might’ve recalled the defunct townships of Disco, Tennessee, and Disco, Illinois.

“Discothèque,” which Wikipedia tells us is French for a “library of phonograph records,” became used to describe mid-century Paris nightclubs before the term spread beyond France’s borders. By the Sixties, there were discothèques in cities across the globe, packed with gyrating young people, sparking dance crazes along the way such as the Twist (see RetroFan #10) and go-go dancing (see #19). What’s a girl to wear when Twisting the night away? The “discothèque dress,” a slinky, sleeveless little number trotted out in 1964. As Denny Hilton reported in a disco history posted in October 2012 on Oxford University Press’ OUPblog, 1964 was also the year “discothèque” was first shortened to “disco,” originally in a July 12, 1964, Salt Lake Tribune article about the dress’ popularity, then in the September 1964 Playboy Magazine, where “disco” was namedropped when describing L.A. nightclubs.

According to DiscoAfterDark.com, “It was possible to get amplifiers and speakers that could deliver clear, powerful sounds,” thus creating a verve that ignited bodies in motion on the dance floor.

(ABOVE) We know that everybody was kung-fu fighting back in the Seventies… but they were Disco-dancing, too! Detail from the poster for the 1978 theatrical release Disco Fever, a.k.a. Jukebox, with other faves getting up and boogieing on the RetroFan dance floor. Disco Fever © Group 1 International

“Technological advances Distribution. Love At First Bite in amplifiers and speakers © American International. enabled a high-fidelity sound Mickey Mouse Disco and to be combined with non-stop Sesame Street © Disney. Roller music so dancers didn’t miss Boogie © Skatekey, Inc. All, a step from one song to the courtesy of Heritage. next,” a trend that started in gay nightclubs in New York in 1969 before soon extending to other cities. In the early Seventies, DJs began to take center stage at many big city clubs, holding court as slick, hip masters of ceremonies while simultaneously spinning records. Black nightclubs pulsated with what DiscoAfterDark.com calls “hot, danceable music”—R&B, funk, and soul—producing “a discothèque environment and set[ting] the stage for the creation of disco music.”

But it wasn’t yet Disco music being played at discos.

So, what exactly is Disco?

“Disco music is known for its ‘four-on-the-floor’ rhythm, which referred to the constant quarter-note bass drum beat—you’ll find four-on-the-floor beats (with some variation) in almost every famous disco hit,” according to GroovyHistory.com. Wikipedia expands this definition by noting Disco music’s “often-reverberated vocals, often doubled by horns, over a background ‘pad’ of electric pianos and ‘chicken-scratch’ electric guitars.” Disco music was RETROFAN

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That Sonny Bono—he should be dancing! And he was, in this Bob Mackie– designed “Disco costume” previously worn by the star. Courtesy of Heritage.

heavily produced—garage bands need not apply!—reveling in its excesses as the ultimate party sound.

Getting too technical for those who never studied music? Most RetroFans don’t need those definitions, because since starting this article you’ve had “Stayin’ Alive” or “Disco Inferno” or—Heaven forbid!!—“Disco Duck” earwormed into your head. Even if back in the day you weren’t some hot stuff dancing queen or some sexy thing struttin’ through Funkytown looking for more than a woman, just the mere mention of “Disco” no doubt rings your bell.

Tempers flare like bellbottom pants legs when music scholars, historians, and aging Disco fans attempt to pinpoint the first Disco song. Disco wasn’t unveiled… it evolved. It was in the September 1973 edition of Rolling Stone that rock journalist Vince Aletti used the word “disco” to describe this new, studio-manufactured sound that was packing nightclubs. By 1974, record companies started signing Disco acts, and by 1975 Disco records had become big business. Funk and R&B artists Disco-ed up their rhythms, and new artists—from consistent hitmakers to flashes-in-the-pan— cranked out Disco records. Disco sounds began influencing film scores and television themes (listen to The Love Boat’s theme if you need proof).

As the United States celebrated its Bicentennial in 1976, Disco was a driving force in the music business. Three records that year scored Billboard Top 10 positions for ten consecutive weeks each: Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music,” Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (a dance-floor update of one of classical music’s most famous works), and the aforementioned “Disco Duck” by Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots. No artists were

Macho men the Village People first made the scene in 1977. They’re caricatured here by cartoonist Jack Rickard for 1980’s MAD Disco special. © EC Publications, Inc. Courtesy of Heritage.

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(LEFT) Writer Brendan Boyd and cartoonist Stan Drake produced weekly installments of their syndicated newspaper strip Pop Idols and the Disco Scene from 1976 through 1980. Shown here is the original art for the June 24, 1979 installment. © Universal Press Syndicate.

Courtesy of Heritage.

more spirited in ’76 than KC and the Sunshine Band, however, as their “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” shook Billboard’s Top Ten charts for 11 straight weeks!! Television tuned into Disco music through its dance shows like Soul Train and American Bandstand, moving teens to do the Hustle and the Bump in their living rooms. Disco became family friendly—the quick-barbing duo Sonny and Cher and toothy siblings Donny and Marie were Discoing on their variety shows, and the Bradys got down in 1976’s hard-to-believe Brady Bunch Variety Hour. You could even find Disco in the Sunday newspapers in the syndicated comic Pop Idols and the Disco Scene by Brendan Boyd and The Heart of Juliet Jones’ Stan Drake, a feature that chronicled Disco history and dance steps and presented mini-bios of music personalities.

“The vibrant sound and energetic dance moves of Disco provided young people with an escape from what film critic Roger Ebert called ‘the general depression and drabness of the political and musical atmosphere of the [S]eventies,’” according to TeachRock.org. Years of civil rights struggles and the unpopular Vietnam War had weighed heavy upon the psyche of the U.S.A.’s citizens, worsened by the recent embarrassment of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Americans needed to party.

Nightclub owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were poised to oblige, in 1977 renovating a Broadway theater at New York City’s 254 West 54th Street into Disco’s hallowed grounds, Studio 54. The exclusive nightclub’s dance floors and bars bustled with A-list celebs—Woody Allen, John Belushi, David Bowie, Martha Graham, Bette Midler, the Rolling Stones, and so many more—with Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, and clothing designer Halston reigning supreme as the venue’s “Gang of Four.” Amid the

RetroFad

glimmering strobe lights that thumped along with the rhythms of Studio 54’s dance floor, eyes squinted from the omnipresent sparkle of paparazzi flash bulbs, snapping pics of the partying “beautiful people.”

Studio 54 presented a window to the world of Disco’s great excesses. Disco itself was a confluence of several in-your-face cultural milestones: the sexual revolution, the emergence of gay pride, and technical enhancements in music. Disco fashions emerged that exemplified these freedoms: polyester fabrics and flowing, glittery dresses allowed movement on the dance floor. Unisexual elements such as bellbottom pants and open-chested shirts were popularized as both men’s and women’s fashions. And you can add to this big party the recreational use of drugs, cocaine in particular.

Two additional 1977 debuts tightened Disco’s grip on pop culture.

The Village People began their meteoric rise to musical stardom that year, followed by several years of hits like “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A.” that made the band Disco superstars and gay icons.

And then there was Tony Manero, the Brooklyn blue-collar misfit by day, neighborhood Disco sensation by night, in director John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, which opened in theaters in mid-December 1977. The film was based upon “Tribal Nights of the New Saturday Night,” writer Nik Cohn’s 1975 piece for New York Magazine. With the likeable John Travolta in the lead as Tony, the actor’s personal charisma— familiar to television audiences from his role as Vinnie

(TOP) Teaser poster for 1979’s Saturday Night Fever, where one-time TV Sweathog John Travola put on his boogie shoes as the groovin’, movin’ Tony Manero. © Paramount Pictures. (CENTER) Saturday Night Fever’s dance floor, with its primary-colored illuminated acrylic panels, has become iconographic to audiences. Constructed specifically for the film and measuring roughly 24 feet by 16 feet with over 250 compartments of lights, the dance floor sold for an astounding $1,200,000 in a June 2017 Heritage auction.

Poster and dance floor courtesy of Heritage. (BOTTOM) The Bee Gees in a publicity photo for the November 1977 TV special Billboard #1 Music Awards. (TOP TO BOTTOM): Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, and Maurice Gibb. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

(LEFT) They may have been too young to love the nightlife, but children caught Disco Fever thanks to kid-friendly fare including this Disco lunchbox. The poster’s art was produced

by Paul Wenzel for the 1979 Disneyland Records release Mickey Mouse Disco, then repurposed here. © Disney.

Courtesy of Heritage.

Barbarino in the ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter—and his spellbinding dancing moves outdazzled even the brightest strobe lights that glimmered throughout the movie.

Despite its stark depictions of the underbelly of New York nightlife and several tragic subplots that earned it an R rating, Saturday Night Fever boogied its way to the top. At first duking it out with box-office powerhouses Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Looking for Mr. Goodbar; Oh, God!; and Star Wars (George Lucas’ classic-in-themaking was still in theaters in December after its May 1977 release!), Saturday Night Fever became the No. 1 movie in the U.S.A. in its tenth week of release, March 1, 1978, and remained No. 1 for four consecutive weeks.

It was Saturday Night Fever’s hit-filled soundtrack from RSO Records, however, that convinced the world it should be dancing, helping the film find its audience. Driven by the flashy falsettos of the Bee Gees, producer Robert Stigwood’s soundtrack spawned eight hit singles and sold 40 million copies worldwide, becoming the bestselling LP of all time until Michael Jackson’s Thriller usurped that title in the following decade. As inseparable as the Bee Gees and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack may seem, Stigwood contracted the Bee Gees to produce those songs after the film was completed. “I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs [during filming],” John Travolta told reporter Sam Kashner in his article “Fever Pitch” in The New Yorker’s Fall 2007 Movies Rock supplement.

“Fever Pitch” indeed, as Disco just kept cranking up the volume in the late Seventies, on more than just the dance floor, record stores, and radio stations. TV producer Norman Lear and music producer Don Kirshner caught the fever, creating the Disco-era sitcom A Year at the Top, co-starring Greg Evigan (BJ and the Bear) and Paul Shaffer (Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman) as struggling musicians who make a deal with the Devil for a year of success.

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(Sorry, fellas, you fell short—A Year at the Top bombed after five weeks on the air.) Kids could tote a Disco lunch box to the cafeteria, then spin Disney or Sesame Street Disco records after school. MAD Magazine produced a MAD Disco special edition (you gotta give MAD’s “usual gang of idiots” props for the gag “slipped Disco”).

Seventies comic books took a particular interest in the Disco culture. Disco fashions helped shape Marvel artist John Romita, Sr.’s designs for open-shirted heroes Luke Cage and Sub-Mariner, as well as artist Mike Grell’s updating of costumes for many of DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes. The Fantastic Four’s Ben (The Thing) Grimm shook his groove thing in a New York Disco, while Bruce (Batman) Wayne got down in a Gotham City nightclub; both characters were clad in white suits with black, open-chested shirts straight off the Saturday Night Fever wardrobe rack! Under the glitter of dance-club lights, Spider-Man tussled with the mind-controlling Hypno-Hustler, while Marvel’s newest mutant, the Dazzler, (LEFT) One-sheet movie was a roller-skating Disco singer who used her superpowers to poster from 1978’s Disco create her own light show! movie Thank God It’s Friday.

Dazzler’s footwear was in response to a Disco sub-fad: Roller Appearing in the film was Disco. Movies like Roller Boogie (Linda Blair on skates!) and Xanadu (RIGHT) Donna Summer, the (Olivia Newton-John on skates!) spun forth while many skating Queen of Disco, shown here rinks sponsored Roller Disco events. in a 1977 publicity photo from Beyond Saturday Night Fever, Disco-influenced movies bumped Casablanca Records. Thank God their way into theaters, including Car Wash and the Village People It’s Friday © Columbia Pictures. vehicle, Can’t Stop the Music. Drive-ins booked Blaxploitation flicks like Disco Godfather and sound (“Death to Disco” and “Disco Sucks” were X-rated fare including popular mantras). Remember Disco Demolition Disco Lady. Even the Night? That was a Major League Baseball special Lord of the Undead promotion held during a Chicago White Sox/ Disco-danced in Love Detroit Tigers doubleheader on July 12, 1979, At First Bite, with an where a crate of Disco records was detonated uncharacteristically before the cheers of a stadium-jamming pale George Hamilton throng of over 50,000. The naysayers may have as Dracula shaking been immune to Disco Fever, but the rest of the meanest cape us weren’t. We kept on trucking until the fad since Adam West first petered out in the early Eighties.

Batusied.

In the spirit of Gloria Gaynor’s Disco No movie better anthem “I Will Survive,” Disco has refused to epitomized the Disco step into the spotlight for its last dance. Disco Fever zeitgeist than parodies and homages appear often in pop director Robert culture, and recording artists and filmmakers Klane’s Thank God (LEFT) C’mon, Spidey, unplug the Hypno-Hustler! continue to revisit the music and its mania.

It’s Friday. Released Cover to Spectacular Spider-Man #24 (Nov. 1978) Sirius XM Radio even offers the Studio 54 in May 1978 on the

by Frank Springer. (RIGHT) It’s the Roller Disco Channel, playing nothing but Disco hits. (platformed) heels of mutant in the first issue of her own magazine!

“Nirvana is the dance; when the music Saturday Night Fever, Dazzler #1 (Mar. 1981) cover by Bob Larkin. © Marvel. stops, you return to being ordinary,” wrote Thank God It’s Friday New Yorker critic Pauline Kael of the appeal of centered around Disco in her 1977 review of Saturday Night Fever. a dance contest at an L.A. club called the Zoo and co-starred Ms. Kael hit the right note. Disco Fever made us feel like one of the songstress regarded by most as the Queen of Disco: Donna the beautiful people.

Summer. Legendary music producer Giorgio Moroder discovered the one-time back-up singer and model and helped transform her into a superstar with sexy hits such as “Love to Love You Baby” Special thanks to sources DiscoAfterDark.com, GroovyHistory.com, Heritage Auctions, Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), Oxford University and “I Feel Love.” No song better exemplifies Disco Fever than Press, TeachRock.org, and Wikipedia.

Summer’s soul-stirring “Last Dance.”

Disco had its dissenters: conservatives were rubbed the wrong Delirious with Disco Fever, RetroFan editor MICHAEL EURY once way by its promotion of sexual freedom and homosexuality, as well as rampant drug use in clubs and at parties; hippies preferred denim over bruised his hip while Bumping with a brick wall at a party in the Seventies. polyester; and many musicians loathed the ultra-manufactured Disco 42

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RETRO MUSIC

Sonny, Cher, & Me

BY PAULA FINN

In December of 1966, I—like countless other “teenyboppers”—was a huge Sonny and Cher fan. They’d had hit records like “Baby Don’t Go” and “Just You,” but it was “I Got You Babe” that had really launched their stardom.

They’d appeared on such musical TV shows as Hullabaloo and Where the Action Is!, and I was fortunate enough to attend a live taping of their appearance on Shindig! I’d sent away for tickets, but received notice that there was a two-year waiting list. No problem: my dad worked in television and knew the producer. He got me four tickets to the next week’s show. I took three friends to an episode that aired August 11, 1965, and which also featured such singers as Glen Campbell, Billy Preston, the Righteous Brothers, and Donovan. And… as was expected of all the teenage girls in the audience—I screamed myself hoarse. Technical difficulties interrupted the taping and the show didn’t end until after midnight.

Sonny and Cher were leaving for their first European tour the next day, and they were the only performers who stayed late to give autographs.

