Mind-numblingly shameless self-promotion.

My little e-pamplet--99 Films and Cartoons Your Children MUST See Before Growing Up: OR THEY'LL TURN OUT TO BE AXE MURDERERS!!--has garnered a couple of good reviews. Here's one of them:

Wonderful guide to many "almost forgotten" pop culture gems that will be great fodder for fun family viewing. Lots of great choices, and very insightful (and funny) commentary. There are loads of great stories, characters and even heroes for kids to be found here... and boomers will be reminded of some beloved treasures from their own past. A great guide for families wanting a change of pace from the glitz and crap passing for entertainment today.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Mr and Mrs North: "Fool's Gold" 10/14/52

Most mystery series need two elements to survive: a well-crafted mystery AND a likeable and/or interesting protagonist.

Pam and Jerry North were certainly likeable enough. He was a publisher and she a housewife, but they seemed to stumble over corpses with alarming frequency. Fortunately, Pam (despite seeming a bit scatterbrained) has a talent for deductive reasoning and usually manages to point out the killer by the end of any one episode.

The show was based on an equally entertaining series of mystery novels. Initially played by Alice Frost and Joseph Curtain, the Norths are an appealing pair--witty, smart and obviously in love with each other. Dropped into reasonably clever whodunits each week, they usually managed to deliver a satisfying half-hour of radio each episode.

"Fool's Gold," though, kind of emphasises yet another aspect of murder mysteries that is always in the background in just about any entry from the genre. The episode is works as an almost classical tragedy as well as a whodunit.

A man is serving on a jury. His greedy adult daughter convinces him to take a bribe to insist the gambler on trial is innocent. When the man's wife later learns about this, she feels obligated to report it.

But the wife soon turns up dead. Convinced the gambler is responsible, the husband attempts to kill him in revenge. But is the gambler the killer? Pam North soon helps clarify that matter.

It is indeed both a well-written whodunit and a tragedy. The poor sap who takes the bribe gives way to greed just once. This snowballs out of control and by the end of the episode, his family has been destroyed and he's off to jail. It's his own fault, of course, but you can't help feeling sorry for him.

That's something that's in the background of just about every murder mystery ever written--just about all of them are on some level morality plays as well as mysteries. That's probably one reason the genre always remains popular.


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Mickey, Horace and a really good gut punch.

If I ever need help rescuing a kidnapped girl from gypsies, who should I call? Batman and Robin? No, not tough enough. The Green Hornet and Kato? No, not skilled enough in hand-to-hand combat.

No, I’d call two guys who make those heroes look like wimpy losers. I’d call Mickey Mouse and Horace Horsecollar.

For proof, I refer you to a 1931 sequence from the Mickey Mouse comic strip. Minnie has been kidnapped, having learned that she has a rich uncle. But the uncle is off traveling and can’t be contacted for the ransom money.

Fortunately, Mickey learns she’s being held in a abandoned mill. So he’s off to the rescue.

Though outnumbered, Mickey (with an assist from Minnie) acquits himself quite well and gets his gal out of the mill. But there’s more villains waiting outside.

That’s when Mickey’s pal Horace shows up. He starts laying out gypsies right and left. Look at the gut punch he’s throwing in the first panel of the strip just below. That’s a good punch. It kinda hurts just looking at it.

Then Horace’s girlfriend Clarabelle Cow gets involved and the bad guys are soon in full retreat.

The Mickey strip was primarily done by Floyd Gottfredson, who did both the story and pencils on the kidnapping sequence. Gottfredson accomplishes something very similar to what Carl Barks would do with Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck in the 1940s and 1950s—he balanced a funny animal strip full of gags with solid adventure storytelling. The end result was a unique and always enjoyable comic strip.

Batman? The Green Hornet? Spider Man? Nightwing? Bah—amateurs and pikers.  When facing off against villainy, I’ll take Mickey and Horace every time.

History of the Marvel Universe: April 1967

FANTASTIC FOUR #61

There’s no rest for the weary—as soon as they get home, the FF gets attacked by some of Reed’s own scientific devices. It soon turns out that the Sandman has again infiltrated the Baxter Building and is turning Reed’s own stuff against him.

This is the introduction of the more high-tech looking costume that the Sandman would wear for several years before finally reverted back to his traditional stripped shirt. I have to say that I never really cared for the newer look. In the end, Flint Marko is just a thug who lucked on to a super-power. The stripped shirt fit his personality. The high-tech suit is just too generic.

