Dark Shadows

In the late sixties, while our older siblings were into CSN and Hendrix, most of us ten year olds were hooked on a soap opera! Not just any soap, mind you, this was the unique, bizarre and downright cheesy DARK SHADOWS. DS began as a "gothic" serial about a hapless heroine and her run-ins with mysterious strangers and ghostly apparitions at an old mansion in New England.
The kids started watching after they added a vampire and began systematically working through the horror cliches. They had a ghost, a werewolf, a Jekyll/Hyde character, a Frankenstein-like monster, a Dorian Gray plot and even a Lovecraft rip-off! For many of us, this was our first exposure to HP! Time travel became a staple and the series would spend months in parallel universes allowing the same repertory company of actors to consistently play different characters! Genius! All the while on a budget and timetable that allowed for no retakes when lines were forgotten, when propmen tripped through the background or when cardboard headstones swayed in the breeze of the studio fans. The music was memorable and led to several singles and a bestselling soundtrack album! The acting was usually over the top. Jonathan Frid as the good/bad vampire Barnabas Collins had been trained in Shakespeare. Grayson Hall had appeared with Richard Burton in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, Joan Bennett was a real living legend of old Hollywood. They all did their best but no one would probably consider this their finest moments.
Enter the movies. HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS was a streamlined version of the original Barnabas storyline only with no need for the character to "turn good", he remains a traditional evil bloodsucker here. Freed from his coffin after more than a century, Barnabas insinuates himself into the modern day Collins household at spooky Collinwood and proceeds to plan a wedding with the woman he feels must be the reincarnation of his lost love, Josette.
The film is moody, atmospheric and much bloodier than the TV series but offers all of the actors a chance to show what they could really do. Frid is quite charismatic onscreen and other actors like Thayer David and John Karlen are shown to good potential. Both of the latter went on to successful character actor careers after DARK SHADOWS with David's best role arguably being as the definitive Nero Wolfe in a pilot movie and Karlen (who chewed the scenery constantly on the soap!) getting an Emmy for TV's CAGNEY AND LACY.

Since the series was still airing five days a week while the film was shot, the TV version had to concentrate on a storyline without any of the main characters for months! Barnabas was supposedly chained in his coffin during this time as I recall. After he got out, additional cast members were carted away to do the semi-sequel, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS. Although an acceptable film, this one was a franchise killer as few of the performers played their trademark TV roles in the picture. David(Quentin Collins) Selby, by this time a teen idol on TIGER BEAT covers monthly, appeared sans-sideburns as "Charles" Collins. His wife was played by Kate Jackson whose first role had been as a mute ghost on the TV version. The all-new plot dealt with the coniving Angelique, the beautiful but evil witch portrayed by Lara Parker both here and on the serial. It was roundly ignored and hopes of continuing the franchise on the big screen went with it. The series itself had soon run its course, also, and we ten year old boys, now twelve or so, were moving on to discover twelve year old girls.
Kathryn Leigh Scott who played Barnabas' love interest in the movie formed her own publishing company to put out a DS memoir. This led to several more DS books and a number of conventions and reunions. The series became popular on video and the Sci-Fi channel and was revived in an all new big budget version on one of the networks!
Notice above however, the picture of Frid as Barnabas guest starring on an episode of the long-running TV kids' show, BOZO THE CLOWN. There were also DARK SHADOWS comic books, a newspaper comic strip, plastic models, toys, games and a long-running and virtually unreadable series of paperback novels! DS may never have been intended for kids but that's the audience it got and for one brief period it was absolute magic...if you were ten.

