Archive for Stuff I Like

| March 29, 2012
Comments Off on Carnival Time: Dreamland Amusements and Sellner Manufacturing

Carnival Time: Dreamland Amusements and Sellner Manufacturing

Anchors Away, the one-of-a-kind amusement ride from Sellner Manufacturing

This past Sunday, I took my three boys to a local carnival, set up in the big parking lot behind the Potomac Mills Mall in Woodbridge, Virginia. The carnival was running a “threatening weather special” on unlimited rides bracelets, and between the special and a set of $5 off coupons, I was able to buy each boy a bracelet for $15 apiece, which seemed reasonable (especially given that buying ride tickets would mean spending $3 or $4 per ride per child, which would very quickly eviscerate my wallet).

When I was a kid, I was a tremendous fan of carnival rides. I begged my parents to take me to any neighborhood or church carnival I heard about, and I’d squeeze in as many rides on the Zipper, the Octopus/Spider, the Tilt-A-Whirl, and the Rock-N-Roll as I could.

My longest continual carnival ride came in high school, when my theater club, the Pioneer Players, raised funds for our trip to the State Thespian Competition by hiring out all the members of our club as extras on the set of the low-budget horror film, The Funhouse, directed by Tobe Hooper and filmed in North Miami in 1981. Nearly all of the film takes place on a carnival midway, and the filmmakers needed hundreds of extras to ride the rides and play games and walk around eating corndogs and fried dough. (The filming took place on the grounds of the old Ivan Tors Studio on 125th Street in North Miami, where Flipper and other TV shows had been produced.) My job turned out to be riding the Sizzler, which twists and twirls you around and around and around. Turned out I had to ride the Sizzler for more than five hours straight, from about 9 PM to 2 AM. On a very chilly night (for North Miami, that is… it was probably in the 50s). Good thing I had a strong stomach back then. I doubt I could handle the Sizzler for five minutes straight at my age now, much less for five hours. The producers called things to a halt a little before 2 AM and invited all us extras into a chow tent for some hot chocolate and hamburgers. By that time I was very hungry and VERY cold (not to mention very tired), so I appreciated their largess.

Anyway, my kids are about as nuts for carnival rides as I once was. So I felt really good about being able to buy them unlimited rides bracelets, which meant I wouldn’t have to carefully ration their rides, like I had during every other trip to a carnival we’ve made as a family. My surprise of the afternoon was how good I ended up feeling about the workers on the midway. There is a widespread stereotype of carnival workers (“carnies”) being, well, skeevy, greasy, ill-mannered, and generally unpleasant. I won’t say that I’ve never had the displeasure of interacting with carnival workers who lived down to the stereotype. However, that didn’t occur at this carnival, operated by Dreamland Amusements. The workers I had the pleasure to interact with were friendly, helpful, and attentive to my anxiety that my kids should be properly strapped and buckled into rides (I almost had a panic attack when I saw that Judah, my five-year-old, had wrapped the bumper car seat belt around his neck after climbing in next to his older brother Levi, but the operator assured me he would sort Judah out, and he did).

One employee was especially friendly, talkative, and helpful. He operated a ride called Anchors Away, a pair of pirate ships that swung on half-moon-shaped tracks, giving the riders a cascading back-and-forth swinging ride (there’s a photo of the ride at the top of this post). All three boys initially rode Anchors Away together. The operator, a man in his sixties, surprised me by showing genuine enthusiasm for children, a quality I don’t typically see in this sort of setting – he laughed with them and encouraged them to raise their arms into the air while the ride swung them back and forth. At first, I wasn’t sure that Judah was enjoying himself. He had a very disconcerted expression the first couple of swings. But then he raised his arms like his brothers were doing, and by the end of the ride he was smiling and laughing. They all asked to ride it again, and since they had ride bracelets, I said, “Sure! Why not?” But when his two older brothers said they wanted to go next door to ride the Sky Hawk, a ride too advanced for Judah, Judah said he wanted to stay and ride Anchors Away some more.

He ended up riding it eight times in a row, and he would’ve kept right on riding it if I had let him. Once, when there were no other children or adults in line with him, the operator even let him ride it all by himself. The operator told me that recently, at a State Fair in Tampa, Florida, a mother had let her little girl, about Judah’s age, ride Anchors Away all day long. I noticed a sign hanging from the guard railing surrounding the ride. It gave a brief history of this particular Anchors Away ride, one-of-a-kind. The ride had been designed by Bruce Sellner, president of Sellner Manufacturing of Faribault, Minnesota, in the mid-1990s. Mr. Sellner had intended for Anchors Away to become a new mainstay of Sellner Manufacturing. However, he passed away shortly after designing the ride and seeing the first one built, and the company decided that it would build and sell only that initial unit. (Did they do this as a memorial for Bruce Sellner? It seems like a better memorial would’ve been to keep building more units of the last ride design he had championed. But maybe his family members who took over the business after his death decided the business model for making more of them no longer stood.) The one and only Anchors Away was sold to a West Coast carnival company, which owned it until last year, when Dreamland Amusements bought it. The sign announced that Dreamland Amusements was proud to bring the only Anchors Away to carnival-goers on the East Coast for the first time.

I wish more carnivals would do this sort of thing – publicize what is unique about their rides and attractions. I’m sure individual rides must take on lives and histories of their own, considering that many of them travel around the country for decades. The rides at Dreamland Amusements range in age from at least my age (I was born in 1964) to less than a year old (they purchased their one-truck Himalaya ride, manufactured by Wisdom Rides, in 2011, and their Dizzy Dragons kiddy ride is also pretty new). The oldest ride I saw probably dates to the mid-1960s; it was a kiddy automobile racing ride, with miniature cars mounted on a turntable. I can pretty much date it to around 1965 or 1966 because all of the cars were either first generation Ford Mustangs (first built in 1964) or early 1960s Corvette Mako Shark concept cars (the concept car precursors to the second generation Stingray Corvettes that came out in 1968). That modest little ride has seen quite a lot of use; how many thousands of kids have sat inside those miniature Mustangs and Corvettes and twirled their steering wheels over the past forty-five years? It is a little staggering to think how many times the ride has been put together and taken apart during its career, considering that it gets disassembled at the end of each show, mounted in pieces on a truck, then reassembled at the next show a week or two later. I’ll bet the long-time carnival workers get pretty attached to and sentimental about the rides they work with, considering that they take them apart and put them together probably between twenty and thirty times each year, then spend long hours operating them in-between.

The Water Toboggan, Sellner Manufacturing's first amusement ride

A happy landing on Sellner's Water Tobaggan

The day after taking the kids to the carnival, I looked up the history of Sellner Manufacturing, the makers of the one and only Anchors Away. The company got started way back in 1923 by Herbert W. Sellner (grandfather of Bruce Sellner, who invented Anchors Away). The first ride Herbert manufactured was the Water-Toboggan Slide, designed for swimming parks on lakes. Boy, does that look like it was fun! Check out these photos. Can you imagine riding a toboggan down that long, tall, steep slide, then skimming a hundred feet across the surface of a lake? What a thrill that must’ve been!

But Sellner Manufacturing’s biggest success and greatest claim to fame rolled out a few years later, in 1926, when Herbert Sellmer invented the Tilt-A-Whirl. They manufactured hundreds of the original design, and they continue to build updated models today (Sellner Manufacturing, a family-owned company for most of its existence, was purchased by Larson International in 2011).

Sellner's Tilt-A-Whirl ride in the 1940s

Take a look at this photo of a Tilt-A-Whirl from the 1940s. I’ll bet lots of readers my age or even a little younger will recognize the design. I rode Tilt-A-Whirls exactly like the one in the photo throughout the 1970s, and I’ll bet if I were to rent a copy of The Funhouse from Netflicks, I’d see one of the old-style Tilt-A-Whirls spinning on that haunted midway where I rode a Sizzler for five hours straight.

Just for comparison’s sake, here’s a photo of a modern-day Tilt-A-Whirl, a custom designed Mardi Gras version Sellner Manufacturing built for New Orleans’ City Park Story Land after Hurricane Katrina destroyed all of the park’s original amusement rides.

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags:
| February 12, 2012
4 comments

A Stay at the Historic Roosevelt Hotel

This week I’ll be back down in New Orleans for work, and I’m fortunate enough to be staying at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of the Central Business District, on Baronne Street just off world-famous Canal Street. During the twenty-one years I lived in the city, the hotel was known as the Fairmont. Built in 1893 as the Grunewald Hotel, the building received a 400-room annex in 1908, then was renamed the Roosevelt Hotel in 1923 to honor President Teddy Roosevelt, who had stayed at the hotel on a number of occasions. In 1965, its name was changed yet again, this time to the Fairmont Hotel. In August, 2005, the hotel’s basement and a number of its guest rooms were flooded with ten feet of water from Lake Pontchartrain following Hurricane Katrina’s rupture of the flood protection levees. The building sat vacant for four years, until it was restored and reopened as part of Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria group in June, 2009.

Dara and I used to have late-night dinners at the Fairmont’s casual restaurant, Bailey’s, which had a great Manhattan vibe (and which served up terrific lox and onion omelettes, one of the only places in New Orleans that offered them). I used to take peeks in the Sazerac Bar and the Blue Room after a meal at Bailey’s or while walking through the hotel’s annual Christmas Wonderland display. The Blue Room, opened in 1935, played host to Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Marlene Dietrich, and Sonny and Cher, among many famous names. Here’s an entertaining story on the many entertainers who played the Blue Room (which is now open again). Here are some other wonderful images of the Blue Room over the decades.

One fact about the Grunewald/Roosevelt Hotel which I hadn’t been aware of prior to putting together this post was that the hotel hosted America’s first nightclub, The Cave. The Cave was opened in 1908 as part of the hotel’s expansion and was located in the basement, one level below where the Blue Room would open in 1935. Meant to make visitors feel like they were dining in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, The Cave featured full-size stalactites, stalacmites, and grotto fountains populated by naked nymphs. This reportedly took 700,000 pounds of plaster to accomplish. Many early jazz bands played The Cave until it was closed in 1930 and the space was turned into the hotel’s laundry. Postcards of The Cave show an unearthly dining room, akin to a set from Georges Melies’ pioneering science fiction film A Voyage to the Moon. For your viewing pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, may I present The Cave…

Here are some other Roosevelt Hotel links you may enjoy:

Great old photographs of the Roosevelt Hotel

The story of the connection between the Kingfish, Governor Huey P. Long, and the Roosevelt Hotel

Evocative images from the Grunewald/Roosevelt Hotel’s early days, including a stay by Elvis during the making of King Creole

Facinating story on the restoration of the Katrina-damaged Fairmont Hotel into the Roosevelt Hotel

Another article on the reopening of the Roosevelt Hotel, this one from USA Today

An article on The Roosevelt Review, the hotel’s house organ, published from 1937 to 1968, filled with articles on New Orleans written by local historians

One last thing–I stumbled upon a photograph of Sharkey Bonano (in the hat, playing the trumpet) and His Kings of Dixieland playing the Blue Room in 1955. Back when I was living on Tchoupitoulas Street and then Constance Street in Uptown New Orleans, I used to do all my writing at the CC’s Coffeehouse at Jefferson Avenue and Magazine Street. That’s where I wrote Fat White Vampire Blues. One of the regulars at CC’s was an elderly gentleman who used to sing for his coffee. He’d serennade patrons who expressed interest in hearing an old standard, and they’d pay him by buying him a cup of coffee or a muffin. Really nice old fellow. He used to talk all the time about his friend Sharkey, the bandleader, who he used to sing with back in the 1960s. He talked about him like he was a father or an older brother, often with tears in his eyes as he remembered.

Sharkey Bonano and His Kings of Dixieland playing the Blue Room in 1955

Category: Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| February 9, 2012
5 comments

Miyazaki’s Steampunk Battleships

A fleet of steampunk battleships seen in Howl's Moving Castle

I recently had the great pleasure of seeing Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature Howl’s Moving Castle, based on the 1986 young adult fantasy novel by British writer Dianna Wynne Jones. I have long adored the aesthetic shared by the majority of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli features, a kind of lush, lyrical, impressionistic steampunk look (the first of his movies I saw was Spirited Away, still one of my favorite films of the 2000s). Howl’s Moving Castle features some of the same types of fantastical airships I had seen in Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service, but what really caught my eye and made me say “Hey! WOW!” were the battleships.