Which brings me to another change in the character I don’t think really worked. Flint’s been “brushing up on his science” and is now able to operate many of the devices he’s captured into weapons. I can’t really buy that. I know the Marvel Universe is one where anyone who likes to tinker in his machine shop can build a super weapon, but Flint doing a little reading on the side and then becoming an expert on Reed Richards-designed tech is stretching things a little too far.

But all whining aside, it’s still a good issue with a typically wonderful fight scene.

Other events mixed in with this include the Silver Surfer’s board flying back to him while he’s being tormented by some of Doom’s guards. With his powers now back, he announces that he’s decided the entire human race is evil and, leveling Doom’s castle, flies off.

Also, the Inhuman royal family is hiding out in Europe until they can decide whether or not it’s safe to make contact with humanity. Crystal, though, is pining over Johnny. Black Bolt lets her take Lockjaw to find her one true love. They find Wyatt, who tells her about the battle with Sandman.

That battle ends when Reed blows the hatch leading to the Negative Zone. (This is, I believe, the first issue in which it is called the Negative Zone rather than simply sub-space.)  Sandman has to beat a hasty retreat to avoid being sucked in to the Zone. Reed, though, actually IS sucked into the Zone. He’s LOST FOREVER!!!

Well, he’s not, of course. But this is the set up for yet another well-written and beautifully visualized adventure.

SPIDER MAN #47

We start this issue with a flashback to a scene we’ve actually never seen before. It turns out that when Kraven the Hunter last fought Spider Man, he was being paid by the Green Goblin to do so. And he followed a man he THOUGHT was the Goblin’s flunky back to Norman Osborn’s home, coming to the erroneous conclusion that Osborn worked for the Goblin.

Now out of prison, Kraven reads that the Goblin is “dead.” So he decides to find Norman Osborn and get some money from him, figuring he earned some pay for at least trying to take out Spidey. I’m not sure of Kraven’s business logic, but it fits quite nicely into his egotistical character.

That all leads to Kraven trying to kidnap Harry Osborn at Flash Thompson’s going-away party. Norman shows up soon after and Kraven captures him. But when Norman claims to know nothing about the Goblin, Kraven’s jungle instincts detect he’s telling the truth. Disgusted, he leaves Norman behind and leaves. Jungle instincts are apparently fooled by amnesia. (Of course, Norman fully believed he was telling the truth, so I really shouldn’t make fun of that plot point.)

The whole kidnapping thing is wrapped inside Kraven’s fight with Spider Man, who manages to save Harry, but get knocked out while trying to save Norman. This leads to an interesting ending to the conflict. Kraven finally defeats the websliinger, but really doesn’t care because he was concentrating on collecting a perceived debt from Norman. After he decides that the Goblin had tricked him months ago into just thinking Norman was a henchman, he simply leaves the scene.

The finally two panels are really nicely done. Peter says goodbye to Flash and sincerely wishes him luck. Flash coughs up a near-compliment for Peter.

That takes Flash out of continuity for a time, which gives us an opportunity to look back at his evolving characterization. Stan Lee really handled him nicely. He was the high school bully, but every so often would show a nicer side to himself. Now a few years later, he’s matured past the overt bully phase, but can still be a bit of a jerk while also showing signs of being a decent and brave man. (He attempts to jump Kraven when the villain first grabbed Harry, for instance.) When he returns to Spider Man, he and Peter will evolve into friends. When its all said and done, Flash’s character arc is very human and very believable.

THOR #139

Thor is stuck on Earth without his hammer, about to turn back into Donald Blake. Knowing that Asgard is being overrun by trolls, his off-the-cuff plan is to allow himself to be run over by a subway car after reverting to Blake. Then he’ll go to Valhalla and be in position to defend Asgard again.

This is a brave but dumb plan, since a GODDESS CAPABLE OF TELEPORTING THEM BOTH TO ASGARD IS STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO HIM. Fortunately, Sif keeps her head and makes the suicide gambit unnecessary. In fact, she zeros in on Mjolnir, zapping Thor and herself into position inside the trolls cavernous homeland.

In the meantime, the troll army, equipped with super-scientific/magical weapons from another dimension, are on the verge of overrunning Asgard. Odin is kicking butt and taking names, but it’s uncertain if even he can stand against the onslaught.

But Thor regains his hammer, knocks out Ulik and frees a super-being called Orikal, who had been forced to provide the trolls with the super-weapons. Orikal zips back to his home dimension, the troll weapons stop working and Asgard wins the war.

