When Magoo Flew

We just got a wonderful book at the library at which I work titled "When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA." Here's a great interview with the author:

From the Bookshelf

Cover Cavalcade

Who doesn't love steamboats?

Saturday Sale

An examination of seven films starring Humphrey Bogart made just prior to or during World War II. Themes of self-sacrifice, service to others and confronting evil run through all these films--themes that are still viable and important today.

Bogie confronts the Axis in various roles in the films:

All Through the Night
Across the Pacific
Casablanca
Action in the North Atlantic
Sahara
Passage to Marseille 
To Have and Have Not

Here it is for the Nook.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sergeant Preston of the Yukon: “The Prisoner” 3/20/52

Sgt. Preston must drive his team of sled dogs through a blizzard with almost no supplies in order to deliver a dangerous prisoner to jail.

Like the other shows that originated at WXYZ in Detroit (The Lone Ranger & The Green Hornet), the best Sgt. Preston episodes were models of clear and vivid storytelling. This is one of my favorites. It keeps you engrossed from start to finish. It also teaches you an important lesson—DON’T ever mess with Preston’s lead dog King. That never ends well.

(Sorry--the link I had for a free download is now broken and I cannot find this particular episode elsewhere on any of the public domain sites.)

Giant Ants, Giant Cannibals and Lots of Crazy People

Read/Watch 'em in Order #20

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Land of Terror with the intention of serializing it, but none of the magazine editors who normally snatched up his stuff were interested. It was eventually printed as a book in 1944.

Burroughs’ longest series was, of course, the perpetually popular Tarzan. I’m pretty sure Burroughs could have written a novel in which the Lord of the Jungle spends the entire plot trying to teach a tribe of apes how to play Yahtzee and he STILL would have found a buyer for it.

But Land of Terror couldn’t find a home in the pulps. I can understand why. Though the novel as a whole is still entertaining, a few of the individual sections were poorly developed and there are several annoying anti-climaxes at the end.

The book picks up where Back to the Stone Age left off. David Innes (returning to center stage as protagonist and narrator for the first time since Pellucidar) is returning home with the expedition that located the badly lost von Horst (hero of the previous novel).  The party is attacked by a tribe of bearded women and David is captured. His allies think he’s been killed, leaving him pretty much on his own.

He soon escapes from the tribe of bearded Amazons, then gets captured by a tribe consisting entirely of insane people, all of them suffering dysfunctions that range from delusions of grandeur to severe hypochondria to random maniacal behavior.

Here he finds his wife, Dian the Beautiful, who had also been captured after a series of separate adventures. They escape, but get separated again. While searching for her, David gets successively captured by a tribe of ten-foot tall giants, a colony of giant ants; and a tribe that lives on a floating island. He escapes each time, though, and eventually gets home and reunites with Dian.

All this is perfectly fine in terms of the basic plot, but—as I mentioned earlier—several of the mini-adventures are perfunctory and read as if Burroughs needed to do one more re-write before he was done. Notably, the bearded woman tribe and the giant cannibal tribe are just there to be weird—Burroughs does nothing (other than milk a few reverse gender role jokes) with these potentially interesting civilizations other than let them hold David prisoner for a short time before he escapes.  Burroughs had a talent for building bizarre civilizations that have their own internal logic, but here he stops short of doing the job properly.

There’s a few other signs of laziness--as if Burroughs just wanted to get another Pellucidar novel out of the way so he could move on to something else.  David learns that Dian is being pursued by an unwanted suitor, something that’s supposed to build up suspense as it means David now need to find her as soon as possible. But this backfires when, at the novel’s climax, we learn that Dian resolved this situation off-screen. Heck, we don’t even get to meet the bad guy.

But the novel as a whole still manages to be fun. Burroughs generates some bizarrely dark humor out of David’s adventures in the village of crazy people, while the sequence in which he’s held prisoner by giant ants (and force-fed with regurgitated food by the ants) is genuinely creepy.

Oh, well, I know I shouldn’t complain. Burroughs himself explained that he wasn’t a fiction writer, but a biographer, getting his information from people like Jason Gridley, John Carter and the guy who knew the guy who knew Tarzan. So if David Innes has an adventure which isn’t quite as interesting as his previous ones, we really can’t shoot the messenger because of this, can we?