GL

At left is a picture of me taken about twenty years ago, photoshopped into a picture of Green Lantern about a year back. It was an early effort with the software so be kind. Anyway, the first letter I ever wrote was to a 1966 issue of GREEN LANTERN. Yesterday, while picking up the aforementioned SIMPSONS extravaganza, I also picked up DC's incredible SHOWCASE GREEN LANTERN, a 9.95 volume featuring 500 or so pages that reprint GL's three initial try-out issues as well as the first 17 issues of his own title! A considerable amount of this early stuff (not being able to afford the expensive Archive editions) is stuff that was new to me. Incredibly innocent and fun, you can tell writer John Broome is feeling his way with the scripts and characters and you can watch Gil Kane's artwork blossom as the book goes on. ( I met Gil Kane once and he looked exactly like a Gil Kane drawing!) So much fun! Over the years , they've screwed with the character of Hal Jordan probably more than any other major super-hero. I really can't even look at the "current" version but, you see, that's the beauty of it! Now that DC has jumped on the inexpensive, telephone-book sized reprint bandwagon, I don't have to look at it! I have the good stuff right here! Thanks, DC and special thanks to Mssrs. Broome and Kane, et al. wherever they are.

Red-Neck!

Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin recommended picking up this year's BART SIMPSON'S TREEHOUSE OF HORROR that features, among other cool things, Bernie Wrightson and Len Wein's Simpsonized parody of their classic SWAMP THING! Well, I did and that got me thinking back to that 1970's issue of ESQUIRE where top comic book artists of the day were reportedly asked to create the heroes of the future. Here we have Berni(e) Wrightson's supposed take on that theme. I don't know...seems to me like Wrightson wasn't really taking the task seriously. I also have to wonder (and I know I could check the dates but I'm not really that interested) if ol' Bern had seen underground artist Larry Welz' CAPTAIN GUTS, a series about a very similar looking "hero" who got his power from beer and fought hippies, women's libbers, minorities and other perceived threats to conservative society at that time. Welz left his rather limited character behind when he came up with CHERRY, a sort of dirty underground ARCHIE series. Proving that sex sells, I believe CHERRY is STILL published occassionally today, having outlived the undergrounds by decades. As for ESQUIRE, you may never see it if you only frequent comics shops but I understand that it continues to sell reasonably well (after some seventy years I believe) in the non-geek outlets.

OF MUNSTERS AND OLD FRIENDS

THE MUNSTERS’ REVENGE was a 1981 TV movie that came 15 years after MUNSTER GO HOME appeared in theaters and before the first of several “revival” series. The really cool thing here was that the great Fred Gwynne, after years of fighting his “Herman Munster” image, agreed to play the role again and does so marvelously. His Herman is such a likable lummox and such an incredible creation! None of the imitators who have taken on the role since have been able to fully achieve the bizarre sense of humanity that Gwynne somehow brought to what by all rights should have been a one dimensional role.
In the years since the TV series ended, (and on up to today!) Al Lewis had pretty much never stopped playing his role as Grandpa! Fred and Al together are so much fun to watch here. They function as a monstrous modern day Laurel and Hardy as they deal with the otherwise ludicrous plot that has comedy legend Sid Caesar creating robots in a wax museum for some such reason. Who cares? The attraction is the amazing chemistry between Herman and Grandpa. Certainly Fred Gwynne was a brilliant actor who deserved better than to be remembered as JUST Herman Munster but, like Karloff before him, he brought much more to that role than was written in the script.(One of my favorite Gwynne roles was in Ray Bradbury’s ANY FRIEND OF NICHOLAS NICKELBY’S IS A FRIEND OF MINE which I believe was an Afterschool Special). THE MUNSTERS’ REVENGE usually airs in October so keep an eye out! It isn’t great but it is fun!
Of special interest to me are two of the TV film’s co-stars. Ezra Stone (pictured in 1991) appears as one of the bad guys and Bob Hastings is the family’s visiting cousin, the Phantom of the Opera! My wife and I met both of these fine gentleman character actors through the Old Time Radio Conventions in the 1990’s so it is somewhat amazingly cool to see them on TV since I can say I worked with them, too! Stone was best known as radio’s typical teen, Henry Aldrich but grew into a prolific TV director perhaps best known for his credits on LOST IN SPACE and…THE MUNSTERS! Hastings was Archie Andrews in his radio incarnation but is probably remembered most for his TV roles on McHALE’S NAVY and ALL IN THE FAMILY where he owned the bar that Archie Bunker eventually bought! On the original MUNSTERS, he sometimes did the voice of the raven in the clock. I appeared opposite these two men in re-creations of THE ALDRICH FAMILY and an abridged radio script version of George S Kaufman’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU in 1991. Ezra Stone was scheduled to be the guest of honor at another Cincinnati show a couple years later but died a month before the show. He was replaced by Bob Hastings. Bob went on to become a mainstay of the convention and is heard in reruns as the voice of Commissioner Gordon in Paul Dini’s long-running BATMAN animated series. Bob turned 80 this year. I remember watching him as a kid on TV and in Disney films such as THE BOATNIKS and NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN and I’ve now acted beside him onstage more than a dozen times. My eight year old son saw him on a WONDER WOMAN rerun and said “There’s Uncle Bob again!” This year, we’re going to watch for THE MUNSTER’S REVENGE to air again. It may not be classic TV but it’s visiting with old friends and that’s always a good thing!