Miyazaki's rendition of one of his film's battleships

Battleships do not play a major role in Howl’s Moving Castle. However, in Miyazaki’s animated version, the country that protagonists Howl and Sophie live in becomes pulled into a regional war, and several scenes show fleets of battleships setting out for battle or limping back to harbor in severely damaged condition. (Many more of the war scenes involve giant multi-engine bombers and oddball flying machines, since one of the wizard Howl’s guises is that of a giant black bird, and he tries several times to disrupt the air war before his country’s cities are bombed.)

When the battleships appeared, what made me sit up and take notice was the fact that they seemed to be based on French pre-dreadnought battleships of the 1880s and 1890s, the most baroque and distinctive period of French shipbuilding. They also looked to owe a debt to the illustrations of French artist and writer Albert Robida (1848-1926), who, in his prime, competed with Jules Verne for popularity and notoriety as the leading French futurist. Not only Miyazaki’s battleships, but also his airships and even the design of Howl’s Moving Castle itself seemed to pay homage to the distinctive illustrations and fancies of Robida, who is nowadays almost entirely forgotten.

French battleship Charles Martel, commissioned in 1896, epitomized the "French look" for battleships

I confess to being both a science fiction/fantasy geek AND a naval geek. My favorite decades of naval history begin in the 1860s with the introduction of ironclads and extend out to the eve of World War One. The ships constructed between 1860 and 1910 stand as some of the most bizarre (and interesting) ever made, because they were designed and built during years of extremely rapid technological change, change which occurred so quickly that a ship designed, say, in 1880 was considered thoroughly obsolete by the time it was commissioned in 1888. Metallurgy was advancing rapidly in those years, with iron armor (usually backed by teak wood) being replaced by compound armor (steel layered over iron layered over wood), which was in turn replaced by nickel-steel armor (sometimes referred to as Harvey armor), which in turn was made obsolete by Krupp face-hardened steel armor. At the same time armor was rapidly improving, so were the size, range, and accuracy of cannons, not to mention the introduction of new anti-warship weapons, such as submarines, self-propelled torpedoes, and fast torpedo boats.

French battleship Massena, commissioned in 1898, showing typical French tumblehome, massive masts, and plethora of long-barreled cannons

The French Navy built the first practical seagoing ironclad, La Glorie, in 1860, forcing their British rivals to launch an even more powerful ironclad, HMS Warrior, later that same year. Early French and British ironclads looked not too much different from the wooden-walled battleships and frigates which had preceded them, having their guns arrayed on the broadsides and mounting vast assortments of sails to back up their steam engines. However, in the 1870s, with the introduction of turrets and barbettes to carry heavy guns and the gradual abandonment of sail, French and British ironclad designs sharply diverged.

The British came to favor turret ships of low freeboard, epitomized by HMS Devastation and HMS Thunderer, the first seagoing ironclads to forego sails altogether. Although they built their oddball battleships, as well (HMS Inflexible and the unlucky HMS Victoria among the weirder), by about 1890 British battleships had come to follow a well-balanced, standard model of moderate freeboard combined with a main armament of four twelve or thirteen inch guns, in one hooded barbette forward and one aft, with secondary guns mounted in sponsons on the broadside.

French battleship Jaureguiberry, commissioned in 1897

The French Navy, which viewed the Royal Navy as its primary potential adversary throughout the nineteenth century, went in a different direction with their battleships. In retrospect, it seems as though most French battleships were designed more with threatening, imposing looks in mind than maximum fighting efficiency (Italian naval architects of the period also tended to build visually impressive battleships with tremendous guns, imposing warships which were not very effective or economical; maybe this was a Mediterranean thing?). French designers favored what came to be known as “fierce face.” Most of their battleships combined high freeboard with exaggerated tumblehome (meaning that the ships were much wider at the waterline than at the main deck, with sides that sloped inward and allowed for turrets or barbettes mounted on the broadsides which could fire fore, aft, or to the side). They studded their ships with turrets or barbettes seemingly mounted anywhere they could fit. The cannons were mounted near the fronts of small diameter turrets or barbettes so that the lengths of their barrels would appear dramatically and menacingly elongated. Additionally, French naval designers saddled their ships with massive superstructures and masts of extreme thickness, festooned with large, top-heavy fighting tops mounting small, anti-torpedo boat guns.

French battleship Hoche, commissioned in 1890, known as "the Floating Hotel"

This made for battleships which were enormously impressive to look at. I’m sure many non-expert observers, when viewing French and British battleships side by side (say, at a port visit or a Royal Naval Review), must have assumed the French ships would quickly clear the seas of their British counterparts in a fight. The British and French battle fleets never came to blows during the ironclad or pre-dreadnought eras (the only occasion on which French and British battleships would exchange fire occurred much later, during the tragic British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria in 1940, after the capitulation of France to Germany, when the British felt they had to prevent the French fleet from being taken over by the Germans). So the issue of which rival battlefleet would prevail in a fight was never conclusively settled. The French fleet was not without its advantages; for several stretches during the late nineteenth century, its armor and cannons were technically superior to those of the British.

French battleship Bouvet, commissioned in 1898, sunk by a Turkish mine in 1915

However, battleships built by British yards did fight battleships either built by French yards or modeled on French designs at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The Russian Baltic Fleet, whose battleships had either been built by French yards or copied from French originals, was annihilated by the Japanese fleet, whose battleships had all been built in British yards and modeled on contemporaneous British designs. Also, on March 18, 1915, when the British and French fleets were allied in their efforts to force the Dardanelles Straits, two British pre-dreadnoughts, HMS Irresistible and HMS Ocean, and one French pre-dreadnought, the Bouvet, were sunk by Turkish mines. The two British battleships remained afloat for several hours, enough time for their crews to be evacuated onto other ships. The Bouvet, however, handicapped by her enormous top-weight and lacking the stability of her British contemporaries, turned turtle in less than three minutes, trapping and drowning 600 of her crew.

Albert Robida's famous rendition of the floating fortresses of the future, circa 1887

Aside from the inspiration provided by actual French battleships of the late nineteenth century, which Miyazaki has acknowledged, he must also have received significant visual inspiration from Albert Robida. Robida was both a writer and an artist, a sort of proto-graphic novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was enormously popular between 1880 and World War One, best known for a trio of futuristic illustrated novels, Le Vingtieme Siecle (1883), La Guerre au Vingtieme Siecle (1887), and Le Vingtieme Siecle—La Vie Electrique (1890). Between 1908 and 1910, he provided 520 illustrations, many of them featuring fantastical flying machines and enormous tank-like mobile land fortresses, for the children’s serialized adventure novel La Guerre Infernale, whose installments appeared every Saturday. It described a world war, fought primarily in the air, between Germany and Britain in Europe and the United States and Japan in the Pacific. His illustrations, which influenced dozens of subsequent science fiction and fantasy artists, must be understood as foundational to the steampunk aesthetic.

Albert Robida's airships, some of the 520 illustrations he created for the weekly serial "La Guerre Infernale," circa 1908

One of Albert Robida's land battleships, looking not too dissimilar from Miyazaki's design for Howl's Moving Castle

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Many of the appealingly quirky airships which populate the Miyazaki films look very much like Robida’s drawings. Miyazaki’s design of Howl’s Moving Castle looks a lot like a cross between one of Robida’s mobile land fortresses and a French pre-dreadnought such as the Charles Martel. And then there are Miyazaki’s wonderful battleships. In his 1887 novel about the future of warfare, Rodiba included illustrations of ludicrously top-heavy battleships, virtual floating fortresses (which, if built, would neither have floated nor remained upright). Strange as these fanciful warships may seem to modern eyes (and as wonderfully bizarre as the Miyazaki steampunk battleships look), they were simply exaggerations of battleships which were actually built by the French Navy, warships which were among the most visually distinctive ever to sail the seas.

Director Hayao Miyazaki with an image of Howl's Moving Castle

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Stuff I Like | Tags:
| January 22, 2012
Comments Off on More Handmade Monsters!

More Handmade Monsters!

Here to save the planet... it's Mothra!

My youngest son, Judah, continues to request handmade monster toys, so I continue to make them. My first efforts were Gorgo and Tarantula (seen here in this earlier post). Gorgo was a simple paper puppet, two layers of construction paper glued together over a straw. Tarantula, however, was a more elaborate project, involving two plastic token cups from Chuck E. Cheese’s, a ball of black yarn, and several dozen black pipe cleaners. I made sure to over-build that sucker, reinforcing his legs six ways to Sunday (or eight ways to Sunday, given the number of legs).

Now I just need those two tiny Japanese twin gals...

Next up, per Judah’s instructions, was Mothra. Making a Mothra isn’t too hard; making a Mothra that won’t get destroyed after one or two sessions of play is a taller order. Mothra’s body is a cardboard toilet paper roll, coated in yellow construction paper, with pipe cleaner legs inserted through holes. Her wings are two layers of construction paper, reinforced on top with “veins” of variously colored pipe cleaners (which also give the wings some stiffness). Her head is construction paper with fuzzy ball eyes and antennae made of Bendaroos (wax-coated string). So far, she has avoided mortal damage, and she has been in Judah’s hands for over a month. So I guess I must’ve built her right.

Ghidorah vs. Godzilla!

Having seen the “Ghidorah Trilogy” (Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster; Monster Zero; and Destroy All Monsters), of course Judah would want a Ghidorah for his collection (and professionally made Ghidorah toys aren’t too common, at least not here in the States). I’d originally intended to make a simple two-dimensional Ghidorah puppet, along the lines of what I’d done with Gorgo, but then I got a bit more ambitious. I couldn’t figure out a workable way for me to make him fully three-dimensional, but by making his heads, wings, torso, and legs separately and then slotting them together, I was able to make him at least partially three-dimensional, plus able to stand on his own (a definite plus in a household inhabited by a kitten who loves to chew paper).

Another view of the wintry grudge match

I printed out a nice, cartoony drawing of Ghidorah from the deviantart.com site and cut out portions to use for the fronts of Ghidorah’s heads and legs, the most difficult parts to draw, then drew the wings and torso freehand. I did my best to draw the reverse sides of his legs and feet and of his heads and necks on another sheet of construction paper, plus reverse sides of his wings and torso. I then traced the parts onto a sheet of corrugated cardboard, which would give all the parts the necessary stiffness. I cut everything out, glued the construction paper “skins” over the cardboard “skeleton,” and then, after it had all dried, cut slots into the various parts and slotted and glued them together, sort of like how you would put together a cardboard model of an airplane. My finished product didn’t come out exactly proportional (the torso and wings are too big for the heads and legs), but he turned out exactly the right scale to battle Judah’s plastic Godzilla, which is more important. And from certain angles, he is rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Besides, Ghidorah was always sort of a lumpy, ungainly monster, anyway, at least in the original 1960s Toho films.

The best thing about Yongary, Monster From the Deep--the hero's 1964 Corvair convertible

This past week was a bad one, health-wise, for my family. One by one, we all came down with bouts of stomach flu. Judah and Asher caught it nearly simultaneously, and while they were on the mend, I stayed home with them to give Dara a bit of a break. The three of us watched Yongary, Monster From the Deep (1967). This was one giant monster picture I had somehow not managed to see as a kid. Yongary is essentially a South Korean Godzilla, with the monster-loving little kid from Gamera, the Invincible tossed in for good measure. The model cities weren’t bad, at least on par with those seen in the early Gamera movies, but the monster costume was a step down from those featured in the Gamera creature-fests, about as silly looking as the average kaiju in an episode of Ultraman.

The worst thing about Yongary, Monster From the Deep--the heroine's absurdly obnoxious little brother, Icho

What made the film stand out in my eyes were two things — the hero drove a splendid 1964 Chevy Corvair convertible, and Icho, the six or seven-year-old kid whom the filmmakers unwisely (and sadistically) foisted on us for much of the film, was simply the most detestable and obnoxious child character I have ever witnessed in any monster movie, ever. Worse than any of the kids in the Gamera movies (even that horrid, virtually unwatchable little Caucasian girl who wore a Scottish tam in War of the Planets). Worse than the kid in Godzilla’s Revenge. Worse, quite possibly, than any of the kids in The Lemon Drop Kids Meet a Brooklyn Gorilla (although I’ll admit I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t say for certain). One gizmo that plays a role in the movie’s plot is an itching ray (yes, an itching ray) developed by the hero (for God knows what reason; he’s already invented it when the film begins, before Yongary ever appears). The first time we meet Icho, he is hiding in the bushes, having stolen his new brother-in-law’s invention, and he zaps his sister and her new husband with the itching ray as they drive past (in that splendid Corvair convertible), forcing them to pull over and jump out of their clothes while they are on their way to their honeymoon. Icho gets even more obnoxious as the film rolls on. At one point, the hero scientist and the military have found a way to render Yongary unconscious, after he has knocked down most of those parts of Seoul that weren’t already knocked down during the Korean War. What does cute little Icho do? He steals the itching ray again, runs to the giant monster’s side, and wakes him up. Just as a goof, you know. Yongary then proceeds to knock down those parts of Seoul he missed the first time around. At that point, I was rooting for the big lizard to squash the kid already. Doesn’t happen. Evil triumphs; Yongary dies.

