0048: Save Us, Fred Lerner!

Thanks to decades of multi-billion dollar misinformation campaigns, there are millions of people here in the U.S. who will only believe the opposite of what scientists tell them. I was thinking about that during all the coverage leading up to the eclipse event that will take place on the day this is originally posted. There's really no new information; as always, people who know about these things are quick to warn dim-bulb newscasters that they must warn the general public not to look directly at the eclipse. The reasons for this will be ignored (because the world would come to an end if TV news devoted more than 30 seconds to a story, apparently), but the message is still unequivocal. Don't look into a total eclipse with your bare eyes. Period. Then I looked at the path of "totality", the areas on the Earth that will be most directly beneath the path of the moon as it passes in front of the sun. Not California, not the northeast: it will cut through states that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. You know what that means: the same people who were cheering on the elimination of publicly funded health care will suffer everything from severe nausea to lifelong blindness and possibly death. It's been a long time since these people put their trust in someone who deserved it. It would help them immensely if they had someone they could identify with who would tell them, "Hey, it's not good for you to drink toxic waste." (I'm sure a lot of people are thinking "It would help the rest of us immensely if they didn't.") Maybe it could be someone with a military rank. On basic cable. Possibly with a mullet. Hmmmn...

These are stickers that, according to the copyright date, were produced after the first of six seasons of what must have been the most prolific cartoon of the 90's. And for a series with several redundant plotlines, resisting the urge to fall back on reruns is admirable. It probably went on as long as it did to accommodate the celebrities willing to do voice roles (you don't have to trust this scientist-- find it at IMDB and click on "Full Cast").

The limited animation and limited dialogue kept me from watching more than a couple of episodes but my preschool nephew loved it and it lasted long enough for him to enjoy it right through elementary school. These were probably bought for him by his grandparents and forgotten before they could give them to him. Sometimes I open a box of my things and find unopened fast food toys I don't recognize. I've become accustomed to being the family wrangler for comic/cartoon related items. What I can't sell as collectibles goes to yard sales. These are easy to store, though, and if my nephew ever gets a pang of nostalgia he's welcome to them. Me, I'll be back to comics soon enough. It's just a question of what I trip over next.

0044: Plectrum Is Green?

The end of September will be the 50th Anniversary of Captain Scarlet, one of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation television series. Anderson, in post-war England, had intended to start a movie production company but needed to film television commercials to pay the bills and one with a marionette caught on and created a demand for more. Anderson himself was not a puppeteer and, frankly, never had an interest in them but he wasn't stupid. Anderson and DP Arthur Provis formed AP Films and created three series of fantasy short films (10-15 minutes each) for small children that were broadcast within larger blocks of programming from 1957 to 1960. They hired puppeteers willing to work on a budget consisting of whatever lint they had in their pockets, and that meant people who experimented with their materials, willing to rework and repurpose puppets, sets and everything else. To meet deadlines, a willingness to innovate wasn't enough, they needed a taste for it. By 1960 they were ready for something more ambitious and closer to Anderson's taste in stories: a  half-hour science fiction series about the crew of an advanced vehicle, the first of three successful series, all running 39 episodes. They were SUPERCAR (a high-speed car in the present day), FIREBALL XL-5 (a spaceship 1000 years in the future) and STINGRAY (a submarine 100 years in the future). The next series, the hour-long THUNDERBIRDS, guaranteed their place in pop culture history. With every series, the puppeteers, engineers and cameramen all worked towards the same goal: to make the marionettes look like they were moving as closely to human behavior as practically possible, to create the illusion that the viewer was watching living things act out the story.

