Just wanted to drop by from my holiday hiatus and say that I hope everyone has the best holiday season they can (times being how they are and all.)  To brighten up your day I'd like to share this great four page Transformers comic from (of all places) Woman's Day Magazine 12/26/1985.  This was sent to me a while back by the ever awesome Jerzy Drozd (of the Art & Story Podcast, MLaT Comics, and Sugary Serials.)  So join me in reading just how the Transformers Saved Christmas!









Merry Christmas to all and to all (insert something clever here!)

**Update** Apparently the release date for the single season 1 volume has been pushed back two months. Ug.

Jeez, I sure haven't been active this past couple weeks.  Sigh, the holiday season is smacking me in the face with its good will and cheer I guess.  I probably won't have much time to post for the next week or so as I'll be leaving town to visit family.  I did want to throw up this quick post though (and just in time for holiday shopping fun!)

Back a few months ago, Time Life announced that they were going to release a complete series set for the Real Ghostbusters cartoon.  On the one hand it was pretty cool that this show was finally going to get some love on DVD, but on the other it was announced as a Time Life online exclusive, which just pissed me off.  Basically it was forcing fans of the show to make a large 5-season purchase (retailing at about $175) for a 20 year-old cartoon series.  That's one heck of a dent in the pocketbook, at least for mine that is.  Though I'm a completist when it comes to collecting 80s cartoons on DVD, I like to have the option to buy bits at a time.  Besides, what if I'm not interested in later seasons, when it converts to Slimer & the Real Ghostbusters?  Anyway, I bitched about it earlier in the year and there's no use in rehashing that.  What I recently found out was that there is going to be a single season release through normal retailers, at least for the 1st season, which is slated to come out from Time Life on January 27th, 2009!  It's priced at a decent $40, but you can currently pre-order it on Amazon for only $27.  Now that is what I'm talking about!

The only question I have now is whether or not TL will be releasing the remaining seasons individually, or if this is simply bait to pick up the complete series set?  Either way, I will be busting some ghosts in about two months, and that's all I really care about right now.

Also, in new 80s cartoon on DVD news, I also just recently discovered that a couple of shows have recently seen new releases.  The very odd 80s cartoon Drak Pack was released in Canada recently, which is good news for us Region 1 Drak Pack fans.  If you've never seen it, the show revolves around the exploits of three teenagers who are descendants of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolfman, who fight crime, ala Scooby Doo (it was a Hanna Barbera show after all.)  Though they are typically three normal teens, they can transform into monstrous versions of their classic monster ancestors by doing a group high five and shouting Whack-O!  Honestly the show itself is pretty wacko, but in a good way. the show borrows a lot from its predecessor the Groovie Goolies, but honestly it's not like there is a glut of monster themed cartoons.  Anyway, you can either order the show from Amazon Canada, or get it from a retailer new/imported, also on amazon for pretty much the same price (about $30 US.)



I also noticed that the Pound Puppies movie is available on DVD (and has been for a couple years.)



Anyway, hope to be back posting soon.

I've been on a John C. Reilly kick lately, and this past week I sat down and watched the flick The Promotion (written and directed by Steve Conrad.)  I wasn't expecting to really connect with the film at all as it's sort of set up with a pretty standard comedy plot and stars Seann William Scott (he of Stiffler fame from the American Pie movies) who I'm not all that enamored with.  Honestly, I was expecting to enjoy Reilly's performance, a few jokes here and there and that's about it.



Part my initial disinterest was that the flick seemed to be drawing from the same cultural ennui of flicks like Waiting, Office Space and more importantly Clerks.  I experienced Clerks at the perfect age, 19, right smack dab in the middle of my initial career as a grocery store stock clerk and budding film buff, and connected with it in a very visceral way.  For my money Kevin Smith totally captured what life was life like for a 20-something pop culture nerd working in retail, whittling away the hours with humor as the world (customers, supervisors, family, etc.) slowly sucked away at your soul.  Well, with a lot of genres (sub-genres, sub-categories, what-have-you) it seems like there are one or two films that do a great job of addressing the particular subject matter, and thereafter other flicks just seem to be watered down imitations or parodies.  For me, in the minimum wage lackey category of comedy films, Clerks stands head and shoulders above the rest (with a nice honorable mention to Office Space, even though it deals more with corporate misery), and after watching flicks like Waiting or Kill the Man I was getting kind of tired of the genre.  When I saw the trailer for the Promotion, I was expecting just more of the same.

Actually, I think part of my disinterest lies simply with the fact that I've moved on from that time and place in my life.  I'm over ten years older, working a slightly more rewarding office job (I still emotionally connect to Office Space just fine thank you), and I'm less interested in wallowing in sarcastic hopelessness, preferring a bit more upbeat fare (in general, not as a rule.)  Again, watching the trailer for the Promotion, which revolves around two grocery store assistant managers vying for the coveted store manager position at a new location, I was expecting to be less than engaged by the plot.