The next year, Sonny and Cher’s home address was circulating around my high school, and I jumped at the chance to get in on it. I never knew who first discovered the privileged information—but when it reached my friend Fern, she gladly shared it with me.

I was thrilled to have it. But now, what to do with it? Sonny and Cher lived in the hills of San Fernando Valley’s town of Encino, less than six miles from me. Too young for a driver’s license, I decided to take the bus which ran along the main thoroughfare of Ventura Boulevard. It was July, and I struggled to walk the last mile and a half of the journey up a steep hill in scorching heat. I’d brought a heart-shaped cake baked as a gift that I’d decorated with fresh oleanders from our garden. I had no idea the flowers were poisonous! This might not have ended well.

The house was a taupe one-story behind an electric gate. Parked in the driveway were the matching customized Mustangs I’d read about: gold for Sonny, and hot pink for Cher. I rang the bell and was disappointed when their maid came out and said they weren’t home. I gave her the cake and started the long walk down the hill.

I knew I’d try again.

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It wasn’t until the Christmas season that I had another chance. I picked a night when my parents were away at a party. Uncharacteristically bold, I called a taxi and took off.

When I arrived, I rang the bell nervously. The cab driver, a young guy, waited with me to see if anyone answered. He seemed amused when Sonny came out, wearing a bathrobe. I wondered if he recognized him; he must have sensed my excitement. The next thing I knew, the electric gate was opening and Sonny invited me in.

I’d like to describe in detail their home’s interior but I’m nearsighted and was too vain to wear my glasses that night. I did see a tall, lavishly decorated Christmas tree. And on the table next to the couch was a wrapped present for Christy, Sonny’s daughter from a previous marriage.

I handed Cher a box of earrings I’d made of beads and crystals.

She thanked me, saying she’d never have the patience to make jewelry.

They were getting ready to go to a party. Sonny excused himself to take a shower, and Cher invited me into the bedroom.

She was in a long silver-sequined dress—a change from her iconic bell-bottoms. I sat on their bed as she put on the finishing touches of make-up. A TV was on, tuned to a black-and-white episode of the sitcom Bewitched.

In the mid-Sixties, long straight hair was in style—and if Cher didn’t start that trend, she certainly popularized it. At the time, she wrote a teen magazine’s advice column in which she responded to fans’ most pressing concerns. I shared with her my “problem”: no matter how many chemical straighteners I used or how many times I ironed it—I couldn’t get my hair to stay straight. “Bummer,” Cher said in response. I had never heard that word before; I thought she said “Bumper.”

The next thing I knew, they were leaving for their party and Sonny called a taxi for me. He gave me $5 cash, which more than covered my trip home. I also received an autographed copy of their newest single, “The Beat Goes On.” I left, thrilled at how things had played out.

My parents had come home before I did, and they weren’t happy to discover me missing. And when I got back and explained where I’d been, they still weren’t happy about it. I’d never done anything like this before! But when they later told their friends, and the friends praised me for being so brave—my parents saw my adventure in a new light.

I wonder how many teen idols would be as gracious to their young fans today. How many would make time for them when it didn’t earn them any publicity? How many would risk their personal safety by inviting a complete stranger into their home? I’ll always be thankful to Sonny and Cher for making this teenybopper’s holiday season truly magical.

PAULA FINN is a Los Angeles–based author of Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy (Rowman & Littlefield). She’s written personal narratives for HuffPost and Newsweek, and nonfiction articles for such blogs and magazines as Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, South Bay Accent, and Screencraft. She’s the author of ten gift books and for decades has licensed her inspirational writings worldwide on top-selling gift products.

(OPPOSITE) Sonny and Cher in the Sixties, as drawn by artist John Rosenberger circa 1967 for a DC Comics teen title; the art went unpublished by DC. (CENTER BACKGROUND) The stars’ faces, iconic imagery from their 1971–1974 TV series, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. (ABOVE) The dazzling dynamic duo in the early Seventies, from a personality poster released by Kapp Records. All, courtesy of Heritage.

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THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!

Detroit’s Mad Monster-Maker/Cartoonist

Dave Ivey

(and how he originated Ghostbuster’s Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man without getting any dough!)

BY SCOTT SHAW! It all started with Shock Theater in October 1957.

Originally marketed as Shock!, Shock Theatre was a package of 52 films from Universal Studios, many of which featured indelible characters now known as “the classic Universal Monsters.” It also contained suspense, mysteries, and anything with a tinge of spookiness. The films were licensed to appear on local stations, sometimes as “Million Dollar Movies” that ran every evening and four times on both Saturdays and Sundays, usually on late night Saturdays under the title Shock Theater. In 1958, Universal released 20 more horror-ish movies as Son of Shock to add some cool new ghouls into the content.

“All the local TV stations had to fill time, so they’d buy a package of movies from a distributor, which they would use for six months,” explained cartoonist Dave Ivey. “They might get one hundred films and maybe ten or 20 of them would be considered sci-fi or horror. Most of them were black and white and pretty old and junky. So they didn’t quite fill a two-hour time slot, so

(ABOVE) Dave Ivey’s “radio-active biscuit,” the Abominable Snowman, squares off against Ultra Ghoul—years before Ghostbusters! © Dave Ivey estate.

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the TV stations around the country were recruiting from within their ranks, people to host the sci-fi shows, the horror shows, and stretch them out a little bit, put some bumpers in there, talk to the viewers about one of the stars, or something like that, like Svengoolie does now.”

All of those horror hosts and hostesses left a fond mark on more than one generation of those of us who now refer to ourselves as “MonsterKids,” many of whom are also faithful readers (and writers and the editor) of TwoMorrows’ RetroFan. From 1957 well into the Eighties, a few MonsterKids even achieved the dream job of working with local TV stations’ weathermen, morning show hosts, and goofy gaffers in the lucrative and respected industry of horror-hosting. Of course, local programming attracted local talent, as well as people already working for the local stations.

Newcomers gladly traded a paycheck for training and experience, while the funniest employees among the stations’ staffs had a great time performing as horror hosts for a few extra shekels in their paycheck.

Dave’s widow Claudia recalls, “Dave loved drawing. He wanted to make cartoons, or any other kind of art. He also had a love for cameras. His dad gave him a camera when he was young, and Dave would get his friend, and sometimes one of his brothers and he would make up scripts, and Dave would film them and make short movies. Dave also liked camping, scuba diving, and going to the

(LEFT) Cartoonist and puppeteer Dave Ivey and his wife, Claudia Lee Ivey. (RIGHT) A big Eighties flashback! Dave Ivey with children Miki, Bryan, and Michelle, plus a couple of E.T.s. Courtesy of the Ivey family.

movies. In school, Dave was always drawing, making little comic strips. He was more of a loner and got picked on a lot.”

During San Diego’s Comic-Con International in 2022, I met Dave Ivey’s daughters Michele and Miki and his recently widowed wife Claudia for the first time. As someone who’s spent decades in the animation industry, I’m not only impressed with Dave’s work, but it made me wish I’d had a chance to get to know him… and to let you know who he was.

WHO WAS DAVE IVEY?

The middle of three brothers, David “Dave” Ivey was born on July 14, 1950. He was born and raised raised in Detroit, Michigan. He loved animated cartoons, especially the Warner Bros. shorts and everything from Walt Disney and Jim Henson, comic books, National Lampoon, and Fractured Flickers, Jay Ward’s TV series comprising repurposed silent movies. Therefore, Dave’s #1 fixation as a kid was making movies and cartoons.

“When I was in my early teens, I was crazy about animation,” Ivey said. “I wanted to, like, go work for Walt Disney or something, and I would buy these 50-foot, 8mm movies at the department store, and I’d run them through my projector one frame at a time and study the movements and how fast things moved per frame. And I started experimenting with my camera at home. I was making crude animated films when I was, like, 12, 13. When I was 15, though, I made the opening for a local kids’ show called Jerry Booth’s Funhouse, and they ran that for two years. I was in high school. Everybody was high-fiving me, ‘Hey, you got a cartoon on TV.’” Dave Ivey met his wife Claudia Lee at Ferndale High School in 1968, in 11th grade. Ferndale is a northern suburb of Detroit. Dave was a fanboy and an outsider, but schoolgirls would often ask him to draw their boyfriends. “I never went to art school.

I never knew that the Center for Creative Studies existed,” Ivey recalled. “I had a hard time getting through high school, because I was always drawing cartoons. And I’d get dragged down to the office and [the principal would] tear up my cartoon in front of

me. ‘Don’t do this anymore.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ I’d go back and start drawing a new comic strip about the principal. ‘I’ll get him!’”

Claudia recalled, “In most classes he was more interested in drawing cartoons than listening to the lessons, but to me he had to be listening. Dave was very intelligent. Dave kept to himself, and didn’t talk much. In the 8th grade I was asked by some kid if Dave Ivey was my brother; as they pointed at him, he was standing near the end of a hallway. I asked why. They said because we both were good in art and because we both had dark hair. I told them no, that my brother was blond.

I knew about Dave because he made a cartoon. I didn’t have Dave in any of my classes until 11th grade. He was in my art class.”

Dave Ivey and Claudia Lee were engaged on December 25, 1971, married on June 24, 1972, and raised three children: Miki, Bryan, and Michele.

GHOULS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

While Dave was selling his cartoons to National Diver magazine, he discovered a local show that showed vintage horror movies that was hosted by an entertaining weirdo horror host known as “The Ghoul.”

“David always loved horror host shows,” according to (TOP) The Ghoul and Froggy the Gremlin appear in this undated Brainsqueezins cartoon by Dave. (BOTTOM) Jacques Cousteau gets ribbed by Dave as Jock Ghoulsteau. © Dave Ivey estate.

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Claudia Lee Ivey. “In 1974, Dave (ABOVE) Ron Sweed as ran across the Ghoul show and TV horror host the Ghoul. really enjoyed it. Dave noticed (RIGHT) Heads’ up, that people were encouraged Detroit! The full image to send in home movies to the of Dave’s promo cartoon show, and he thought about for the 1979 animated making a cartoon. All this was short, Ultra Ghoul vs. the happening around the time Abominable Doughman. my firstborn was due. While I © Dave Ivey estate. was in the hospital having our daughter, Dave made a cartoon on our kitchen table to send into The Ghoul show. By the time Dave was ready to mail it in, the show had gone off the air, and Dave was so disappointed. A year later, The Ghoul show was back on the air, now on Channel 20 instead of Channel 50. Dave mailed the cartoon to their new address.”

As Dave Ivey recalled, “The Ghoul came into being about 1971 and I was too busy working at a factory to really worry about it. I liked watching the show, but he introduced a new part of the show called “Home Movies”. ‘Hey, kids, get your home movies on TV and send them in!’ That inspired me. So I made an animated cartoon called King Croak, which was a deliberate goof on King Kong, because the film Dino De Laurentiis did in 1976 was coming out soon and I wanted to beat him to the punch.

“My cartoons take me about a week of hard work. I wrote to the show and I said, ‘Dear Ghoul, I have a color and sound animated film [I made] of you and Froggy [the Gremlin, a television oldie].’

And they called me. I was shocked. The phone rang and… ‘Hey, ah, Mr. Ivey, we don’t have a Super 8 sound projector here at the studio. Could you bring yours over when we do our next shoot?’

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Ding! Yes! And I showed up for the film, I projected it on the wall in the conference room, because they can’t just run stuff on the show without checking it out first for nasty stuff. So I ran the cartoon and they’re all crowded around the conference table staring at it, and it runs out. It’s like five minutes long. And they turned to me and said, ‘Ah, so where did you get this film?’ I said, ‘At the drugstore.’ ‘No, no, where did you really get this movie?’ And I said, ‘I made it myself.’

“They’re looking at each other like, ‘Let’s get this guy out of here as quick as we can.’ And I start pulling out the artwork I had in the file and throwing it out on the table. And I started doing lines from the movie like, ‘Look out, Mr. Ghoul, he’s gonna get ya.’

And they stared at me, stared at the artwork. They ran out in the hall for about a minute, and they came back in all huddled up and humble, and they said, ‘Ah, Dave, do you think you’d consider being the art director on our show?’ I said, ‘Ah, yeah! How much does it pay?’ ‘Well, nothing right now, but when the show makes money, you’ll make money.’ I never made any money, but I blew off a lot of creative steam.”

Dave was 25 years old when he became the art director for The Ghoul, starring Ron Sweed. The show started in Cleveland from 1971 to 1975, then in Detroit from 1976 to 1978, and back to Cleveland from 1979 to 1998.

“I did all the voices for my cartoons,” Ivey remembered. “It’s a one-man show! I had no help. I did not have to send my animation over to Korea to have it finished up and sent back. I’m not The Simpsons. Just me, my camera, and discount film if I could find it over at Arbor Drugs. A lot of times, if the film was a couple of months out of date, they’d put it on for a quarter. I’d buy ’em all! And that’s what I was doing my cartoons on. I’m a good improviser.”

The oddball world of scott shaw!

Dave was also a prop-maker for the show. One of his assignments was to revive a TV character from decades earlier. “Froggy [the Gremlin] dates back to the Forties, the late Forties, when the Buster Brown television show was on NBC, and it ran into the mid-Fifties. Andy Devine was hosting it. ‘Froggy the Gremlin’ was this frog puppet. Andy Devine would go, ‘Plug your magic twanger over there, Froggy!’”

FLOUR POWER

One of Dave’s handmade animated cartoon shorts for The Ghoul was Ultra Ghoul vs. the Abominable Doughman (1979), pitting the secret identity of the horror host against a kaiju-size parody of the Pillsbury Doughboy. This cleverly written 5½-minute cartoon may be a bit crudely executed, but its Rocky and Bullwinkle/MAD–ish story makes up for any budgetary issues.

This parody of 1966’s Ultraman—a live-action Japanese Tokusatsu [live-action] science fiction television series that was syndicated across America—starts in the suburbs of Detroit as a microwaved biscuit mutates due to radiation and enlarges into the skyscraper-tall Doughman, a fiendishly jolly monster that sports a baker’s hat and scarf while destroying downtown Detroit. As the creature uses “flour power” to stomp on the city’s residents, it gloats and giggles, “Take this, you biscuit-eaters!”

After being informed of the biscuit behemoth’s rampage, the city’s Scientific Patrol—which includes the Ghoul as one of the uniformed team—calls a meeting to determine the Doughman’s goal. Let’s tune into Dave’s actual dialogue, transcribed from the short itself: FRONT DESK: A Doughman, huh? We’ll take it from here.

CHIEF: The Doughman is headed downtown. What does that tell us?

Moray?

MORAY: Ehh, he’s not carryin’ a lot of cash?

CHIEF: No. Komoto?

KOMOTO: He’s probably going to take over the city.

CHIEF: That’s my guess. And I’ll bet he’s headed for the tallest building we’ve got.

MORAY: But why, sir?

CHIEF: Because all the monsters we fight do that, that’s why!

As the Doughman continues to demolish downtown Detroit, we see two elderly bystanders who are reincarnated versions of Jay Ward’s cartoon characters Edgar and Chauncy, shtick and all: EDGAR: Now, there’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncy.

CHAUNCY: Ehh, what’s that, Edgar?

EDGAR: Big white blimp comin’ down the street.

CHAUNCY: Oh, I dunno, Goodyear might be advertising a sale.

EDGAR: Ehh, you’re probably right.

Doughman rips a huge building off of its foundation and drops it on top of Moray.

KOMOTO: This looks like a job for Ultra Ghoul!

NARRATOR: With Moray out of the way, the Ghoul slips into the deserted Tiger Stadium to become Ultra Ghoul, and leaps into battle!

