Cover Cavalcade

I think I'd rather be on Batman's bad side than face off against the Spectre.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Dangerous Assignment: "End Antisubmarine Base Sabotage" 4/29/53

Steve Mitchell is sent to New Guinea to investigate sabotage that is slowing down construction of a naval base. This episode plays out like a Whodunit, with a nice twist at the end involving the saboteur's motivation.



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A Haunted Castle--OR IS IT?

When we think of hilarious horror-comedies, many classic film fans probably default to Abbott and Costello films such as A & C Meet Frankenstein. But if we jump back a half-decade or so, we discover that Bob Hope actually had a jump on the boys in this department.

Hope developed a sort-of cowardly con artist persona that he played to the hilt in many of his films. So its actually a fun change-of-pace to see him playing a reasonably brave and competent protagonist in 1940's The Ghost Breakers.

Hope plays Larry Lawrence ("My folks had no imagination."), a radio broadcaster who--after some shenanigans in which he thinks he accidentally murdered someone--ends up on a ship sailing to Cuba. Also aboard is Mary Carter, who recently inherited a castle near Havana that's rumored to be haunted. Larry ends up helping Mary, because someone doesn't want Mary to move into her new home and doesn't object to committing murder to stop her. Whether or not there's an actual supernatural element to the proceedings is a part of the mystery.

Mary is played by the mind-numbingly pretty Paulette Goddard. Hope and Goddard had co-starred a year before in The Cat and the Canary, another horror/comedy. The two work well with each other--Goddard is often the straight "man" for Hope, but she's given her fair share of one-liners as well and handles them nicely.

In fact, one of the strengths of The Ghost Breakers is that Goddard isn't just a damsel-in-distress, but also has her share of courage and brains. For instance, she's the one who solves an obscure clue leading to a secret room near the film's climax.

The combination of mystery, scares and comedy are perfectly balanced. There are one-liners and plenty of slapstick moments, but there's also a real mystery with a logical outcome, some honestly creepy moments and a downright scary zombie played by Noble Johnson.

Hope's assistant is played by African-American comedian Willie Best. Like Mantan Moreland & Stepin Fetchet, Best is a figure of some controversy today. Jump over to his IMDB page to read some of the comments. Or rather, don't do that. It's the Internet--you won't find rational discussion there.

Best was a brilliant comedic actor, working in an era where most of his roles played on black stereotypes. But there's no denying that he was hilarious--Hope later called him "the best actor I know." For me, I think actors such as Best, Moreland and Fetchet should be appreciated and enjoyed for their obvious skill at making people laugh. Their ability to make us laugh is such that we sincerely like them and never laugh "at" them, if you see what I mean.
At the same time, I recognize that the type of roles they had were often intended to be safe and non-threatening to the racial status quo of the day. So if someone else cringes at Best's performance and doesn't find anything to laugh about, then I'm not at all critical. It's yet another situation where it's not a matter of being politically correct or incorrect, but simply reacting to the performances on an individual basis and respecting the opinions of others.

I recorded a clip of the movie to share here, but I guess Paramount Pictures is (like Universal) one of the big-meanie studios that tells YouTube to block clips. I'm all for intellectual rights, so (though I think short clips should qualify as Fair Use) I don't question Paramount's right to control their content. It's a silly decision, though, since such clips are essentially free advertising. Oh, well--there's no accounting for lawyers, I guess. At least Warner Brothers is cool about such things.

Here, at least, is the trailer:

Toys Running Wild in the Toy Store

Micronauts Annual #2 (1980) is made of pure fun.

The plot is simple. The Micronauts are in their ship, flying over New York City, when Acroyear is struck by a severe headache and compelled to fly down into the city and then into Macy's Department Story. This is because a mad scientist has inserted a special chip into a new line of Micronaut action figures and is using a beam to activate and control them. A side effect of this is causing Acroyear to go bonkers--it later affects some of the other living Micronauts as well. The other Micronauts pursue Acroyear into the store.

This leads to a rough-and-tumble fight between real Micronauts and fake Micronauts, with some time out to deal with the mad scientist as well. (The villain, by the way, turns out to be a half-cyborg scientist they had encountered before.)



I could go into more detail about the plot, but that would be senseless. It's mostly an excuse to let Steve Ditko go to town with showing us tiny warriors battling through a toy department and using what they find (checkers, frisbees, even a teddy bear) to help defeat the evil toys. It is indeed pure fun. In fact, trying to decide which panels to scan to share in this review nearly drove me as mad as the story's villain. There's not a single image that isn't engaging and lively.

Rich Buckler drew the first seven pages, with Ditko taking over for the rest of the issue. I think Ditko's style fits the half-goofy, half-serious Micornauts stories perfectly and his old skill at choreographing entertaining fight scenes is still evident. So when I say that the plot serves primarily as an excuse to set up the battle, I'm not being critical. The world would be a poorer place without a record of this particular bit of comic book mayhem.

The story is fun on another level as well--tacitly acknowledging that the characters are based on toys and making gentle fun of merchandising.

The writer was Bill Mantlo, a storyteller whose own sense of fun shows through in pretty much everything he wrote. He simply knew how to entertain his readers. Here, he combines humor (without ever going too far into slapstick) with non-stop action to give us 30 boisterous and enjoyable pages of great fantasy.

Next week, we'll watch the Fantastic Four fix history after the timeline is mucked up by...   their mailman?

Cover Cavalcade

I'll bet money this doesn't end well for the guy threatening Tonto.