For the first half of the film everything was going exactly as I figured.  I was really enjoying John C. Reilly's Richard Wehlner, there were a couple of really funny jokes (in particular a handful about an annoying banjo teacher/gay dominatrix type), and a few surprising cameos (in particular by Jason Bateman and Bobby Cannavale.)  I was actually a little surprised that Seann William Scott didn't bug me all that much (something I also noticed in the flick Southland Tales), though there wasn't anything particularly engaging about him either.  Then, as the rivalry between Reilly and Scott started to heat up a bit I found myself wanting the film to side-step the clichéd plot (where one of the two would take on the role of the villain and you’d start rooting for the other by proxy) and veer into more uncharted territory.  The weird thing is that it did.

I as mentioned before, the film stars Scott as Doug Stauber, who is an assistant manager at a grocery store chain located in Chicago, and along with his wife (played by Jenna Fischer) is just trying to make a go of life in middle class America.  Figuring on being the shoo-in for the Store Manager position at a new location under construction, the couple decides to take a chance on buying their first house.  At the same time, Canadian transplant Richard Wehlner (Reilly) (and his family, including his Scottish wife played by Lili Taylor), also an assistant manager (though for a chain of Canadian sister stores), and a recovering drug addict, transfers to Chicago putting Stauber's "shoo-in" status in jeopardy.  As the bigwigs descend on the store to check up on Doug and Richard, each end up dealing with their own demons, be it a gang making life on parking lot duty hell, the possibility of slipping back into depression, alcohol and drugs, or their need to get 'promoted' in order to grab a hold on their life.

Though the film is mainly a comedy, it manages to avoid some of the more obvious or gratuitous plot machinations, and pretty much plays the jokes in a subtle manner (even the more outrageous humor isn't in your face.)  The flick manages to balance the gags with plenty of introspection and does a surprisingly amazing job at illustrating a more real-life struggle for success.  This is what kills me about most movies where the characters are always shooting for the stars, where success is defined only by achieving what in the long run only a very few people can.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for striving for greatness, but I'm also content in not shooting myself into the cosmos.  Becoming an amazing success is wonderful, unless the trip there and beyond is horrible.  Anyway, about halfway into the film I started hoping for a particular outcome, and was surprised when it occurred.  Where Clerks deals with the grind of working a Middle American job with sarcasm, apathy and slack, The Promotion deals in hope, duty, and a positive work ethic.  It's the other side of the coin, and sort of the next logical step after a film like Clerks (which is sort of where Smith was going with Clerks II, just without the goofy dance sequences, inexcusably ignorant fanboys, and donkey sex.)

Just found out that another one of my favorite TV Shows is finally coming to DVD, the awesome (in my opinion) Tales From the Darkside!



Though I missed out on shows like the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents (for the most part), I was weaned on horror though episodes of Tales From the Darkside, as well as other similar anthology shows like Monsters and Freddy's Nightmares.  In fact one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies is the Tales From the Darkside flick starring Debbie Harry, Buster Poindexter, Christian Slater, and Steve Buscemi.  I'm so excited to finally get a chance to relive the experience of watching this great series again.  The best part is that the release looks to be priced rather cheaply at around $30 a season.  I can't wait for February 10th to get here!

During this past Halloween season the wife and I were browsing around some of the outlet stores in North Georgia and I had another one of those lightening strike nostalgic moments while in an antique shop.  Sitting on top of a stack of old records was a copy of Scooby Doo and the Mystery of the Rider Without a Head record and storybook issued by Peter Pan records back in 1977.  I've mentioned this feeling before, but it's my favorite sort of nostalgia moment, the kind when I can't believe I forget whatever it is that made me slap myself upside the head with disbelief.  There are plenty of these bits of pop culture flotsam and jetsam that I come across that will put a smile on my face or make me stop for a second and say "Huh", but it's really a great an rare feeling when I feel like a part of me has been lost and is there sitting in front of me again.

This particular book must have been a hand-me-down from my sister as I was born the same year it was released and probably wouldn't have used or appreciated it until I was five or six.  I'm also not sure how often I actually listened to the record as I didn't recall much when I listened to it recently…

(You can listen to the record at the great read-along site, the Secret Cavern of Read-Along Treasures.) What really grabbed me when I found this in the antique shop, and what I really remember pouring over as a kid is the interior artwork.  Unfortunately the artist on this particular book wasn't credited, and I have a feeling it's because it was more of a quickie in-house art department rush job as opposed to shopping the work out to freelance talent.

Honestly, looking back at this stuff so many years later I have to say that I'm a bit underwhelmed at the quality.  Actually it's pretty sloppy in a lot of places, smacking of a bad tracing job.  The line work is very stiff with almost no grace or variance to the line width and weight, but even for all of this, I still love it.  It makes me feel like I'm six years old again…

My favorite bit in the book is the Rider Without a Head, not only because of the monster-esque subject matter, but because the character is rendered with the most detail and attention throughout.  In fact, the stiff art style paired with the watercolor in the book reminded me of the work of one of my favorite artists, Quinton Hoover.  When I started playing the Magic: the Gathering collectable card game back in the mid 90s, Hoover artwork was the one that really stood out and spoke to me.  I'm a big fan of the exacting lines and the colored pencil & watercolor work in the color.  It's the essence of comic book art, minus the thick black shadowing.  There's something in this type of clean line work that makes me think of cartoons or the type of simple effective illustration used in product packaging.