The series that followed THUNDERBIRDS was CAPTAIN SCARLET, which took several unusual departures from the formula. Going back to half-hours and, like STINGRAY and THUNDERBIRDS, set 100 years in the future in the 2060's, CAPTAIN SCARLET was their first feature-length science fiction show in which the fantastic vehicles were an afterthought instead of the focus of the plot. The premise is that an organisation called Spectrum (with color-coded top agents) is a peace-keeping authority recognized and supported by countries participating in a World Government. Unbeknownst to them, an alien species had colonized Mars thousands of years earlier, built self-repairing automated cities and at some point disappeared without having contacted Earth. When humans create technology capable of receiving signals from the city on Mars, Spectrum is tasked with investigating to determine if the activity is evidence of a security risk. When the expedition, led by Captain Black, accidentally reacts the the city's automation as an attack and inflicts damage, the city responds with a 'retrometabolism' ray. The ray reconstructs matter to its most immediately previous shape. Thus, if a centuries old building collapses, as long as no one moves the pieces the ray will restore the building. However, when used on living things recently killed it reanimates their corpse, placing it under the control of the city's computers, who identify themselves as the Mysterons (commonly assumed to be the name of the species who built them). Returning to Earth, the now Mysteron-controlled Captain Black arranges a car crash to kill Captains Brown and Scarlet, the Spectrum agents assigned to protect the World Government President, so that they can be reconstructed under Mysteron control and assassinate the President instead. Brown is later blown up in a failed assassination attempt but Scarlet falls hundreds of feet and apparently dies intact. Instead, his synthetic body restores itself to the point before the car crash, with no memory since then and free of the Mysterons' control.

A-side

(The "S.I.G." under the band's name is the phrase often heard during the TV show, an abbreviation for "Spectrum Is Green". It was a phrase Spectrum agents would use to signify to each other that their assignment was understood and that everything was going forward. On the THUNDERBIRDS, characters would similarly use the phrase "F.A.B.", presumably because the slang word "fab"-- short for "fabulous"-- was popular at the time. Anderson admitted years later that, unlike "S.I.G.", "F.A.B." didn't stand for anything. They just needed something that sounded like jargon unique to the show.)

B-side

The first, most obvious difference between the show and its predecessors was the complete design of the puppet heads. Since 1961, the Anderson shows had been using marionettes with radio controlled devices built into the heads that enabled the puppeteers to move move the mouths, eyes and brows by remote control, which minimized the number of strings used and therefore minimized the chances of strings being visible on camera. However, the heads were proportionately too large for the bodies to be convincing as adult humans. Beginning with CAPTAIN SCARLET, the entire bodies, heads included, could be scaled closer to average adult human proportions thanks to transistors and other tools of miniaturization. Of course, this welcome innovation came with the need (and expense) of making all new sets, vehicles, clothes and other accessories.

The other obvious difference was the switch from nearly camp melodrama to a more sober, dark tone and a title character isn't a vehicle and dies during each episode more often than not. The fear of children putting themselves into lethal danger while "playing Captain Scarlet" was not an unreasonable one, leading to the stern message added to opening sequences, "Captain Scarlet is indestructible. You are not. Do NOT try to imitate him." That explains the parody of the phrase that appears on the back of the sleeve for the single in today's post.

I think is the only Hellbillys recording I have. The photo of Captain Black on the sleeve front caught my eye but finding out that they sing the closing theme song sealed the deal for me. That's another departure the series took. Instead of a catchy theme song or the THUNDERBIRDS' adrenaline-pumping march over the opening credits, almost every episode opened with some scene of carnage that enables the Mysterons to create new agents on Earth, represented by two green circles of light gliding over the surface of the affected objects or people. (Note the circles on the sleeve back above.)  The credits consisted of someone unsuccessfully trying to shoot Captain Scarlet followed by the super creepy voice of the Mysterons issuing a new threat over the same footage of the light circles gliding menacingly over various members of Spectrum. It was during the closing credits that the theme song played, a rock pop number played by an anonymous ensemble identified only as "The Spectrum", the same name as a British band releasing singles on RCA Victor in England. According to Discogs, they were the same band and there is a version of the song included on a 2CD compilation of their complete recordings released earlier this year. The Hellbillys would be a little more difficult to compile, having used about a dozen different labels over 25 years and more members than Spinal Tap or Uriah Heep. Bright note? They still have a MySpace page.

0043: Cast Your Rice Upon The Waters

I can't remember if the first John Waters movie I saw was "Pink Flamingos" or "Polyester", but I'm pretty sure I've seen all of them, from "The Diane Linkletter Story" to "A Dirty Shame". Nowadays he's mostly writing books and hosting film festivals, but his name has been registering on my radar for years. Turning back the clock ten years, he started 2007 by appearing as a funeral director in an episode of "My Name Is Earl" in January. In February, for Valentine's Day, New Line Records released a compilation of love songs called "A Date With John Waters", a sequel to the popular "A John Waters Christmas"(2004). Both were various artists albums for which Waters wrote liner notes to songs he selected around a holiday theme.