As Ultra Ghoul and Abominable Doughman face off in a kingsized wrestling match, the bystanders make puns: OLD LADY: Wow, did you see that? Right in the old breadbasket!

BOY: I’ll bet that knocked the Stove-Top Stuffing out of him!

After some back-and-forth grappling, our hero gets the upper hand by rolling the Doughman into a crescent roll. Doughman

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Ahhh, disgusting! I haven’t seen anything so disgusting since my Uncle Harvey dropped his teeth in his soup!

THAT was disgusting! I mean, that was awful!

retaliates, but Ultra Ghoul blasts his flour-filled foe with a powerful ray he emits from one of his armpits.

NEWSCASTER: Just look at that, folks.

Ultra Ghoul has just opened up with his famous B.O. Beam!

And there you have it—the Doughman is done for, flash-cooked by the Ultra Ghoul’s armpit armory!

Flung into the Bermuda Triangle, the over-baked Doughman nears TV’s Fantasy Island.

TATTOO: A crescent roll, a crescent roll is coming!

MR. ROARKE: A crescent roll? We didn’t order any crescent rolls, Tattoo!

TATTOO: Sorry, Boss. I just call ’em as I see ’em.

Her false teeth fall out into her lap. Embarrassed, she picks them up and fit them back into her mouth.

OLD LADY: Sorry!

IT’S DOUGHTIME!

As I mentioned, this and Dave’s other handmade cartoons definitely weren’t slick. But considering that these longer-than-fiveminutes cartoons were produced by a single, self-taught cartoonist with only paper, crayons, and markers in one week is rather remarkable. Although his art was never polished, it was appealing and funny. Dave’s approach to animated cartoons was especially notable, since none of them involved transparent cels, just paper.

Dave cleverly invented his own version of “limited animation” that allowed him to complete a seven-minute cartoon in a just a few days.

Suddenly, the Doughman crashes down, immediately submerging Fantasy Island. Then, a decidedly Roger Ramjet–ish card fills the screen: NARRATOR: Be sure to tune in next time when Ultra Ghoul has it out with a giant tub of soft margarine!

GIANT TUB OF SOFT MARGARINE: BUTTER!!!

NARRATOR (sheepish): Butter, huh? >Heh!< (We’ll change the script, guys, don’t get mad!)

From out of nowhere appears an animated old lady who’s on screen just to gripe about what we just saw: OLD LADY: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, that was horrible, that was awful.

I’ve seen better cartoons on bubble gum wrappers!

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(LEFT) The fiberglass-constructed Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man head worn in Ghostbuster’s climax. (RIGHT) Creature designer Tom Enriquez’s conceptual designs for facial expressions for the Stay-Puft character in 1984’s blockbuster, Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters © Columbia Pictures. Both, courtesy of Heritage.

The oddball world of scott shaw!

Dave Ivey clowns around with some of his handmade monster puppets. Courtesy of the Ivey family.

Five years later, Dave Ivey and every other resident of Detroit experienced a case of cinematic déjà vu when 1984’s Ghostbusters hit theater screens. It was directed and produced by Ivan Reitman and written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Ghostbusters introduced the all-too-familiar—to Detroit citizens!—“Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man,” a rather obvious lift from the concept of Dave’s Abominable Doughman. Purportedly, Dan Aykroyd was a big fan of The Ghoul, which was accessible on many TV sets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Aykroyd’s old stomping grounds.

“When we saw the movie at the theaters, we were all stunned and shocked,” recalls Claudia Ivey. “Dave was completely surprised—they even had one of the lines from his cartoon used. He was flattered, but also hurt that they never reached out to him. He wasn’t sure what to do, and asked for help on what to do, with no luck.

“Years later, our youngest daughter was working at a local convention that Ernie Hudson was a guest at, and asked him about it. Ernie confirmed that they use to watch The Ghoul show and it was Dan Aykroyd who showed them the cartoon. Dave should have been credited.”

Dave Ivey might have been disappointed, but he continued to stay active creatively. He portrayed “Hostage with Children” in the film Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except (1985), with Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, and Ted Raimi. Dave wrote for and art-directed Nightmare Sinema (2006), another Detroit-based hosted-horror-movie TV series, with Mac Kelly as “Wolfman Mac.” He next designed characters and wrote gags for Wolfman Mac’s Chiller Drive-In (2007–2011), where he also acted as “Oscar the Ogre.” In 2016 Dave acted, art-directed, and made puppets for Halloween Spooktacular, a Detroit television special with Mac Kelly as Wolfman Mac hosting a collection of comedy skits with a Halloween theme.

“I have to say, my dad’s passion really came alive when he worked on both The Ghoul and Wolfman Mac,” Dave’s daughter Michelle Ivey remembers. “He enjoyed having these creative outlets and getting to work with a lot of fun people who shared the same drive that he had.”

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foam rubber. Dave designed and built costumes and character suits that were used as mascots for businesses and restaurants, or as promotional props for shops and markets—and guess who actually wore some of those getups? “I made these costumes for my wife and I,” Dave recalled. “We were called the Volcano Gods. I was Krakatoa, she was Saint Helen. Volcanos, right? And we started winning contests left and right. We won trips, we won cruises, we won money. We got a trip to the Mall of America with a thousand bucks to spend!”

Dave also worked for Erebus, the world’s longest walk-through haunted attraction, headquartered in Pontiac, Michigan. His talents often stood out among the seemingly never-ending displays. “I worked at Erebus when they started out in 2000,” Ivey recalled. “They were just getting the building ready; we were, like, two weeks late opening. But I was building giant animated creatures. I did that big demon that is holding the word ‘Erebus’ over the front door of the place. It was a big sculpt. I had to glue multiple layers of pink board together and then carve it down with a chainsaw, knives, and sanders and stuff to make the finished product.”

Dave and Claudia’s creativity and fannish interests certainly rubbed off on their girls, Michele and Miki. Michele is known as the top expert on Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Miki is an outstanding designer and sculptor. Dave once said, “I taught my daughter Miki how to sculpt, and she’s become very good at it. In fact, she has sculpted floats for the Halloween parade in Disneyland. So, she is excellent.” Dave also has a son, David “Bryan” Ivey, whose creativeness lies in his writing and sense of humor he definitely got from his dad.

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Dave Ivey left our planet on July 24, 2020. The 70-year-old was MonsterKid to the very end, making corny jokes from his hospital bed.

Many thanks to Dave’s family—Claudia Lee Ivey, Miki Ivey, and Michele Ivey—for their kind assistance. Also, thanks to radio station WGHS 89.5, from which Dave Ivey’s quotes were taken from an interview, and transcriber Brian Martin for their help with this article.

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.

ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING (LEFT) Thundarr the Barbarian title card art.

(BELOW LEFT) Thundarr, Ariel, and Ookla as drawn

by Jack Kirby. Thundarr

the Barbarian © Warner Bros.

Television Studios. Courtesy of Heritage. (BOTTOM LEFT)

Joseph Ruby and (BOTTOM RIGHT) Kenneth Spears.

BY ANDY MANGELS Welcome back to “Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning,” your constant guide to the shows from yesteryear that thrilled us, exciting our imaginations and capturing our memories. Grab some milk and cereal, sit cross-legged leaning against the couch, and dig in to “Retro Saturday Morning”! This issue, we’re taking a long-requested look at one of the most beloved Saturday morning shows from the Eighties… Thundarr the Barbarian!

The opening credits for Thundarr set up the most destructive view of a post-apocalyptic future that had ever been shown on Saturday mornings, complete with earthquakes, volcanos, and tidal waves wiping out entire cities. Dick Tufeld intoned, “The year, 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction.

Man’s civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!”

But how did Thundarr come to the air, and how did the series bring together the world of comics and Hollywood like never before? Read on…

DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Ruby and Spears began working for Fred Silverman at CBS—and then ABC—taking West Coast pitches for the New York-based executive. Because networks worked closely with studios on content at that time, Silverman asked them to help supervise the Saturday morning shows, and in 1977 they founded Ruby-Spears Productions, a direct animation competitor to Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. Their first series was 1978’s Fangface, followed by 1979’s The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show, and 1980’s Heathcliff and Dingbat.

Prior to 1980, the world of Barbarians and post-apocalyptic futures had been confined mostly to pulps, novels, comic books, and feature films. Although the apocalypse was a story as old as time, showing up as Ragnarök in mythology or the Last Judgment/ Second Coming in the Bible, it often was comprised of the destruction of man on Earth due to climate events, astronomical catastrophe, medical pandemics, alien or zombie invasions, or religious endtimes. In the 1800s, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Edgar

RUBY-SPEARS & THE APOCALYPSE & NEARLY NAKED MUSCLEMEN

Through the early days of Saturday morning animation, two studios had dominated the market: Filmation Associates and Hanna-Barbera Productions. Working side-by-side at HannaBarbera were Joseph Ruby (film editor) and Kenneth Spears (track reader), and in 1959, the pair began to write episodes of series such as Space Ghost and Herculoids together and develop shows. Their first big hit was Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, which they co-created, but they left shortly after all the new episodes for the series were completed, frustrated that they couldn’t move up on the ladder to the role of associate producers. After a period of time at RETROFAN

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(LEFT) Presentation art by Alex Toth. (CENTER) Writer Steve Gerber. Photo by Alan Light. (RIGHT) Character designer Alex Toth.

A BARBARIAN, UCLA, AND COMIC BOOK SUPERSTARS?

Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells all wrote of the post-apocalyptic times, and into the 1900s, the burgeoning genre became the domain of science fiction and horror authors and filmmakers.

Barbarian fiction was mostly inspired by gladiator and warrior stories of old, with noble savages rebelling against warlords or unjust tribes or societies. No author was more successful with barbarian fiction than Robert E. Howard, whose 1932 creation of Conan the Barbarian would combine a brawny muscleman with sex and violence, set in a world of sorcery and monsters. Conan would be featured in pulp magazines, novels, and in an incredibly popular series of comics from Marvel. The first semi-barbarians to appear in animation were caveman Ugh, who appeared in the Dino Boy and the Lost Valley segments of Hanna-Barbera’s Space Ghost from 1966–1968, super-powered caveman Tor, who appeared in Hanna-Barbera’s Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor from 1967­­– 1969; and the alien space barbarian family on another planet on Hanna-Barbera’s The Herculoids, from 1967–1969. All three shows featured character designs created by master comic artist Alex Toth.

Filmation produced what was likely the first post-apocalypse Saturday series with their live-action Ark II show, which aired on CBS from 1976–1979, and was set on a pollution-ruined Earth in the 25th Century. And although they were developing Blackstar, a CBS series about an astronaut-turned-barbarian when he is flung onto a planet full of magic and monsters, that series would be beaten to the air by one year. Blackstar would debut in 1981, and Filmation’s sword and sorcery megahits He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power would debut on 1983 and 1985, but the first “real” post-apocalyptic barbarian series was Thundarr the Barbarian.

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Steve Gerber had been a popular comic writer for Marvel Comics in the 1970s, working on books such as Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, and Man-Thing. It was in that latter series that he created Howard the Duck, who became a cult favorite character, and even ran in the 1976 U.S. Presidential campaign. Gerber had problems with deadlines, and was eventually fired off Marvel books, and in 1980, he filed suit against the company for ownership of his creations.

Gerber had written some Hanna-Barbera comics for foreign markets, for editor Mark Evanier. When he found out that Evanier was working on the Plastic Man series for Ruby-Spears, Gerber asked for an intro to the producers. Shortly after turning in his first Plastic Man script, he was signed for an exclusive contract for animation with Ruby-Spears.

As he revealed in a 1983 interview in Comics Interview, Gerber met with Joe Ruby in September 1979 for a lunch meeting. “The

Thundarr expressions character sheet. Art by Alex Toth.

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

earliest ballyhoo was beginning to appear on the Conan movie, and it occurred to me that a sword-and-sorcery series had never been attempted on television, let alone on Saturday morning. We met, and I proposed the idea. He liked it, took it to the network, and I suppose he got a development deal, since he called me back a week later and asked me to come on staff for a month or so to develop the show.” A development deal only meant that the show was a possibility, though, not a sure thing.

Ruby remembered the birthing of the concept differently though, telling the now-defunct Thundarr website in a 2003 interview, “I had gotten hold of some action/adventure magazines to see what was the latest in this arena. I noticed a story that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to make a movie based on the Conan the Barbarian stories. Usually we waited until a movie was released to see how well it did, especially with kids, then we’d develop shows in that arena. But this time I decided to develop a show in the sword and sorcery arena a year before the movie came out.

That way, if it worked, we’d have a show on the air at the same time as the movie. And hopefully our show would do as well as we thought the movie would do. So I pitched the idea to ABC’s Marilyn Olin and Judy Price at the Beverly Hills Hotel from a list of about 15 ideas I had. Thundarr was pitched two ways—one a post-nuclear world, or a world destroyed by a natural disaster from space. We all agreed the first way wouldn’t be so good for kids. Well, after getting the development deal, I went about finding a development team of artists and a writer to work with me on the bible of the yet unnamed series… I considered two writers, and decided on Steve Gerber, who had done some scripts for us the year before. I wanted something different from what I called the ‘soft action/adventure’ that was the mainstay of Saturday Morning. Gerber, a comic book writer, seemed the perfect fit. Steve came up with the names Thundarr, Ookla, and Ariel, and we worked together in developing the bible.”

Gerber gave Ruby a lion’s share of the credit in Comics Feature #10, saying, “I believe it was Joe who suggested the threesome… a barbarian type, a monster, and a female who might or might not be a sorceress. He also came up with the cosmic disaster concept, the runaway planet causing the cataclysm that wiped out civilization on Earth. It struck me as a much more original idea than the usual nuclear or environmental catastrophe on which so many of these stories rely.”

Gerber developed the story and concepts further for about four weeks, adding in characterization and developing New Earth further. He would consult with Ruby as needed. According to Gerber in Comics Interview, “we designed it very specifically to be very workable within the restrictions we knew existed on Saturday morning adventures series. When you tailor a show that way from the beginning, sometimes you come out ahead in terms of the final production. The limitations have all been dealt with from the outset, and the ways around them are built into the concept, so you don’t find yourself constantly having to overcome some new and unexpected complaint from the censors. For example, we knew

Various poses for (ABOVE) Ariel and (LEFT) Ookla. Art by Alex Toth.

(BELOW) Promotional cel based on a Toth illustration.

that we wouldn’t be allowed to show sharp objects on ABC, so we invented the Sunsword and Ookla’s stun-bow with the arrows that look like they have rubber suction tips. That was a bit of an in-joke, a perfectly deadpan parody of the restrictions.”

In our brother magazine Jack Kirby Collector #85, Steve Gerber told how he described the unusual Ookla to Alex Toth to get the fantastic design. “I don’t remember exactly the words I used, but I gave a description of the character. He’s about eight feet tall, big and hairy, a little bit like an ape, a little bit like a bear—doesn’t talk, afraid of water, whatever. And I just tried to give an impression of the character, the same way I would describe a character for a comic book artist to draw.” What Toth turned in resembled a lion crossed with a bear and a human.

Interestingly enough, Ruby-Spears had been in development on series for Spider-Man and Daredevil at the same time as Thundarr.

As Gerber would tell later animation producer Paul Dini in Comics Feature #10, “What happened, as far as I can ascertain, is that ABC’s testing led them to the conclusion that Thundarr was a better risk than those other two characters. Spider-Man has been overexposed.