Even though the artwork in the Scooby Doo book isn't nearly as elegant as Quniton Hoover's work (example of which you can see here and here), it makes me wonder if spending hours pouring over the book helped to predispose me to enjoying this sort of clean style (though obviously there were the hundreds of hours of cartoon watching and comic book reading that didn't hurt.)  Looking at the pieces above and below, I really do see a close connection to Hoover's style, so much so that I would have to say that there is some sort of connection (as tenuous as it seems.)  At the end of the day it's another piece of the puzzle at least.

On a side note, I thought it was interesting how on-model the above image of Scooby is compared to the art in the rest of the book.  You see this exact same pose repeated in the final image in the book, again leading me to think that a good bit of the artwork was traced from other existing Scooby Doo work.

 

 

Though I had a handful of other read-along storybook and record sets (namely Gremlins, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the various weird Star Wars exopanded universe books like Planet of the Hoojibs), I don't remember if I had any others released by Peter Pan Records.  I seem to remember the company character icon pretty well though.  I wonder if it was from pouring over this Scooby Doo book so many times?

I'm sure I've written about this before, but one of the aspects I love the most about pop culture is how I can chart the time line of my life by what was bouncing around my skull at the time.  Back in the late 80s, early 90s, my family was going though a lot of changes, mostly geographically, taking us from Florida to Massachusetts, then to New Hampshire, and eventually back down south to Georgia (all within a one year period.)  This was a tough time for me as I was always in flux, leaving behind best friends and family, jumping into new climates (in particular dealing with snow for the first time in my life), and continuously changing schools (as well as going from middle back to elementary because the programs up north had 6th grade as part of elementary.)  The only constant in my life at the time was my love for and addiction to the DuckTales cartoon.  Actually it was DuckTales and the movie Willow as my mother was also in a weird place, and we ended up watching Ron Howard and George Lucas' under appreciated fantasy flick almost nightly.

For me, sitting down in front of the TV and hearing the opening synthesized drum beats from the DuckTales theme was like a warm blanket and a cup of chicken noodle soup.  There was nothing more comforting at the time than watching Huey, Dewey, Louie, Doofus, Uncle Scrooge, Duckworth, Webby, Ms. Beakley, Launchpad, Gyro, Gizmoduck, and Bubba the prehistoric cave duck battling the likes of Magica de Spell, Flintheart Glomgold, the Beagles Boys, and El Capitan (from the original miniseries.)  It was always a treat when Donald duck would make an appearance, getting some shore leave from the Navy to spend some time with his nephews.

The below sheet of stickers was released in 1986, though I'm not sure if it was part of a Hallmark set or if it was just distributed by Disney (or a subsidiary) in other retail outlets…



Aside from ditching one of the Beagle Boys in the set above (and replacing it with a Magica de Spell sticker) I think this sheet does a nice job of representing the main characters of the show.  I was surprised to see Doofus getting some love here as he was pretty annoying, though I'm not sure who he's be replaced by.  I love Gryo Gearloose, but I'm not sure if he was a fan favorite, and I'm not surprised there isn't a Ms. Beakley sticker.  Gizmoduck would have been cool, but this sheet was printed before his appearance on the show.  Actually, I'm sort of surprised there wasn't a Flintheart sticker as he is more or less the main villain of the show, at least in terms of being Scrooge's nemesis.

Getting back to the show itself for a second, Ducktales, the second Disney cartoon released in the 80s (after the Adventures of the Gummi Bears), and the first of their syndicated fare (which would be followed by shows like Rescue Rangers, Talespin, and Darkwing Duck throughout the 90s) is probably the best written and executed of the various Toon Disney shows (at least IMO.)  Also, the revamp of the Duckberg characters was probably the most subtle of the various Disney chartoons adding hints of Indiana Jones' adventures to spice up the shenanigans of the greedy Scrooge and his mischievous nephews (as opposed to throwing a bunch of the Jungle Book characters into the odd air pirate setting of Talespin, or making Chip and Dale into makeshift MacGyver's in a Wings sitcom setting.)

For me, DuckTales marks the end of my afternoons watching more or less realistic action cartoons after school (like Transformers, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and Bravestarr), and the shift into more cartoony action/comedy fare (like Tiny Tunes, the Disney Shows, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid.)  Luckily the show has begun to be released on DVD by Disney (there are currently three volumes containing 75 of the 100 produced episodes, including the original mini series, available), though the sets are a bit lacking.  The episodes are out of order, and currently there are no plans to release the final 25 episodes of the show, which is kind of a shame, though if nothing else, the sets are pretty cheaply priced.

There are a ton of reasons why I'm a nerd/dork/geek/what-the-fuck-ever, but if I had to pick one that exemplified this blog, it would probably have to be the word document file that I've been working on for the past four years that I call "the list."  What is on this list you probably aren't asking?  Well I'll tell you.  It's a list of every film I've ever seen.  Not so dorky you say?  Well it's also annotated.

Over the course of the past four years I've spent a good bit of my spare time reading over IMDB lists, complete video and DVD release guides, and any other list of films I could find to compile a list of everything I've ever seen, film-wise.  I was pretty proud of myself at first because this sprang out of boredom at work as I tried to think of some project that would take a long time, and when I decided to draw up the list, I figured that I'd never finish it.  I have seen quite a few movies, but the thing that I felt was going to be the biggest stumbling block was finding thorough lists of flicks.  See most of the lists and guides I was reading were either yearly best-of's, or limited to what has been released either on video or DVD, and even then these weren't exhaustive as they leaned toward more popular fare.  So between these, 6 million Google searches, and my collection of movie ticket stubs that I started collecting about 20 years ago I managed to put together a pretty exhaustive list.

