Friday's Favorite OTR

Phil Harris: "Cadillac in the Swimming Pool" 5/15/49

Don't ever invite Phil's best friend Remley to a party. It will not end well.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Typhoons and Pirates

It's always fun to run across a 1930s-era movie that I had never seen before.

China Seas, produced by MGM in 1935, stars Clark Gable as the perpetually ill-tempered captain of a tramp steamer that is making a trip from Singapore to Hong Kong. Aside from his passengers, he's also secretly transported £250,000 pounds in gold, hidden somewhere aboard the ship.

Captain Gaskell is supposedly the only person who knows about it, but one of the passengers--Jamesy McArdle (Wallace Beery) also knows about it. And McArdle is working with a gang of cutthroat Malay pirates. Even when Gaskell spots some pirates trying to sneak aboard disguised as women, McArdle improvises a back-up plan and is still determined to get the gold.

The gold isn't the only complication in Gaskell's life. A new officer named Davis (Lewis Stone) is a former captain who now lives with the shame of surviving after all his passengers and crew were wiped out by pirates. On a more personal level, Gaskell... well, he's played by Clark Gable, so he has not one--but TWO beautiful women aboard who are in love with him.  One is an aristocrat played by Rosalind Russel. The other is a more earthy gal played by Jean Harlowe.

The word play is between Gaskell and Dolly (Harlowe's character) is sharp and funny, while Gaskell's messy relationship situation is tied nicely into the main plot as Dolly, rejected by Gaskell, takes up with McArdle. When she accidentally learns of McArdle's piratical plans, she tries to warn Gaskell, but he's a little tipsy at the time (to be fair, he was off-duty) and refuses to take her seriously. Bitter, Dolly throws in with McArdle.

The action sequences in the film--dealing with a dangerous typhoon and the climatic clash with the pirates--are excellent and the characters are all sharply drawn, with each playing a part in the action that makes story sense and fits their personalities. This includes a strong character arc for the cowardly Davis, who gets a chance to redeem himself on a rather epic level. McArdle's eventual fate is handled superbly, both in terms of story and with Wallace Beery's strong performance.

I should also mention Robert Benchley's hilarious performance as a perpetually drunk passenger throughout the film. In fact, I believe he finishes the movie without ever realizing the ship had been briefly taken over by pirates.

One of my favorite aspects of the film is how it ends. I don't want to give away too much, but it represents essentially good characters who have messed up, but are willing to take complete responsibilites for their actions. Once again, it fits the personalities of the characters and also gives the movie an effective moral backbone.

By the way, Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone had starred together in the original version of The Lost World a decade earlier. Interestingly, Malay pirates turn out to be more of a danger to them than were the dinosaurs.

Wagon Train

For eight seasons, that darn wagon train rumbled across the plains and mountains of the Old West without ever seeming to get anywhere.

Wagon Train is a classic TV Western, with strong, intelligent scripts and some great guest stars. Actually, I've always assumed that Major Adams (Ward Bond) and his crew simply hired out on different wagon trains. When one got to its destination, they moved on and ramroded another.  But this really didn't matter. It's the individual stories that make it a strong series.

Like most TV series in the 1950s, Wagon Train got a comic book adaptation published by Dell Comics. As was usual, there were several try-out issues in Four Color before Wagon Train moved on to its own series.

The first appearance was in Four Color #895 (March 1958), which contained two stories written by Eric Friewald and Robert Schaefer, with art by Nicholas Firfires. We'll be looking at "Fury at Blue River"--the first of those stories.

It's a straightfoward and well-told tale. As was usual in the TV series, the main characters are that particular story's "guest stars," with the wagonmaster and his crew acting in supporting roles. In this case, an aging retired marshall named Davis is clashing with a young jerk named Brant. Brant has no patience for someone he thinks is too old to be useful on the journey, while Davis begins to think he needs to find ways to prove he is indeed useful.

By the way, I picture a young Dennis Hopper as Brant and perhaps Paul Fix as the marshal.