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him—especially the female segment of the audience. Daredevil was interesting to the kids, but, as it turns out, he’s virtually unknown outside the relatively small comics readership. So a Daredevil series was as a big a gamble for the networks as Thundarr. When it came down to a choice between the two, the network preferred Thundarr, for exactly the same reason, I imagine, that Marvel made the decision to publish Conan 11 years ago; it was different. The ABC schedule already had its fill of super-heroes, and our show offered a change of pace, a little variety.”

For Gerber (who had been required to write the Daredevil pilot) and Kirby, the triumph of Thundarr even behind the scenes was a bit of revenge. In Comics Feature #12, Gerber said, “I was very pleased when the network chose Thundarr over both Daredevil and Spider-Man for that half-hour slot. The notion that Joe Ruby, Jack Kirby, and I could walk in with a totally original creation and win out over all these ‘pre-sold’ items was very gratifying—not the least because of the way Jack and I were treated in the past by Marvel.”

Indeed, both had an acrimonious relationship with the comics publisher.

Alex Toth, the man who had designed many of Hanna-Barbera’s series, was brought in to develop Thundarr’s heroic trio of Thundarr, Ookla, and Princess Ariel. But then… Toth left. No reason has ever been revealed as to Toth’s departure, thought the book Genius Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth says that it was because Toth heard that Jack Kirby was being brought in to work on the show and didn’t want a situation where two “alpha dogs” would be fighting in the kennel. In research, this is the only version of this story found; all other interviews and memories state that Kirby was brought in only after Toth left. Either way, Toth was gone, returning to work at Hanna-Barbera.

Gerber said that he first met Kirby in 1979 when he came in to Ruby-Spears to do production work on Thundarr. “It was my idea and Mark Evanier’s to bring him in on that project,” Gerber said in 1983. “Alex Toth had done the earliest Thundarr drawings, designed the three lead characters and the equort beast that Ookla rode, and then for some reason, left the project. To this day, I don’t know why.

The studio was looking for someone else who could draw that kind of adventure stuff. It took Mark and me about three seconds to come up with Kirby’s name.”

Kirby did the majority of the production and character design for Thundarr, creating the supporting characters, villains, creatures, weaponry, and even settings. Gerber told Comic Times in 1980 that, “I am completely in awe of him… He has a totally visual mind. I have never seen anyone who can match him in comics or in any other visual medium… Jack is unparalleled as a designer of costuming and setting (mise-en-scene). His depiction of the heroic figure has become a classic in its own time.” Kirby’s production designs were largely inked by another famed comic book veteran, Alfredo Alcala.

Gerber said, “We asked Alfredo to use a different style than the one he’s so famous for from The Savage Sword of Conan and he did a magnificent job. The inking style is vastly simplified from Alcala’s other work. It retains Alcala’s distinctive characteristics without his usual line rendering in order to keep Kirby’s power.” According to Mark Evanier, Jack’s wife Roz Kirby inked a few of the presentation pieces as well. The backgrounds to many of Kirby’s designs were done by Andre Gordon.

Gerber and his friend, fellow comic writer Martin Pasko, had dinner in the Westwood area one night, which they did weekly. As Pasko related in an interview for the TwoMorrows book The Krypton 56

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Presentation art by Jack Kirby: (ABOVE) Ariel and Ookla approach the remnants of New York City via a magically created ramp. (BELOW) Thundarr’s nemesis Gemini in its inked form before being painted.

(LEFT) Writer Buzz Dixon. (RIGHT) Artist Jack Kirby.

Companion [written by editor Michael Eury], “we were wandering around Westwood as Steve was telling me about how the network was frustrating him with its insistence on a Wookie-like character.

He had worked out how the creature could be made to seem somewhat less derivative. but was stuck for a name for it. Just then,

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(LEFT) Ariel and Thundarr promotional art by Jack Kirby and Alfredo Alcala. (INSET) Lizard Men attack Thundarr as he wields an early version of his sword. Art by Kirby. (BELOW) Kirby’s ability to create wildly imaginative settings are on display as our heroes battle a mutant spider.

we passed one of the entrances to the UCLA campus and when I saw the acronym on signage, the phonetic pronunciation leapt to mind. Entirely facetiously, I said, ‘Why not call him Oo-clah?’ Steve did the unexpected and bit. And this, God help me, I will have on my tombstone.”

Pasko would go on to write several of the Thundarr scripts, and he eventually became a story editor on the series’ second season.

The material written by Gerber, and designs and presentation boards by Alex Toth and Jack Kirby, were gathered together to show ABC. As Gerber said in Comics Feature #12, “All of that was finally presented to the network, along with the ‘bible,’ the pilot script, and the pilot storyboard. The entire series was sold on that basis. At that point, I was hired to story-edit the series, in addition to writing scripts.”

But what exactly would Thundarr the Barbarian be about other than cool visuals?

WE HAVEN’T LOST THE PLOT

Thundarr had much more backstory than most animated series at the time, especially comedy shows. As noted in the credits, the series was set 2,000 years after the desolation of Earth in 1994, with a split Moon hanging in the sky. Evil wizards had combined and manipulated the magical forces which had emerged—along with ancient technology—and used them to enslave what was left of mankind, as well as the mutated animal-human hybrids and mythical creatures that now roamed the planet. While some of humanity existed in caves, tree-dwellings, or the ruined cities of the past, others lived in cities or citadels ruled by overlords and wizards.

Born into slavery, Thundarr teamed

Writer Martin Pasko.

with a giant brutish bear-like creature named Ookla to rebel against evil wizards.

Aiding Thundarr and Ookla in their rebellion was the empathetic sorceress Princess Ariel; in the show’s bible, she was the step-daughter of the evil wizard Sabian, and the one who gave Thundarr his magical Sunsword. The weapon crackled and glowed with lightning energy, absorbed magic, cut through anything smoothly, and attached magnetically to Thundarr’s wrist gauntlets.

Ariel herself wields her magic, while Ookla can utilize both his bow and immense strength to fight foes. After defeating Sabian, the three set out to explore future Earth—or at least future North and South America—determined to fight for freedom and against oppression.

Along the way the trio discovered Serpent Men, werewolves in Washington, Lizard Kings, the Hoover Dam transformed into a holy monolith, river pirates, Sandsharks, mutants, and more. The only twice-recurring villain of the series was Kirby creation Gemini, whose helmeted head not only shot laser beams from his eyes—à la Kirby’s own Darkseid—but also swiveled to show a more benign face on its backside.

The difference between the main cast members was marked when compared to other shows of the time. Thundarr was noble, but often angry and crude, dismissing the past as something that didn’t matter. Ariel was erudite and classy, even when riding on horseback through the ruined Earth. She was also a powerful sorceress in her own right, and of Asian lineage—most likely Chinese. Ookla was an emotional beast, part-ape, part-lion, and part-human. He rode a quadrupedal animal called an equort and only spoke in guttural noises. Unlike the Super Friends or other group shows, the trio did not always agree on a course of action, and often had disagreements or sarcastic words between then.

In Comics Feature, Gerber would say of Thundarr’s personality that, “I knew what I wanted, which was essentially a large, strong, brawny, but illiterate character—a guy with no formal education at all. His only guide to his personal conduct would be his own instincts, his own sense of fair and unfair, right and wrong. He would have a native, but undeveloped intellect, whereas Arial RETROFAN

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would be much more civilized, and therefore more cautious, a more rational type. Ookla would be entirely a creature of emotion, functioning only slightly above the level of a beast, a character who could go from sweet and cuddly to totally berserk in the blink of an eye, reacting to outside stimulus.” Essentially, like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, or Bonanza’s Hoss, Ben, and Little Joe, the Thundarr trio represented—more or less—the id, ego, and super-ego.

Jack Kirby was interviewed for Fangoria about Thundarr in 1980—by show writer Buzz Dixon—and Kirby was enthusiastic about the project. “I love working on the series because the premise is so spectacular… The fact is that we all like to speculate on the future. What will common, ordinary objects be like in 2446? What will New York City look like?... Thundarr has that touch of realism blended with fantasy that makes speculation so interesting. Thundarr has both the audience’s sympathy and envy—he has in him things we admire, though we never get tested the way he does. I don’t know if we should be happy or sad at that.”

In an interview for RetroFan, Buzz Dixon expressed his own enthusiasm for Kirby, the “King of Comics.” He recalls that meeting Jack and Roz Kirby was his most special memory on Thundarr. “I tell people I became friends with Jack before I knew he was Jack Kirby. This was in pre-Internet days, so while I knew Jack’s name I didn’t know what he looked like.

He came into a development meeting and no one introduced him. We started talking and hit it off really well. After the meeting I told Steve Gerber that I thought the old guy in the meeting had a great imagination and would make a wonderful addition to the team but since nobody introduced us I didn’t know his name. Steve said, ‘That was Jack Kirby,’ and it damn near floored me!”

‘DEMON DOGS!’—SCRIPTS MEET CENSORS

Steve Gerber was story editor on the series, and worked with all of the writers on their scripts. The pilot, “Secret of the Black Pearl,” was Gerber’s entirely, and he worked on other scripts solo, or with fellow comic writers Marty Pasko or Mark Evanier, or animation veterans Buzz Dixon or Chris Vane. In 1983, Gerber would say, “I honestly don’t remember which ones I actually wrote as opposed to rewrote or edited. It gets very hectic during a production season. All you really recall when it’s over is that you’re very tired.” In TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #31 (Dec. 2008), Pasko would say, “Technically, I ‘co-wrote’ with Steve the majority of the first season episodes, though it was more like he dictated and I typed.”

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The show was shot in the typical “limited animation process” of television at the time, using 12 cels double-printed for each 24 seconds of film. Storyboarders included art director John Dorman and Hank Tucker, two Kirby fans, who took the writers’ scripts and laid them out. Animation was then sent to Korea to complete.

Gerber complained to Comic Times that, “The animation is never what you would like it to be. However, this series probably contains as much or more full animation as any other series on television.”

In Comics Feature #12, Gerber elaborated, saying, “Because the series was going to be animated in Korea, we knew we had to give them as much as possible of the look, the feel of the show to get what we wanted. [Staff] were regularly putting in twelvehour days throughout an entire production season. And there was extreme dedication to the project. Each person has a great deal of respect for the person who preceded him. Joe and I had a tremendous appreciation of Kirby’s work, the storyboard people liked the scripts they were getting, the layout people liked the scripts and the storyboards, and then—surprise of surprises—the Korean studio began turning out almost full animation on some of the sequences! A lot of that stuff with horses is animated, not rotoscoped. We

(ABOVE AND LEFT) Scenes of outrageous action as only Jack Kirby can do.

had rotoscoped some stock footage, and then the Koreans decided not even to use most of it, but to do original animation.”

As expected, there was back-and-forth problems with Broadcast Standards & Practices, the network watchdogs who censored material for Saturday mornings. As Gerber told Comic Times, “I found myself the primary advocate of the obligatory fight and action scenes which had become such a cliché at Marvel. The difficulty was to make the Broadcast Standards and Practices division of the network accept any conflict at all, much less physical conflict.” In one insane circumstance, S&P forbade Thundarr from having werewolves that bit anyone in an episode, and instead

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required that their victims be clawed… except the animators were not allowed to show them being clawed!

The werewolves were brought up again in a Fantastic Films interview with Gerber, in which he said, “The big thing that we’ve had to overcome is that the censors tend to treat children as if they’re not just morons, but lunatics, potentially dangerous creatures…

The criteria seems to be what children can emulate. If Thundarr sticks out his foot and trips a couple of werewolves, that’s emulatable; a kid is likely to do that to his little sister. If, on the other hand, Thundarr picks up a boulder and throws it in the path of the werewolves, thereby tripping them up, that’s not emulatable, and we’re allowed to do that. The funny thing is that the violence is actually scaled up and not down. The images become much bigger and the scale much grander. Fortunately, the characters are very much suited for that.”

Buzz Dixon wrote for both seasons of Thundarr, and he remembers that the biggest challenge for the show was indeed “Onerous censorship from the network. After season one they said they were going to cut back on the action to keep the show from being too violent. Joe Ruby wondered how we could get around it. I told him we should write a super-violent season opener that no matter how badly they censored it would still set the bar high enough for us to get other shows past. Joe said, ‘Who’s going to write it?’ and every eye in the room turned to me. I wrote ‘Wizard War,’ which was non-stop robots vs. muck-monster battles. The censors slashed away at it but still left it intact enough to keep the second season as action packed as the first. For the next 17 years, however, my script was ABC’s official bad example. Whenever they’d hire a new censor they’d give the script to them and if they couldn’t find at least 50 things wrong with it, they didn’t get the job!”

‘LORDS OF LIGHT’—THE VOICES AND ART OF THUNDARR

The network battles even included the hiring of voice actors.

For the lead character, Gerber explained, “Joe Ruby and I were hearing Conan; the network was hearing Tarzan. Eventually, the network chose the voice actor who does Tarzan’s voice for the Filmation series to do the voice of Thundarr. Their impulse is

(LEFT) The post-apocalyptic world of Thundarr the Barbarian as seen in this screen grab of the show’s opening.

always to go with the familiar, especially with a series as different as this one is in so many other ways.”

That voice for Tarzan was industry veteran Robert Ridgely, who later recalled the audition as one of the longest audition days he ever had. He also recalled that actor Michael Ansara was his competition for the role, but eventually, voice director Alan Dinehart told Ridgely he had the role. Ridgely would tell Comics Feature, “I love doing voices, especially villains, because they have a much greater range of emotions than the hero. Thundarr, in particular, is a harder character for me to play, because he’s always kept at one level. He’s always angry, even when saying the simplest lines.”

Ridgely also found Thundarr’s lines to be too complex and articulate, and attempted to simplify his speech. But in the same interview, Gerber replied that Thundarr, “In theory, his solution to any given problem is always the same—to hack it into bite-size bits. But Bob [Ridgely] is confusing ‘barbarian’ with ‘savage’ when he talks about simplifying Thundarr’s speech pattern. We intentionally strove for an archaic, yet very direct manner of speaking for Thundarr. He’s unschooled, but not totally inarticulate.”

In addition to Ridgley, the other lead with the most dialogue was Ariel, who was voiced by Nellie Bellflower, a mostly unknown actress whose only recurring role was as “Sweet Alice” in two episodes of Starsky & Hutch, and whose sole voice credits had been in 1979’s Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July and 1980’s The Return of the King telefilm, both for Rankin/Bass. Ookla’s vocal stylings were the creation of Henry Corden, who had been providing the voice of Fred Flintstone since 1977, but had been doing voices for Hanna-Barbera since 1964 for Jonny Quest and The Flintstones. Writer Buzz Dixon says of Ookla that the character was his favorite to write for “because he stole every scene he was in.” All the other characters were played by voice acting regulars, mostly from Hanna-Barbera shows.

The artists who worked on the show were also a syllabus in past, present, and future comic artists and award-winning animators.

Famed Star Wars and Tarzan artist Rick Hoberg worked on both Thundarr runs and says, “I was both a story artist and a layout artist on the show. I started out as a layout artist doing little bits and pieces to let John Dorman and Kirk Conner know that I was up for the job. And once they realized I was, they handed me bigger assignments and I ended up doing layouts for the rotoscope runs

(LEFT) Ariel, Thundarr, and Ookla in a screencapture from Thundarr the Barbarian. © Warner Bros. Television Studios.

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(LEFT) Opening titles art by Rick Hoberg. (RIGHT) Storyboard art by Bob Kline. and gallops on the horses and that bizarro thing that the Wookie character rode [an equort]. I also did a lot of the title stuff as well as title card art. I worked pretty closely with John Dorman and Kurt Conner and Jim Woodring and those guys; it was a thoroughly enjoyable job.”