One of Pellucidar book to go and then we’ll move on to something else for the literature section of our Read/Watch ‘em in Order series.

History of the Marvel Universe: March 1970

FANTASTIC FOUR #96

The Mad Thinker is up to his old shenanigans once again. He’s ambushing the FF one by one and replacing them with androids.

But Reed Richards manages to get the best of his android and poses as that artificial duplicate until he gets a chance to attack the other androids. He links up with Ben and the two put the kibosh on the FF androids and the Thinker, rescuing Johnny and Sue in the process.

This issue is a fine example of what a single-issue story should be—pure fun with great visuals. Watching Reed and Ben battle “themselves” is a real pleasure.

Also, for no real reason at all, I like the fact that the FF and their android doubles are in civilian clothes rather than their uniforms during the battle.

 There’s not a lot else to say here. The story isn’t particularly deep or complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just plain, simple fun.

SPIDER MAN #82

And here we have another example of a great single-issue story, though this one plays off of Peter’s continuing character arc quite effectively.

Pete’s feeling down in the dumps about his various problems, most especially that he had to convince Aunt May she was seeing things when she saw the web dummy in his bed last issue. He’s also worried about his lack of money and his inability to properly wine and dine Gwen.

So, on a whim, he swings into the office a network executive and offers to appear on a talk show that night. There is, I suppose, a continuity error here. Peter already knows he can’t get paid without giving his real name, social security number and so on. That’s what happened when he tried show biz back in Spider Man #1.  In fact, the problem is acknowledged in this issue, but is glossed over with a joke and not mentioned again.

But this is a strong enough issue to make us forgiving.

Max Dillon, aka Electro, is working as an electrician at the studio while he’s on parole. He cuts a deal with Jameson to unmask Spider Man on the air. This leads to a fight that pretty much ends in a draw, but ruins Peter’s chances to make some extra cash.

The fight scene is a typically good one in terms of visuals, but it’s the character moments that make this issue notable. Peter’s problems all make sense in context to his life as a super hero, but still keep him grounded as a human being we can relate to. His scenes with Gwen, in which she tells him she doesn’t care that he’s broke, are legitimately sweet.

There's also a panel that might just be the single funniest gag ever to appear in Spider Man. Peter needs to wash his Spidey suit before his TV appearance. So as to not giveaway his secret ID, he wears a bag over his head while at the laundry-mat.

I also like Electro’s characterization. He’s presented as angry with the world and thinks the worse of everyone as he just waits for an opportunity to jump back into action as Electro. But Stan Lee does some subtle characterization here. Though it’s not emphasized, we do see that Dillon has gotten a good job and seems to have the respect of his peers. His parole officer seems to be supportive of him. But he’s blind to all this—thinking of them all as “smug jerks.”  It’s a nicely done and effective characterization of a man who’s perceptions of those around him are skewed by bitterness.

THOR #174

After I spent so much time in the last Marvel entry whining about what I thought were mediocre issues, I’m glad I can give three thumbs-up in a row this time around.

The Thor story is another single-issue affair in which a young scientist has his theories mocked by the established scientific community and decides to take a trip to Crazy Town. To prove his theories, he knocks Thor out with a hypno-beam, then uses another device to draw out half of the Thunder God’s strength. He transfers this strength into a robot called the Crypto-Man and sends it on a rampage.

Thor fights the robot, but with half his strength given to his opponent, he’s not able to defeat it. But when the robot breaks into a nuclear reactor and becomes a threat to the entire city—including the scientist’s elderly mother—the scientist has a change of heart. He deactivates the robot, sacrificing his life to do so.

Yes, it’s corny and even at the time not that original. But Kirby (of course) makes it look great and the final panel—in which Dr. Blake tells the scientist’s mom he died a hero—is touching despite its corniness.

That’s it for March. Next week, we'll tour Europe with the Haunted Tank. In two weeks we'll look at April 1970, in which the FF fight a monster who may not be a monster; Spider Man encounters a new villain; and Thor discovers there’s been a change in leadership back home in Asgard.