Is anyone still reading this?  God bless your inexhaustive patience and limit for boredom if you are.  So were there any stipulations to what could and couldn't find a home on the list?  There sure were.  First off, I had to feel like I remembered a decent amount of the plot in order for the flick to make it on the list.  If I remembered the title but couldn't remember the plot, I nixed it.  Second, and this is the super stupid anal part of this list considering I'm the only person who will ever see it besides what ever estate lawyer lackey is forced to read through it upon my death, I had to feel like I watched the flick from beginning to end.  So anything that I've seen edited on TV didn't make the list either.

So what are these annotations you probably aren't asking about?  Well, once I finished the general list it didn't seem quite as cool as I had hoped.  I did mention that I was a dork right?  So in order to make the list cooler than G. Gordon Liddy the night before the Watergate scandal broke, I decided to run through the list and mark each movie with some code.  First, each flick was marked to show who (out of my circle of friends and family) that I saw the flick with.  Then I marked it as to whether or not I saw it in the theater.  Then whether or not I owned it.  Then I figured I'd try and mark the approximate number of times I could remember watching it.  This list was really starting to take shape now.  I had to make a key for the various notations.  As a coupe de grace, I decided to highlight all the flicks that I wanted to own on DVD, and then whether or not they were available on DVD, so now the list was all colorful as well.

Outside of feeling like the biggest anal-list-retentive geek on the planet, I felt like all the time and effort I put into the this was well worth the, well, effort, if for nothing else, than for giving me fodder for other boredom relieving activities like "count the seconds".  Have you ever found yourself on the toilet with a calculator so bored that you decided to mathematically deduce the total number of seconds you've been alive, or the approximate number of breaths you've taken, or the possible number of times you've pooped in your life?  Liar, I saw you doing it.  Wil Wheaton has done it.  Well, he wasn't on the toilet, but that's neither here nor there.  Anyway, this list has a ton of statistics fodder for crap like this, from the approximate proportion of my life I've spent watching movies, to the ratio of films seen with each of my friends, and who I am more likely to see a flick with.  Last warning, I mentioned I was a dork, okay, so stop screaming at me.

One thing I'd like to do it to be able to compare this list to someone else's like another movie buff that's seen a ton of movies.  I mean, even though the list took four years to finish and refine, at the end of the day there are only 1950 films on it. Is that a lot?  Dunno.  Doesn't look like a lot, but then it felt like a lot when I set out to make it.  I think I might need therapy...

Wow, when the heck did the middle of November jump in our laps?!?  Mentally, I'm still back in late August trying to figure out how to not go stark raving mad because of all the changes at work.  Sheesh.  I'm totally neglecting the internet right now (actually it feels like I've been out of the game so to speak since the start of the year.)  But I'm not writing to complain about my silly life woes, no I'm back to get into a fun head-space, and what better way to do this than by cracking open a bootleg copy of one of my favorite all time movies, the 1986 BMX cult classic RAD.

Growing up in the 80s I had a chance to catch the insane home video boom right from the beginning, what with all of the mom & pop rental shops opening and the initial flood of movie titles on VHS and Beta.  My family was a late adopter in terms of getting our own VCR, so instead we'd rent one every other weekend from a little store tucked in a corner of a Gooding's shopping center down the street from us.  As a kid I was a creature of habit when it came to renting movies, not only because I loved watching the same flicks over and over, but also because there were only a handful of titles that I was interested in packed into that tiny rental store.  I remember that the store was divided pretty evenly between Beta and VHS, and the little old couple that owned it only ordered the flicks in one format or the other.  For some reason my parents only ever really wanted to rent a VHS player, so I was severely restricted in terms of titles to rent.  Usually it was a choice between three or four movies, Red Dawn, War Games, SpaceCamp, and RAD, and for some reason the flick that I was always choosing was RAD.   It was also around this time that I realized just how much VHS tapes used to cost back in the day.  I think on my sixth or seventh rental I got up the courage to ask my mom for a copy of the movie for Christmas, so we asked the rental store owners how much a copy cost. ;'When they told us that a new copy of the movie would run about $110, both my and my mother's jaws hit the floor.  Owning VHS was apparently only for the very, very rich in 1986 (well actually it was aimed at store owners for rentals as the industry really hadn't caught a whiff of just how much people wanted to own copies of films.)

So I never got a copy of RAD on VHS, and later on when I starting building my own library of films, I was cheated again as RAD has never been officially released on DVD.   I had to resort to picking up a bootleg copy on ebay, which was just a crappy port of an old VHS rental ripped and burned to disc.  My copy did come with a nice bonus disc though, which included the majority of the RAD soundtrack songs.

The flick begins with the very iconic Tri-Star opening (with the Pegasus running kitty corner into the screen and then leaping over the logo), something that I associate with plenty of Saturday afternoons spent glued to the TV during movie marathons.