Jack Kirby, who drew lots of the major and minor characters for Larry Houston, who would go on to great acclaim on Teenage each script,” says Houston. “They would drop off their work, and Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and especially Fox’s X-Men, also worked I’d casually geek out, talking to them there. Their designs really on both seasons of Thundarr. “I drew storyboards on Thundarr, activated my fanboy enthusiasm genes. Also, as a Marvel fan, the freelance at night. Director John Dorman was my contact there chance to stage Thundarr episodes like a Marvel comic book comefor getting freelance assignments. My day job was storyboards at to-life was a thrill and a good challenge… Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Marvel Productions. Being in my mid-20s, I could burn the candles and The Herculoids were my early childhood ‘comic books,’ although at both ends, not need sleep much, because I was having so much they weren’t real comic books. They felt like it, though. And even fun drawing cartoons! My previous job was as a Systems Analyst though I was working at Marvel Productions on Spider-Man and for McDonnell Douglas, fixing computers. There is no drawing stuff His Amazing Friends, Thundarr had actual Jack Kirby model sheets at all. Now I was storyboarding at Marvel and at Ruby Spears, and I to work with! And Alex Toth! Pros I grew up with and admired. So, was getting paid to draw stuff, using Jack Kirby/Gil Kane/Alex Toth yeah, this was, at that time, the ultimate comic book TV show until models! I was in fanboy heaven!” my X-Men show in 1992.”

Hoberg agrees with the assessment of those he worked with.

Both Hoberg and Houston chose Thundarr as their favorite “I love the fact that guys like Toth and Kirby and some of the other character to draw. “Even with the restrictive guidelines of Saturday folks like Steve Gerber were involved, and it was a fun show. It was Morning, I had fun storyboarding the action as dramatically as kind of more like The Mighty Samson, the old Gold Key comic book I could,” says Houston, “and with Thundarr, the chance to stage than anything else I’d ever seen before… One of the draws for me normal action-adventure Conan-type scenes of him taking on on the show was getting to work on a show with all of these guys monsters and robots was so cool to draw. Ookla was the next involved. I had worked on Super Friends over at Hanna-Barbera, favorite because he was the muscle, the Hulk of the group. Hulk but that was always to me kind of really campy, and I wasn’t crazy smash! Ariel was the brains of the trio, so her action scenes were about that. In fact, I didn’t like any of the campy stuff; when Batman not as dramatic as the other two. At least in my scripts. Others, first came on, I really detested maybe she got more to do.” it as a kid. I wanted something Hoberg chose Ariel as his second favorite, and Ookla as more serious, like the Superman his third, but noted that “most show had been in the Fifties. of the villains were a little too But since then I’ve grown to goofy for my liking, but I still have a real love for the Batman TV show. Anyway, yes, I think enjoyed working on the show and most of the scripts were that’s why I like Thundarr is that really solid… When I was doing it did reflect a good comic book design or story stuff and even sensibility. And you could tell when I was doing layout, I’d get Steve Gerber was just having a to elaborate on the emotions of blast with this thing.” a character like Thundarr and “My special memories of the background elements and working on Thundarr included casually meeting with pros like so forth and quite often it was (LEFT) Artist Rick Hoberg. (RIGHT) Artist Larry Houston.

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fact that it was preempted didn’t hurt viewers when they saw it. The network immediately ordered a second season, but the writers knew they didn’t want to get stuck in a rut with their stories, and unique script ideas were requested.

The second season had a short order of only eight new episodes. As Gerber explained in 1983, “This is another semi-suicidal network policy. They figure if a Saturday morning show is a success, it’s not necessary to order another season of 13 new episodes.

They ‘freshen’ the show with as many as eight or as few as three new episodes a year. The first 13 Thundarr have been broadcast now six or seven times! Need I say that this hampers a show whose most basic elements are suspense and the elements of surprise in a new, mutated world?”

While ratings for the first season were excellent, the second year—starting in September 1982— (LEFT) Rare Thundarr okay with them if I gave a experienced some problems. The series comic book art by Win little tweak here and there was consistently preempted by football Mortimer. (ABOVE RIGHT) to a layout so that it was a for the first three months of the second Promotional art also seen little more fun to look at in season, decimating the ratings. In an (INSET) repurposed for a animation.” attempt to resuscitate it, ABC played DVD cover.

The challenges of working on the series were mostly Russian roulette with the timeslots, contained in the Standards & Practices rulings, though moving it one week to later and another Houston jokes that, “The biggest challenge for working on Thundarr week to earlier. Eventually, it settled to very early in the morning, for me was that I couldn’t work on all of them! The other was the which was too early for its intended audience. restrictions Saturday morning put on all of the action-adventure For the second season, Marty Pasko was brought in as co-story shows, from the Sixties all the way up through the Eighties. Almost editor. As he said in Back Issue #31, “after delivering Ruby-Spears’ first everything in an action show was considered ‘violent,’ especially to number one show, Steve was too valuable to the studio in develPeggy Charren, the head of Action for Children’s Television in the opment to write as much on Thundarr, so we brought in a lot of our Sixties. We did our best to push the limited but exciting visual storycomics friends—guys like Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway—who we telling, but they, the critics, won. Until syndication came into being in knew could deliver solid first drafts, and then Steve and/or I would do the Eighties. Then normal action-adventure shows came back to TV production rewrites in response to the demented network notes. For again.” the rest of the order, we relied mostly on Buzz [Dixon].”

Hoberg remembers being happiest that Thundarr really broke In early 1983, Gerber told Comics Interview that, “Thundarr has new ground. “The fact that it was the first thing of its kind… the been cancelled, and I think that’s (the timeslot moves) exactly barbarian wave in comics kind of started with Conan and Dagar, the what killed it. I saw the ratings last week and we made a respectbook that Don Glut did over at Gold Key. And from there, Roy Thomas able showing even against The Smurfs, which is a big hit and is especially had a lot of luck with the Robert E. Howard characters with our opposition on the East Coast. I was astonished at the ratings, King Kull and Solomon Kane, and they ended up being real influences that they were so good. Only one interpretation of those numbers on me. In fact, I got to work on Savage Sword of Conan for a short time made any sense to me. The show must be pulling a gargantuan with Roy before he handed me the Star Wars assignments. So, I was share of the audience west of the Rockies, where it’s on at a time intrigued by the characters and what was going on in Thundarr. It was when the audience for Thundarr—the older kids—is awake to a lot of fun to draw those ancient worlds combined with the dystowatch it. Back east, I suspect the numbers for this year are as low pian future world. It was just more fun than generally I was having on as ever.” some of the other shows… I was always looking for something I could According to series writer and animation historian Mark Evanier, enjoy at that point in my career.” the real reason Thundarr was cancelled was not solely ratings. At his online blog News from Me, he wrote, “At the time, [super-producer HIGH RATINGS DON’T MATTER? Garry Marshall] had the three hottest prime-time shows on ABC— Thundarr the Barbarian debuted on October 4, 1980 on ABC, and— Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Mork & Mindy—and he (or maybe when it aired—it was a ratings success. Even though the show Paramount) wanted animated versions of them on Saturday morn. had some subtle continuity elements, it wasn’t serialized, so the At that moment, if Marshall had wanted all the ABC executives to RETROFAN

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dance naked on his front lawn, they would have. To make room for Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, they cancelled Thundarr. (The following year, there was a Laverne & Shirley cartoon show and the year after, Mork & Mindy. None of them did as well as the shows they displaced.)”

In an interview on the now-defunct Thundarr website, Ken Spears said, “When ABC cancelled Thundarr, we had excellent ratings. And when the news hit the streets, we received hundreds of letters from viewers telling us how much they will miss the show and asking why it was going off the air. Incredibly, many of the letters were signed by entire school classes! Literally hundreds of fans, from grade schools, high schools, and even from prestigious universities like Stanford were writing in!

Without a doubt, Thundarr had a huge teenage and adult following.”

After Thundarr left the air, it seemed doomed to syndication, but an unexpected saving grace occurred. NBC was doing horrible in the ratings with The Jetsons, and deciding that Thundarr’s ABC ratings were preferable to their own numbers, picked up the series to air from April 9, 1983 to September 15, 1984.

Spears would say in the Thundarr website interview, “Unfortunately, NBC only wanted the show for re-run purposes, feeling the show was so strong that the viewers would watch the originals over and over again.” Ruby meanwhile added an interesting and tantalizing factoid: “The re-runs had good ratings and we got a development deal to add a couple of kids to the show. But eventually, I heard it was rejected because of the so-called ‘violent nature’ of the show.”

Buzz Dixon does note that he did development work for a prospective third season of Thundarr, in which the kids of Thundarr and Ariel would be introduced; it would have included a time-jump and been called “Thundarr the King.” In 1984, Dixon wrote a filmlength treatment for Thundarr, which would have explored the origins of the characters and how they met. But sadly, that project never went forward either.

The last new televised appearance of Thundarr was actually its oddest. On Friday, September 16, 1983, NBC broadcast a Saturday morning preview special called The 1st Annual NBC Yummy Awards.

Designed as a children’s award show that promoted its shows (read far more about it in RetroFan #10), a late segment of the show featured Foobie the Robot and Glenn Scarpelli (Jennifer Slept Here) giving the award for “Best Series About a Barbarian and an Evil Wizard “ to the live cast of Thundarr the Barbarian. Yes, you read that correctly. Thundarr, Princess Ariel, and Ookla the Mok appeared live, in costumes that probably cost as much as the budget for a new episode! And thus ended the new appearances of Thundarr the Barbarian… though NBC would rerun the show for another year!

THE LEGACY OF THE SHOW

While Thundarr was on the air, a smattering of merchandise was released. This included a board game from Milton Bradley, a lunch box and thermos, Ben Cooper costumes with vacuuformed plastic masks and a flame-retardant bodysuit, several volumes of the series on VHS video tapes from Worldvision, and a Whitman coloring book. Whitman was owned by Western Publishing which also prepared several issues of a Thundarr comic book series, drawn by artist Win Mortimer, and at least one script by John David Warner. Sadly, these books were never published.

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Thundarr was eventually run in syndication, and later shown on Cartoon Network and Boomerang. Fans remembered it fondly, and as those fans grew up and disposable income grew, a call for more Thundarr was heard. Eventually, Thundarr licensing became a slightly more common reality. Toynami released the trio of lead characters as action figures and mini-figures in 2003. Funko put out Funko Pop! Figures. Nothing new has been released in years, but at least some toys are available, even if only on eBay. Warner released the pilot episode as part of a Saturday Morning Collection set in May 2010, including with it a 19-minute documentary called “Lords of Light: The Thundarr the Barbarian Story.” Later that year, Warner Archive put out the first DVD version of Thundarr, as part of a limited edition four-disc set in their Hanna-Barbera Classic Collection (which had absorbed the Ruby-Spears catalogue).

That set was released on September 28, 2010, in MOD (manufacture-on-demand) quantities. Thundarr the Barbarian: The Complete Series was released on Blu-ray on April 6, 2021, looking better than when it was originally broadcast, and unlike its DVD counterpart, it did include the “Lords of Light” documentary.

In his online blog, Mark Evanier wrote of the show’s lasting popularity that “I think the answer may be that it was just a neat

FAST FACTS THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN f No. of seasons: Two f Studio: Ruby-Spears Productions f Original run: October 4, 1980–September 18, 1982 (ABC) f Rerun: April 9, 1983– September 15, 1984 (NBC) f No. of episodes: 21

PRIMARY VOICE PERFORMER CAST f Dick Tufeld: Narrator f Robert Ridgely: Thundarr f Henry Corden: Ookla the Mok, Gemini, Vortak, Skullus, and more f Nellie Bellf lower: Princess Ariel f Michael Ansara: Vashtarr f Marlene Aragon: Maya f Liz Aubrey: Valorie Storm f Michael Bell: Yondo f Alan Oppenheimer: Mindok, Morag f Avery Schreiber: Octagon f Hal Smith: Simius f Joan Van Ark: Cinda, Queen Diona f Janet Waldo: Circe f William Woodson: Crom f Joe Higgins: Korb f Keye Luke: Zevon, Kublai f Chuck McCann: Artemus, Mutant Deputy f Nancy McKeon: Tye f Julie McWhirter: Stryia f Other Voices: Alan Dinehart, Al Fann, Stacy Keach, Sr., Shepard Menken

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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) Detail from a Thundarr comic strip by Jack Kirby, Funko Ookla, coloring book, and board game.

idea—a good-looking character with a good name and premise.”

Buzz Dixon thinks that Thundarr is still popular with fans today because “we never wrote down to our audience. We could be goofy at times but we were never patronizing.”

Proudly displaying Thundarr materials at his convention signings and store appearances, Larry Houston says, “I think Thundarr is still so well-loved and respected to those Eighties kids because it was visually fascinating, lots of fun action-adventure stories, the storyboard artists and writers put their best creative foot forward and also, the cultural zeitgeist was right for it to succeed, due in part, in my opinion, to the action-adventure success of the first 1977 Star Wars movie and Luke’s lightsaber. High quality escapism was back in style again.”

Rick Hoberg concludes, saying he agrees that “Thundarr is quite well-loved today. It gets brought up a lot when I’m doing convention panels or just doing interviews. The two shows that really come up more than any other—even more than X-Men or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends—are Thundarr and Defenders of the Earth. I’m amazed… The reason this show is still so well-loved is because I don’t think there has been anything quite like it. Even since then, there was the Conan the Adventurer show, and a few others, but most of them weren’t this kind of mash-up of so many things. You even had Star Wars stuff in it with that Sunsword. It was a lot of fun and it had elements of a lot of stuff, but still highly original. I will always credit Gerber; he was always tremendously original. Even when he was working over stuff that had been done 1,000 times, he could find something in it to make it new and fresh for him, and for the rest of us.”

We’ll see you in the next issue of RetroFan as we take a Marvelous look at the early animated years of The Fantastic Four and The Thing!

Unless otherwise credited, artwork and photos are courtesy the collection of Andy Mangels.

Interviews with Rick Hoberg, Buzz Dixon, and Larry Houston conducted in December 2023. Because most of the principle interviewees have passed away, archive interview quotes are from Back Issue #31 (December 2008), Comic Times #4 (January 1981), Comics Feature #10 (July 1981), Comics Feature #12 (September–October 1981), Comics Interview #1 (February 1983), Fangoria #9 (November 1980), Fantastic Films #20 (December 1980), Jack Kirby Collector #85 (Winter 2023), and The Krypton Companion (September 2006). Also cited is Mark Evanier’s blog at www.newsfromme.com ANDY MANGELS is the USA Today bestselling author and co-author of 20 books, including the TwoMorrows book Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation, as well as Star Trek and Star Wars tomes, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, and a lot of comic books. He recently wrote the bestselling Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman series for Dynamite and DC Comics, and has written six Fractured Fairy Tales graphic novels for Junior High audiences, 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

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RETRO HOLLYWOOD

40 Years Later

BY D eWAY NE TO DD

‘CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT IT MUST HAVE BEEN LIKE THEN…’

It was the summer of 1984.

20th Century Fox was launching its next big blockbuster franchise to rival Raiders of the Lost Ark and James Bond.

Headlined by a stellar cast who were on tap for at least five films, the series would explore a richly detailed universe that had been under development for a decade.

Peter Weller. Jeff Goldblum. John Lithgow. Ellen Barkin. Christopher Lloyd. These critically acclaimed actors were entering the prime of their careers, bringing a dramatic veracity to the leading roles.