Angel's Halloween

Dipping back into our vast archive of Cincinnati newspaper TV magazines (or at least their covers) from the seventies, here we have starlet Angel Tompkins, then starring in TV's SEARCH (AKA PROBE). Here's a link to Angel's contemporary studio bio: Probe-Control Dedicated to the 1972 Series Search and the Pilot Movie Probe

Her later credits run the gamut from softcore sleaze to TV tearjerkers with a bizarre aside for the cult classic, LITTLE CIGARS in which she leads a troupe of midget gangsters (or to be politically correct, "gangsters who happen to be little persons"). Interestingly enough, however, she ran for the head of the Actors union a few years back, apparently being only narrowly beaten by William Daniels!
Happy Halloween, Angel! We remember you!

Paul Lynde

I swear to God, long after I knew what “gay” meant, it never occurred to me for a second that the late comedian Paul Lynde was gay. Most people seem to feel that he was the most obviously “outed” performer on television in the sixties and seventies (I always gave that honor to puppeteerWayland Flowers, myself). I even researched Lynde for my nigh-legendary, unpublished book of cartoon voice actors in the late eighties and still didn’t have a clue! A new arrival at the Library this week is CENTER SQUARE, THE PAUL LYNDE STORY, a smallish but detailed warts-and-all bio put out by the gay lifestyles magazine, THE ADVOCATE. This, along with the recent TV biography, reveal Paul to be a sad, troubled man whose talents for making people laugh were rarely utilized to their fullest. There’s quite a bit in the book about Paul’s annual returns to appear onstage in summer stock in his native Ohio. I never saw him there but I DID see his fellow HOLLYWOOD SQUARES co-stars Karen Valentine and Rose Marie (along with future star James Naughton) and their after show bull session with the audience was completely dominated by questions about…Paul Lynde. From cartoon voices to game shows to BEWITCHED reruns, you’re STILL making me laugh, Paul! I hope you’re happy these days.
Here's an incredible site with scores and scores of rare, hilarious clips of Paul Lynde!http://paullynde.info/clips.htm

Johnny West

Johnny West was the flagship character of Marx Toys' Best of the West line of cowboy action figures. I guess I got Johnny and his horse Thunderbolt in 1965 or 1966. Obviously, this was long after the real TV cowboy boom of the 1950's but I would have been six or seven and Westerns were still hot and not quite yet spaghettified. That year, I also got Chief Cherokee. Over the next few years, the line kept growing with the rest of the West family, more Indians, some cavalrymen, that stalwart hero(sic) General Custer, and lots and lots of horses including the fully posable Comanche (who, quite frankly, wouldn't stand up for more than two seconds). Ultimately I got about 50 to 75 percent of the dolls (Excuse me! Action figures!) but the problem was finding a place to keep them. It got to the point where you couldn't take them all outside to play with because you were too exhausted to do anything but pack 'em back up once you finally got out there! The horses alone took up a whole toybox. At one point my entire dresser top looked like a livery stable! Like all good things, Marx exploited it until it wasn't so good anymore. Sometime in the mid seventies, I traded all of my Best of the West figures to a guy in exchange for some old ADVENTURE COMICS. Actually, I kept a couple of the beautifully molded horses but even those have now gone away. All I have left is this lousy paper membership card which got you even less than the Archie Club card did!
Here's a link to a keen site with pictures of ALL of the Best of the West toys, pardner!
Ran's Realm Marx Johnny West Best of the West