Anyway, I thought I'd sort of go through the movie chronologically and talk about the stuff I find interesting.  RAD is part of an unofficial trilogy of flicks in the 80s that touch on the 3 main popular extreme (for lack of a better term) sports of the decade (skate boarding, which was covered by the movie Thrasin', surfing covered in the seriously underrated flick North Shore, and BMX.)  Though there were a couple other BMX movies in the 80s (namely the Aussie flick BMX Bandits, which was more about escaping murderous thieves than BMX), none were as cool to me as RAD.  The opening features a plethora of professional BMXers free-styling over the credits, set to the rocking Jon Farnham tune, Break the Ice (which deserves to be held up with other 80s triumphant movie rock ballads like Rock Until You Drop from Monster Squad, and You're the Best from Karate Kid.)



The flick was produced by Jack Schwartzman, the husband of one of the film's stars, Talia Shire (and father of Wes Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman.)  It was directed by Hal Needham, the guy responsible for many of the goofy Burt Reynolds car-centric comedies of the late 70s and early 80s (like Smokey and the Bandit and the Cannonball Run series), so you know that he can handle the fast paced action of RAD.

I think it was during this credit sequence that I got the most jazzed while watching the flick.  The pro BMX riders doing all sorts of stunts (which I can only hazard a guess to what the names are by using the internets) would always get me in the mood to go outside and try them myself.  Trouble was that I'm horribly uncoordinated when it comes to most physical activities, not to mention that I'm deathly afraid of pain and looking too much like an ass (a trait I've since grown out of), so I'd get pumped, go outside to ride my bike (a sweet powder blue and white GT Performer covered in pink GT stickers), fall off once while trying to do a simple trick and then pedal back home in a huff.  Pretty sad I know.  Guess I would have been the definition of a poser.

Anyway, the flick's main star is Bill Allen who at the time was a 24 year-old guy who looked a hell of a lot like a young Powers Booth.  Playing opposite of Allen was a young Lori Loughlin, who would later on play Uncle Jessie's girlfriend/wife on Full House for six or seven seasons.  Rounding out the cast (in terms of the more known established actors) are Ray Walston of Fast Times at Ridgemont High fame, Jack Weston (who I remember mostly from Dirty Dancing, Ishtar and Short Circuit 2, but who also had turns in flicks like the Cincinnati Kid and the original Thomas Crown Affair), and H.B. Haggerty (who was a familiar wrestler and starred in another underrated flick from the 80s, Million Dollar Mystery.)



In the above screen caps you can take a gander at two of my favorite 80s BMX memories, the first being a fabled full pipe and the second my favorite freestyle move though I have no idea what it's called.  Basically it's when someone does an endo, starts pogoing on the front tire and whips the frame of the bike around in circles, stepping over it as it flips around.





The opening credits sequence is one of those (for me) breathtakingly awesome bits of 80s nostalgia and excitement that I revel in like a drug.   Between the sickly sweet fist pumping heartfelt ice breaking and right making anthem playing over the free-styling action, and the non stop montage of professional BMX riders doing all your basic tricks and such, it's just 80s perfection.  Every time I hopped on my GT Performer heading out for school in the morning, this is the kind of thing I had in my mind's eye.  Sure, I couldn't do much besides popping a wheelie or coming to a side-sliding stop, but I always imagined I was just as talented and, well, cool.  Never meant to be though.

Anyway, back to the film.   The action opens on Cru Jones and his two friends Becky and Luke, splitting up to do their morning paper routes…



What follows is a montage (of which this film has in spades) of the three playing out every possible BMX cliché and fantasy, at least in terms of riding around a local neighborhood goes.  There's riding through construction sites (which was always a favorite of mine growing up within a series of newly built subdivisions…)



…followed by the perfectly timed (or not so much so) jump off of one structure onto a car (and the hilarious wipe out that ensues, complete with straightening of hair and uttering the word "gnarly".)



To illustrate just how ensconced Cru and his compatriots are in their small town, the local fire department is shown getting their delivery mid-street at the appointed time, as well as a friendly garbage man who obviously gives Cru a 'lift' on a regular basis…



Of course, everything isn't wine and roses.  The filmmakers had to make sure and keep an edge to the characters, which is where the ornery residents of the 'hood come in.  You've got the guy who doesn't appreciate his paper thrown into his flower bed, and the most typecast curmudgeon of all time, Ray Walston, who gets a walkway full of spilled coffee and newspaper, courtesy of our hero Mr. Jones.



The sequence ends with Cru in the middle of town staring down an iconic clock tower pumped at another shot at his own best time.  Again, though this sequence is pretty cliché, it does address a lot of what it felt like to cut through my own neighborhood, using my regular shortcuts through golf courses, and light woods to get to school or my friend's houses.

There's even a nicely executed bit with Cru riding though a specifically rigged section of fencing (again, another childhood fantasy of secret passageways hidden throughout the subdivision), which he then turns to face revealing the plot of the film in an advertisement for Helltrack, a 7-Eleven sponsored BMX event coming to the small town.



Again, the plot is pretty straight forward with the corrupt owner of a BMX company (an actual company Mongoose, who I'm sure didn't realize how their company was going to be painted when they agreed to be featured in the film) putting on Helltrack to promote one of his star riders, Bart Taylor (played by real life Olympian Bart Conner), and securing a million dollar T-Shirt licensing deal.  The catch, and the entry of our hero into the story, comes with a local town hall meeting where the residents want to know if local talent can enter into the race.  After some thought, Mongoose owner Duke Best (played with plenty of sleeze by Jack Weston) decides that there will be a qualifying race, the top contenders of which will be featured in the final Helltrack race.