Cover Cavalcade

Who doesn't love trains?

Saturday Sale

This is the rule book for playing a game that requires you provide a pencil and paper for each player. You would also need to have some ten-sided dice and six-sided dice handy.

In this game, each player commands a space ship taking part in a pirate raid on Civilized Space. There are a succession of missions to undertake. With each mission, the players must individually decide how many attack shuttles to risk, how many missiles to launch, and whether to use Risky Tactics (increasing the risk of damage to your ship, but earning you more Glory Points.). The more resources a player uses on a mission, the more Glory Points can be earned--but that leaves less resources available for later missions. 

Players whose ships suffer too much Hull Damage or Crew Loses are knocked ou of the game.Those who survive until the end of the game (which includes surviving a final battle with the intrepid Earth captain Isaac Templeton of the battleship Saturn's Glory) add up their total Glory Points. The player with the most points wins.

This is a very simple game that can usually be played in less than half-an-hour, If you are in the mood to lead a crew of bloodthirsty alien pirates on a quest for loot and glory, then you'll enjoy SPACE PIRATES.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: “The Stars are the Styx” 7/24/56

The setting for this story—based on a short story by Theodore Sturgeon—is a space station above Earth that serves as an embarkation point for those who will colonize other planets.

This is the set up for a study of several characters—some likeably and some not so much—in what becomes a very sweet and human tale.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Old Movies and Old Friends

For those of us who tastes gravitate towards older films, many of the character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age become reliable friends—people we enjoy seeing in a movie even if that movie is only so-so. That was the case in Dakota, the Western I wrote about a few weeks back. The presence of Mike Mazurki, Ward Bond and Walter Brennan in that film adds to its appeal even beyond consideration of how well they play their roles.

We just like hanging out with these guys. It kind of makes up for the fact our real-life friends are all mind-numbingly boring.

(Oh, and if any friend of mine is reading this—please rest assured that I forgive you for being less interesting than Mike Mazurki and will continue doing you the honor of being your friend.)

Anyway, the 1941 B-movie Mr. District Attorney contains another visit from an old friend. Peter Lorre is there, playing a small but important role as one of the bad guys.

The movie is an odd one. It’s supposedly based on the then popular radio show of the same name. But whereas the radio show was a straightforward procedural, the movie is almost a screwball comedy.

The main character is P. Caldwallader Jones, a young lawyer hired by the D.A.’s office because he has an influential uncle. He and spunky (and really cute) girl reporter Terry Parker stumble their way through a case involving murder and corruption until—pretty much by dumb luck--they nab the crooked lawyer who is running the local rackets.

Lorre is an embezzler who’s been in hiding for years, sitting on some hot money and enough evidence to break the rackets. To cover his trail, he bumps off a couple of people.

As Ron Backer points out in his excellent book Mystery Movie Series of 1940s Hollywood, Lorre’s scenes seem almost disconnected from the rest of the film. Whenever he shows up, the mood of the film abruptly switches from comedy to film noir, both in mood, in staging, and in lighting. It’s almost jarring.

But what the heck. The movie is flawed in this regard, but it’s still a fun little film. Dennis O’Keefe and Florence Rice play the two leads and bring a fair amount of charm to their roles. Sarah Edwards is great as Miss Petherby, the District Attorney’s “doesn’t take any guff from her boss” secretary, while Charles Arnt is perfect as a wimpy bank clerk who unwittingly embezzles from an embezzler to get money to spend on his burlesque-dancer girl friend. Arnt, in fact, was often cast as a wimpy or hen-pecked man throughout his career.

And of course Lorre is effectively menacing in his small role. To quote Becker’s book: “Lorre is a rare actor whose mere presence adds to a scene, even before he begins to talk in that strange voice of his.”

He’s really just another of the many old friends we meet when we come to appreciate the films of this era. If he’s in a movie, then it automatically gets some points in its favor regardless of its faults.

So—if any friend of mine IS reading this: That’s how you can finally become interesting. Just emulate Peter Lorre. Or Mike Mazurki. Or Ward Bond. Or Charles Arnt. Heck, with so many choices, you really have no excuse for being mind-numbingly boring, do you?