View from my back deck, January 21, 2012

But enough about itch-inducing child actors. We got a bit of wet snow last night, enough to lightly coat our back yard and replenish our stream. Knowing I’d be posting about giant monster movies, I began wondering whether any of them had taken place in the wintertime, during a heavy snowfall. Dozens of them took place in the desert, in the American Southwest, near where the atomic tests were carried out. All of the Japanese kaiju movies that I can recall took place in the summertime, with the exception of the early parts of Gigantis the Fire Monster / Godzilla Raids Again, the second Godzilla movie, in which Godzilla (or a second Godzilla-like creature, the original having been thoroughly disintegrated by the oxygen destroyer at the close of Godzilla, King of the Monsters) and Anguilus are discovered fighting each other on a northerly, ice-covered island, before they both invade Japan. The Deadly Mantis begins in Antarctica, where the titular giant bug makes his first attack on humanity, but when he gets up to the cities of North America, it is summertime. Much of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, which features numerous giant creatures, takes place in a mysterious region of the Arctic, but that’s more a fantasy-adventure film than a traditional “giant monsters attack” movie. I haven’t seen The Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms in a long time, and I seem to recall that its climax takes place in Coney Island during a storm. Was it a snowstorm? If anyone has a good memory for this kind of thing, help me out here. I just think it would be neat to see New York City or Washington, DC or Tokyo (or even Seoul) get attacked by a gigantic lizard during a beautiful snowstorm.

(Ah, memory just kicked in; Peter Jackson’s New York City scenes in his recent remake of King Kong took place in the wintertime, one of the nicer touches in that film. Digital effects make much possible that perhaps weren’t so practicable during the era of miniature models.)

Category: Stuff I Like, Uncategorized | Tags: ,
| January 7, 2012
4 comments

What Do You Replace a Pontiac Aztek With?

Here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com, we do not shy away from asking the hard questions.

Today’s hard question: If one were faced with the necessity (or desire) of replacing a 2005 Burnt Orange Pontiak Aztek, what vehicle should one choose, given the offerings available in the marketplace?

A few caveats…

(1) This is NOT my personal vehicle I am replacing. The Pontiac in question belongs to my dad, Jerry Mellin, an 83 year-old retiree who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(2) I have no idea when or if Dad will ever want to give up his Aztek. He hardly puts any mileage on it, and the vehicle is almost ridiculously well maintained. The only reasons the issue even occurred to me are (a) my sister Robyn’s Chrysler PT Cruiser, formerly my dad’s daily driver, now has a humongous amount of miles on it, so Dad may be thinking of having the Aztek shipped to Tampa to replace the Chrysler; (b) I’m bored and it’s fun to think about goofy cars; and (c) I’m always looking for something to blog about.

Okay, now that those important caveats are out of the way, we may proceed. My dad has rather, ahem, “distinctive” tastes when it comes to vehicles. He spent most of his career as a salesman of folding cardboard boxes, and one of his salesman’s stratagems was to always wear a hideous tie on sales calls. He used the offensive ties as ice-breakers with his potential customers and their secretaries. Since his retirement to New Mexico, he has used his cars in sort of the same way, only with his buddies and all the new acquaintances he meets on his noodlings around town. Nothing pleases him more than to invite a new friend out for a cup of coffee, pick him up with the Aztek, and watch the horrified look of distaste appear on his friend’s face, accompanied by the inevitable question, “You bought one of THOSE…?”

Also, Dad has never relied entirely upon the manufacturer’s designers to supply the reverse of eye appeal. He is an avid customer of auto accessory shops and is the first in line whenever new models of bolt-on spoilers, fake hood scoops, and phony bullet hole decals are offered. He is very fond of utilizing enormous quantities of glue to affix various custom items to his interiors, which has made trading in his cars rather tricky at times; my dad is an artist of glue (oh, to have been a fly on the wall when his car salesman went to talk with his supervisor about the trade-in in private). He doesn’t go in for bling, mind you – it’s the opposite of bling he’s looking for. Or a kind of sideways bling. He’d probably call it “Retired Old Fart Bling.”

So, here are the stipulations with which I winnowed down the field:

(1) The vehicle must, in some way, echo the spirit of a 2005 Burnt Orange Pontiak Aztek with a glued-on fake hood scoop.

(2) Must not cost more than $25,000 out-the-door (closer to $20,000 would be preferable). This, unfortunately, rules out various Lincolns with their baleen whale snouts and that ridiculous looking Mercedes minivan/SUV thing, the R Class.

(3) Must seat at least four. Dad likes to take his buddies out for lunch and a movie. This rules out the Honda CRZ, which otherwise would be a strong contender.

(4) Must be available as a new vehicle. My dad has not bought a used car in all of his sixty years of purchasing vehicles. This rules out… well, loads of wonderful candidates, enough for me to spend days listing them.

So, without further ado, here are the candidates, listed in what, in my expert opinion, will likely be reverse order of preference.

8. Nissan Murano Cabriolet

This one is the dark-horse choice. I say that mainly because of its priceyness. Dad would have to find one of these as a heavily marked-down Demonstrator Special in order to keep the price below $25,000. Why not lease one, you ask? Dad had a bad experience with his last leased car, so I doubt he’d want to jump into that particular pool again. Plus, leasing would prohibit his customization efforts, unless he’d be willing to pay thousands to have the car reconditioned at the end of the lease.

Pluses:
–Athletic V-6 engine
–High uniqueness value (very, very few of them on the road)
–Worthy aesthetic successor to the late, lamented PT Cruiser Convertible
–The top goes down

Minuses:
–Pricey
–Would be hard to find a Demonstrator Special
–Only looks truly offensive with the convertible top up
–No room on the trunk lid for a tack-on spoiler

7. Fiat 500C

Pluses:
–Good gas mileage
–Would probably remind Dad of his old Morris Minor
–Closest thing to a Citroen CV2 on the market
–Pretty good uniqueness value (Fiat is selling in the U.S. only about a quarter of the numbers of 500s they’d projected)
–The top goes down (kinda-sorta)

Minuses:
–Kind of a chick car
–Not much room in that trunk
–Absence of any rear vision when the top is fully folded down
–With an auto transmission, might not have enough power to climb the hills between Albuquerque and Santa Fe
–Fix It Again Tony

6. Dodge Caliber

Pluses:
–About to be phased out by a new model, so dealers will be dumping them
–Spiritual descendant of the Chevy Citation hatchback and its X-car brethren (although the X-cars were arguably more attractive than the Caliber)
–Available in that becoming pea-soup-green color
–Fake hood scoop and spoiler are factory options

Minuses:
–Common as cockroaches
–The car you dread seeing waiting for you at the Budget Rent A Car lot
–Drives like a Chevy Citation hatchback (with the Iron Duke 4 cylinder motor)

5. Ford Transit Connect Wagon

Pluses:
–Has the oddest proportions this side of Sandra Bernhard’s face
–Lots of room for Dad’s tall friends, even if they wear hats
–He’ll never lose it in a crowded parking lot
–Able to transport Christmas trees home for his gentile friends

Minuses:
–Might be tempted to transport Christmas trees and throw out his back
–Could be mistaken for a taxi cab driver
–Might tip over in a strong cross wind
–Made in Turkey

4. Nissan Cube

Pluses:
–Great interior room for its size
–Looks like the box it came in; will remind Dad of his history selling cardboard boxes
–Available in a full line of garish colors
–Good gas mileage

Minuses:
–Not much in the way of get-up-and-go
–Funky styling makes for huge blind spots, likely collisions when backing up

3. Hyundai Veloster

Pluses:
–Looks like a jelly bean that’s been sucked on for a day or two
–Trick third door is a real conversation-starter
–Fun to drive
–Great warranty

Minuses:
–Limited head room for Dad’s buddies in the back seat
–May end up being a popular model
–Hyundai dealers not offering discounts on these (yet)

2. Kia Soul

Pluses:
–Especially fugly rear end
–Available with a wide variety of racing stripe packages
–Plenty of interior room for its size
–Good gas mileage
–More fun to drive than a Nissan Cube
–Cheap to buy
–Same great warranty as the Veloster

Minuses:
–May be too popular for its own good

And the winner, the worthiest successor to a 2005 Pontiac Aztek, is…

1. Nissan Juke

Pluses:
–A nose only a mother (or Jerry Mellin) could love
–So ugly it’s actually cute and interesting, sort of like a dung beetle
–More storage space than the Veloster
–Turbo comes standard, a definite conversation-starter
–Goes like a bat out of hell, even saddled with a Continuously Variable Transmission
–Most fun-to-drive vehicle on this list

Minuses:
–Nasty torque-steer if Dad floors it coming out of a turn

So, Dad, feel free to take my advice or disregard it. You may hold on to your Aztek until its plastic cladding falls off (and Robyn may refuse to accept it). But if you buy a Juke, just take it easy with that torque steer, okay?

Category: Stuff I Like |
| January 5, 2012
3 comments

Visit to the National Navy Museum (part 2)

Levi with quad 40mm anti-aircraft mount

The National Museum of the U.S. Navy is a treasure house, both inside and out. My recent post described the artifacts, some of them gargantuan, that occupy the lawn between the museum’s building and the Anacostia River, where the USS Barry is docked. Today’s post will cover some of the equally stunning (although less large) exhibits found inside the museum hall.

Any fan of the model maker’s art simply must visit the National Navy Museum. When I was a kid, my father, also a military and naval buff, put together plastic model kits for me as birthday and Hanukkah gifts. He built me a Bismarck, a HMS Rodney, and a USS Olympia, as well as a set of Hampton Roads opponents, USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. He regularly took me to hobby shops and to the Dade County Youth Fair, where we could see other model makers’ work on display, some of it very elaborate. However, nothing – absolutely nothing – I have ever seen in the way of scale models compares with the models which awaited me when the boys and I walked inside the Navy Museum.

Armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania

Both Levi and Judah have a funny little habit they engage in whenever something really, really excites them. They jump up and down and flap their arms. Well, I very nearly jumped up and down and flapped like a Canada goose when I saw the first model that awaited us, the USS Pennsylvania, an armored cruiser which served as part of the backbone of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, making up part of the “Big Eight” group of armored cruisers. The Pennsylvania is best known, however, as the US Navy’s first “aircraft carrier.” A little more than a hundred years ago, in 1911, she was outfitted with a temporary wooden take-off ramp on her stern and launched seaplanes, which landed in the water and were recovered by ship-mounted cranes. The model on display shows the Pennsylvania in her 1911 state with the temporary ramp installed. This is a big model, easily six feet long, built to a scale, if I remember correctly, of about 1 foot per 100 feet, a scale standard to nearly all the museum’s models.

Monitor USS Miantonomoh

One of the most unusual attractions of the Navy Museum is its outstanding collection of models and artifacts documenting the US Steel Navy, the ships which served from the period stretching from 1890 to the world cruise of the Great White Fleet in 1907-09. One ship which straddled naval epochs, bridging the gap between the US Navy’s ironclad period during the Civil War and its Steel Navy period leading into the Spanish-American War, was the monitor USS Miantonomoh. The history of the Miantonomoh‘s building, and that of her sister ships, is actually more interesting than nearly any of their operational histories. These vessels took longer to construct than any other ships built for the US Navy, reflecting the lowest period in the Navy’s long history. Their construction was begun in 1873 under a cloud of subterfuge. An incident on the high seas nearly led to war between Spain and the United States. The Secretary of the Navy was mortified to learn that the US Navy, had it been called upon to fight the Spanish fleet, had no modern, oceangoing armored ships ready to steam. Congress approved funds for five of the most recent double-turreted monitors to be repaired and modernized; these ironclads had been commissioned in the final year of the Civil War or shortly thereafter. The original Miantonomoh, one of this group, had been the first monitor to cross the Atlantic Ocean, back in 1867. However, by 1873, the five monitors, all with wooden hulls, had deteriorated so badly that they were not worth repairing.