If you've ever seen a kids flick in your life you can probably figure out the rest of the film from here.  But this is beside the point as the cult status of this film isn't in its intricate plot shenanigans, but in the 80s laced cheese, and fun BMX sequences.  One of my favorite of which takes place in a lumberyard where our heroes have a clubhouse (again, another staple of my childhood fantasies realized on film.)  Again, like with the morning paper route antics, this group of BMX nerds is apparently frequently confronted by a local motorcycle cop (played by the iconic H. B. Hagerty) who chases them for sport.  In this bit, it involves riding around huge stacks of freshly cut & stacked wood, as well as a mountain of logs that Cru ends up very unconvincingly riding up to evade the policeman (you can see the planks through the logs the stunt rider used to scale the heap.)  It's crazy and over the top set to a goofy fun rock song called Get Strange by the act Hubert Kah.



Of course, there's also the angle of the Cru's home life with precocious sister Wesley (place in pitch perfect Peppermint Patty tomboy by Laura Jacoby), and his hardworking depressed mother played by Talia Shire (who brings way more gravitas to the role than the film probably calls for, but is plenty welcome.)   Basically, the old push and pull of Cru's hopes and dreams of becoming an ace BMXer, and his obligation to get good grades and go to college (the money for which his mother works hard to earn.)   It's not enough that there's a super evil greedy BMX company owner to contend with.



Completing the template set up by films like the Karate Kid, Cru also has to master that perfect race winning BMX trick, the awe inspiring 360 degree mid jump back flip.  It's surely the crane kick of this film, though is eventually more or less useless in the grand scheme of things.



The film really picks up steam with the introduction of the main villains of the piece, Bart Taylor and his twin toadies, Rod & Rex Reynolds (played by the dreamy real life twins Carey and Chad Hayes respectively.)  They're introduced in the weirdest fashion, a parade through the center of town.  Granted, the whole Helltrack business would probably be a big deal, but parade worthy?  I don’t know.  Of course, blowing into town along side Bart, Rod, and Rex is the lovely Christian Hollings (played by the one and only Lori Loughlin, who looks about ten years older than the character she was cast to play.)



One of the weird themes in this flick involves our hero Cru not always portrayed in the best of lights.  As I mentioned in the beginning of the film he's not the best paperboy, annoying shop keeps by riding through their stores, and knocking coffee out of senior citizen's hands willy nilly.  There's also a short bit with Cru jumping a fence into the school parking lot right into the middle of a group of yuppie teens, who granted probably deserved it, though it's still unprovoked and not the nicest.  During the parade, there is a weird sequence where Cru and his friends stop the parade to let a lady in a car on a side street through the traffic, but then to the angry sneers of the evil BMXers and being chased by the local fuzz, Cru beats a hasty getaway by jumping his bike onto a car and riding over it.  Maybe it's just the crotchety old curmudgeon in me, but this would have pissed me off and I'm sure dented the hood and roof to hell and back.  Maybe I'm just getting to old to appreciate these teen action flicks.



By far, my favorite sequence in the entire film revolves around a school dance that Bart, Rod and Rex are forced to attend while in town.  The scenes feature two of the zaniest, most ridiculous dance sequences ever put to film (including both Rodney Dangerfield performances in Caddyshack and Back to School.)  The first is the stupendously retarded evil line dancing bit, set to the song Music That You Can Dance To by Sparks.  Bart Taylor is decked out in his supremely "cool" suit jacket over a plain yellow T-shirt looking like a reject Billy Zabka clone and is dancing with a hussy all gussied up to look like Debbie Harry.   They're both so stiff and trying way too hard to exude sexiness that they come off laughable, particularly in their Macarena-like dance moves (don't you dig the crossed arms grasping the shoulders dance move?)   The look of evil intensity on their faces is offset by the absurd faux break dancing styles of the Reynolds twins dancing around a zebra-striped, skintight-lycra-wearing shell of a woman.  Hands down, the evil dancing craziness reaches a nice crescendo when the twins drop to the floor doing the god awful push-ups move, followed by a double dose of the worm that has to bee seen to be believed.



As all this is going on inside, Cru (who has come to the dance Dutch after being rebuffed earlier in the film), is doing a bunch of freestyle BMX tricks outside the school gym.  A crowd begins to gather, when all of a sudden Lori Loughlin arrives and a very tenuous, yet lasting connection is formed between the two star-crossed lovers…



…which leads to the single most insane dance sequence ever!



Set to Real Life's Send Me an Angel, Cru and Christian proceed to rip up the floor BMX style, dancing on their bikes.  The above screen captures just don't do this sequence justice.   In fact I don't have the words to adequately describe just how over the top, hilarious, and amazing this sequence is (check out youtube for the proof and judge for yourselves…)
This craziness is followed by a lightening fast procession of falling in love montage scenes set to With You by John Farnham.  Again, it's predictably hokey, but lovable just the same and ends with the oddly named Ass Sliding scene.  Why is there a nice concrete slide in the middle of the woods leading down into a nearby lake?  Don’t know, but it makes for some zaney love scenes…



Again, adding to the idea that Cru isn't the best person in the world, he ends up sort of cheating during the Helltrack qualifying races by riding outside of the boundaries to avoid entangling with the other racers, and skipping over obstacles.  It's a weird message to send to kids, and it sort of ends up muddying the film a bit.  Ces't la vie though.  The sequence is scored by the rocking Thunder in Your Heart by John Farnham, which is equally as high five inducing as the opening song Break the Ice.   It's rare that a movie like this get two fist pumping anthems…



Of course, by taking part in the qualifiers, Cru has to pass up on taking his SATs, and really pisses his mother off.