The story starts a little slowly, but this is not a problem. Effective storytelling introduces us to the characters while Firfires' nifty art gives us a sense of how much work was involved in getting a wagon train from Point A to Point B.

Flint, the train's scout, spots potential trouble when he finds some burnt-out wagons and a few corpses. There are outlaws nearby, attacking and looting whereever they can.

Guards are posted at night, but the outlaws manage to light one wagon on fire, then use this as a distraction to look other wagons.  But Davis--old but still alert--spots them and drives them off. A prisoner is taken, who pretty quickly rats out the location of the outlaw gang's hideout.

Davis, still smarting under Brant's insults, heads to the hideout on his own. This is a less-than-wise idea, as he soon finds himself wounded and pinned down. But Adams, Flint and Brant soon come riding to the rescue. After a brief tussle, the outlaws are all killed or captured. Brant apologizes to Davis for his insults while Davis admits he let his pride get the best of him when he rode out on his own.

"Fury at Blue River" does an excellent job of replicating the series' storytelling format, using that format to tell an entertaining yarn. Four Color #895 has hit the public domain, so you can read it online HERE.

Next week, we'll pay a visit to Frostbite Falls.

Cover Cavalcade

An eye-catching cover from 1953.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode @12: Video Version

Friday's Favorite OTR

Candy Matson: "Egyptian Amulet" 9/12/50

Candy follows up a clue in a murder case as a favor to Lt. Mallard. To the surprise of absolutely no one listening to this episode, this eventually leads her into a rather dangerous situation.

Click HERE to listen or download.

How to Survive on Europa

Read/Watch 'em in Order #111

I made a mistake when I wrote about the first of A.E. Van Vogt's stories that were collected into the fix-up novel The War Against the Rull. Yes, I was wrong about something. It's hard to believe, I know, but it's true.

The stories all originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, with the tale we are discussing today getting published in the April 1940 issue. I knew of them but had never read any of them, stumbling across "Co-operate... or Else" at random and deciding that the stories would make good entries in my "Read/Watch 'em in Order" series. I decided I would review them as they appeared in the pulps and then made the unwarrented assumption that they were not significantly re-written before being included in Van Vogt's 1959 fix-up novel.

Well, I was wr......  wro....  I was... I was WRONG. There. I said it.

"Retribution" was published two years before "Co-operate... or Else," but was considered the second story chronologically when included in the novel. But I discovered when I read the pulp version that it was not originally a part of the War Against the Rull Universe.

The protagonist is a former explorer who is now a government official, visiting Jupiter's moon Europa. Named Thomas (we never learn his first name), he's there to tell the human settlers that Earth is turning the moon over to the Martian government.

Feeling betrayed, the settlers decide to fight rather than accept this. Their first act is to try to kill Thomas. This doesn't go as planned, though. As events play out, Thomas and his would-be assassin, Bartlett, are stuck together many days walk back to the nearest city, with no radio and wearing heated suits that don't stand a chance against the incredibly cold nights. They are also breathing filtered air that has a side effect of bringing on starvation very, very quickly.

Also, there's a nigh-indestructable predator called a Gryp, which loves to drink the blood of anything alive.

The two are forced to work together, though Bartlett is working on the assumption that they are doomed. But Thomas is a man of experience, modifying techniques used on other planets to kill a large, giraffe-like grass eater for food and then come up with a plan for taking out a Gryp. Deep caves provide them with a fighting chance against the cold during the nights.

But all this won't do Thomas any good at all if Barlett remains determined to eventually kill him.

The story is a solid and entertaining bit of Space Opera, which can be read online HERE.

As I've said, this is the first time I've read these stories, so I haven't yet read the version published in War Against the Rull 19 years later. I have found out that the protagonist was changed to Professor Jamieson, the hero from "Co-Operate... or Else," the location was shifted to a moon outside our solar system and the person forced to team up with Jamieson was gender-swapped. I presume the motivation for wanting to kill Jamieson was completely different, though I get the impression that the action-oriented events of the story remain the same. But I won't say that for sure. I don't want to be wrong again. The world could not survive that.