USS Monadnock in heavy Pacific swells

So the Secretary of the Navy used the funds appropriated for repairs to begin building five entirely new monitors, each of which would be given the same name of one of the old monitors, so as to maintain the fiction that those old ironclads were being repaired and refitted. Running out of funds, the Secretary of the Navy gave the private shipyards dozens of Civil War-era monitors and sloops to scrap for additional building money. The scheme eventually came to light, and Congress directed that work on the five monitors be halted. Several years later, however, during another diplomatic crisis, Congress changed its mind and directed that the vessels be completed in various Navy Yards. The incomplete Miantonomoh was transferred to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. However, laggard appropriations and frequent changes in design dragged out construction times for another decade. The Miantonomoh did not enter service until 1891, seventeen years after her construction had been initiated. Her sisters and partial sister, the Puritan, did not enter Navy service until 1895-96, more than twenty years after their construction had begun. Contemporaries and rough equivalents of the British ironclad HMS Devastation, which had been commissioned in the early 1870s, the Miantonomoh and her sisters were thoroughly obsolete as frontline warships by the time they entered service. The major problem with the class can be seen in this photograph of the Miantonomoh‘s sister, USS Monadnock, crossing the Pacific to join Commodore Dewey’s squadron during the Spanish-American War. She made it, but the crossing was so treacherous that she spent the rest of her career on the western side of the Pacific with the US Asiatic Fleet, never daring to cross an ocean again.

Protected cruiser USS Baltimore

The protected cruiser USS Baltimore played a role in every major US conflict from the Spanish-American War to WWII. Commissioned in 1890 as Cruiser #3 of the New Navy, her first major duty was to transport the body of famous engineer John Ericsson, inventor of the US Monitor, to be buried in his native Sweden. She was one of Commodore Dewey’s ships at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War and participated in the Philippines operations which followed that war. Prior to the US involvement in WWI, she was converted to a minelayer, and in 1918 she helped lay anti-submarine minefields between Scotland and Ireland and in the North Sea, an effective deterrent against German U-boats. Between 1922 and 1942 she was laid up as a storage hulk at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and was present during the Japanese air raid on December 7, 1941.

Broadside 8" gun turret, armored cruiser USS Brooklyn

The USS Brooklyn was the most powerful of the first group of New Navy cruisers, mounting eight 8” guns, four of them mounted in French-style en echelon broadside turrets (one of which can be seen in my photograph of the model of the Brooklyn). Commissioned in 1896, she played a key role in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in July of 1898, where the main Spanish battle fleet was destroyed. The Brooklyn was hit twenty times by Spanish shells but suffered only one sailor killed. In 1905, she retrieved the remains of naval hero John Paul Jones from Cherbourg, France and delivered them to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where the body was reinterred. During WWI she served as the flagship of the US Asiatic Fleet and finished her lengthy career with the Pacific Fleet in 1921. The Brooklyn was the only US armored cruiser named for a city, rather than a state.

Battleship USS Kearsarge

Similarly, the USS Kearsarge was the only US battleship not named for a state; rather, she was named after the famous steam sloop of the Civil War, the vanquisher of the Confederate raider CSS Alabama (the museum also features models of the original Kearsarge and the Alabama). Commissioned in 1900, too late for service in the Spanish-American War, the Kearsarge nevertheless enjoyed a very lengthy and varied career in the US Navy. Never firing any of her guns in anger, she participated in the cruise of the Great White Fleet in 1907-09 and served as a training vessel during WW1. In 1920, she was converted to a heavy-lift crane ship. During WWII, she lifted and enabled the installation of guns, turrets, and armor plating for the battleships Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Alabama, as well as the cruisers Savanna and Chicago. She continued to serve as a heavy-lift vessel until decommissioned in 1955, five and a half decades after her first commissioning. The most notable feature of the Kearsarge’s design was her double-decker main turrets, with the turrets for her four 13” guns serving as the bases for turrets for her secondary armament of 8” guns. This arrangement caused blast interference between the 13” and 8” guns, however, and the arrangement was repeated in only one other class of US battleships (the Virginia class).

Ironclad CSS Virginia

Other outstanding models at the museum include a diorama of the CSS Virginia in drydock, completing her fitting out after her conversion from the steam frigate USS Merrimac; the USS South Carolina, the US Navy’s first all-big-gun battleship (designed before the famous HMS Dreadnought but completed several years after that history-making warship); and a tremendous model of one of the navy’s last dreadnought battleships, the USS Missouri. The model of the Missouri was built by the same technicians and craftsmen who built the actual ship; they spent an incredible 70,000 man hours working on the model, which is likely one of the finest ship models existent, anywhere.

Battle flag of USS Balao

The museum contains more than just scale models. There are numerous preserved cannons on display, the largest inside the museum being a twin 5″ gun mount from a WWII anti-aircraft cruiser. My boys enormously enjoyed sitting in the gunners’ seats of a quad 40mm anti-aircraft mount, which they were able to swivel and elevate. A display on American submarines contained fascinating models of some of the earliest US Navy submersibles, as well as two working periscopes, both of which poked out the museum’s roof and looked out onto the USS Barry. Another wonderfully appealing artifact is the battle flag of the submarine USS Balao, credited with sinking seven Japanese vessels in WWII. This memorable flag, with its cartoon mascot of a pistol-packing bumblebee riding a torpedo, was designed by a Walt Disney Studios artist in 1945 at the request of Motor Machinist’s Mate 3rd class William G. Hartley.

We’ll most definitely go back. Many times!

Category: Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| January 3, 2012
2 comments

Visit to the National Navy Museum (part 1)

1850s experimental 15" gun

This past week, while my boys were on their winter break from school, I finally found the time to visit one of the Washington, DC-area museums I’ve been anxious to see since moving up here – the National Museum of the U.S. Navy. Located next to the Anacostia River, inside the Washington Navy Yard, the Navy Museum is a good bit smaller than its sister facility, the National Museum of the U.S. Marine Corps, located in Quantico, Virginia. However, it is densely packed with artifacts and displays, many of them one-of-a-kind, and a naval buff can easily spend an entire afternoon strolling among the outside artifacts and exploring the various exhibits inside the museum hall. Additionally, the 1950s-era destroyer USS Barry is docked adjacent to the hall as a museum ship (the boys and I ran out of time and energy before setting foot aboard the Barry, so we’ll have to save that exploration for another visit to the Navy Yard).

We visited on a cold, blustery day, but the outside artifacts were so fascinating that we spent nearly an hour braving the winds off the river. Some of the most fascinating things we saw included:

Cannons from ironclad CSS Tennessee

Four cannons removed from the ironclad USS Tennessee (formerly CSS Tennessee) prior to that ship’s scrapping in 1867: two 7” Brook rifles and two 6.4” Brook rifles (the latter seen in the photograph of the Navy Museum’s entrance); as the CSS Tennessee, the ironclad had fought valiantly against Union Admiral David Farrugut’s entire fleet, which included four ironclad monitors, before being overwhelmed by the combined gunfire of the monitors USS Manhattan, USS Chickasaw, and USS Winnebago;

6" gun from USS Maine

A 6” gun salvaged from the wreckage of the second class battleship USS Maine after she was sunk by a magazine explosion in Havana Harbor in 1898, the incident that precipitated the Spanish American War;

Post WWI 16" gun

Several very large cannons which were never used in combat, including an experimental model of a 15” muzzle-loading cannon built in the 1850s, and a 16” gun built prior to the Washington Naval Conference arms limitations talks of 1921-22, which resulted in the scrapping, cancellation, or (in the cases of the USS Lexington and USS Saratoga) conversion of big gun capital ships into aircraft carriers; battleship size was limited by the treaty to 35,000 tons, which ruled out two classes of U.S. battleships and battlecruisers than being built, most of which would have been armed with the model of 16” gun on display here;

26" thick Japanese battleship armor

Sections of battleship armor plating, including large strakes of 16″ thick waterline armor and 9″ thick upper side armor from the USS South Dakota, plus a massive 26″ thick plate intended for the battleship Yamato, recovered by the American Navy at the Japanese naval base of Kure after the war and later tested against 16″ gun armor-piercing shells (as you can see, the American battleship gunfire pierced the Japanese plate clear through, so perhaps the American Iowa class battleships would not have been so terribly outgunned by the Yamato and Musashi had the ships ever met in a gun duel, particularly given the former ships’ five knots greater speed).

Judah between two 16" shells

The most mesmerizing artifact we saw outside the museum was also the largest — a 14″ battleship gun mounted on a railcar carriage. This particular gun (identical to those being mounted on battle wagons of the Pennsylvania class) was shipped to France in the spring of 1918 in time to fire several hundred giant shells at German positions up to twenty-four miles distant. The gun was manned by U.S. Navy sailors who fired it in over a dozen campaigns on the Western Front.

14" railway gun sent to France

14" railway gun (background); Civil War cannons (foreground)

Next in Part 2: the scale model treasures found inside the museum hall

Category: Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| December 16, 2011
One comment

Farewell to Joe Simon, American

One of the last remaining creators of comic books’ Golden Age left us this past Wednesday. Joe Simon (born Hymie Simon) died at the age of 98 on December 14, 2011. Best known as the co-creator, with his partner Jack Kirby, of Captain America – Joe drew the very first sketch of the character – his career in comics contained many “firsts” and milestones that stretched throughout the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics.

Born in 1913 in Rochester, New York (his father, Harry Simon, was an immigrant tailor from England), Joe’s career in comics began in the late 1930s when he went to work as an artist for Funnies, Inc., one of the earliest packagers of comic books. Shortly thereafter, Martin Goodman, publisher of Timely Comics, asked Joe to create a new superhero similar to Timely’s first hit character, the Human Torch; Joe’s first super-heroic creation was the Fiery Mask. Joe then became the first official editor of Timely Comics. Not long afterward, he met Jack Kirby, and the two formed an artistic partnership that would last until 1955, when political attacks on the comic book industry led Joe to turn his efforts to commercial art.

Joe’s and Jack’s most significant shared creation was Captain America, whom they portrayed punching Adolf Hitler in the kisser on the cover of his very first issue, released in December, 1940, a year prior to America’s entry into World War Two. Captain America was far from the only patriotic hero the artistic duo created, however. In 1942, they launched the Boy Commandos for National (later DC) Comics, which became the company’s third best-selling title, after Superman and Batman. They paired that success with another hit, the Newsboy Legion, a home front kid gang action team led by an adult costumed superhero named the Guardian, who wielded a bulletproof shield much like Captain America’s. During the Korean War, Simon and Kirby co-created the Fighting American to pick up where Captain America had (temporarily) left off.

In the late forties, Joe and Jack created the subgenre of romance comics with their Young Romance, which inspired dozens of imitators, and were pioneers in the subgenre of horror comics with Black Magic. In the late fifties, the pair briefly reunited to create a line of superhero comics for Archie Comics, and Joe created the character the Fly, which some comics historians consider a precursor to Spider-Man. In 1960, Joe created a competitor to Mad Magazine, called Sick, which he drew and wrote material for and edited through the early 1970s. In 1966, Joe and Jack briefly reteamed again to create a line of superheroes for Harvey Comics. His final work in the comics realm came during the Silver Age, when he and Jack revamped for DC a Gardner Fox character they had first revamped in the 1940s, the Sandman. On his own, Joe created two unusual properties for DC – Brother Power, the Geek, about a living mannequin who joins the hippy movement, and Prez, about a teenaged president of the United States.

Joe’s name returned to the headlines of the comic book news media in 1999 when, following a legal ruling that the heirs of Jerry Siegel were entitled to a share of the United States copyright of the character Superman, Joe sued Marvel Comics, the successor to Timely Comics, for copyright to Captain America. The two parties settled out of court in 2003. In recent years, a wealth of material about Joe’s career has been made available. His memoir of his career in the comics, The Comic Book Makers, was reissued, joined by a companion volume, Joe Simon: My Life in Comics: the Illustrated Autobiography of Joe Simon. Several coffee table books of his art have been released, including the very handsome The Best of Simon and Kirby, compiled by my friend Steve Saffel.

In my several decades of following the comic book press, both fan and professional, I have never come across a single negative word said about Joe Simon. The comics press (and associated fan discussion) is often catty and backbiting; virtually no major figures in the industry have avoided being savaged from time to time by rumor, innuendo, or personal attacks. That Joe Simon is such a figure speaks volumes about him.