To complete the clichéd plot, Cru is wooed by both Duke Best and the evil BMX hussies to come ride for them, and just as soon as he turns them down, our hero finds more obstacles in the way of riding at Helltrack…



Enter the last bit of cult styling to the movie with the introduction of the Rad Racing team, as Cru and his friends find that they have to have a liquid corporate sponsor in order to ride at Helltrack.  The group decides to print up their own T-Shirts with their newly formed team logo and sell them to raise the money they need to race.



Of course in all the ruckus there is some strife for the blossoming relationship between Cru and Christian.   If this film holds the record for the most insane dance sequence, then it also holds the record for the corniest make-up love scene involving a god awful poster featuring pandas and ice cream, reenacted by the two doe-eyed lovers.



As a quick aside, take a look at that monster comic book rack in that ice cream/convenience store!



Again, falling back on the Karate Kid template, the film features a 'sweep the leg' moment as Duke Best informs Bart, Rod and Rex that they need to wipeout Cru no matter what it takes (punctuated by Weston knocking back some whiskey.)



The film builds to the crazy BMX track called Helltrack, and boy does it live up to its name.  Featuring an almost two story vertical drop and some craze jumps (for standard BMX bikes at least), not to mention a giant cereal bowl (of Kix no less), Helltrack was a very convincing set piece.



Again, another strength of this movie was that it featured a bevy of real BMX superstars…



A). Team Hutch – Jeff Ingram. B). Team Robinson – Richard Fleming. C). Factory DK – Robert Rupe. D). Powerlite – Danny Millwee. E). Redline Team – Scott Clark. F). Norco – Kirk Bihun. G). GT – Mike Napareho. H). Binghams Schwinn – Glen Adams. I). Peddle Power Rider – Chris Phoenix. J). Team Robinson – Travis Chipres. K). GT – Eddie Fiola (who also did most of the stunt riding for Cru in the Film as well as being the Technical Advisor on the stunts.) L). GT – Kevin Hull. M). Skyway – Richie Anderson. N). Vans – Beatle Rosecrans. O). Hutch – "Hollywood" Mike Miranda.







All in all, this is one of my favorite cheesy films from the 80s, one that I can watch a hundred times in a row and never get tired of.  I'm sure true BMX fanatics can't stand the flick, but as a kid I loved it to pieces.  Hopefully one day it'll get a true DVD release, but in the meantime I hear that Bill Allen is signing copies of the bootlegs (as well as selling headshots.)  Also, don't forget to check his site for some more Rad trivia, straight from Cru's mouth...

Did you ever wonder how some people can find the time to have multiple blogs?  Well I did, and then for some insane reason decided to start up a second about a year or so ago called Buried in DVDs where I waxed deconstructive on my favorite movies and my DVD collection.  I felt awesomely productive for a few months, and then I was all of a sudden asking myself where in the hell did I think I'd find the time for a second site and promptly stopped updating it.  I think I initially wanted to keep this content separate from Branded as I was going to get into a lot of non-eighties flicks and TV shows, but honestly, I don't really think it's necessary to paint myself into such a tight 80s corner.  So I've decide to integrate the archives of Buried in DVDs into Branded (a process that is one hell of a time sucker. )

Anyway, for anyone curious, there are a handful of Buried posts, well, buried in this site now (you can access them through the banner on the sidebar.)  Hopefully this will free me up to posting about movies and TV shows again as I at least feel it's all working toward the same goal (and site) now…

It's kind of weird how much I switch off holiday-wise after Halloween.  Sure, there are aspects to some of the American holidays that get me excited, but there really is no other holiday that even remotely gets me jazzed besides the 'ween.  I like seeing my family during Christmas, but I'm getting to a near Scrooge level of bah-humbugging when it comes to the pageantry and gift giving.  From a totally pop culture angle there isn't much about Easter that floats my boat besides my first Cadbury Egg of the season (which is also subsequently my last as well.)  I detest the pointlessness and card company greed of Valentine's Day (not to mention that I can't find sets of kid or cartoon inspired card sets that I dig anymore.)  I don't have the energy or interest in color-coordinating my clothing choices for St. Patrick's Day.  Fear of living in rough neighborhoods and a general Curmudgeon-ness has also deflated my love of the sound of fireworks during the 4th of July (not to mention my near non-existent general patriotism for being an American, and the fact that no one ever stops with the fourth to set off firecrackers and the like and it gets old real quick.)  That leaves Thanksgiving, and again I find myself teetering dangerously toward falling out of love with the holiday. 