So what to do for March when you're not Irish? Why, star in a new basic cable TV series, of course! Waters had been telling interviewers for years that he loved attending murder trials and only stopped when people started recognizing him and he became concerned about being a distraction in a serious legal proceeding. That's not to say that he lost interest in true crime stories. And the more bizarre the circumstances, the better. So, a series on CourtTV seemed a natural match. After shooting a pilot in 2006, he went to narrate 13 episodes of "'Til Death Do Us Part" in the character of "The Groom Reaper", who was sort of a cross between Rod Serling in "The Twilight Zone" and any of the EC horror hosts.

Each episode would open with the Groom Reaper at a wedding or its reception, speaking directly to the audience. Unlike Serling, however, it was always clear that he was physically there, interacting with the events, even though the other attendants never noticed that he was speaking to an invisible third party.

The bulk of each half hour episode would then consist of actors playing out a dramatized version of an actual, real-life murder case in which one spouse killed the other and was eventually caught. (They had to have been caught, because otherwise we would never have had the story.) Waters didn't write, direct or produce any of the episodes, he only performed in them, which was a departure for him. Most of his performing credits have been cameos, often in his own movies as a gag, or else voice work. After sprinkling some of those voice overs onto choice parts of the story, the episodes would end with the Groom Reaper emerging at the killer's apprehension, arrest or trial for one last wry observation before telling the viewers, "I've got another wedding to go to. I hope it's not yours."

I remember the airings to be oddly spotty, even by basic cable standards. They seemed to skip every third week  and, while many basic cable channels (like TBS or Comedy Central) will run the new episodes of original shows several times during the week (including time slots they expect to be low performing, like midnight to dawn), "'Til Death Do Us Part" had its one airing in primetime. After three months it was gone, with only half of its episodes aired. It also ran in Canada, under the name "Love You To Death", possibly to avoid confusion with the American sitcom also being produced that year, "'Til Death" (with Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher).

By the end of the year, CourtTV had been converted into TruTV, which announced that one of its guiding principles would be that they would use only genuine footage. Even though TDDUP was based on true stories it was technically scripted and shot, complete with (out of necessity) fabricated dialogue just like "Dragnet" or "Naked City" (well, maybe not just like them...). A year later, in mod-2008, it was made available as a 3-DVD set from Navarre (UPC# 787364-818198). Soon after, TruTV's claims about keeping things real proved to be disingenuous as the crime and law enforcement orientation of CourtTV was replaced with skeevy "real footage" programs about repo men, dangerous occupations in remote areas and out of work D-list 'celebrities' (Tonya Harding, Danny Bonaduce, Todd Bridges...) cracking jokes about security camera footage. After five years of failing to knock AMC (or anyone else) out of the Emmys, it switched format to comedy, including scripted shows like "Adam Ruins Everything". However much the network rubs me the wrong way, I can't get too mad at "Adam...", "Talk Show: The Game Show" or some others that have emerged since then. Those shows are at least funny, unlike the network's most aired show recently, "Impractical Jokers". It's scheduled to run 37 half-hour episodes tomorrow alone. That's not a special occasion, it's a typical day. And I would like to point out that seven of the remaining eleven half-hours  are infomercials, which frankly would be preferable to "Impractical Jokers", which is so appallingly cringe-inducing that I can confidently say that I've seen funnier things with Sarah McLachlan singing in the background.

About the promo comic itself, it's a coverless 16 page freebie that I picked up at my regular direct market comics specialty store. Scans of the first three pages are above and page 14 is on the left here. It adapts the first episode from the premiere on March 19, 2007, which aired along with the third episode. The few episodes that aired jumped around the production schedule, which is less harmful in an anthology series like this than it would be in a show with fixed characters. It cuts off half way through that episode, where the commercial break would be. In some episodes viewers were encouraged to text in which spouse they believed would murder the other in the second half. That seemed like a kind of dated approach in 2007, just as multi-platform viewing was becoming the norm.

