ONE YEAR AGO TODAY

On June 29th, 2012, this blog was born. Today, I celebrate my first anniversary as a blogger. Two big thanks are in order here.

First, thanks to my lovely wife Judy who set this blog up for me as a surprise. I came home from work one day and she said "guess what you have now?" I was genuinely but pleasantly surprised. I most likely would have never done this without her support and encouragement. Thanks honey, you're the best!

Thanks also to each and every one of you who have taken the time to visit this blog and read my posts. As of this morning, I've had 28,508 hits which is not bad. I hope that you've enjoyed reading about the stuff that interests me and hopefully, interests you. Is there anything you'd like to see more of? Less of? Something I haven't written about? Something you wish I'd never write about again? Please let me know. Your feedback and comments are always welcome and appreciated.

In honor of this first anniversary, I've been going back to the beginning of the blog and adding a new coat of paint to some of my early postings. I must admit that I didn't really know what I was doing when I started this endeavor. I learned by doing and made some mistakes along the way but I've definitely made the blog better now than when I started. If you're a regular reader or a first timer, you might want to go into the archives and read some of the "new" old posts.

Finally, a word from our sponsor. I sell lots of the stuff I write about here on my blog on eBay. I sell DVDs, comic books, magazines, books (hardcover and paperback) and graphic novels. My eBay seller i.d. is: member287992. Check it out and bid on anything that strikes your interest. I'd love to sell some of my stuff to someone who reads this blog. Also, I have a list of comic books for sale/trade that I'd be happy to send to anyone who's interested. Email me at docsavag@austin.rr.com and ask and I'll send you the list.

Thanks again to one and all. Someone once said that a writer only starts the story. It's the readers who finish it. It's been a great first year and I hope the second year is even bigger and better. Keep reading and I'll keep blogging.  

A RED SUN ALSO RISES

I finished reading A RED SUN ALSO RISES (2012) by British science fiction author Mark Hodder the other day. It's the first book by Hodder I've read but it won't be the last.

RED SUN is a steam-punk "sword and planet" story in which a British vicar and his female sexton are sent as missionaries from Victorian London to a remote island in the South Pacific. The natives practice cannibalistic rituals and sacrifices and guess who's on the menu?

But before Aiden Fleischer and Clarissa Stark can be offered up to the dark gods, a space/time portal opens up above the island and transports the duo to a distant planet. Aiden is suffering from a crisis of faith and is not sure if he's responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders back on earth (he's not). Clarissa, whose body was horribly deformed on earth, is cured of her crippling injuries on the alien world and emerges as a stunning beauty (of course).

The natives of the planet are mimetic. They collectively scan Clarissa's mind and, based on what they find there, recreate Victorian London on their world in a matter of days. But the twin suns are about to set and the red giant is about to rise and with the dawn come the Blood Gods.

There's more, much more including revelations about the true nature of the aliens and imprisonment and escape from a massive crystalline island. The real villain is finally revealed along with his nefarious scheme and it's up to Aiden, Clarissa and their alien allies to turn back the invasion of our world. The climatic battle is quite cinematic and the weapons used are an intriguing mix of steam punk tanks and airships. Our heroes win the day but Aiden is transported back to earth where World War II is now being waged. While voyaging back to England his ship is sunk by a Nazi submarine and he loses the crystal that will facilitate his return to Clarissa and his new found home planet. But fear not for Aiden Fleischer. He won't have trouble finding his missing crystal for it seems there are some mighty strange things happening in a triangular portion of the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. To be continued...

A RED SUN ALSO RISES is squarely in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first novel in his John Carter of Mars series. It takes a while to get going and there's a lot of travelogue type narration describing the alien world and its' inhabitants. The story picks up steam (pun intended) about halfway through and the climax is a thrilling page-turner with vividly described action set pieces. I enjoyed  RED SUN and look forward to reading the further adventures of Aiden and Clarissa. Recommended.

DARK PASSAGE

I watched DARK PASSAGE (1947) the other night. I recorded it off of TCM. It's a good film noir that I'd never seen before and it's one of four films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together. The other films include THE BIG SLEEP, TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and KEY LARGO.

DARK PASSAGE, uses a unique narrative conceit for the first act of the film. Almost everything we see is shot from the subjective point-of-view of Bogart who plays an innocent man framed and convicted of his wife's murder. He escapes from prison at the beginning of the film and is determined to find his wife's real killer and clear his name. Does that set-up sound familiar? David Goodis, who wrote the novel this film was based on, filed suit many years later against the producers of the television series THE FUGITIVE, claiming that series stole from his work.