The next story is "The Second Solution," published in 1942. We'll look at that one soon.

Superman goes Bonkers!

cover art by Curt Swan

Action Comics #335 (March 1966) starts out with Superman a mental wreck after the events of the last issue. Even though it turned out that Lex's attempt to bring on a new Ice Age was just an illusion projected directly into the Man of Steel's brain, he's now unable to make even the simpliest decisions When another crisis happens, he's totally useless.

So maybe its time to retire from the superhero business and just live out his life as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.

But quiet retirement isn't in the cards for poor Clark. This story is set during a time that Perry White was serving a term as U.S. Senator. Soon, Clark, Lois and Jimmy are summoned to Washington, where Perry and the president ask their help in rebuilding Superman's confidence.

I'm not sure what Lois and Jimmy were supposed to do. Clark is simply asked to contact Superman and have him come in for some tests. But those tests are rigged. Luthor has teamed up with Braniac, who replace the doctors doing the tests and rig them so Superman fails. His confidence is apparently shattered forever.

But fooling a man with superhearing and X-Ray vision isn't easy. It's a bit of a hole in the story that Lex rigged the tests in such a way that Superman could see that it was rigged. But overconfidence has always been one of Lex's flaws, so perhaps its understandable.

Now that Superman knows what's going on, he's able to turn the tables on the next attempt to drive him to Crazy Town, catching the two villains and revealing that he now knows what's going on.

Lex tries to claim a partail victory by getting away with Braniac and flying the Lexor, where the red sun prevents Superman from coming after him. But remember that Lex was particularly mad at Superman because the hero had told Adora that her husband was a super-crook. So he seems to be returning to a rather uncomfortable domestic situation.

It turns out, though, that Superman has been particularly generous in victory. He had used an amnesia gas to remove the memory of Lex's crimes from Adora. She loves him again.

Lex acknowleges Superman's gift to him, though he still maintains that the universe isn't big enough for the two of them, so he's not ready to give up on being a crook just yet. But all the same, this is actually a sweet way to bring this story to an end. Writer Leo Dorfman and artist Al Plastino created a tale that exemplifies the goofy fun of the DC Silver Age and still manage to inject a moment of sincere human emotion at the end, simply by having the DC hero who most strongly represents morality and service to others doing a nice thing for his most hated enemy.

Next week, we'll take a ride on a wagon train.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast #12: The Pirates of Venus

Tim, Jess and Scott take the podcast on our first trip to Venus to discuss ERB's 1932 novel.

Download or listen to it HERE. 

Cover Cavalcade

A nifty Nick Cardy cover from 1966.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "The Case of the Red Goose Murder" 9/1/46

Nick Carter is actually absent from this episode. Nick is out of town, so his Lovely Assistant (tm) Patsy has to take the lead in figuring out who strangled a nightclub singer with a guitar string.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Shell Scott

I'm familar with the happy-go-lucky Shell Scott, a private eye created by Richard S. Prather in the 1950 novel Case of the Vanishing Beauty. He went on to appear in over 30 novels during the next three decades, as well as a metric ton of short stories. He was, apparently, able to give Mike Hammer a run for the money in popularity during the '50s.

But I never got around to reading any of the Shell Scott books or stories. There's just too much stuff out there to read and I never quite get around to reading everything.

Well, now I have. I've been reading through an anthology of hard-boiled stuff from the 1950s, which includes "The Double Take," from the July 1953 issue of Manhunt, a digest from that decade notable for the high-quality of its storie.

In this one, Shell is beginning his day by stopping by a bar for a drink--this being his way of dealing with a hangover. But he doesn't get time to enjoy his drink. A woman he's never seen before bursts in, accuses him of stealing $24,000, and then shoots at him.