The comic is also a DC production, whose editors were also working on "Connor Hawke: Dragon's Blood" at the time. Later in the year they would edit promo comics for Batman and Cal Ripken, Jr. (given out at Camden yards) and another for JLA and Con Edison. James Peaty was doing random fill-in issues for various DC titles then. Later he would write "Good Looking Corpse", the next to last story arc in "Supergirl" in 2011 before it was cancelled for New52. Adam Dekraker also hopped around, not only at DC but other publishers. He might be best known for working on the "Smallville" comic and did the "Forerunner" feature in Countdown to Adventure after this. Inker Dan Davis, letterer Pat Brosseau and colorist Guy Major are all DC perennials 

0034: The Crayola 64 Beats The New52

1966 was an interesting year for Superboy. Jerry Siegel returned to scripting him briefly (after writing for Marvel under pseudonyms) and 14 year old Jim Shooter became the regular scripter for Legion Of Super-Heroes stories in "Adventure Comics", finally ending the practice of filling out the issues with Superboy reprints, running full-length LSH stories instead. Most significantly, Filmation brought an animated "Superboy" to television as a series of 6-7 minute shorts meant to alternate with cartoons of adult DC heroes like Superman, Aquaman and Batman (that's right, Aquaman had a show named after him but Flash and Green Lantern did not; they did get three shorts apiece, as did Atom, Hawkman, JLA and Teen Titans and they alternated with Aquaman stories just as Superboy alternated with Superman). A large batch was produced in 1966 and smaller batches in 1967 and 1968, when the schedules could be completed with reruns from the first season. The fourth season was entirely reruns.

By the end of the first season in 1967, this coloring book was produced by Whitman Publishing Company with "Drawings by Jason Studios". The back cover has identical art with the text "Superboy Coloring Book" and the Whitman logo. It is missing the price and stock number (seen here in the upper right corner) and, curiously, it's also missing the words "Authorized Edition" that appear under the word "Book" on the front. The contents were 96 pages of (naturally) black-and-white drawings of characters from the cartoons, including plenty of Ma and Pa Kent and Lana Lang so that kids won't wear down their blue crayons to a nub before they get through the book.

Also in 1966, Andy Warhol was known to have shot a film he called "Superboy" which he never released. There are promotional stills that have circulated featuring known Factory regulars Mary Woronov and International Velvet (not a drag queen, by the way) posing with an unidentified shirtless blond surfer. How they found a surfer in New York, I don't know. How they lured him into a repurposed factory building full of women with Adam's apples in an enormous, then-dirty city like New York and convinced him to pose shirtless..., well, I'd really like to know how anybody would do that because that's some real salesman-of-the-year stuff right there. I don't suppose the page on the right is a little tip-of-the-hat to Warhol's efforts?

Superboy remained wonderful for a few years, at least. As the 1960's ended, the Legion lost their lead in "Adventure Comics" to Supergirl, who had been a back-up feature in "Action Comics" prior to that. The LSH became a back-up in "Superboy" until the early 70's when, after the cartoon was cancelled, LSH became the lead and it was retitled "Superboy and the Legion Of Super-Heroes" (on the cover, anyway; the indicia would remain "Superboy" for years). Often he became a barely speaking supporting character in his own book. Before the DC implosion in 1978 there was an effort to give him some sort of a vehicle by making him the new lead in "Adventure Comics" and giving the old series over to LSH completely, effectively switching places from a decade earlier. After the Implosion things got even more convoluted. Superboy was given a new series outside of DCU continuity while still being a part of the Silver/Bronze Age Superman's past. He was also the subject of the first DC direct market-only comic in December 1979. But it all became moot after Crisis On Infinite Earths gave Superman a new history without Superboy. Or so we thought. There must be something about putting a teen-age boy in tights that fuels constant demands for his return. There's also the prospect for some of vicariously reliving their teens with invulnerability. I just wish he could show a little more invulnerability to acidification.

ADMIN01: Here Comes Summer

Sorry, no scans this time. This is the first time I've done an administrative post because, with summer coming I thought I'd add a little green to the background. Then, while I was at it I widened the main text area. Then I added a few gadgets and removed things that were redundant. I was almost feeling like a responsible adult until I realized that many more people are probably reading the posts on mobile devices now than when I worked on different blogs years ago. Since I don't use a mobile/smart phone, I have no idea if the changes have had a negative effect on the experience of readers who do.

So, are you a mobile device user who can't get the gadgets to work? Has your loading/response time worsened? Does the text cut off in the middle of words? Are you a PC user who doesn't have any of those problems, but the green color makes you nauseous? Any feedback in the comments below or on G+ will be seen.

Siiiiggggghhhh.... Ok, I know I said no scans and then asked for help with something, and now I feel guilty.
Since you've been accommodating enough to read this far, how about something that wouldn't have justified an entire post on its own? No need for it to go to waste. This is a chase card from a set of ALF trading cards (Topps, 1987).

You're welcome. I think.