With everything seen from Bogart's p.o.v, we don't see the actor's familiar face until after he's had plastic surgery and emerges with a new face in the second act of the film. For an actor of Bogart's stature, this was a pretty bold move to star in a film in which he doesn't appear on screen for almost a third of the movie. Bogart is aided in his search for the truth by Lauren Bacall, a wealthy young artist whose own father was also wrongly convicted for a crime he didn't commit. Bogart encounters a two-bit crook who is wise to the truth and tries to blackmail Bogie. The crook meets an unfortunate, albeit accidental, demise. Bogart finally confronts his wife's real killer but that person also takes a fall from a great height leaving Bogart even more desperate and wanted by the police. He engineers an escape plan to South America and tells Bacall to meet him there whenever she can. She does and the film ends with the couple reunited (and on the lam) in Peru.

Directed by Delmer Daves, DARK PASSAGE is a tight, compelling noir thriller that is well worth seeing. Bogart and Bacall are always fun to watch together and the point-of-view gimmick is actually fairly well executed. Recommended.  

VICE RAID

Despite the slightly lurid title and the presence of the va-va-va-voom Mamie Van Doren, VICE RAID (1960), is about as average a crime film as you're ever likely to find. TCM ran several Van Doren films the other night and, on a whim, I recorded some of them. I watched VICE RAID the other day and I can't recommend it to anyone who's not a hardcore Van Doren fan.

Mamie Van Doren was a platinum blond Marilyn Monroe wanna-be who had a short film career in the 1950s and '60s. Van Doren was never a big star and she only played bit parts in the major films in which she appeared. When she was a headliner, as in VICE RAID, the results were watchable but far from spectacular. In fact, the most spectacular thing (or things) about VICE RAID is Van Doren herself (if you know what I mean and I think you do).

In the film, organized crime boss Brad Dexter (who was, as you'll recall, one of the Magnificent Seven and if you don't remember that factoid, please go back and read my blog post on that film) uses "model" (that's code for prostitute) Van Doren to frame vice detective Richard Coogan. As a result of the set-up, Coogan is fired from the force. He swears vengeance against the racket and Van Doren eventually comes to his aid after her sister is brutally assaulted and raped by Dexter's right-hand man, Barry Atwater (he played the Las Vegas vampire in the classic made-for-television film THE NIGHT STALKER). Coogan and Van Doren work with the police to get the goods on Dexter and the mob, Coogan gets his job back on the force and Van Doren and her kid sister leave the big city to return to their small hometown. The end.

Interior scenes in VICE RAID appear to have been shot on only a couple of re-dressed sets and the exteriors were all filmed on the back lot. The cast is okay and they do their best with what they're given to work with which isn't much. VICE RAID isn't dark enough to be a noir and it's not so-bad-it's-good to be a cult film. It's a passable, routine crime film worth seeing for only one reason.

 Make that two reasons.

"TAKE ME HOME LITTLE BOY, YOU WILL LOVE ME!"

Pictured above is the box art for the Creature from the Black Lagoon Aurora plastic model kit. The cover art, as I learned just a few years ago, is by the incomparable James Bama. Bama did many striking paperback cover for Bantam Books and among his best and most well-known works are the cover paintings he did for Bantam's Doc Savage series, which reprinted the vintage pulp novels in paperback format. Bama did the cover art for many of the first generation of Aurora monster model kits and it was his work on the Creature box art that grabbed me by the throat (metaphorically speaking, of course) when I was a very young boy.

The time was the early 1960s, the place, Fort Worth, Texas, where my family had been relocated for a couple of years due to my dad's work. I was in either kindergarten or (most likely) first grade, when I saw a display of Aurora monster model kits in a variety/department store. I had no idea who James Bama was (although he would become one of my all-time favorite artists). What's more, I had no idea who or what "the Creature" was. I had no knowledge of the film whatsoever at that young age and I didn't see the classic monster movie for the first time until many years later. All I knew was that this image, this monster, was one of the coolest things I had ever seen and I simply had to have it.

My father, who also loved old monster movies, indulged me and bought the kit, along with a tube of glue, some little bottles of model paint and a couple of brushes. As soon as we got home, the building of this fabulous monster model kit began. Having never built a model kit before, my father did the majority of the work while I merely watched in wonder and awe. When he was finished and all of the pieces were properly painted and the paint was dry, he began gluing the pieces together. It was an agonizingly slow process but the finished product was well worth the wait. I now owned my very first ever monster model. I had to have another and I did.

 Over the next few years, I managed to purchase and build almost every Aurora monster model kit on the market. I quickly became proficient at kit painting and building by myself, a skill I had to master when my dad passed away in 1965. I never kept the original boxes once the kits were assembled and, as I've related elsewhere on this blog, all of my monster models met destructive demises.

The finished Creature kit looked like this:

One of these days, I plan to purchase one of the reproductions of the kit that are currently available. They're exact replicas in every way including the original box art and graphics. While it would be even better to own an original unbuilt kit in the original box, the prices that those treasures are fetching are beyond me. I'll settle for a nice copy at a decent price and throw in the priceless memories for free.

KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

In yesterday's blog post, I wrote about how, as kids, we used to regularly blow up our plastic models with firecrackers, lighter fluid and matches on a regular basis. All of us kids had a stash of Black Cat firecrackers squirreled away somewhere in our closets. Those firecrackers used to be much easier to come by back in the 1960s. We didn't have to wait for the 4th of July or New Year's Eve to purchase them and there were no ordinances banning the use of fireworks in the city limits.

Still, I'll be the first to admit that while the destructive, pyrotechnical practices we indulged in on a regular basis were and are dangerous things to do, none of us young miscreants were ever seriously hurt while doing this, nor did we ever cause any property damage (except the loss of our models). And none of us grew up to be arsonists, terrorists or other threats to society.

You must remember that this was fifty years ago and the world was a radically different place. Safety gear? Didn't exist. Adult supervision? Are you kidding? As kids, we regularly engaged in various dangerous practices (almost all of which could have ended very badly) but we came through all of these adventures in one piece. And most importantly of all, we had fun doing it.

We rode our bikes all over hell-and-creation without bicycle helmets or any other safety gear. There were certain streets I was not allowed to ride on but I regularly rode to my friends' houses and to the neighborhood 7-11 to buy comic books.

During elementary school at Brykerwoods, a bunch of us boys would gather on the playground after school, choose up sides and play either tackle football (in the fall) or baseball (in the spring). The only equipment we had were a football, a couple of baseballs and a few bats. Every kid had a baseball glove. There was no protective gear, no referees, umpires or adults. Everybody played and everybody had a good time. No one, that I can recall, was ever seriously injured. We'd go home with a skinned up knee or elbow and our clothes would be filthy but we were uninjured.

On Saturday afternoons, we'd hop a city bus and ride to downtown Austin to see a movie at the Paramount or the State Theaters and afterwards, we'd go to the soda fountain in the basement of Woolworth's or goof around in Seniors' Discount store (they had amazing novelty items) until it was time to get on a bus and go home.

There was no such thing as a "play date". If you wanted to play with a friend you rode your bike (or walked) to his house, rang the doorbell and when he came to the door you'd ask "want to play?"

In the summers, we'd play some kind of crazy ass game in the street until it was dark enough for the streetlight to come on. That's when we knew it was time to head for home.

We regularly played along the banks of Shoal Creek which ran near my street. There were no homeless encampments then, just us kids playing "army" or "spies" or whatever.

But 2013 is a vastly different world than 1965 and I must caution my readers (especially the youngsters, if there are any), not to do as I did when I was kid and blow up your monster models with firecrackers. In fact, almost all of the activities listed above are most likely forbidden (or greatly frowned upon) in today's world. I did all of these things and survived but I certainly don't want to be seen as an advocate of unsafe and dangerous activities.

But boy, did we have fun.

MY FAMOUS MONSTERS 6

Lots of great stuff in issue #32 which came out in March, 1965. That's my birthday month and I was nine-years old when I first bought this issue of FAMOUS MONSTERS. I sold it/traded it/lost it somewhere over the years but I do have a copy of it in my current collection.

The cover image is one of the winners of the big Aurora/FAMOUS MONSTERS/ Universal Pictures Master Monster Maker contest. This was a competition for FM readers to go to town on customizing their  Aurora monster models (or "all-plastic-assembly-kits" as they were technically referred to). Readers were asked to customize their models and send in photos of their work. The cover image, of King Kong on a rampage, is very nicely done and there are plenty of other great photos of the handiwork of "master monster makers" in this issue.

I wish I could have been skilled enough to customize my monster models. I was a pretty good kit builder but I stuck to the parts that came in the box and the suggested paint schemes. My monster models looked good for the work of a kid but they were nothing spectacular. Of course, none of them survived my childhood. All of them, every last monster, met a fiery demise at the business end of Black Cat firecrackers, lighter fluid and matches (usually a combination of all three elements).

I don't know why I was so eager to destroy something that had cost me money and time to assemble and I certainly enjoyed admiring the fruits of my labor. But at some point in time, I was compelled to get rid of them all in the most spectacular, pyrotechnical way I could safely engineer. And I wasn't alone. Every kid in the neighborhood contributed their models-monsters, cars, planes, etc. to community conflagrations over the years. I vividly recall stuffing a model of PT-109 (the patrol boat skippered by John F. Kennedy in WWII) with firecrackers, lighting the fuses and setting the small plastic boat afloat in a large puddle of water moments before it was blown to bits. That model had to be destroyed on the water.

Other features in this issue of FM include a comic book adaptation of the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Hammer films masterpiece THE HORROR OF DRACULA, a first look at THE MUNSTERS television show, and THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON (which reminds me, I have a story to relate about my near encounter with the film's star Robert Clarke for a future blog post).