She gets away through a ladies' room window. Shell heads back to his office, only to find someone at his desk claiming to be him. When Shell confronts the imposter, someone else slugs him from behind.

It's all very confusing and isn't helping his hangover at all. What follows is a short, but very well-constructed tale, with Shell playing intelligent hunches and following up solid clues to figure out what's going on. My understanding is that Prather's Shell Scott stories could often get pretty goofy and that's part of their fun. This particular story, though, is pretty straightfoward private eye stuff. Within that context, though, it's got a strong protagonist and a very-well constructed story.

It turns out that the bad guys are con artists who are using Shell's well-earned reputation as honesty as part of a ploy to pull off a series a real estate scams. Shell eventually manages to identify and catch the bad guys in the act of getting money from their latest victim. The excitement of the final confrontation is spiced up with an hilarious scene in which Shell can't convince the latest victim that he really has been scammed.

So I guess I can see where the series' reputation for a degree of ruthlessness comes in. In any case, I enjoyed this particular story enormously. It can be found in an anthology titled The Best of Manhunt.

Lex Luthor is Mean to a Bunny Rabbit!

cover art by Curt Swan

Sure, Lex Luthor has committed countless crimes, attempted to kill Superman on countless occasions and is a complete villain by any reasonable standard. But now, by golly, he's sunk to a new low. He's mean to a cute little bunny rabbit!

This happens in Action Comics #333 (February 1966), written by Leo Dorfman and drawn by Al Plastino. The bunny rabbit thing is an initial experiment to test the effectiveness of Lex's plan to psychologically drive Superman to the point where the Man of Steel is unable to make decisions. Hey, if it worked on a bunny rabbit, then it should work on the world's most powerful superhero, right?

It sounds like I'm making mocking the story, but it actually is wonderful Silver Age fun. Lex kick-starts his plan by saving Superman's life on several occasions, including stopping a crook armed with a sword made of Kryptonian metal (which could thus hurt Superman). One would think it would have been simplier to to let Superman get killed, but it actually makes sense that Lex would want to play mind games with his arch enemy first before being the one to personally finish him off. Also, Superman had recently outed Lex as a criminal to Adora, Lex's wife on the planet Lexor.

He then uses an image projector to make people think that Superman has turned into a monster, with Supes being completely unaware of why everyone is panicking.

By the way, though Curt Swan is without question THE Superman artist, I think that Plastino was the correct artist for this story. He had a way of making panels such as the one below look particularly fun.

Superman begins to worry about his mental health and takes a few days off resting on a cloud planet. He returns just in time to stop a Luthor-built robot from robbing a bank.

Except it wasn't robbing the bank. While Superman was off-planet, Lex had begun to return money he had previously stolen to banks, using robots as messengers. Now Superman has messed that up. The Citizens of Metropolis begin to sign petitions asking the Man of Steel to leave town.

Well, at least Lex is now apparently a good guy. He even warns Superman that a train full of radioactive waste is now a runaway. Superman immediately transports the train to Venus, only to later find out that the train was actually full of police commissioners from all over the world who were heading for a convention. The lead-lined cars were protection against attacks by criminals.

Superman retrieves the castaway cops, but he's now pretty frazzled. So when Lex uses a weather control machine to bring a new ice age to Metropolis, Superman considers and rejects plan after plan to deal with the situation. What if he chooses the wrong plan? What if he makes things worse yet again? Soon, just like that poor bunny rabbit, he's flying in circles unable to make a decision.

The story breaks here at this bizarre cliffhanger. The original readers in 1966 would have to wait two issues for the story's resolution, as Action Comics #334 would be a reprint issue (though both that issue and #335 would be cover-dated March 1966). But we'll only have to wait one week before we take a look at how it all ends.

Cover Cavalcade

Another wonderful Earle Bergey cover, this one from 1942.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Lives of Harry Lime: "Fool's Gold" 4/4/52

Harry poses as an archeologist as part of a plan to hijack a shipment of gold in Kuwait. But less-than-trustworthy associates and a love-struck dancing girl add complications to the supposedly straightforward plan.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Who is this Doctor Who?