If there is one figure in American arts and letters who most strongly reminds me of Joe Simon, it is composer and lyricist Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Baline). Both lived very long lives; Berlin died in 1989 at the age of 101. Both came from Jewish immigrant families (Berlin’s from Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) and spent the bulk of their working lives in New York City. Both achieved their most enduring successes during the World War Two era – Joe Simon with Captain America, the Newsboy Legion, and the Young Commandoes; Irving Berlin with his most beloved and ubiquitous songs, “God Bless America” (1938), “White Christmas” (1942), and “This is the Army” (1943). Both sought to create popular art for the average American. I think Joe would have enthusiastically nodded his head at this quote from Berlin: “My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American, not the highbrow nor the lowbrow but that vast intermediate crew which is the real soul of the country.”

Both men felt in their kiskas what it meant to be an American. Although it would not be fashionable for them to do so now, not in this age of multiculturalism and widespread disdain among the artistic classes for the notion of a shared national identity, both men chose not to emphasize the particularities of their own ethnic and religious backgrounds in creating their greatest works. Rather, each tried to reflect what they saw as the finest characteristics of that broad group they considered “average Americans.” Irving Berlin often gave credit to his mother for inspiring the lyrics of his most famous song. During his growing up years on New York City’s Lower East Side, his mother would frequently say “God bless America,” her way of expressing gratitude to a country which had taken in her and her family and provided them refuge from the pograms which had destroyed their home in Russia. Joe Simon would approve. In September, 2001, shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he recreated the iconic cover of Captain America Comics No. 1, substituting Osama bin Laden for Hitler as Captain America’s punching bag. His quote? “I did it out of anger. Adolf got his. Osama will too.”

Joe Simon lived long enough to see bin Laden get his. He also lived long enough to enjoy, at last, a successful and reverent big-screen adaptation of his most famous character, Captain America: the First Avenger, which he enthusiastically endorsed. Joe, may your red, white, and blue shield never lose its luster. I’ll miss you.

(My appreciation of what the character of Captain America has meant to me over the years can be found here.)

Category: Miscellaneous Musings, Stuff I Like | Tags:
| December 13, 2011
4 comments

Voices from the Planet of the Apes

Roddy McDowall, the man with the voice of vulnerability

This past weekend, I re-watched The Legend of Hell House, the 1973 horror film based on Richard Matheson’s novel, Hell House (Matheson wrote the script for the film). I hadn’t seen it in a number of years. Roddy McDowall is featured as Ben Fischer, a physical medium who, as a teenager, was the only survivor of a previous scientific expedition to the titular haunted house. He barely escaped with his life fifteen years earlier and is only convinced to join the present expedition by a promised $100,000 payment from a dying millionaire who wants to obtain proof of life after death. Ben is determined to keep his head low through the week he is instructed to spend inside the Belasco House, cutting himself off psychically from the house’s poltergeists; but he is forced into a more active role by the deaths of two of his compatriots and ultimately emerges triumphant over the malign spirit of Emeric Belasco, the perverted, evil former owner of the house.

What really struck me about McDowall’s performance was the compelling power and finesse of his voice. McDowall was gifted with an extraordinary vocal instrument. During much of his career, he, along with Montgomery Clift, exemplified the vulnerable, sensitive, often wounded male – Clift with his face, and McDowall with his voice. In The Legend of Hell House, McDowall was called upon to present an extraordinary range of emotions, from meek, fearful passivity to scornful, mocking sarcasm; from desperate cowardice to determined self-sacrifice; and from near-helpless terror to a vengeful, furious, nearly megalomaniacal triumph. And at least seventy percent of his performance came through his voice. He would have been a superb radio drama actor during the Golden Age of Radio.

Cornelius, father of Caesar

Roddy McDowall’s best-remembered roles were as Cornelius and Caesar in four of the original five Planet of the Apes films. He is as closely identified with POTA: The Original Series as William Shatner is with Star Trek: The Original Series (McDowall and Shatner made opposite migrations with their best-known properties: Shatner from the small screen to the big screen, and McDowall from the big screen to the small screen, but very briefly). McDowall would have appeared in all five films had not a job directing a film in Scotland kept him away from the production of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Apart from the John Chambers simian makeup (ground-breaking for its day) and their convoluted, time-bending plots, the films are probably best remembered for the sound of Roddy McDowall’s voice: as Cornelius begging his wife Zira to be more sensible, and as Caesar pointing out the hypocrisies and injustices of human treatment of apes or leading battles against human oppressors.

Yet Roddy McDowall’s is far from the only memorable voice talent employed by the makers of the original Planet of the Apes films. The series is replete with them. The casting directors pursued the very wise strategy of selecting actors with strong, unique, memorable voices, realizing that the John Chambers makeup and the bulky costumes would cloak most of the actors’ subtle facial expressions and body language. Also, although Chambers made great efforts to physically differentiate his various chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan major characters, ensuring that each character had a very distinctive voice would help audiences keep the characters straight, so they would not confuse Cornelius with Milo or Dr. Zaius with Dr. Honorious. No casting director was listed in the credits for the original Planet of the Apes, but the Internet Movie Database credits Joe Scully with unit casting and Carl Joy with atmosphere casting (I presume the latter means casting the extras, of which there were many in each of the films). I suspect that producer Arthur P. Jacobs had a major hand in making casting decisions (his wife, Natalie Trundy, appears in four of the films, as the mutant Albina in Beneath, as Dr. Stevie Branton in Escape, and as chimpanzee Lisa in Conquest and Battle).

To whomever the credit goes, casting certainly proved to be a major strength of the original series. Many lines of dialogue from the films have entered the shared cultural lexicon (to be endlessly parodied on shows like The Simpsons). I’m sure you remember these:

“Get your stinking paws off me, you damned, dirty ape!”

“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn…”

“You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

“The only good human… is a dead human!”

“He bleeds! The Lawgiver bleeds!”

“I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God.”

“So, cast out your vengeance. Tonight, we have seen the birth of the Planet of the Apes!”

“Then God in his wrath sent the world a savior, miraculously born of two apes who descended on Earth from Earth’s own future. And man was afraid, for both parent apes possessed the power of speech.”

“Ape has killed ape! Ape has killed ape!”

Maurice Evans/Dr. Zaius

If you’ve seen the films, and if those lines are at all familiar, I’m sure you remember them in the distinct voices of the actors who spoke them: Charlton Heston (as George Taylor), Roddy McDowall (as Cornelius and Caesar), James Gregory (as General Ursus), Don Pedro Colley (as the mutant Ongaro), and John Huston (as the Lawgiver). None of their voices could be confused with any other voices in the films. Each voice lingers in the memory like a familiar pop tune.
Originally, the part of Dr. Zaius in the first film was to have been filled by Edward G. Robinson, who actually did a screen test in an early version of the ape makeup. He ultimately backed out due to concerns about the amount of time he would need to spend in the make-up chair. His role was eventually filled by an actor with an equally distinctive voice, Maurice Evans. Still, it’s amusing to think of Dr. Zaius being voiced by the inimitable Edward G. Robinson, he of Little Caesar and Scarlett Street fame:

“I’m Little Zaius, see?”

“Mother of mercy… is this the end of Zaius?”

Lou Wagner/Lucius

Lou Wagner is no household name, but he also has a voice more than capable of slicing through layers of heavy makeup. Fans of Star Trek: the Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine will immediately recognize his voice as belonging to DaiMon Solok and Krax, respectively. In the first Apes film, he played Lucius, a chimpanzee, Zira’s nerdy, socially conscious student nephew. His high-pitched, reedy voice fit the character perfectly and made him a suitable comedic foil for the dignified, austere Charlton Heston.

Claude Akins/Aldo

Claude Akins also has a voice with which most TV viewers of a certain age will be very familiar. He played Sheriff Lobo in the 1970s TV series B. J. and the Bear and trucker Sonny Pruitt in Movin’ On from the same decade. Prior to his TV work, he was a supporting actor in many prominent films of the latter portion of Hollywood’s Golden Age, including From Here to Eternity (1953), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Killers (1964). During the early days of television, he was a frequent guest star in popular westerns, including Wagon Train, Laramie, The Rifleman, and Gunsmoke. Horror fans will likely remember his wonderfully funny portrayal of Kolchak’s editor boss in The Night Stalker (1972). Akins played the gorilla Aldo in the final original Apes film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Supposedly he was chosen for the role because, apart from the facial prostheses, he didn’t require the body portion of the ape costume – he already looked like an ape. I’m certain the real reason he was selected, though, was for his voice, perfect for Aldo, capable of expressing brutishness and a childlike naiveté simultaneously.

John Huston

One of Akins’ costars in Battle was veteran director/actor John Huston, possessed of one of the most distinctive and memorable voices of the American stage or screen. Huston’s career is awe-inspiring in its scope, longevity, and enduring aesthetic quality. Not many other filmmakers can list on their resumes having directed such classics as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and Fat City, as well as turning in unforgettable performances in films such as Chinatown. He was perfectly cast as the wise, gentle, saintly Lawgiver, his gravelly voice lending its gravitas to ape scripture mumbo-jumbo that probably would’ve sounded silly coming out of most other actors’ mouths.

James Gregory/General Ursus

In casting about for other memorable American or British voices which could have been lent to an ape, I thought of Orson Welles. Turns out I wasn’t the first to do so. According to the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes, Welles was offered the role of gorilla General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but he turned it down. Perhaps by that time in his career, he had grown (sideways) beyond the capability of mounting a horse. Or maybe, like Edward G. Robinson, he didn’t relish the thought of being cooped up in a make-up chair for three or four hours a day. However, the casting director didn’t miss a beat in finding a replacement. At this point in time, I cannot imagine anyone but James Gregory mouthing the line, “The only good human… is a dead human!” Gregory was capable of embodying arrogant swagger with his voice, and he certainly did so as General Ursus. Another wonderful aspect of his performance is that he was so obviously having a grand old time going ape; his enthusiasm is infectious. Genre fans will recognize Gregory from two episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, The Manchurian Candidate, and an episode of the original Star Trek, “Dagger of the Mind.” TV comedy fans will remember him from his many seasons as Inspector Luger on Barney Miller.

Another well-known TV comedy/science fiction actor, Jonathan Smith, best known as the sniveling, always scheming Dr. Smith of Lost in Space, was offered a role in the first Apes film; John Chambers had tested out an early version of his ape make-up in an episode of that series. But Smith, having seen up close what was involved in the application of the make-up, took a pass. A shame… with that superior sneer of his, he would have made a wonderful orangutan.

Kim Hunter/Zira

One prominent actress from the series, although possessed of a wonderful, highly emotive voice, was cast, I believe, for her unique ability to act right through her chimpanzee make-up, to project her facial expressions, particularly those of her eyes, right through all the layers of latex and spirit gum. This was Kim Hunter, who portrayed Zira in the first three films. Here’s a prescription for a fun evening: rent/download A Streetcar Named Desire and Escape From the Planet of the Apes and watch them back to back. I guarantee that, while watching the latter, you’ll exclaim while watching Zira, “Good lord, it’s Stella Kowalski!” and while watching Stella in the former movie, you’ll blurt out, “My God, it’s Zira!” Kim Hunter’s electric persona leaps off the screen in both films, make-up be damned (in Escape). I’ve got a feeling they could have dressed her up as the Elephant (Wo)Man and viewers would still think to themselves, “Good lord, it’s Stella Kowalski!” That’s how strong her screen personality was.

I honestly don’t remember much about the vocal talents on display in the Tim Burton remake (although I suppose I would have to give Helena Bonham Carter kudos in that regard). For me, all the energy that film might have possessed was swallowed up by the black hole of Mark Wahlberg’s sleepwalking performance as the film’s astronaut protagonist. I don’t know whether he made a conscious decision to portray the anti-Charlton Heston, dialing his own charisma down to zero, or whether he just decided to collect his paycheck, but he sank that film as surely as a Japanese Long Lance torpedo sank the USS Indianapolis.

I haven’t yet seen the 2011 reboot of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (apparently a very loose remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes). It marks a departure from tradition in that all of the apes are computer generated. It received much better reviews than its Burton-helmed predecessor, and its producers would like it to be the start of a new series of Apes films. If I may give them one bit of unsolicited advice? Listen to the original five films with the picture turned off, concentrating on just the voices; and choose your ape vocal actors with care. For the voices will make or break your films, lingering in audiences’ minds long after the visual novelty of the CGI gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans has faded.