Bolstered by contemporary music and a hip rock ’n’ roll aesthetic, this movie was at the cutting-edge zeitgeist of Japanese-American fashion and Zen philosophy.

Revealed at the conclusion of the film, the sequel to this hip science fiction action-adventure was already titled: Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.

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There was only one glaring (ABOVE) Buckaroo Banzai problem… No one could figure and his fashionable out how to sell the movie. crew incorporated an Lacking a clear description of assortment of Eighties the film, it would be impossible fashions. Buckaroo Banzai to create an effective marketing © 20th Century Studios. Unless and promotional strategy. otherwise noted, all images Uncertain what to do, studio illustrating this article are executives opted to push the courtesy of DeWayne Todd. film release from early June to early August, right in the middle of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Marketers decided to expand the title of the film and test the market appeal with a limited distribution. The five-month paced release of the movie effectively killed a strongly coordinated advertising campaign.

As a result of this misguided launch, the film never found an audience and was a bomb at the box office, recouping only half of its $12 million production costs.

Auspiciously, this was not the end of the movie. In the mid-Eighties, the home video and cable industries were beginning to explode and Buckaroo Banzai was the perfect film to capture these new markets. The movie quickly began to develop a group of fans through videocassette rentals, college campus screenings, and midnight showings. Viewers that did not have the opportunity to see the movie in its limited theatrical release could now experience the movie in the comfort of their homes.

Although a strong following began to grow, Buckaroo Banzai never appealed to the casual viewer. The film is complicated by design and requires multiple viewings to savor the complexity of the story and directorial style.

However, when someone likes Banzai, they really like it, often to the point of obsession. It is the repeat-viewing, dialogue-quoting, and enduring devotion of its fans that makes Buckaroo Banzai one of the best, if not the greatest, of all cult films.

While Buckaroo Banzai could have easily passed into quirky cult obscurity, the magic of this film continues to insert itself into motion picture and comic book arts without crossing into mainstream pop culture. The influence of Banzai can be seen in Stranger Things, Ready Player One, Star Trek, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Over the years, the dense cinematic mythos created for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension continues to be kept alive by passionate fans. But even now, 40 years later, Buckaroo Banzai remains one of the most elusive to define but quintessential films of the Eighties.

‘THEIR TRUE BACKGROUNDS ARE SHROUDED IN SECRECY’

(LEFT) As creative and outlandish as the film itself, the Australian day bill attempted to explain the unexplainable. (RIGHT) While the French advertising art looks fantastic, viewers expecting a Mad Max–style alien invasion may have been disappointed. © 20th Century Studios.

Buckaroo Banzai, originally named Buckaroo Bandy, is the brainchild of screenplay writer Earl Mac Rauch, who developed his first Banzai story in 1974, under an agreement with fellow writer W. D. Richter. Rauch would continue to create new stories about the character for years, including The Strange Case of Mr. Cigars, Lepers from Saturn, and Find the Jetcar, Said the President – A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller.

As Richter and Rauch worked on a potential Buckaroo Banzai film treatment, Richter would establish his own flourishing career as a screenwriter with the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dracula (1979), and the Academy Award®–nominated Brubaker (1980).

Earl Mac Rauch also proved himself successful, producing scripts for major films like A Stranger Is Watching and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. Despite these other projects, the exploits of Buckaroo Banzai continued to be refined through the Seventies and the collection of tales became a repository of adventures, characters, and subplots, which would eventually populate the Banzai universe.

It was ten years before the project finally made its way to the big screen in a script that was simply titled Buckaroo Banzai. Along the way, the focus of these adventures changed from creating an

updated version of singing cowboy Gene Autry to producing a hero for the Eighties: a hard-rockin’ neurosurgeon-physicist who drives racecars, practices martial arts, and fronts a rock band called the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

Rauch described his vision for Buckaroo Banzai as a “pulp adventure inspired by serials and the Seventies’ kung-fu movies.” W. D. Richter, who would direct the Banzai adaptation, cited Gene Autry’s 1935 Saturday matinee serial, The Phantom Empire, the first science fiction/Western film ever made, as the primary inspiration.

‘THE ONE THE ONLY… BUCKAROO BANZAI’

Moving from screenplay to film, the on-screen character of Buckaroo Banzai continued to evolve, becoming an enigmatic convergence of inspirations from Rauch, Richter, and the lead actor, Peter Weller.

Weller reflected, “That movie changed my life. I connected to his Zen-ness. First, I had never done a film—or anything—that took so much physical discipline. I was 36… I was 20 pounds overweight… the last of my party days—when L.A. was wide open... I turned to discipline. I was running six miles a day, which I started doing for Buckaroo…. It also got me reading and sent me on some scholastic channel that I’m still on… That was one of the greatest times of my life.”

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‘YOU’RE THINKING OF MR. WIZARD’

When it comes to mad scientists, the world of cinema has plenty, but few can compare with the primary villain of Buckaroo Banzai, Italian physicist Dr. Emilio Lizardo, played by John Lithgow. His out-of-this-world performance as a scientist possessed by the evil Lord John Whorfin, who comes straight outta the 8th Dimension, is one of the most bombastic villains to ever terrorize the screen. With orange hair, yellow teeth, and multiple layers of heavy wool clothing, Lithgow ambles through the film snapping necks, torturing women, and spouting Mussolini-esque inspirational speeches that are cinematic magic. “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!”

Adding to his maniacal energy are Whorfin’s cronies, John Bigbooté, John O’Connor, John Gomez, and even John Smallberries.

Yes, all the aliens have the same first name—John. The on-screen conflict between Whorfin and his second in command, Bigbooté, whose name is repeatedly pronounced incorrectly, is a perfect sample of the film’s subtle, deadpan humor.

‘BUCKAROO BANZAI – ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION’

The movie begins with Dr. Banzai preparing to break the dimensional barrier, a critical sequence that first time director W. D. Richter wanted to make as authentic as possible. Richter engaged racecar designers Jerry Segal and George Haddebeck to construct a working vehicle for the film. The result was a functional jet engine strapped to a Ford F-350 Pick-Up Truck, complete with oil leaks and a “dieseling” problem that persisted after shutdown. Capable of speeds approaching 200 m.p.h., this vehicle was every young boy’s dream!

When Buckaroo passes into the 8th Dimension, Richter wanted to show the audience something extraordinary, so the director did something that had never been done before. After installing a motion-tracking system on a still-image electron viewer, Richter filmed the first microscopic movie. “It takes a SEM [Scanning Electronic Microscope] 90 seconds to register an image on a single frame of film. In the end, after three months of work, [John] Scheele had shot about a minute and a half of the film. Twenty-five seconds of the best footage appears in Buckaroo Banzai as the 8th Dimension.” The composite sequence was built from extreme close-ups of a mouse tongue, liver specimens, and an assortment of fungi, giving the audience a truly astonishing scene.

Throughout the film, Production Designer Michael Riva combined superbly designed props like the dimension-busting Oscillation Overthruster with other more amusing elements such as the alien viewing glasses that are clearly made from common bubble wrap. A repurposed Sony Watchman, a reworked Talking View-Master, and modified BMX racing vests are the basis of multiple pieces of “advanced” technology. This blend of practical props enhances the film’s humorous, non sequitur charm. Props like the Oscillation Overthruster can be seen in productions like Ready Player One, Ahsoka, and multiple episodes of Star Trek.

‘VISCIOUS RED ALIENS WALKING FREELY AMONG US’

Long before John Carpenter’s They Live, Buckaroo Banzai also envisioned a race of alien creatures living among us that could disguise their form to appear as regular people. Described as a process of “electric brainwashing,” it is only when the good aliens give Buckaroo a special antidote that he sees the bad aliens as they really are. Bewildering? Yes. But imagine the deft balancing 66

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(TOP) John Lithgow as the evil and bloodthirsty Lord John Whorfin. (ABOVE) Buckaroo’s Jet Car was a modified Ford F-350 with a jet engine strapped to the back. “Believe it!” © 20th Century Studios.

retro Hollywood

act that was required to constantly shift the actors from human appearance to Lectroid form so that the visual perspective of the other characters would be consistent. Often, the alien appearance switched back and forth within a single scene. No wonder many audience members reported being confused!

Uniquely designed by Michael Riva and brought to life by make-up artist Tom Burman, the Lectroid appearance was inspired by placing an inverted lobster on the designer’s face. These remarkable masks were then custom sculpted for specific actors, including Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, and Dan Hadaya. Amazingly, the actor’s distinctive features are seen in the heavy latex masks, making the characters both distinguishable and recognizable.

For the Lectroid spacecraft, Richter wanted to break away from the high-tech look of most Hollywood films. Taking a line from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Richter observed, “Why do we always expect metal ships? Because we are very self-centered, and we have metal ships.” To get a unique design, Richter and Riva turned to nature as the inspiration for developing organic vehicles. Respected modeler Greg Jein built the miniatures for Banzai, deftly modeling the large ship of the Black Lectroids from large sections of coral and John Whorfin’s troop ship from a massive spiky oyster. “The result is like something you’ve never seen before,” declared Richter. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to like them, but you haven’t seen spaceships like this.”

Many of these visual and directorial innovations can be lost in the fast-paced complexity of the film, but Richter never caters to audience expectations or motion picture tropes. These are the elements that make Buckaroo Banzai entirely unpredictable and wildly entertaining.

‘WHERE ARE YOUR SPURS AT?’

Designer Aggie Guerrard Rogers met Richter on the set of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was brought onto the team to oversee costume development for Buckaroo Banzai. Having recently designed the look of Return of the Jedi, Rogers was challenged to bring the styles back to earth. “Buckaroo’s clothes are progressive, a little far out, not at all conservative or wild. For his rock outfit, he wears a Gianni Versace sports jacket and a Perry Ellis suit and tie. For the press conference, he wears a recut Giorgio Armani fabric suit. And for Japanese fashion… he wears a modern Yogi Yamamoto shirt.”

Other members of Team Banzai are also arrayed in essential Eighties styles that include teased hair and brightly colored outfits.

Each of the unique looks were constructed for the specific character portrayed by strong supporting cast members Clancy Brown, Pepe Serna, Lewis Smith, Carl Lumbly, and Laura Harrington.

The aliens, who have been trapped on Earth for nearly 50 years, would get a completely different fashion treatment. Riva explained, “We were going with greens and blues and yellows for the Lectroids, who are basically sick and anemic.” Other observers would describe the Lectroid outfits as resembling shady Russian salesmen.

‘I WANT SOME MUSIC OUT OF YOU CHARACTERS’

An essential part of Buckaroo Banzai is the music from both the soundtrack and within the film itself. Buckaroo and his inner circle, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, are a hard-rockin’ group of musicians. In the movie, Buckaroo performs at a small venue called Artie’s Artery, a perfect example of the hip early Eighties glam-metal neon-lit clubs of Los Angeles.

The hard-rockin’ Hong Kong Cavaliers embody the spectacle of early Eighties L.A. club bands. © 20th Century Studios.

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The unique Lectroid design was conceived at a lobster dinner. Tom Burman Studios designed these “vicious” Lectroid aliens that walk among us. © 20th Century Studios.

A real-world inspiration for the Cavaliers came from one of the hottest bands in L.A., Billy Vera and the Beaters, a blues rock ’n’ roll group that included its own horn section. Richter brought in several of the Beaters to provide back-up in the concert sequence where Peter Weller, a trained musician, actually plays the pocket horn. To give the movie even more authenticity, singer-songwriter and Grammy Award–winning musician Billy Vera is featured in the movie as the irascible Blue Blaze Irregular, Pinky Carruthers.

The soundtrack for the film was developed by Academy Award®–winning composer Michael Boddicker, one of the pioneers in synthesizer music. The rich soundtrack is unusually sparse for an action film, but few audiences can forget Boddicker’s end credits march, a magical tune that accompanies Buckaroo and his friends as they stride through an L.A. aqueduct.

Wes Anderson would shoot an homage to this sequence years later in his film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

drove Begelman to step in and replace celebrated Blade Runner cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth weeks into production. In his place, Begelman brought on stolid photographer Fred Konencamp without informing director Richter.

Another infamous conflict centered on the red glasses Buckaroo Banzai wears. Begelman complained that “heroes don’t wear glasses” and they made Banzai look “gay,” a stereotype that was anathema in the early Eighties. The escalating clash over this issue was only resolved by an agreement that Richter could show the glasses no more than three times in the film. Otherwise, Begelman would stop the entire project.

Eventually, Begelman disengaged from the daily agitation, leading to one of the most memorable moments of the film. Jeff Goldblum observes, “What is that watermelon doing there?” and is told, “I’ll tell you later.” Completely random and never explained, many viewers have pointed to this moment as a defining representation of what is either wonderful or annoying about the movie. It all depends on the viewer’s perspective. Although Richter would provide a logical explanation years later, the real story was that the production designer stopped at a fruit stand on the way to the set and decided to test whether Begelman was still watching the dailies from the film. The completely random nature of the watermelon would be a test. After shooting the sequence, Richter and crew confirmed that the producer was no longer engaged with micro-managing production of the film because nary a word was spoken.

Throughout the film, W. D. Richter boldly fills the screen with nods to some of the greatest films in the history of cinema—2001: A Space Odyssey. Doctor Strangelove. The Right Stuff. Citizen Kane. An entire sequence is lifted from one of the greatest episodes of The Outer Limits, “The Architects of Fear.”

But as the movie wrapped production, it became clear

‘PERHAPS YOU CAN EXPLAIN YOURSELF’

Principal photography for Buckaroo Banzai began on July 12, 1983, but as the film started to take shape, studio executives and marketing teams began to be troubled by its offbeat structure.

As he reviewed the daily footage, Producer David Begelman realized that Banzai was something completely different than the conventional action franchise he had promised investors.

Begelman was a charismatic and highly influential Hollywood producer, despite having been convicted of forgery and embezzlement in the past. Without Begelman’s support for Buckaroo Banzai, the movie would likely never have made it to production.

In the tradition of directorial nightmares, Begelman began to harass Richter and the production team about the look of the film and repeatedly threatened to shut down production and fire Richter. Disagreements over the lighting and camerawork 68

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(LEFT) Peter Weller as Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, a man that can do anything while wearing his contemporary red glasses. (RIGHT) “The one, the only, Buckaroo Banzai.” © 20th Century Studios.

retro Hollywood

that this film could not be easily categorized. What is it? Science fiction? Action? Comedy? Or some wildly profound docudrama?

Everyone seemed to get something different from this movie that defied description.

Peter Weller would recall, “I kept asking myself, what in the hell is this movie about? Saving the world? Understanding the interplanetary reaction of racism? I don’t know, man; the movie has everything. It has politics, the central adjustments of racism; a whole extraterrestrial look at what’s good and evil. Socialism, man.

I don’t know what the hell it’s about, but it’s a comedy for sure….”

It did not help that in the first 20 minutes, Buckaroo performs neurosurgery on an Eskimo, drives a supersonic car through a mountain, gives a concert, and practices martial arts in his own tour bus that keeps an eye on worldwide communications.

Buckaroo defines himself as a renaissance man, but Weller would caution, “He is not a super-hero! Buckaroo’s an ordinary guy. He just uses his time well.”

as “the latest issue!” The idea of an internal metaverse was quite original when Banzai came out, although it is more common in modern productions.

Another running gag is the notion that Buckaroo Banzai exists in the real world. This concept became part of the promotion of the film when Sherwood Productions sent letters to film critics claiming that the villainous Hanoi Xan had tampered with the mail and shanghaied promotional materials that had previously been sent out. This marketing ploy often confused journalists. A similar mock disclaimer from the estate of Orson Welles disavowing any knowledge of what happened on Halloween 1938 was placed in the novelization, planting the seed that the film was based on real events.