Gee whiz, it took 13 years after Star Trek premiered before Star Trek movies began being produced, but Doctor Who got a theatrical film just 2 years after it began airing on television--and this happened while the series was still being produced.

The good Doctor began his television adventures in November 1963. Its second story arc introduced his greatest enemy--the evil Daleks. In 1965, this particular storyline was adapted into a movie.

Peter Cushing was cast as Doctor Who--and, yes, in this version, he's literally named "Who." This Doctor isn't an alien. Instead he's an entirely human and absent-minded inventor who had built his own time machine. The movie simplifies his origin considerably in this regard, which also simplifies the exposition necessary to get the story started. The original serial ran for for seven half-hour episodes for a run time of just under three hours. The movie runs 82 minutes, so had less time to introduce us to the characters and get to the actual adventure. 

So the Doctor becomes a human being. His three companions are still Susan, Ian and Barbara. But Susan--a fifteen-year-old in the series--becomes a 12-year-old in the movie. Barbara morphs into another granddaughter and Ian becomes Barbara's clumsy boyfriend. (In the series, they were Susan's school teachers--and Ian was more straightlaced hero rather than bumbling comic relief.)

The Doctor is showing Ian his TARDIS (that's a picture of the TARDIS interior above) when Ian stumbles into a lever and sends them to another planet. Here, they soon meet the Daleks.

What follows is a fun adventure, with the humans getting captured by the Daleks, escaping, befriending the humanoid Thals outside the Dalek city, then working with the Thals to prevent the Daleks from setting off a huge nuke and wiping out the Thals.

It's all good stuff, with Cushing's performance as the Doctor being the highlight of the film. No one does absent-minded brilliance as effectively and with as much a sense of fun as did Peter Cushing. Yes, he could also play evil characters better than nearly anyone else (see his Frankenstein movies or Star Wars for examples of that), but when he wanted to be lovable, then he was pretty darn lovable. And even detractors of his two Doctor Who films will concede that he's the best part of the movie. No matter how much you might love your real-life grandfathers, you'll find yourself wishing Cushing's Doctor was your granddad as well.

The adventure stuff is fun as well, though some scenes in which the Daleks discuss things among themselves to provide us with exposition do drag. The budget was obviously limited, but the production design gives us some pretty nice looking alien landscapes and the Daleks themselves are always great villains.

In the end, the humans and the Thals team up in a battle to stop the Daleks from firing their nuke. Getting to that scene, though, involved some dialogue that actually adds an interesting level of depth to the story. The Thals once had had a great civilization, but this was destroyed in a nuclear war years ago when they fought the race that would eventually mutate into the Daleks. So now they are complete pacifists. They will not fight.

But if they don't fight, they will die. The Doctor as to convince a people who have a perfectly understandable reason for being pacifists that they are going to have to re-learn how to fight a war. Though the movie clearly favors the "You have to fight!" side of this argument, the sincere struggle the Thals have with this concept adds a nice thematic backbone to the story.

Not all Doctor Who fans care for these movies. That it has its own seperate continuity from the TV series apparently isn't an issue. Many simply do not think its a very good film. It also has its fans, though, and I count myself among them. Despite its flaws, its a varient of the Doctor that I'm glad exists.

By the way, there are two theories out there for how to fit this movie and its sequel into the regular Doctor's continuity. Peter Cushing said that he thought of his Doctor as a future incarnation of the Doctor that had been mind-wiped of his knowledge that he was a Time Lord by the Celestial Toymaker, a villain from the classic series. I kind of like this idea, but that means he had to have had an adventure almost identical to one he had already had with three companions who just happened to have the same names as his original companions.

The novelization of the Doctor's 50th Anniversary special suggests that the Doctor was a friend of Peter Cushing and gave Cushing permission to adapt several of his early adventures into movies. Since I love the idea of Peter Cushing hanging out with a Time Lord, I am tempted to lean towards this theory. But this would also mean that the Cushing Doctor never really existed and what fun is that?