Category: Science Fiction, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| December 6, 2011
Comments Off on Training the Next Generation of SF Geeks: an Intergenerational Case Study

Training the Next Generation of SF Geeks: an Intergenerational Case Study

My gateway to the heroes of comics' Golden Age, courtesy of my stepdad and Jules Feiffer

Any culture that fails to train its young in its traditions is doomed to extinction. The culture of science fiction geekdom is no exception. Many SF geeks have come into their geekhood entirely on their own, sometimes in clear opposition to their parents’ preferences (most of the Futurians, for example, needed to get away from their families in order to come into their full geekhood). Yet many others (myself included) have benefitted from the support and encouragement of a geek (or partial geek, or proto-geek) parent. SF geek culture has now been with us long enough that grandparents can share it with their grandchildren (especially if it is Flash Gordon serials or Astounding Science Fiction pulps or EC horror comics that are the artifacts being passed on).

My stepdad was my initial mentor in geekdom, although I’m sure he didn’t think about in those terms (my training in geekhood began in the late 1960s, but the term “geek” did not begin taking on anything approaching a positive connotation until fairly recently, sometime during Bill Clinton’s term in office). He is a movie lover and for many years was an amateur movie maker (in the old days of Super-8 equipment; he never made the transition to digital media). During his twenties, he had nursed an ambition to go to Hollywood to work for Warner Brothers as an animator. He ended up a salesman instead, a very successful one, first of shoes and later of folding cardboard boxes. He and my mother both enjoyed science fiction and horror movies, so my earliest movie-going experiences were outings to the drive-in to see pictures including Destroy All Monsters (1968), The Return of Count Yorga (1971), Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971), and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971). (Come to think of it, we saw an awful lot of movies at the drive-in in 1971.) He was a huge fan of old-time film actors, so the bookshelf in our living room was stocked with oversized volumes on the history of movies serials, classic films of Hollywood’s Golden Age (including the Universal monster movie cycle), and silent film comedy stars such as Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields. He also amassed a pretty big collection of Super-8 film shorts to show on his collapsible movie screen, including shorts by Chaplin, the Our Gang kids, and Laurel and Hardy, as well as compilations of coming attractions from Japanese kaiju giant monster films and 1950s Hollywood giant insect movies.

The book on his shelf that probably had the biggest impact on me, though, was Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965). I still have numerous passages virtually memorized (most especially Feiffer’s remembered glee as a young man when he read that psychologist Fredric Wertham had written in Seduction of the Innocent that Batman and Robin, in their civilian identities as Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, could be said to be experiencing “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together;” Feiffer always hated Robin, so anyone who muddied Robin’s rep was okay by him). I passed hundreds of hours on my living room sofa with that book open on my lap. Feiffer presented a very personal memoir of what each of the classic characters of the Golden Age of Comic Books had meant to him during his childhood and teen years. His book generously provided me with origin stories or very early adventures of such figures as Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, the Spectre, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and the Spirit, in nearly all cases (with the exceptions of Superman and Batman) my very first exposure to the characters. My stepdad, noting my enthusiasm, followed up by taking me to my very first comic book and nostalgia convention, held in the Coconut Grove library, where I got to see a couple of chapters from Monogram’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial and page through a mimeographed reproduction of the famous Human Torch-Sub-Mariner epic battle from Marvel Mystery Comics.

The fact that my stepdad loved old monster movies and old comic book heroes made me want to love them, too; not that I needed too much encouragement in that direction, since I had discovered my love of dinosaurs, prehistoric life, and Greek and Norse mythology all on my own. One thing led to another. Novelizations of the Planet of the Apes films and TV shows proved to be my “entry drugs” to original science fiction novels and story collections by H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Silverberg. A fondness for atomic apocalypse movies led to my picking up books on worldwide catastrophe by J. G. Ballard and John Christopher. The movie versions of The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend made me hunt down the original books by Richard Matheson. The same kid at summer camp who let me look at his dog-earred Iron Man comics also lent me a truly magical novel, The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney.

And thus was my career as a science fiction geek well and truly launched by the time I turned eight. That year I wrote my first short story, “Tyrann!”, a tale about a lonely little boy, his scientist father, the mechanical Tyrannosaurus the father builds as a companion for his son, and the gangsters who have evil plans for the scientist and his robot creation. The boys at school loved it, and I got the idea that writing stories and entertaining my peers was kind of fun.

One thing my stepdad didn’t do was pass on any relics of his own proto-geek childhood. Hardly anybody from his generation saved their comic books and pulp magazines (unless they were extremely obsessed with them). This, of course, is what makes those artifacts of the 1930s and 1940s so valuable – scarcity. Oh, the daydreams I had, though, as a child – “If only Dad had saved his Captain America comics!” I resolved at a very young age that I would save everything: all my comics, all my issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, all my copies of Eerie and Creepy, and all of my science fiction paperbacks. No future son (or daughter) of mine would ever have to pine for the childhood stuff I had thrown away. I also considered the potential monetary value of the collectibles I would be passing on, figuring I would be doing my future children a great fiduciary favor.

Judah "Iron Man" Fox, celebrating his fifth birthday

Unfortunately, I proved to have an odd talent for buying comics which would never go up in value and for passing up those comics which would someday be worth real money. I distinctly recall seeing all the early issues of The All-New, All-Different X-Men on the carousel wire racks at my local convenience stores (Little General and 7-11) and turning up my nose at them, because the characters on the covers looked “too weird” (why I felt that way about the New X-Men I cannot currently fathom; after all, I eagerly purchased other comics with stranger heroes, such as Jack Kirby’s The Demon and Marv Wolfman’s The Tomb of Dracula, but I remember having a powerful aversion to the costumes worn by the New X-Men in their early adventures). Instead, I bought reprint comics like Marvel Triple Action, Marvel’s Greatest Comics, Monsters on the Prowl, and Creatures on the Loose; the adventures of short-run, failed characters like It! the Living Colossus, the Living Mummy, Man-Thing, Brother Voodoo, the Defenders (a bit more successful than the others on this list), the Invaders, the Golem, and Werewolf by Night; and a fairly full set of The Invincible Iron Man during the character’s worst run ever (excepting, perhaps, the much later Teen Tony issues), from about issue 35 to issue 90 or so. So I ended up with an accumulation of essentially worthless comics, boxes and boxes of them, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Worthless, that is, except for the reading pleasure they might provide a young person.

Over the past eight years, I’ve been blessed with three sons. How should I divide my childhood collection among the three of them, I’ve often wondered? Have them draw lots? Let them sort out the materials among themselves, according to their preferences, with me serving as referee? As things have turned out, this will not be an issue, surprisingly; two of the three appear to have very little interest in my old stuff.

Levi, my oldest, is a voracious reader, but he generally avoids comic books. He showed a mild interest in Silver Age Superman stories for a time, but that didn’t last. After I took him and his brothers to see Captain America: the First Avenger, we went to the comic book store next to the theater, and I offered to buy him any Captain America or Avengers comic he wanted. He wouldn’t bite; instead, he insisted I buy him the latest Wimpy Kid chapter book. The only comics or graphic novels he seems to be interested in are the Bone books. He is very interested in science, but blasé about dinosaurs. He shows very little interest in my collection of old horror movie videos. However, he is fascinated by astronomy and outer space, and most of the chapter books he likes to read (such as the Magic Treehouse and the Captain Underpants books) are essentially fantasy. So I have hopes that I’ll be able to steer him toward science fiction. Within the next year (he is currently in second grade) I plan to introduce him to the Heinlein juveniles, the Rick Riordan books, and eventually Ender’s Game. We’ll see how he takes to those. He is very opinionated and particular regarding what books he chooses to read, so I know I will only be able to suggest (and gently suggest, at that). The potential for an SF geek resides within him (“The Force is strong in this one…”). We shall see.

Asher, my middle child, on the other hand, appears to have little or no geek potential. His interests are decidedly mainstream American boy – he likes sports, race cars, and monster trucks. He enjoys superhero and science fiction movies and TV shows, but he mainly appreciates them for their action. He likes watching things explode and seeing giant robots beat on each other. He thought the last twenty minutes of X-Men: First Class were “awesome,” and he simply loved Real Steel. His favorite toys are his large collection of Hot Wheels cars. He is a pretty strong reader, but he won’t go out of his way to pick up a book. He gets bored when I try to read him Silver Age Superman stories (which Levi enjoys to an extent). His preferred books to look at are illustrated editions of The Guinness Book of World Records and any books on monster trucks.

So, I was at two strikes and one ball to go, so far as passing along my old comics and monster magazines to one of my offspring. Perhaps Judah, my youngest, sensed an opportunity, an unclaimed niche, a chance to beat out his brothers at snuggling up close to Daddy. Or maybe it’s all in the genes (could there be a specific geek chromosome)? In any case, with my final opportunity to reproduce myself as a young geek, I finally struck geek gold in Judah. Several years back, I bought a whole collection of plush Godzilla figures for Levi and Asher as Hanukkah gifts; on eBay, I found Godzilla, Minya, Rodan, Anguillis, Gigan, young Godzilla, Hedorah, King Kong, and Destroyah. These were gorgeous toys. Had they been available when I was a young boy, I would have wet my pants with excitement. But neither Levi nor Asher took to them. They sat on the edge of the boys’ bed for years, unplayed with, gathering dust and cat hair.

Judah with "The Deadly Mantis"

Then Judah decided he liked Godzilla movies. In fact, he loved Godzilla movies. Better still was to watch a Godzilla movie with toys that matched the monsters on screen. He expanded his palate to include a fondness for Gamera movies, too (and I happened to have a few Gamera toys lying around). He will watch any monster movie with his daddy, and he has a particular liking for giant insect movies. Like me, he can watch Tarantula over and over again. When I took him and his brothers to Dinosaur Land in White Post, Virginia, one of the statues there was of a ten-foot-tall praying mantis. I took a picture of the boys standing beneath its claws, and I posted the picture on my website, next to a photo from the 1957 monster movie The Deadly Mantis. Judah took a look at that photo and declared he simply had to have a Deadly Mantis toy. After looking far and wide, I managed to find a really nice praying mantis figurine at Le Jouet Toys down in New Orleans, and I bought it as a birthday gift for Judah. One event marking his fifth birthday celebration was a family viewing of The Deadly Mantis (a clean DVD print obtained from Netflix). Judah sat in bed between me and his brothers with his brand-new mantis toy in his fist, watching Craig Stevens, William Hopper, and Alix Talton deal with their bug problem. He is very disappointed that there has never been a Tarantula vs. the Deadly Mantis movie, or, even better, a Tarantula vs. Godzilla film. He has asked multiple times for me to buy him a Deadly Mantis costume to wear, and I’ve endeavored to explain that no one is likely to make a costume based on a giant bug movie from 1957 that hardly anyone remembers.

It’s not just monsters. He loves dinosaurs and superheroes, too. His favorite dinosaur (for the past few weeks, anyway) is Ankylosaurus, an armored dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period. When I told him that Anguillus from the Godzilla movies is an Ankylosaurus, he went and got his plastic figurine of the monster and asked why Anguillus doesn’t have a knob of bone at the end of his tail like a real Ankylosaurus would. The only reply I could come up with was “artistic license.” So he went and found a small, hollow rubber ball that he was able to insert on the end of Anguillus’ tail. Thus far, he doesn’t seem to have a favorite superhero. Between his dad’s old toys and action figures he has gotten as gifts or collected from McDonald’s or Burger King, he has amassed a pretty impressive set of Justice Society, Justice League, X-Men, and Avengers figures. His affection and loyalty shifts between characters and figures, depending on his mood and which toy happens to catch his eye. One day his favorite will be Banshee from the X-Men, and the next day it might be Captain America or Iron Man, and the day after that either Batman or the Golden Age Flash will have captured his fancy.

Scene from "The Deadly Mantis 2: Mantis in Manassas"

He’s still too young to pass along to him my old comics and issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland (I shudder to think what shape he would leave them in after tearing through them). I’ll probably wait until he turns eight. But that kid has a tremendous bequest coming his way. I can hardly wait to see his face on the day I pull out box after box after box of my old stuff from the basement.

For the time being, I’m as delighted as any proud Little League parent to have him sitting next to me and watching Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster or Tarantula, a rapt look of enjoyment on his face. I glance down at him, squirming with excitement while nestled in the nook of my arm, and think to myself with a glow of satisfaction, “That’s my boy!”