I’m describing this very briefly, but this is once again a plot which allows Jack Kirby’s art to really shine. Once again, every panel looks awesome and drips with a sense of cosmic power. The bizarre designs of the troll weapons (such as the “ulti-force cannon”—I’m not sure what it does, but it looks fantastic) only add to the coolness factor, as do several successive panels of Thor and Ulik pounding away at each other again. .  Even considering Thor’s brief moment of plot-induced stupidity at the beginning, this is a great story.

The Tales of Asgard feature involves Thor and the Warriors Three locating Mogul’s mountain fortress (the mountain actually stretches down underground rather than up into the sky), confronting Mogul’s giant jinn in the last panel. These feature continues to exist primarily to showcase Kirby’s strength as an incredible artist.

That’s it for April. In May, Reed Richards continues to drift through the Negative Zone; Spider Man encounters another old enemy; and Thor returns to Earth to face a threat from the future.

Cover Cavalcade

I think the artist here manages to generate an appropriately creepy vibe, even though the ghost is actually kinda nice-lookin'.

Friday's Favorite OTR

NBC University Theater: "For Whom the Bell Tolls"--11/20/49


This show and Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air both did pretty much the same thing--one hour-long adaptations of classic novels.


Both were excellent series, which is an amazing accomplishment when you consider the challenge of jamming a novel-length story into an hour time slot. Sometimes, this would lead the writers to rush through a story a little too quickly for it to be completely satistfying. But sometimes, the episode would work because it draws on one aspect or plot-line from the original novel and concentrates almost exclusively on that.


That's what the creative staff of NBC University Theater did when they turned to Ernest Hemingway's classic story set during the Spanish Civil War. The main character is an American named Robert Jordan, who is fighting for the Republicans. Traveling behind enemy lines to blow up an important bridge, he hooks up with a band of guerilla fighters led by a man named Pablo.


And it is this dynamic--the clash of wills between Jordan and Pablo (and the uncomfortable possibility that Jordan might have to assassinate Pablo)--that the radio adaptation concentrates on. And it does a great job, especially a sequence in which Pilar, Pablo's woman, recounts the story of how Pablo once led an attack on a particular town and had all the captured facist leaders executed afterwards.


Of course, this leaves out a lot of cool stuff. Jordan's romance with Maria is absent (Maria is there, just not as an important character). The last stand of El Sordo and his band is gone. Jordan's internal thoughts about the morality of war are gone. Anyone familar with the book will miss all this, but the show does such a good job with what it does keep that there's really no reason to complain. It's an excellent hour of drama, demonstrating just how good a storytelling medium radio can be.

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The Woes of Suspended Animation

The April 21, 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone was “The Rip Van Winkle Caper.” Written by Rod Serling, it’s a very good entry in the series. Not one of the classics, but still a solid story.

Actually, if you get to know Serling’s style as a writer, you can start to identify the Zone episodes he wrote by listening to the rhythms and word choices in the dialogue.  Dialogue was one of his real strengths as a writer, maybe coming from the fact that he starting his career doing radio scripts, having been influenced by skilled writers such as Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin.  Serling developed a knack for using just the right word choices and sentence structures needed to advance both characterizations and stories.

On The Twilight Zone, his sharp dialogue was helped along by the many excellent character actors who appeared on the show. In “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” Simon Oakland and Oscar Beregi, Jr. bring solid credibility to the lead roles.

Anyway, the point of this post is to point out an instance where Serling may have re-used an incident from this episode in a later screenplay.  “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” is about four guys who rob a gold shipment. One of them is a scientist. They hide out in a cave in the desert, where the scientist will put them all into suspended animation for 100 years. When they wake up, the heat will be off and they can freely spend their ill-gotten gains.

Well, when only three of them wake up. A falling rock cracked open the suspension chamber of the fourth guy—all that’s left of him is a decayed skeleton.

It’s an effective scene visually and also helps advance the plot by confirming to the other characters (and to us) that they actually have been asleep for a century.

Now let’s jump ahead about seven years. Serling is co-writer of the screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes, staring Charlton Heston. 

As this movie begins, four astronauts are in suspended animation during a long space voyage. When they crash land on a planet, three of them wake up. The fourth, though, is a mummified corpse. Her suspension chamber cracked open during the flight. 

That makes me think that maybe Serling consciously re-used the same idea to convey the same information to us—that the characters had been in suspended animation for a very long time. 

I’m not familiar enough with the production history of Apes to know this for sure. I know other writers worked on the script after Serling did a first draft, so I don’t even know for sure if he put that incident into the story.