Years later, W. D. Richter and Earl Mac Rauch’s audio commentary for the first DVD release was made under the contextual premise that the movie was based on the real-life exploits of Buckaroo Banzai, who was aptly played by Peter Weller.

‘I KNOW YOU… YOU’RE PECOS’

Even Buckaroo Banzai doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, the film passionately embraces its own odd quirkiness. Right out of the gate, the movie sets a fast pace and never slows down to explain what is happening.

It is as if everyone is expected to know who Buckaroo Banzai is and go along for the ride. Although common in modern films like Fury Road, A Quiet Place, and many Marvel movies, this cinematic technique of throwing the audience in the middle of a story and letting them figure it out with minimal explanation was way ahead of its time.

“Buckaroo Banzai is a million things,” explained Richter. “It’s not even just a movie. Buckaroo Banzai to us is a world.” A world that includes Buckaroo’s fame.

Within the movie, Buckaroo is aware of his own prominence and has a franchise that includes video games, comic books, posters, and assorted publications from the the physicist. Patients in a mental health facility are playing a Buckaroo Banzai video game. Two random duck hunters are so familiar with Buckaroo’s adventures that they recognize a random comic book (ABOVE) Christopher Lloyd as Lectroid John Bigbooté… Tay… Tay… Tay! (LEFT) The unique Lectroid design was conceived at a lobster dinner.

Tom Burman Studios designed these “vicious” Lectroid aliens that walk among us. © 20th Century Studios.

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‘PICTURES DON’T LIE… THE HELL THEY DON’T’

While marketing teams struggled to sell Buckaroo Banzai domestically, an even bigger challenge was faced when they tried to promote the film to international audiences.

Mark Damon of Producer’s Sales Organization (PSO), an expert in foreign markets, was engaged to develop customized advertising campaigns for localized distributors. These expanded promotional materials produced even more fascinating pieces of the film’s marketing history.

For example, the now-infamous promotional art for France featured a leather-clad, Mad Max version of Buckaroo Banzai, with a massive gun and fleets of alien ships swarming across the skies. This piece of advertising was just one element in a campaign that deceptively focused on guns and violence.

Marvel Comics was hopeful about the film, adapting it in (LEFT) the color magazine Marvel Super Special #33 and serializing the adaptation in a Buckaroo Banzai miniseries.

Courtesy of Heritage. (RIGHT) Buckaroo Banzai comic book adaptations were even translated to German! © 20th Century Studios.

Another fascinating marketing approach included the promotional materials for Germany, which centered on the scientific and industrial pictures from the film. In the advertisements, the character of Buckaroo was likened to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Henry Kissinger. Even more bizarre was a detailed informational poster that declared “Buckaroo Banzai is the freakiest guy since Donald Duck and Superman!” Director Richter would later pass on a note from Dr. Banzai himself that explained “he was totally unaware that some people in Germany consider him to be the freakiest guy since Donald Duck, a fact that has given him some pause.”

A special day bill was designed for audiences in Australia that reflected the unique style of humor in the film. The poster image of John Whorfin reveals, “Five things you should know before seeing Buckaroo Banzai,” one stating that “Buckaroo’s army of ‘The Hong Kong Cavaliers’ are more fearsome than the West Indian pace-bowling attack.” Viewers from Down Under may have been disappointed, expecting Buckaroo’s rock band scientists to be a fearsome army. But then again, who would believe the word of a vicious Red Lectroid like Whorfin?

Although strange and misguided, these odd advertising designs often match the offbeat, make-it-up-as-you-go spirit of Buckaroo Banzai. Many of these images have become an integral part of the rich heritage of the film.

‘NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO… BUCKAROO BANZAI LIVES!’

Ellen Barkin and Jeff Goldblum were part of the rich cast of Buckaroo Banzai. © 20th Century Studios.

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Over the past 40 years, Buckaroo Banzai’s flame has been kept alive in ongoing publications of World Watch One, a fanzine originally published by 20th Century Fox. In 2006, Moonstone Comics launched a series of comic books that continued to explore Buckaroo’s adventures and in 2019,

retro Hollywood

The crew of Buckaroo Banzai poses before the assault on the Lectroid nest at Yoyodyne Propulsions. © 20th Century Studios.

Dark Horse Books published the follow-up novel by Earl Mac Rauch titled Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Not surprisingly, the contentious sequel by Rauch received extreme reactions from fans, even causing some readers to speculate that the book was actually penned by Buckaroo’s arch-nemesis, Hanoi Xan. Like his nefarious enemy, the future of the Buckaroo Banzai franchise remains shrouded in murky legal waters with no clear path to new film productions. However, there have been many proposals for continuations or reboots, including avid fan Kevin Smith, who declared Buckaroo Banzai to be, “A true work of art.”

While chances for a direct sequel appear to be lost, the nostalgic resurgence of love for the Eighties makes Buckaroo Banzai ripe for a new adaptation. Unfortunately, no one seems willing to work through the potential legal battles to move forward.

‘DON’T EMBARRASS US’

So, what is it about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai that creates such a deep passion in its fans? For many, this film was a love at first sight and the movie remains a personal treasure. Whether it is the chicken fat that is strewn about every set, or the multitude of subplots that populate each scene, the film calls for repeated viewings. The character of Buckaroo Banzai has often been described as a modern-day DaVinci. In the same way, the movie might be compared to a DaVinci painting that can be studied again and again, with each viewing revealing new layers.

“Buckaroo Banzai is a catalyst,” proclaimed W. D. Richter. “He is more of an inspiration to the guys around him than they are to him.”

It is Buckaroo’s capacity to bring out the best in others that makes him so appealing. In the movie, we see Jeff Goldblum’s New Jersey persona transform from a timid and uncertain surgeon, panicking in the operating room, to a strong and confident member of Buckaroo’s inner circle. Similarly, Ellen Barkin’s character of Penny Priddy shifts from throwing her life away to being willing to sacrifice herself to keep Buckaroo’s secrets hidden. It is Buckaroo’s sincere statement “I care…” that begins Penny’s journey. Isn’t that what we all want from a hero?

And while Buckaroo’s capacity to help others may be his most appealing quality, there is also an upbeat spirit to the movie that fans love. This positive energy can be seen in the performances of the actors, many of whom have said that making Buckaroo Banzai was the best experience of their life.

As Peter Weller would observe, “Whatever you may say about the film, it’s one-of-a-kind. There’s no comparison.”

After 40 years, Buckaroo Banzai may not have become the summer blockbuster that 20th Century Fox was hoping for, but there is little doubt this extraordinary film continues to resonate with viewers in every dimension.

DeWAYNE TODD is an author, artist, and film enthusiast who lives his life like Buckaroo, going in many directions at once. A thought leader in the electric utility industry, DeWayne has published many papers on consumer energy alternatives and is the author of Volumes One and Two of The Buckaroo Banzai Collectors’ Compendium.

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RETRO TRAVEL

Klaatu Barada

BY KATHERINE KERESTMAN Any day is The Day the Earth Stood Still, if you are in Roswell, New Mexico, and if you are one of the people ogling Gort, the robot ambassador from Klatuu, sent to warn us warmongering Earthlings that if we do not curtail our aggression, our intergalactic neighbors will do it for us.

Visiting Roswell is stepping into Cold War America: the era of Buck Rogers and The War of the Worlds. The Earth is on the brink of an alien incursion.

Even deplaning at the Roswell Airport is walking into the past—the airport is a tiny airfield where an Air Force base used to be.

The small tarmac and diminutive airport building evoke images of the airports in the movies from the Forties and Fifties—Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly deplaning by walking down a ramp and claiming her baggage in a small room (that has a sliding garage-style door in a wall that opens like the door on an old-fashioned breadbox), (ABOVE) You don’t have just as I did when I arrived. Today, the to be abducted to have airport is the site of the one-room Walker an alien encounter…

Air Force Base Museum, dedicated to Exterior of the Invasion the period before the attack on Pearl Station in Roswell, Harbor—when Walker’s mandate was New Mexico. (RIGHT) the preparation of fighter pilots to take Roswell Air Center America into World War II. arrival gate. Photos President Franklin Roosevelt, knowing accompanying this article that the United States would soon be are by and courtesy of entering the war, had declared a National Katherine Kerestman.

Emergency, and the National Guard had been called to active duty. As part of his war preparations, Roosevelt ordered tens of thousands of aircraft seeking to learn about us in 1947, as well as before and after to be built. To fly these planes, tens of thousands of pilots would be required, too, for which reason the Bombardier School formed that time? The museum’s Research Library houses a collection of pop culture Buck Rogers and Star Wars toys; a large room of at Roswell was established. One of the most curious exhibits at UFO-related books; and an archive of publications ranging from the museum is a group of bomb fragments—concrete bombs— NASA reports to UFO, science, and science fiction magazines. The dropped from planes onto prairie land, as a training exercise; the museum was founded in 1990, to gather information relating to bombs were made of concrete, the docent explained, so as not to the Roswell UFO crash of 1947. scare the animals with explosions. Walker Air Force Base closed On July 3, 1947, rancher Dan Wilmot observed a bright, in 1967. saucer-shaped vessel with glowing lights. He estimated that it was Atomic testing in nearby White Sands and the war in Europe travelling at about 500 miles per hour and that it was perhaps 25 had America on edge. The anxiety of the time was expressed in to 50 feet in diameter; he told his story to the Roswell Daily Record science fiction films—especially after 1947. newspaper. W. W. Brazel (Mac) of J. B. Fork Ranch discovered The film loop playing in the foyer of the International UFO debris scattered over a wide area near the village of Corona, Museum and Research Center poses this question: if human southeast of Roswell, and he notified Chaves County Sheriff George explorers are always seeking to expand our boundaries, why Wilcox, who, in turn, notified Roswell Army Airfield Intelligence could not intelligent life from outside our world have been 72

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Nikto

Travel in Roswell, New Mexico (ABOVE) Exhibits at the Walker Air Force Base Museum. (RIGHT) Concrete bomb remnants used in training exercises at Walker Air Force Base.

(BELOW) Roswell crash timeline exhibit at the International UFO Museum and Research Center.

Officer Major Jesse Marcel. When Marcel notified his superior, Colonel William Blanchard, Blanchard ordered him to send counter-intelligence personnel to the crash site; but, before they could get there, military police officers had already confiscated the debris that Brazel had left there.

Blanchard is responsible for the first press release (July 8, 1947) stating that wreckage from a crashed flying disc had been found.

Blanchard sent Marcel to Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, to report to General Ramey. Within a few hours, the pieces of debris which Marcel had brought to Fort Worth had disappeared, and General Roger Ramey had issued a second press release, denying that the debris was from a flying disc and stating that it was from a downed weather balloon. Colonel Blanchard left “on leave” from the base. Marcel—and some of the debris—were carried by plane to Forth Worth Army Base. Marcel stated that, while in flight, he peeked under the tarp covering the debris and saw bodies—bodies that looked like aliens. Key personnel disappeared or were silenced in the aftermath of the crash.

The museum’s exhibits document the timeline of events, from the initial reports and announcements to the reversals and back-peddling statements and the various accounts given over the 75 years since the incident. Equally under scrutiny are the evidence relating to UFOs and alien contacts and to questions of government honesty and dishonesty in these matters. Project Blue Book (1952–1969), an Air Force program dedicated to the investigation of UFOs in order to determine if they pose a threat to national security, followed Project Sign (1947) and Project Grudge (1948). Project Grudge is considered to have had a debunking mandate—to discredit all the reports of UFO sightings investigated by Project Sign. In 1953, it became illegal for military personnel to divulge classified UFO reports.

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retro travel

Project Blue Book had collected over 12,000 reports of UFO sightings by the time it was ended in 1969 because of the Condon Report (a study conducted by the University of Colorado), which concluded that Project Blue Book was not providing much in the way of new scientific information and that most of the phenomena had been explained (it blamed the bulk of the reports on misidentification, hoaxes, and mental aberrations of individuals). But what about the small percentage of sightings for which explanations have not been found? Investigations into those were halted, too.

Alien and UFO treatment in pop culture are explored through exhibits, featuring Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a video loop, Spielberg states that his movie was not intended as a science fiction thriller—it was not fiction. Other displays include the 1951 movies They Came from Another World (the government covers up the finding of an alien who survived the crash) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (with a life-size Gort, the space visitor robot that was sent to Earth from Klatuu to deliver this ultimatum: “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” i.e., “Cut out the atomic bombs”), as well as the 1953 The War of the Worlds (based on the H. G. Wells novel) and the 1994 Roswell film (starring my Twin Peaks heartthrob, Kyle MacLachlan, and Martin Sheen), a private citizen-versus-big government take on the Roswell incident. Independence Day (1996), in which human survivors cannot hope to prevail unless they band together; Men in Black (1997), in which undercover agents harass UFO witnesses and intimidate them into silence; The X-Files (1993–2002), a TV series which concerns itself with government conspiracies, aliens, and alien invasions; Communion (1989), a

(LEFT) Local history is also celebrated. film about alien abductee Christopher Walken; and the History Channel’s Project Blue Book (2021) are also included.

A simulated alien invasion takes place in a cockpit-like room, straight out of Star Trek. The narrative is based on an extraterrestrial reply to the Trinity Atomic Bomb Test conducted in White Sands, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, during which Earth must have sent this message to the intelligent life in the rest of the universe: “You are not alone.” The end result posited by the program is that “we might be getting a few more visitors than we had bargained for,” a dire result of having drawn attention to ourselves with an atomic bomb blast.

Ten – nine – eight – seven – six – five –four – three – two – one – Blast off! If you are intrepid enough, you have climbed the dizzying heights of the scaffolding, entered the cockpit, and been strapped

Various exhibits featuring space aliens and their visitations on Earth as imagined by Earthlings.

74

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in—and the engines have fired. The earth drops out form beneath your feet—nothing but stars in every direction—you have taken off! The Apollo 11 scenario at Spaceport Roswell is breathtaking.

Before you strap on your virtual reality helmet, the Intergalactic Flight Attendant asks some security questions: Are you carrying your flux capacitor (Back to the Future)? Have any of your droids or robotic possessions been out of your possession during the last two days? And, are you carrying any extraterrestrial goop, slime, ooze, mucus, or glop? “Failure to follow intergalactic rules may result in fines and/or ejection into space,” the introductory video cautions. The introductory material also provides a very good summary of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race and the anxiety it caused in the populace of both nations.

There is a second adventure, as well—a Ray Bradbury–style story of the alien crash landing in 1947 in Roswell (a scenario presented from an extraterrestrial point of view, in which humans treat our out-of-galaxy guests with our customary inhumanity).

Nearby is Area 51, a fun intergalactic space that provides alien laboratory photo-ops—I lay down upon a dissection table for a memorable photo. Its Crash Down Café is a Twilight Zone–ian set, having red vinyl booths and counter seats and alien personnel (it is an indoor picnic area for visitors). Across the street is the Roswell UFO Space Walk, a black-light “funhouse,” replete with psychedelic glow-in-the-dark intergalactic photo-ops and dioramas; in its gift

VISITING THE INVASION STATION? The Invasion Station 600 N. Main Street Roswell, NM 88201 www.invasionstation.com 575-416-3830 Open Monday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Evidence of Roswell’s embrace of its UFO heritage is everywhere, including the local McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. shop, I purchased a haunting Lovecraftian painting of a red Martian city skyline by Bryan Ward, whose pop art cosmic landscapes evoke both Lovecraft’s R’yleh and Buck Rogers’ Mars.