Category: Book Love, Conventions and Fandom, Horror and Fantasy, Science Fiction, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: , ,
| November 22, 2011
Comments Off on Reevaluating Tim Burton’s Ed Wood

Reevaluating Tim Burton’s Ed Wood

I first saw Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp and Martin Landau, when it was originally released in theaters. I was someone whom marketing professionals would have identified as an ideal member of the core audience for the movie – someone familiar with Ed Wood’s films; a fan of 1950s monster movies; an appreciative viewer of Johnny Depp’s and Martin Landau’s earlier performances; and an admirer of Bela Lugosi’s oeuvre. As a teenager, I had read my copy of sibling co-authors Michael and Harry Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards literally to shreds, referring back to it so often and lending it to so many friends that the book’s spine disintegrated and the pages fell out. That book “celebrated” the dubious cinematic accomplishments of director Edward D. Wood, Jr. and, based upon the tabulation of 3,000 ballots submitted by readers of Michael Medved’s earlier book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, named Wood’s 1959 magnum opus Plan 9 From Outer Space as the worst film ever made. After reading the book, I made sure to attend any revival screening of Plan 9 that screened within a hundred miles of my home, guffawing whenever a cardboard tombstone got knocked over or a scene abruptly shifted from day to night and back to day again. When I purchased a VCR, one of my first VHS tapes was a copy of Plan 9.

So I was delighted when I learned Tim Burton, whose 1993 animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas I had loved, would be directing a movie about the career of Edward D. Wood, Jr. I went to see Ed Wood with high expectations. Although Martin Landau’s performance as Bela Lugosi left me agog (and critics agreed – Landau won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe award, and a Film Critics award for his performance), I found myself curiously dissatisfied with the movie as a whole. It wasn’t because of the principal performances – I’ve already mentioned being knocked out by Landau’s inhabitation of Bela Lugosi, and Johnny Depp portrayed Ed Wood as likable, sympathetic, even admirable, not mocking the real-life director in the slightest. The supporting performances were all of a high standard, with the least of them being no less than watchable and entertaining; Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge, Jeffrey Jones as the Amazing Criswell, and George “The Animal” Steele as Tor Johnson were, I thought, particularly good. It wasn’t due to any shortcomings in cinematography or set design; in typical Tim Burton fashion, these were first rate, and the subject matter of Ed Wood fit the director’s visual style to a T. It wasn’t due to bad or unbelievable dialogue; the repartee amongst the characters was engaging, entertaining, and often very funny.

Yet the problem, when I was able to puzzle it out after leaving the theater and talking it over with my then-wife, did have to do with the script. American audiences have been trained to expect meaningful change to occur in the lives of the protagonists of the films they watch or the novels they read. Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood begins the movie as a young man somewhat frustrated by his current circumstances (working as a low-paid functionary at a Hollywood studio), but powerfully optimistic about his talents and his chances to write, produce, and direct memorable motion pictures. Throughout the film, he continually runs into roadblocks which temporarily discourage him or stymie him, but he always manages to find a way to press on towards his objective. He ends the film as a slightly older man who is still somewhat frustrated by his current circumstances (having written, directed, and produced several movies which have enraged audiences and inspired derision from critics, in addition to making very little money for Wood), but who retains his optimism about his talents and his chances to produce works of cinematic art that will last as long as those created by his idol, Orson Welles (who shows up in a wonderful cameo appearance near the film’s end). In all the essentials, he hasn’t changed. His character hasn’t changed or grown appreciably. He has gained many new friends over the course of the film, but his problem, if he can be said to have one, was never a deficit of likeability; at no point in the film is he either friendless or without a serious girlfriend. So the film, at least on that initial viewing, seemed to have a static quality, for all of its immense likeability.

Since that initial viewing back in 1994, I’ve watched the film three more times, two times in just the past six months. Each time I have found myself enjoying the movie more and more. Which poses the obvious question: why? It is much more common, it seems, to have a wonderful memory of a film and to then go back to it fifteen years later and be disappointed; what had once seemed magical now comes across as trite or obvious. To gain greater pleasure from a film after initially suffering no small measure of disappointment is an anomaly, an anomaly which requires a change in perspective.

Starting with my third viewing, I began to realize the film would more accurately have been titled The World of Ed Wood, for at its heart, it is an ensemble picture. Ed Wood the character doesn’t change, because Ed Wood the character is actually Ed Wood the environment, or Ed Wood the setting. The film’s true protagonists, the people who experience change and growth, are Ed Wood’s circle of friends. Ed Wood brings them together as an extended family of oddballs, has-beens, and never-beens, and his invincible optimism and undying faith in his own creative powers — and by extension, their creative powers, for he has invited them to join his charmed (if tarnished) circle — allows them to experience their own brands of achievement or rebirth. Loretta King, an ingenue from the hinterlands, gets to experience life as a film actress (albeit an actress in a Grade Z science fiction movie). Tor Johnson achieves a rise from the tawdry life of a professional wrestler to the somewhat more dignified role of a popular and recognizable film actor, someone who can dress his wife and kids in their fanciest clothes to take to a Hollywood premiere. The Amazing Criswell gets to expand his fan base and socialize with the demimonde element he enjoys and appreciates. Bunny Breckinridge, Ed’s gay friend, gets to become a kind of hero to the local gay community by getting many of them parts as extras in Glen or Glenda. Kathy O’Hara finds the love of her life in Ed, marrying him and staying with him through the rest of his life. Paul Marco, Conrad Brooks, and Tom Mason (Kathy’s chiropractor) get to escape being nobodies by becoming (slight) somebodies in Ed’s films. Vampira gets to continue her film and media work after being fired by the television station that had employed her as a horror hostess. Even Dolores Fuller, Ed’s girlfriend through the first half of the film, who ultimately gets fed up with the tawdry milieu in which Ed chooses to immerse himself, goes on to bigger and better things; we learn in the film’s postscript that after breaking off her relationship with Ed, she wrote a series of hit songs for Elvis Presley.

But the central relationship of the film is the relationship between Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi. Here the film’s writers, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, do their finest job of showing the redemptive and ennobling effect Ed Wood’s friendship could have on the people he brought close to himself. When Ed first accidentally meets Bela, one of his screen idols, Bela is at the nadir of his career, a heroin addict who hasn’t been able to land a film role in over three years. Ed quickly entangles him in a series of marginal film projects, beginning with using him as an omniscient narrator in Glen or Glenda (surely Bela Lugosi’s strangest role ever), then as a misunderstood mad scientist in Bride of the Monster, and finally (and mostly posthumously) as an old man dying of grief following the death of his wife, in the unforgettable Plan 9 From Outer Space. Between the making of these movies, the film shows Ed seeing Bela through crisis after crisis, culminating in Bela’s stay in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility (interestingly, their on-screen relationship drew partial inspiration from the real-life relationship between young, amateur filmmaker Tim Burton and faded Hollywood horror star Vincent Price). Through his friendship with Ed, Bela regains his self-respect and a sense of hope. By the last days of his life, he has recovered much of his old energy and is enjoying himself and his work again, looking forward to greater things over the horizon. Ed’s friendship and unwavering faith in him have transformed him, to the point where he dies a happy man, rather than an embittered failure.

Tim Burton’s film’s true protagonist is Bela Lugosi, not Ed Wood. The transformation of Bela Lugosi from a self-pitying, drug-besotted wreck to a self-respecting, self-actualizing artist, enabled by the friendship and support provided by Ed Wood, is what primarily lends a glow to the lives of all the other supporting characters in the film. Examined in this light, I think it is fair to consider Tim Burton’s Ed Wood a minor masterpiece, a film worthy of repeated viewings.

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Reviews and Such, Stuff I Like | Tags:
| October 31, 2011
Comments Off on Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

As you might well imagine, here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com, Halloween is one of our favorite holidays. As a little Halloween treat, allow me to suggest a list of my Top Thirteen Creature Feature Oldies (spooky movies more than thirty years old), all guaranteed to add to your Halloween enjoyment. Some are classic, some are quirky, some are so-bad-they’re-good. So surf to your Netflix queue or dash over to Blockbuster Video (if there’s still one of those by your house) and download or rent one of these oldies-but-goodies:

1) Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922): The granddaddy of all vampire movies, and still one of the best. You won’t find a creepier, more repulsive vampire than Max Shreck as Count Orlok, who portrays the vampire as half-man, half-rat.

2) The Black Cat (1934): Probably the best film Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi ever made together. Fabulous Expressionist sets and an intriguing back-story of World War One horror and betrayal add to the star power in this tale of devil worship and sadism.

3) The Bride of Frankenstein (1935): The best of the early Universal Studios horror films, director James Whale’s masterpiece of whimsical terror, and certainly Boris Karloff’s finest acting as the Monster. Plus, you get Elsa Lanchester in two roles!

4) House of Frankenstein (1944): I included this one for its major fun value. All of the Universal Studios monsters are here (save the Mummy, who was too wrapped up, I suppose, and the Creature, only because he hadn’t been invented yet) — Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the wolf man, the mad doctor, and the mad doctor’s demented assistant. You can’t beat the cast: Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, George Zucco, and Lionel Atwill. This would be spoofed twenty-three years later by the puppet animation film Mad Monster Party (1967).

5) Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954): This rates both for the outstanding, iconic design of the starring amphibian and for the fabulous underwater photography, shot on location at the Florida Panhandle’s Wakulla Springs. Watch Ricou Browning as the Creature swimming furtively beneath Julie Adams, contemplating her with curiosity and perhaps desire, and you’ll be watching a monster you’ll never forget.

6) Them! (1954): This gi-ants movie is the direct ancestor of both Aliens and every “swarm-of-creatures-is-out-to-get-me-or-eat-me” movie released since the mid-fifties. Great scenes in the sewer tunnels beneath Los Angeles.

7) Invisible Invaders (1959): This one is mainly on the list for its historical value and high camp and fun quotient. The inspiration for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and thus virtually every zombie movie made in the last forty years. John Carradine is great as the leader of the aliens. The scenes of the aliens inhabiting the bodies of the dead and creeping across the desert are still pretty effective. And for a truly goofy special effect, you’d have to revisit Plan Nine from Outer Space to see something as ridiculous as the invaders’ invisible feet, shuffling slowly through the sand, leaving beach shovel-like trails behind.

8 ) The Haunting (1963): This adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is the real deal, a truly spooky haunted house movie. Much, much more effective and frightening than the 1999 remake, which over-relied on CGI effects that weren’t nearly as hair-raising as the subtle, off-screen suggestions of supernatural menace so well used in the original.

9) Attack of the Mushroom People (aka: Matango, Fungus of Terror) (1963): Yes, it is mainly here for its two alternate titles, either of which place it high on the list of campy horror films. However, this Japanese flick does have its moments of genuinely unsettling atmosphere and mounting unease, as the castaways, trapped on a weird island, begin running out of food and must resort to consuming the local fungi… definitely not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (nor its Japanese equivalent). This one creeped me out when I was a kid; I was always susceptible to the effects of the “heroes-into-monsters” trope (also featured in the climax of The Return of Count Yorga and in most zombie movies).

10) Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971): Low-budget psychological horror film about a woman recently released from a mental institution who seeks rest and rehabilitation on a bucolic farm, only to be faced by the dreadful fact that either she is sliding back into madness again, or that one or more of her house guests is a vampire. Lots of visual and thematic references here to the then-recent Manson Family murders. This one really weirded me out when I saw it on late-night TV as a kid.

11) Blacula (1972): Far more than your run-of-the-mill Blaxploitation pic, as I’ve written elsewhere. William Marshall’s performance is first rate, and this movie really started the whole trope of vampire-as-tragic-romantic-hero in American popular culture. Plus, it serves as a virtual museum piece of early 1970s urban styles.

12) Horror Express (1972): Who can pass up a Victorian era horror movie set entirely on a train, starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Telly Savalas? Plus, the missing link monster is not your run-of-the-mill ghoul; watch what it does to poor Telly. Uuuch.

13) The Legend of Hell House (1973): I’ve always been a big Roddy McDowall fan, as well as a great admirer of Richard Matheson’s stories, novels, teleplays, and film scripts. An interesting book end to The Haunting, and another on the short list of truly spooky haunted house films.

Sergeant Rock and Captain America salute you on Halloween!

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 28, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Imaginary Monsters

Imaginary giant shark, or the actual prehistoric Megalodon? The model maker didn't know himself!