But if he did, and if it was deliberately lifted from his previous script, then it’s to his credit as a writer.  Serling was a great writer—he understood story construction and good characterizations. Recognizing that he could re-use a small detail that helped one story along for the same purpose in another story (but still keep both stories original) is something I could see him doing. He was talented enough to know when he could "steal" from himself without hurting the quality of his work.

I wish Serling had stuck around longer—he died in 1975 at the age of 50. There have been few television shows that have matched the best Twlight Zone episodes in terms of great stories and sharp dialogue. The Vast Wasteland that is network TV has always needed more of that quality.

More Terrifying Than a Tyrannosaurus!!!!

Turok and Andar, the two American Indians who spent many comic book years trapped in the Lost Valley, had more than their share of dinosaur encounters. Fortunately for them, they had learned how to coat their arrow points with a virulent poison, making them effective Weapons of Mass Destruction against even the largest saurian killer.

But, though taking on the average T-Rex was all in a days work, there were at least two issues from the mid-1960s when Turok was forced to go one-on-one against particularly nasty meat-eaters.

The first instance was in Turok, Son of Stone #46 (November 1965). Turok and Andar find a giant stone wall and decide to climb it to see if it leads to a way out of the valley. But they inadvertently cause a rock slide that weakens the wall. This soon allows a legendary monster named Karalak to burst through.

The local cave men had described Karalak as a fire-breathing, multi-armed creature. Well, it turns out to be a really, really big carnosaur. And I mean REALLY BIG—this guy can strangle a brontosaurus and apparently consider the ensuing meal to be just a light snack.

Sentenced to death by the cave men unless they kill the monster, Turok and Andar go hunting.

Karalak turns out to be annoyingly hard to kill. It’s immune to their poison arrows. So they try to lure it off a cliff; set fire to it; and dump an avalanche on it. It’s only when Karalak chases Turok into a swamp that the Indian is able to improvise a last-minute plan to lure it to its death.

Well, you’d think one particularly nasty carnosaur would fill poor Turok’s quota for awhile. But only a few months later (Turok #50—March 1966), the same darn thing happens again.

Well, almost the same thing. While exploring a high-altitude section of the valley, they see a large carnosaur frozen in the ice. This particular beasty seems to be a mish-mash of several different species—he’s got the basic dino meat-eater shape, but the carapace and tail of an anklyosaurus.

An earthquake changes the landscape enough to let direct sunlight hit the frozen area and the monster is soon running loose. It soon proves to be a pretty nasty creature, able to mop the floor with gangs of more conventional carnosaurs.

Turok finds some cave paintings that indicate this creature will soon lay a large batch of eggs. Both it and the eggs will need to be destroyed or this powerful species might overrun the whole valley. Basically, they opt to finish off an endangered species—PETA would hate this story. 

The trouble was is that the Indians were currently out of poison arrows (a situation left over from the previous issue in a rare instance of between-issue continuity). That means escaping the monster long enough to find a poison berry patch and make some more of their WMDs.

But that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is getting rid of those darn eggs. The monster lays them on the bottom of a river that seems to be infested with countless meat-eating monsters—everything from over-sized piranha to a hungry plesiosaur to the traditional multi-tentacled giant squid.  Our heroes make several attempts to get to the eggs without becoming lunch for something before they finally figure out how to succeed.

Most Turok stories were written by Paul S. Newman (no, not THAT Paul Newman) and drawn by Alberto Giolitti. In past posts, I’ve often praised the dynamic painted covers from this series, but been a little bit critical of the artwork. As I look at these stories again via the current Turok Archives reprints, though, I become more and more appreciative of Giolitti’s art. I’ll always think of his figure work as a little bit stiff, but his jungle designs are often magnificent and his sense of composition was really sharp.

And Newman was a skilled writer in the best pulp/comic book tradition, a man able to churn out a huge volume of quality work—never producing a true classic, but always telling a entertaining story.

One thing I really like about the Turok stories is how the protagonist is presented as an intelligent and quick-thinking man. Turok and Andar were given an effective anti-dinosaur weapon pretty early on, but Newman and other writers were always placing them in situations where simply firing another barrage of poison arrows wasn’t enough to get the job done. They had to THINK—as well as fight--their way out of dangerous situations.

Well, that completes our visit to the Lost Valley. Next week, we’ll return to the Marvel Universe.

New on-line article by me.

Take a look at my new article about The Civil War on Old-Time Radio.

Cover Cavalcade

This sort of thing happened to G-8 all the time.