Gorgo

I just made this video for the Ringling College of Art Library's YouTube channel.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Suspense: "The Face is Familiar" 1/18/54

Jack Benny plays a man so nondescript, that everyone has trouble recognizing him or remembering his name. So he seems to be the perfect unwitting patsy for some crooks to use in a bank robbery scheme.

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Dead End for Jo Gar

Read/Watch 'em In Order #66

"The Blind Chinese" (published in the April 1931 issue of Black Mask) brings us to the halfway point in the Rainbow Diamonds saga.

In the first two stories, the trail after the stolen diamonds has brought Spanish-Filipino detective Jo Gar from Manila to Honolulu--following partial clues taken from the fragmented last words of dying criminals.

As I mentioned last time, Jo Gar heard dying men mumble cryptic last words with surprising frequency. This entry in the series, though, seems to bring him to a dead end. He knows he has to find a blind Chinese in Honolulu, but the city has a large Chinese population, undoubtedly with its percentage of blind people.

The bad guys inadvertently help Jo out by trying to kill him. Jo evades death and captures the chauffeur who had been paid to drive him into a trap. This puts the chauffeur in a very uncomfortable position. If he takes Jo to the blind Chinese, he'll be killed. If he refuses to help Jo--he'll be killed. (Or so Jo allows him to think.)

This leads to a great bit of hard-boiled dialogue. When the driver tries to justify his actions by saying he's a poor man, Jo Gar replies "Then you have less to live for. Let us start."

Anyway, the story ends with several dead crooks--not ONE of which manages to utter any cryptic last words. That may be a first in Jo Gar's eventful career.

I know I sound like I'm making fun of the story, but it's really a superb piece of hard-boiled fiction, building suspense that leads us to a violent but satisfying conclusion. Jo Gar seems to have run out of leads at this point, but he's still got three upcoming stories in the series, so I'm sure he'll be back on the trail of the diamonds before long.

Riverboats, Goats and Criminals

By 1946, the Our Gang shorts were no longer being produced by MGM, but Dell Comics was still publishing an Our Gang comic book. That meant writer/artist Walt Kelly had more freedom in the stories he told--able to freely introduce his own characters, use whichever members of the gang he wanted in any particular story, and tell action-adventure tales in addition to giving us slapstick comedy.

A prime example of this is a saga that ran from Our Gang #26 (September 1946) through #29 (December 1946). In earlier issues, the gang had met vaudeville performer Professor Gravy and helped capture a crook named Barrel. Now, Professor Gravy has bought a riverboat and plans to use it as an old-fashioned showboat, cruising along the river along with a number of different acts and putting on shows.

Two of the gang, Froggy and Red, are able to come along. This is a clear sign of the freedom Kelly had--because the comic existed on its own merits and didn't have to showcase the movie shorts, Kelly wasn't obligated to use characters based on the Our Gang actors. He could add or subtract from the cast based on what it best for a particular story. Here he takes Froggy (a character who had appeared in the shorts) and Red (a character I'm pretty sure is original to the comics--though I'm not complete certain of that), leaving the rest of the gang behind for a few issues because they didn't fit into the story he wanted to tell. Of course, each issue included stories by other artists, so any particular character was rarely gone from an entire issue.

Kelly was brilliant at pure comedy, but he was a skilled storyteller no matter what. The first part of the Riverboat Saga involves Barrel, the crook who wants revenge on Professor Gravy, getting a job on in the engine room under a false name. Some other crooks show up as well. But the kids, their pet goat Julip and a few of the adults manage to get the best of them.

The next issue is pure slapstick--Julip swallows a mechanical parrot, which provides him with the illusion that he can talk. A lady wrestler named Guinevere sneaks aboard to look for work on the show and gets mixed up in a scheme to shoot Julip out of a cannon. It is sincerely funny stuff, but also moves the story arc as a whole along, since Guinevere will play a key role in the final two issues.

Because more crooks are stalking the showboat--the unnamed river its sailing on seems to have an
awfully high crime rate. Professor Gravy agrees to transport a valuable race horse. Crooks sneak aboard to rustle the poor beast.

I love Kelly's art here. Most of the action takes place at night and Kelly uses light and shadow brilliantly to generate suspense. Reading this story almost makes you sad Kelly eventually dedicated his career to the comic strip Pogo. That strip was one of the finest to ever grace a newspaper page, but Kelly shows us here he could have been equally superb at giving us adventure stories.

The crooks after the horse accidentally kidnap Froggy and Red, who were in a horse costume at the time.

The crooks talk about doing away with the kids, but reinforcements arrive in time to foil this. It's here we really see how much the Our Gang comics have drifted from the original shorts--while in the movie theaters, it was rare to see a bad guy in an Our Gang short catch fire and run screaming in fear and pain.

The last part of the riverboat saga involves one of the horse thieves escaping. Professor Gravy, Guinevere, Red and Froggy pursue, but Red is captured after the crook rejoins one of his companions.

Red escapes, though the crooks think they've killed him. This gives Red a chance to freak out the bad guys by quickly improvising a haunting.

That's another creepy panel up there, isn't it? By golly, Pogo, look what you took away from us!

Anyway, Gravy, Guinevere and Froggy arrive and--after a brief but sharp gun fight in which the Professor is wounded--the bad guys are captured. The saga ends at this point because Red and Froggy have to return home to attend school. Though after multiple fights for their lives, kidnappings, escapes and gun battles, one wonders what else there is they really need to learn.

Next week, we'll join characters based on toys as they rampage through a toy store.

Cover Cavalcade

A very striking Phantom Detective cover.