Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 22

LAW AND DISORDER was a decidedly strange little R rated comedy-drama that snuck into second string theaters on its first run in 1974. Starring Carroll O’ Conner near the absolute height of his fame on the long-running ALL IN THE FAMILY (although I’ve always suspected it may have been shot earlier and shelved as witness the small role for then hot Karen Black) one would have thought the film might do better than it did. Instead, it went virtually unnoticed. O’Conner co-stars as a cabbie who, along with fellow New Yorker Ernest Borgnine (whose Academy Award winning career was then on a post-POSEIDON ADVENTURE upswing) becomes an amateur police officer in an attempt to clean up the neighborhood. At first it’s a lark and the pair bumble through their rounds like characters on a bad sitcom but eventually violent reality sets in and the picture gets dark. It drones on far too long before ending on a hackneyed note (that my father nonetheless loved!) but it has moments where it’s fun to watch Carroll prove he wasn’t just Archie Bunker and he and Borgnine play off each other quite well.

Green Lantern # 1 Ad

R. I. P. Christa Helm 11/21/49-2/12/77

Bob Oksner

Special thanks to Steven Rowe and Sam Kujava for verifying my tentative but sleep-deprived identification of Bob Oksner as the artist on the previous Bob Hope PSA. It actually got me thinking about Oksner and realizing I knew little or nothing about him even though he has long been a favorite artist. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that nobody from the best PLAYBOY cartoonists to Jazzy Johnny Romita (Senior) or even my revered and admired Wally Wood could draw prettier, sexier girls than Bob Oksner! Here are just a very few examples from the man who won the National Cartoonists Society Award for best comic book cartoonist at least twice in the early sixties along with a one-page bio that appeared in THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS.

Comic Buttons

Here's another 1940's ad for collecting Kellogg's PEP cereal's comic book character pins. This one is a fairly impressive looking piece of advertising (with a beanie!) except for one obvious flaw. I can just see the comic's colorists thinking to themselves: Hmmm...Blondie, ey? Wonder what color HER hair should be.

GI JOE

One of the very first toys I actually remember requesting (politely of course), roughly age six, was GI JOE. They were everywhere! This ad from a mid-sixties comic points out that the toy was familiar from television—commercials that is! I actually never had the Army guy, the Air Force guy or the Navy guy. No, "Santa" got me the Marine guy that year. No disrespect but I wasn’t even sure what a Marine WAS at that age! Perhaps adding to the confusion was the fact that the only accessory I ever got for my Marine Joe was the snowsuit set! Well, the only one we bought anyway. A few years later (1971 I believe) I traded Timmy Wheeler some comic books (Surprisingly, I don’t recall which ones) for the GI JOE helicopter. Now this thing was freakin’ humongous! The chopper blades alone had a wingspan of about three or four feet. I soon found out that was probably why Timmy traded it. Even though the blades were removable, you couldn’t store the darn thing! It was always there! Sigh.
Not long after my initial JOE, they came out with CAPTAIN ACTION and my collecting mentality (and perhaps the fact that no one I actually knew was in the service or had a brother in Vietnam or anything like that) led me to obsess on him for the next few years instead.
Toymaker Hasbro later revived, revised and reinvented GI JOE to be something very different (and to me not very interesting) from its initial action figure beginnings leading to a massively successful marketing campaign, TV series and long-running comic book!

Bob Hope in The Golden Rule-1964

Here's a 1964 DC PSA one pager featuring their licensed character Bob Hope. Well, technically it features the "real" Bob Hope, not the silly licensed character drawn by Bob Oksner (and later Neal Adams of all people!) for many years. I know the art style here but I can't place it. Is it Oksner? Chic Stone? Sam Kujava? Ummm...actually I know it's not Sam. I was just wondering if perhaps Sam, a longtime comics expert and sometime reader of this lowly blog, could identify the artist as I am totally blanking due to sleep deprivation!