One of the wonderful, weird, and almost dada aspects of Dinosaur Land is that its builders did not limit themselves to actual dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. They let their imaginations run a bit wild. The first two creatures a visitor encounters when he or she walks out of the gift shop, through a short, cavern-like tunnel and out into the Prehistoric Forest are a 60 foot-long shark and a giant octopus which stretches 70 feet from tentacle tip to tentacle tip. In fact, to continue on into the park, one must walk beneath one of the octopus’s pink tentacles. Now the park’s operators could have identified the big shark as a Megolodon, an actual prehistoric shark which grew up to 52 feet long. They don’t; I get the feeling the big shark was installed up front, where it could be seen from the road, around the time the movie Jaws was a mega summer hit (my feeling was reinforced when the boys and I discovered you could walk into his mouth through his gills and pose between his giant teeth).

Did any octopi actually grow to be seventy feet in diameter? Who knows? They didn't leave any fossils behind!

The octopus? Who knows? There’s the legend of the kraken, of course. And it’s possible that giant octopi did exist at one time, but we likely will never know, because, apart from their beaks, no other parts of their bodies would have fossilized. As cephalopods, they would have left behind no bones for us to find.

"The Deadly Mantis:" 1957 called and wants its giant bug monster back

So I suppose the big shark and the giant octopus are borderline creatures, on the margin between potential scientific fact and imaginative fantasy. Other critters in Dinosaur Land, however, definitely fall into the latter category. There’s the giant king cobra. Actual examples stretch up to 14 feet long. This representation, on the other hand, towers a good 14 feet high. Then there’s the 13 foot-high praying mantis. Unless its breathing apparatus were to be completely different from that of actual insects, a mantis anywhere near this size would be unable to breathe.

But it is a wonderful reminder of one of my all-time favorite Creature Features, the 1957 giant bug movie The Deadly Mantis, starring Craig Stevens and a bunch of other B-listers I never heard of. The film’s memorable climax takes place when the big bug crawls into the Manhattan Tunnel in New York City and the army goes in after it.

Kong says, "Fay Wray? Who needs Fay Wray? These boys look tastier!"

And then there’s the boys’ favorite, and one of the largest statues in the park – King Kong. Kong is the only figure the park’s managers encourages children to climb upon (into his big paw, at least), so he makes for irresistible pictures. Interestingly, all of Kong’s prehistoric playmates from the classic 1933 film are with him at Dinosaur Land. His companions include a Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, a Stegosaurus, a giant snake, and a Pterodon.

Is this the giant octopus Kong fought in "King Kong vs. Godzilla"?

The only missing creature from the original King Kong is a giant spider (but, to be fair to the park’s designers, the giant spider scene was cut out of King Kong’s original release prints, and was not restored to the movie until nearly fifty years later).

On the other hand, one of Kong’s antagonists from a later film appearance is present, the giant octopus from 1962’s Toho Films monsterfest King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Forget King Cobra... how about "Emperor Cobra?"

One request for the Dinosaur Land folks… my youngest son, Judah, was sorely disappointed that there were no giant turtles in the park. He is a big fan of Gamera (child after my own heart!). The closest thing we could find to a giant turtle was the Ankylosaurus, which looked more like a giant horny toad than a giant turtle.

unnamed colorful beastie menaces the boys

All in all, we loved the place. You could easily take a quick look-through and spend only twenty minutes in the Prehistoric Forest. But you would be denying yourself one of the park’s primary pleasures – an opportunity to quietly and languorously allow your imagination to roam.

a sign you can't miss if you're driving Route 340/522 North

(Go to Part One)
(Go to Part Two)

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 27, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Allosaurus on the prowl


(Go to Part One)

Dinosaur Land has added a number of additional statues since its opening back in 1964. Most of the additions have been carnivores (or herbivores being eaten by carnivores in life-sized dioramas of ancient life and death battles). I’d be curious to find out how many of the newer carnivores were added to the park after the huge success of the film version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1993, which helped make Velociraptors part of every red-blooded American boy’s fantasy life.

Watch out, Stegosaurus! Oviraptor is about to steal your eggs!

The park certainly suffers from no shortage of meat-eaters now. Newer dinosaurs include a Gigantosaurus, a Dilophosaurus, a Velociraptor (star of the movie), a Megalosaurus, and an additional Tyrannosaurus, this one trying to take down a Titanosaurus. The park also added a few herbivores, including a Styracosaurus and a mother and baby Stegosaurus. (More fantastical additions have included a 60 foot-long shark, a 70 foot-wide octopus, and King Kong, I suppose to keep the 13 foot-tall praying mantis company.)

Boys, don't tick off the Stegosaurus! You wouldn't want to get whacked by that tail!

Oddly, one of the original figures has disappeared, the “cave man” (possibly a homo erectus, to try to judge from an old photo, but more likely a figure from the artist’s imagination). Possibly he was just too anatomically incorrect (but the 70-foot octopus and King Kong have remained?). Or maybe some overly exuberant children tried climbing up his back or yanked on his arms, toppling him over and smashing him beyond repair? I would bet on the latter, given my own children’s behavior (Asher, my middle son, admitted to breaking off one of the giant ground sloth’s claws while hanging on it; I sheepishly handed over the broken finger to one of the staff).

Tylosaurus is a fish out of water--actually, a marine reptile out of water

Dilophosaurus says, "Aww, Mom, just one snack before dinner?"

Pterodon swoops down on the attack!

Gigantosaurus says, "Mmm... tastes like chicken!" Pterodon says, "Shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning!"

Megalosaurus about to enjoy an Apatosaurus steak

Each child that attends Dinosaur Land receives a free copy of a wonderful booklet on the park’s recreations that was originally compiled and printed back when the attraction first opened in 1964 or shortly thereafter (the girl in the miniskirt on the rear cover, standing next to the Tyrannosaurus, makes me think the photos in the booklet might come from a little later, perhaps 1966?). It contains photos of the original 27 statues — dinosaurs, other prehistoric animals, and two oddities, a giant praying mantis and a giant king cobra. Especially eye-popping is to page through this little guide and see how comparatively desolate the park appeared in the mid-1960s compared to its lush foliage today. Back then, all of the trees in the park were saplings, none taller than five feet. Today, forty-five years later, the trees are all fully grown and provide dense shade above most of the animals’ heads. It is also intriguing to see how the paint schemes have been changed over the years on the original animals, such as the Dimetrodon, the Oviraptor, the Pachycephalosaurus, and the Stegosaurus. All of them have become much more colorful since their original unveilings.

Who is "Responsible for accidents," Pachycephalosaurus or Levi?

A 1993 article on Dinosaur Land in the Hampshire Review listed the park’s annual attendance at between 18,000 and 20,000 visitors per year, or an average of 50 visitors per day. That would roughly match the level of attendance I saw during the couple of hours the boys and I explored the park on a Sunday afternoon. About half a dozen families with 3-5 members wandered in while we were there, along with another four or five moms pushing a toddler in a stroller. There were a few ten or fifteen minute stretches during which we were the only guests present. Which was wonderful.

Tyranosaurus vs. Titanosaurus (I know who I'd place my bet on)

Despite the four scenes of carnage and combat (a Gigantosaurus munching down a pterodactyl; a Megalosaurus feasting on an Apatosaurus; a battle between a Titanosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus; and, if memory serves, another Tyrannosaurus facing off against a pair of Triceratopses), the park is exceptionally peaceful and quiet, inviting silent contemplation of the ancient beasts (and the fanciful creatures mixed in). I enjoyed as restful a Sunday afternoon with the boys as any I can remember. That, by itself, was well worth the $17 we spent on admission to the Prehistoric Forest.

(Go to Part Three)

Your kindly blog narrator, one second before his head is bitten off

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 25, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Not Just Another Roadside Attraction

We're there! We're there!

Ah, roadside attractions… at one time in our national childhood, salvation for parents traveling cross country with their kids, looking desperately for a bathroom break and a pause from choruses of “Are we there yet?” Oases of fun for children stuck all day long in the rear storage hatch of their parents’ station wagon, tired of reading the same comic books over and over again.

hanging out with Triceratops

I grew up in South Florida at pretty much the end of the Golden Age of roadside attractions, just before the mega theme parks closed so many of them down by drawing away their customers (I was born in 1964, and Disney World opened in Orlando in 1971). I still remember Planet Ocean, Stars Hall of Fame Wax Museum, the Fun Fair, the Miami Serpentarium, the Mystery Fun House, Ocean World, Parrot Jungle (now Jungle Island), and Monkey Jungle (still going strong!).

My fondest dream as a kid was a pet Stegosaurus that I could ride to school

I loved dinosaurs as a kid. The only life-sized dinosaur statue anywhere near me was a scrawny Tyrannosaurus mounted in front of the parking lot of a furniture store located, I believe, in South Miami, placed there to make parents with kids pull over and take a look (and then maybe wander into the furniture store). The Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium had statues of a giant ground sloth and a sabretoothed tiger, but those were prehistoric mammals, not dinosaurs. Had I known back then that a place such as Dinosaur Land existed, I’m sure I would’ve bugged the dickens out of my mom and dad until they agreed to take me to White Post in rural northwestern Virginia, between Winchester and Front Royal (maybe combining that with a visit to relatives in Charleston, West Virginia, not too far away).

Good thing Psittacosaurus is a plant eater--that beak looks sharp!

Dinosaur Land was built the same year I was born. So it’s about 47 years old. The place doesn’t advertise much; I’ve driven the western stretch of I-66 a dozen times or more and never seen a billboard hawking the place, which is located only seven miles north of the highway, up Route 340/522 North. I stumbled upon a description of the place when I was looking online for weekend activities for my three boys. That was back at the height of the summer. I decided I’d wait for a perfect autumn day and then take my sons. The perfect day arrived this past Sunday, crisp and sunny. Off we went.

Mama Stegosaurus and her baby

Diatryma says, "There's Colonel Sanders! Hide me! Hide me!"

Cheer up, Dimetrodon! It'll be sailing season before you know it!

Dinosaur Land is completely charming. Any Baby Boomer (I came at the tail end of the boom) will be plunged into nostalgia by a visit. You enter the attraction through the gift shop (of course). This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because the gift shop is part of the charm of the place, with a tremendous variety of knick-nacks and tchotches for sale at all price ranges, from leather moccasins to dinosaur masks. As a parent, I was very pleased to find I didn’t have to spend a minimum of five bucks per kid on souvenirs; I could’ve easily spent a bundle (had I heeded my boys’ pleadings), but the shop also sold a huge assortment of rubber insects and small dinosaur figurines from 75 cents to $2.95, so I was able to redirect my childrens’ cravings to more reasonably priced items. Admission to the Prehistoric Forest is also very reasonable at $5 for adults and $4 for children (children two and under enter for free).

Pachycephalosaurus reminds himself, "Next time, I need to buy the anti-psoriasis shampoo!"

Once you exit the gift shop, you walk through a “cavern” to get to the Prehistoric Forest. The approximately three acre park contains 37 creature statues (not just dinosaurs), all either life-sized or larger than life-sized (I’ll explain that in an upcoming post). When the park opened in 1964, it had 26 statues. Since then, the owners have added several dinosaur battles and beefed up their stock of the trendy carnivores. Attached to the multi-room gift shop is a modest ranch house where the original owners once lived. They looked out their windows at Tyrannosaurus, a gigantic praying mantis right out of the 1957 monster movie The Deadly Mantis, and a Mylodon, or giant ground sloth. I wonder if they had kids.

Judah says to Moschops, "I prefer lamb chops!"

The dinosaurs are definitely old-school (except for the most recent additions), modeled upon the classic dinosaur murals that line the walls of the New York Museum of Natural History. Since then, paleontologists have completely revised their theories of how dinosaurs moved and lived, and many dinosaur skeletons in major natural history museums have been remounted to reflect the current view of dinosaurs as swift, active animals, possibly warm-blooded, very different from modern reptiles, more like modern birds. The Dinosaur Land dinosaurs, however, would all be very much at home in the Ray Harryhausen dino epics of the 1950s and 1960s.

Stegosaurus, the armored dinosaur which was my favorite when I was a boy, gets lots of love at Dinosaur Land. There are three of them, one an old-fashioned green gentleman and the other two a more updated mother Stego and baby. I was very pleased to see all of them.

cuddling with the friendly Stegosaurus, my childhood favorite

More photos to come! More dinos and other weird, fantastical creatures! A mystery dinosaur! The giant octopus from King Kong vs. Godzilla! And Kong himself!

(Go to Part Two)

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
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