Roswell is a very small city, and all of the attractions were within walking distance of my hotel, the centrally located Home2 Suites.

Roswell’s considerable array of alien-themed gift shops purvey green, oversized, oval-eyed alien sunglasses and T-shirts, as well as all kinds of books related to aliens. Aliens—and rocket ships—are everywhere in Roswell. Fluorescent-green, long-headed, slanteyed, short creatures with long arms are found atop the street lights, at gas stations, in front of Dunkin’ Donuts and Papa John’s Pizza. Flying saucers, too, are a common sight—a vintage McDonald’s formed in the image of a stainless-steel flying saucer sits next to Invasion Station, a gift shop on which a flying saucer is parked.

Roswell holds a UFO festival annually, in the first part of July.

Pack your bags and prepare to blast off! Oh… and pack a lot of fluorescent green in your wardrobe.

KATHERINE KERESTMAN, shown with her friends Gort and Klaatu, is the author of Lethal (PsychoToxin Press, 2023) and Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020), as well as co-editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat, an anthology of weird cat stories by writers living and dead (WordCrafts Press, 2023). Her Lovecraftian and gothic works have been featured in Black Wings VII, Penumbra, Journ-E, Spectral Realms, and The Little Book of Cursed Dolls (Media Macabre, 2023). Katherine is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks and has been seen cavorting in the graveyards of Salem on Halloween. You can keep up with her at www.creepycatlair.com RETROFAN

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I’m a subscriber and huge fan of RetroFan. It’s probably too late to pitch this story for your magazine, but this December [2023] marks the 50th Anniversary of Gayla Peevey’s 1953 hit, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” I am in a middle of writing a deep dive on a new book that tells the incredible stories behind

every Christmas song, and Gayla’s story is a remarkable one. In 1953, when she was just ten years old, Gayla went from singing with the Girl Scouts in Oklahoma City in January to appearing (twice) on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town in October. That remarkable year included working with Hoagy Carmichael on his NBC variety show, Saturday Night Revue, getting a deal with Columbia Records, and having her record produced

by Mitch Miller, who was also the head of A&R at the time. Time and Look magazines did full feature stories on her, and she ended the amazing year by “re-gifting” to the Oklahoma Zoo a 700-pound Hippopotamus that was given to her as part of a local promotion. The story is finished and it’s loaded with some great illustrations. If you have any interest or questions let me know!

VINNIE FAVALE Favale Media Thanks, Vinnie, for this info! While it did reach us too late for a feature timed to the anniversary, we’re happy to share the news and story here.

Huge fan of RetroFan, (and Back Issue, and Hero A-Go-Go!), so as usual I liked the whole of RetroFan #28. Looking ahead, I don’t know how to not get too excited about the next three issues.

A few nits to pick: Mark Voger’s article on the British Invasion was great. I looked at the preview for his book on the Invasion [Britmania], and I will definitely be looking to read it in the future. Two items that I didn’t see mentioned: The song “Lies!” by the Knickerbockers is a direct imitation of the Beatles. It sounds so much like a Beatles song that I spent years trying to track down what I thought was a “lost” Beatles song (I couldn’t find

TM & © DC Comics.

I still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was years ago. It’s so clear in my memory after all this time. Of course, I was younger at the time. I’m 68 now, but I’ll never forget that life-changing experience.

I can recall where I was, what I was doing, and the effect it had on me. It’s pure nostalgia.

Little did I know I would still be talking about it in 2023.

Even though it was back in the halcyon days of 2018, I still remember buying my first issue of RetroFan. Was it the bright colors of the cover that caught my eye? The large color photo of Lou Ferrigno that attracted my attention?

Or maybe the fact that I had pre-ordered the debut issue three months in advance from my local comics shop. But there it was!

I read it and I was hooked. And I have ordered every issue since then. Now I have a special box where I save my back issues of RetroFan so I can go back and reread them in my old age.

It has been five long years since that first issue. A lot has happened in that time. But like the Alamo, where I rented a car last summer, I’ll always remember RetroFan #1.

DAVID BURD

it on any album, in other words). And Frankie Avalon adopted an English accent and mod clothes to portray “the Potato Bug” in Bikini Beach (1964). Clearly a parody of a rock band making waves elsewhere.

I always like Will Murray’s stories, and I have clear memories of Hercules the cartoon. I wish you had included the lyrics to the theme, as I have lost them in memory. I seem to recall the final shots of Herc always dragging whatever bad guy back to Mount Olympus. I must say, I don’t know how you missed DC’s Hercules, who appeared in All-Star #8 with Wonder Woman, but also was brought to his future by Lex Luthor in Action Comics #267 and 268. Looking at the timing, I’m sure Superman editor Mort Weisinger saw the movie posters and thought of how to mix the newest movie strongman with his own strong man.

Finally, nice work on the Frito Bandito. The issue of stereotyping is handled well here. That also accounts for why the Dick Tracy cartoons have not been covered. One nitpick: W. C. Fields made one movie with Mae West (My Little Chickadee), not many “comedies” that may be implied.

I could likely sing further praises of other articles but I will wrap up. A few requests: the universe of Irwin Allen needs to be explored

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in the corner that said “As sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

Scott Saavedra hit another bull’s-eye with his look at the Frito Bandito. Considering the Bandito’s short career, it’s amazing how many people still know that song. I’d like to see more articles about these iconic commercial mascots because, well, what other magazine is going to tell us about them?

Hercules, hero of song and story.

Hercules, winner of ancient glory.

Fighting for the right, Fighting with his might, With the strength of ten, ordinary men.

Hercules, people are safe when near him.

Hercules, only the evil fear him.

Softness in his eyes, Iron in his thighs, Virtue in his heart, Fire in every part, Of the Mighty Hercules.

Victory is here, Raise a mighty cheer, At the side of Hercules!

RetroFan took a casual look at Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows way back in issue #3 and has since returned to Lost in Space on several occasions.

But Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants deserve deeper dives in our pages. Not sure when, but eventually. Same with the animated Fantastic Voyage (heck, and the live-action movie that preceded it, as well). But rest assured there’s loads of great stuff in store in our pages in forthcoming issues to keep you reading until we’re able to explore those shows.

We appreciate the reminders about DC Comics’ Hercules, and have shared the cover of Action Comics #268 (Sept. 1960), drawn by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye, to illustrate the meeting of the men of steel! (In the Seventies, DC introduced another version of the mythical muscleman in its Hercules Unbound series.)

Your latest issue of RetroFan [#28] did as promised, because I was properly wigged out, flipped out, freaked out, and hung out by it.

I liked Mark Voger’s look at the British Invasion; while the Beatles were king, I appreciated the list of other Brit invaders. To this day, I catch myself suddenly singing “Oy’m ’enery the Eighth oy yam” out loud in many public places (places that no longer allow me to patronize them; there may be a connection there…).

The Beatles-ploitation article raised teenage memories of splurging on a record, only to go home and find out that it was some poser who sometimes didn’t even bother trying to sound anything like the original. Yep, nothing like buying an album with “The Greatest Hits of the Rolling Stones” and not noticing the tiny print 78

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May 2024

© Frito-Lay/PepsiCo. Cel courtesy of Heritage.

Steve, courtesy of LyricsOnDemand.com, here are the lyrics for the Mighty Hercules theme song:

Finally, your faux TV Guide listing was hilarious. I especially liked the format descriptions of the shows: Product Placement and Bad Movie Discussion. These final-page jokes are another favorite part of your magazine. Keep Mr. Saavedra around, he’s a funny guy.

MICHAL JACOT P.S. Thank you for including my TV Guide Fall Preview article into the mix. I’ve spent the last few days showing it off to anyone who will look at it!

Michal, we look forward to your return to our pages as a RetroFan writer!

Your letters column is always a highlight of the magazine; it’s heartening to see so many readers who share the same memories as I do.

Pierre Pouliot’s photo collage was fun to see, and reminded me of the glory days of Matchbox toy cars. I wouldn’t mind seeing an article on those cool collectibles!

John Fishel’s letter admitting his crush on Angela Cartwright (I’m with you, bro) got me thinking about our celebrity crushes at different stages of our lives. You had three Celeb Crush stages to deal with. The first one was the celebrities who were kids when you were a kid, such as Ms. Cartrwight and Maureen McCormick. Those were my favorite because they seemed almost attainable; maybe you’d bump into them at school (Hey, I could dream, couldn’t I?). The second stage consisted of the adult celebrities you crushed on as a kid. Sure, they were out of your age range, but you could still love Marlo Thomas, Goldie Hawn, or Elizabeth Montgomery from afar. Finally, there were the adult celebrity crushes you got as you entered your teenage years, when your raging hormones made you seriously consider proposing marriage (or at least a date) to Sally Struthers or Farrah Fawcett-Majors. As for me, I’m eagerly awaiting RF #31’s spotlight on everyone’s favorite nose-twitching witch so I can relive my crush on her all over again.

Your excellent profile on actor Allan Melvin [“Too Much TV Quiz,” RF #28] failed to note he was the voice of Bluto in at least 100 Popeye cartoons, produced by HannaBarbera. He growled effectively in both The All New Popeye Hour and The Popeye & Olive Comedy Show. Also in the CBS network prime time Popeye Valentine Day Special.

FRED M. GRANDINETTI This explains why we’ve never seen Sam the Butcher and Bluto in a photograph together!

Thanks for the info, Fred.

© King Features Syndicate, Inc.

further. And I would love it if Andy Mangels can talk about the cartoon Fantastic Voyage. Maybe in the next year or two?

STEVE ANDREWS

Love your magazine’s subject matter and for taking me back to a simpler time.

How about some articles on my favorites, like Gigantor and 8thman. Remember Speed Racer? Let’s not forget Fireball XL5!

You guys have a great product. Keep up the great work!

DAREDEVIL6755 Thanks! We’ve covered Astro Boy, but we’re certainly open to exploring other Japanese imports like one of our faves, Speed Racer, in upcoming issues. Same with the British puppet

sci-fi shows. Speaking of which, whattaya think about this issue’s spotlight on Planet (Space) Patrol?

Learn something new every day. Here, I remembered William F. Buckley as a conservative political commentator. I had no idea he was also an astute judge of pop music, rating the then-new Beatles group as “godawful.”

Yet—somehow—despite that, they managed to catch on.

Funny how other groups and merchants, regardless of their assessment, immediately tried to exploit and cash in on their success, with knock-off versions.

Even comic books, as per the examples you depicted, were eager to get into the act. Both Joe Sinnott and Gene Colan did excellent caricatures. Even the Jack Kirby Thing in a Beatles wig was amusing.

I’m not at all surprised the Beatles, initially, weren’t welcomed by older adults. Anytime kids or teenagers latch onto something they enjoy, invariably, “wiser” critics, who don’t understand, will arise and squawk, simply because the next generation is so mesmerized. Comics, music, videogames, etc. The pattern doesn’t change; only the variable.

The Mighty Hercules and the Frito Bandito have one thing in common: I still remember their songs over half a century later.

I did laugh at the timing of the movies and TV cartoon with Marvel’s introduction of their rendition of Hercules in the ’65 Thor Annual. Still, it was something not often seen: champions of their own pantheons challenging an outside deity.

The Frito Bandito, of a different time, didn’t offend me. Granted, I’m not Latino. I simply thought he was a fun character based mostly on a rhyme between Frito and bandito. Yes, now, I can see how he’s not a great representation. But, no question, as most Mel Blanc voices were, he was so fun to listen to. I thought he did his job well; to publicize Fritos corn chips (which, otherwise, I never cared for). He’s another one—like Lucky the Leprechaun—of a specific culture fixated on his product.

Laughed to see him as I hadn’t thought about him in so long.

I’d never heard of Moona Lisa but found one observation to be true. Many times, the horror hosts were employees at the television station, picking up another assignment outside their normal category. In a late Sixties’ class trip to Channel 2 News, in Detroit, I saw an older guy in a regular suit who I recognized, immediately, as Sir Graves Ghastly, their monster movie comedy relief persona. Unless he was a vampire who

worked the day shift, he had to be a staffer who simply worked two roles there.

An all-Allan Melvin quiz? Don’t see a lot of those. Sad to say, I only got “Voice of Drooper” correct. However, I think he was also the voice of Magilla Gorilla and played Space Enforcer Claudius on Lost in Space. So, that raises my score from one of ten to a more impressive three.

My favorite article, this time, was the look at the TV Guide Fall Preview issues. Loved the photos, new to me, from F-Troop, Gilligan’s Island, and Dick Van Dyke. Also, the list of TV show premieres over a quarter century. So many gems in there. In fact, the exploration here prompted me to go online and check if there were any additional TV Guide photos/videos on YouTube.

There are. Looked up the ’65–’66 TV season and, sure enough, there was an unseen (by me) LIS photo of Guy [Williams] and June [Cartwright] by the astrogator. I’ll check out other favorites presently. Thanks.

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

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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. Space aliens are always coming to Earth. Whether they come to Earth to conquer, steal cattle, or insert probes, even shy extraterrestrials could get their 15 minutes of fame…

Shows with Space Aliens!

L GAME SHOW CHANNE : presents

nts: FOOD NETWORK prese

Your Stupid Minds!

Out-of-this-world dishes like nothing you’ve ever tasted before!

Join Celebrity Host Eros, star of Plan 9 from Outer Space, as he explains that humans are idiots.

Contestants try to convince him otherwise. They fail.

TO SERVE MAN

HISTORY CHANNEL pr

esents:

Space Alien Piñata Autopsies As a friendly gesture, Space Aliens send a treatfilled gift package in a life-sized alien-shaped container. Follow-up visits with actual aliens go terribly wrong as we expect them to all have treats inside.

THE CW presents:

Teen Future Superman and Invisible Cavegirl Lois Lane High-brow drama and kissing!

BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA 80

RETROFAN

Cookin’ with Kanamits

May 2024

Lois is inferior.

Why must I love her?

UGH! Me am right here!

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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!

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(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 #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

RETROFAN #29

RETROFAN #30

RETROFAN #31

RETROFAN #33

RETROFAN #34

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.

Magic memories of ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY for the 60th Anniversary of TV’s Bewitched! Plus: The ’70s thriller Time After Time (with NICHOLAS MEYER, MALCOLM McDOWELL, and DAVID WARNER), The Alvin Show, BUFFALO BOB SMITH and Howdy Doody, Peter Gunn, Saturday morning’s Run Joe Run and Big John Little John, a trip to Camp Crystal Lake, and more fun, fab features!

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.

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.

(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 • Ships June 2024

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

TwoMorrows.

RETROFAN #35

RETROFAN #36

RETROFAN #37

RETROFAN #38

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.

Feel the G-Force of Eighties sci-fi toon BATTLE OF THE PLANETS! Plus: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.’s STEFANIE POWERS, CHUCK CONNORS, The Oddball World of SCTV, Rankin/Bass’ stop-motion Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, TV’s Greatest Catchphrases, one-season TV shows, and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER & MICHAEL EURY.

The Jetsons, Freaky Frankensteins, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling’s HOLLYWOOD, the Archies and other Saturday morning rockers, Star Wars copycats, Build Your Own Adventure books, crazy kitchen gadgets, toymaker MARVIN GLASS, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Tune in to Saturday morning super-heroes Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, The Mod Squad, Hanna-Barbera cartoonists, Jesus Christ Superstar, Mr. Potato Head, ‘Old Yeller” actress BEVERLY WASHBURN, Flying Nun collectibles, 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 • 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 Feb. 2025

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships April 2025

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