So I think we need to stick with the idea that there is a parallel universe out there in which Doctor Who is a human who looks like Peter Cushing and makes you wish he were your grandfather.

Brain Swapping

 If you live in a comic book universe, then sooner or later your mind is going to be transfered into someone else's body. It's pretty much inevitable.

It happens to Ben Grimm and the Hulk in 1974's Giant-Size Super-Stars #1, written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Rich Buckler.  It really is a cliched plot device for any superhero universe. But the reason such cliches exist is often because they can be used as jumping-off points for entertaining stories. On this occasion, a fast pace combined with Buckler's great art and Conway's firm understanding of the characters' personalities make it work.

It starts with Bruce Banner arriving at the Baxter Building, hoping that Reed can help cure him of becoming the Hulk. Reed, though, is away. Only Ben is home at the moment. There's a brief but effective scene in which Ben's inate compassion is demonstrated by helping an exhausted Banner, following by Ben mentioning Reed's newest experiment to cure him of being the Thing.

Well, Bruce is a brilliant scientist in his own right and he immediately sees a possibility in Reed's experiment. He can use it to channel the gamma radiation that infuses him and the cosmic radiation that infuses Ben into each other, but in such a way that they will cancel each other out. What can possibly go wrong?

Naturally, something goes wrong. The device explodes and Bruce turns into the Hulk. This is topped off by the minds of the two super-strong men getting switched. So the Hulk's mind is in the Thing's body and visa versa.

We see an interesting take on the Hulk's psychology at this point. He's not the sharpest tack in the box and doesn't realize he's in a new body. And when he sees the "Hulk" standing nearby, he sees someone that tortures his dreams and that he wants to SMASH!

Ben, on the other hand, is in the stronger body now, but isn't quite used to it. He also wants to avoid a fight if possible. But that isn't possible and the Thing (that is--the Hulk in Thing's body) starts getting in some good licks.

The fight goes through a few walls and ends up in the streets of New York. Thundra--a super-strong woman from another dimension who had become a reoccuring character in the regular FF book, sees them and tries to help the person she quite reasonably thinks is the Thing. This gets her walooped a few times as the fight descends into the subway system and then breaks back onto the surface in the middle of a wrestling ring.

Reed and the rest of the FF finally show up, only to have Johnny knocked out when he tries to help the "Thing" as well. Fortunately, Reed "Sherlock Scans" the situation and quickly figures out there's been a body switch.

 Here we come to a minor glitch in this otherwise fun story. Reed quickly figures out that if the Hulk's body turns back into Banner, that will force the minds back into the correct bodies. That's perfectly reasonable Comic Book Science. To enact a plan to force the transition, Reed first rummages through the arena's first aid kit and fills a hypo with a tranqulizer.  Once again, this is reasonable. But Comic Book Science doesn't explain how a normal hypo needle can penetrate the skin of a being that regularly shrugs off bullets, bombs and the occasional nuke.

Oh, well. Who am I to question Reed Richards? The plan works and everything is okay other than Ben discovering his has to apologize to Thundra for Hulk's actions.

Despite that illogical "super needle" at the end, the story is indeed a fun one. It demonstrates quite effectively why some plot devices become cliched within a specific genre. If done well, it can lead to an entertainting tale. If done badly, you end up with the original Star Trek episode "Turnabout Intruder."

Next week, Lex Luthor drives Superman insane.

Cover Cavalcade

This 1945 issue gives us a pretty nifty robot vs. alien dragon cover. Art by Earle Bergey.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: "The Cadaver in the Roman Toga" 11/9/47

Professor Moriarty is flooding London with counterfeit money, but Holmes is apparently distracted from this by a corpse that was found dressed as an ancient Roman. But then, Holmes often sees connections to which the rest of us are oblivious.

Click HERE to listen or download.