I've never managed to wake up early enough to enjoy the Macy's parade, I don't watch football, and gorging myself until I pass out from all-too-rough heart palpitations isn't as fun as it used to be (besides tarragon and thyme scented night sweats aren't the most attractive prospect.)  If the holiday has one thing going for it, it's the autumn association with Halloween.  Pumpkin iconography, sharing similar color schemes, and shelf space in a lot of stores in particular.  This was a way-too-long intro for the following set of stickers in this week's edition of Peel Here…



This sheet of stickers was released by Hallmark in 1984 and features a very weird video game theme that's in line with the sort of made-up video games you'd find in an arcade in Springfield (in the Simpson's.)  I'm assuming (and this really is a stretch considering these are just silly stickers) that the Turkeyvision game was modeled after Pac-Man with a manic turkey (instead of our hungry round yellow hero) gobbling up candy corn in place of power pellets, and being chased by little pilgrims and Indians (instead of multi-colored speedy ghosts.)

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'd really dig a skin-able version of Pac-Man, especially if I could design my own character sprites.  How much fun would it be to navigate a floating Charlie heard through a maze of candy pellets being chased by umpa lumpas (as a fer-instance?!?)  Anyway, take these stickers as you will…

Just wanted to pop out of my post Halloween hibernation for a second and point to the new episode of the Art & Story podcast (hosted by Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd.)  Jerzy & Mark have been lining up some awesome interviews on the show lately (in particular their recent conversation with animation giant Tom Sito), and this week they got a chance to speak with the very awesome and talented voice actor Bill Ratner, who was responsible for bringing the character Flint to life on the G.I. Joe cartoon!  If you haven't seen G.I. Joe (here's an example of his portrayal of Flint), you've probably heard him narrating movie trailers, and most certainly in commercial voice-overs.  I highly suggest you give the show a listen, and check out the archives as the duo has really done a great job deconstructing the process of storytelling as it relates to making comics (as well as hitting other areas.)

Well, this Halloween season has buzzed by so fast I feel like I could use a whole second month to celebrate.  As per usual, we haven't yet heard the pitter patter of tiny trick-or-treater's feet at the door, and again we'll have a ton of candy to try and eat over the next month.  One of these years we're going to get at least one kid and I'm telling ya, the whole candy bowl is going in that bag (and trust me, it's always the good stuff!)  Anyway, I hope everyone has enjoyed my countdown, as well as visited the other fine blogs doing their creepy part to keep this month chock full of spooky goodness.   Heck, I'll probably still be catching up on all the Halloween craziness for the next few months.  Also, before I get into the meat of this post, I just want to give an official Happy Halloween to everyone out there.

So on to the last countdown post for this season (barring any leftovers I might throw up tomorrow.)   Before I broke down my mother's will and her kibosh on watching horror movies, there were only a handful of flicks that I was allowed to catch that fell into the horror vein.  One of these was a favorite rental throughout my childhood, though for the life of me I didn't remember 90% of the film when I re-watched it this past month (after picking up an out-of-print copy from a local Hollywood Video that was closing its doors), Saturday the 14th (circa 1981)…



I think I remember the film's 1988 sequel (Saturday the 14th Strikes Back) a bit more, though after watching the trailer for that film as well I'm not so sure.  All I know is that for awhile growing up Saturday the 14th and the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown seemed like the only seasonal fare on TV.



I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I plopped this flick in the DVD player, but it sure as hell wasn't what I ended up watching.  Fluttering between god awful silly slap stick, bad pun comedy, and a pretty pedestrian horror film spoof, Saturday the 14th just doesn't know what it wants to be.  Again, seeing as I watched this a few times as a kid, and considering the film opens with a very goofy animation sequence, I figured this film to be kids flick fare…



The film stars husband and wife duo Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as John and Mary a couple who has just inherited a decrepit and spooky house.  Of course, there are others who want the house, namely a couple of vampires named Waldemar (played with camp by Jeffrey Tambor) and Yolanda (played by Nancy Lee Andrews)…



The flick was produced by Julie Corman (wife of famous B movie producer/director Roger Corman) who also brought us the illustrious trilogy of exploitation nursing films, The Night Nurses, the Young Nurses, and Candy Stripe Nurses, as well as Chopping Mall (a film I’ve been obsessed with since falling in love with the poster art at a young age, but have never actually sat through.)  Howard R Cohen directed and penned the script (as well as writing the aforementioned the Young Nurses, which is where Corman probably came to know him; he also brought us episodes of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Rainbow Brite, and Emmanuelle V!)



As I mentioned above, the film opens with Tambor and Andrews lusting after the old creepy house that has been inherited by Benjamin, Prentiss and their two kids, Debbie (played by Kari Michaelson of Gimmie a Break! Fame) and Billy (played with smart-alecky goodness by Kevin Brando…)



It seems that the house is cursed/haunted/possessed, and includes a copy of the Book of Evil, which has the power to unleash evil on the earth.  Billy being the perfectly precocious and curious kid finds the book, opens it, ignores the warning and proceeds to let fly the monsters of evil (which include a rouges gallery of men-in-rubber-suit-monsters such as a mummy, a beastly werewolf, and a goofy looking monster with eyes on stalks that reminds me of the aliens from the Explorers movie.)



There are a million bad puns and jokes, most issued by Richard Benjamin (who delivers the horrible dialogue with a grin and a smile.)  After the 1st third of the film I felt that this was surely a kid's flick, and was then totally taken aback by the drawn-out stripping-before-a-bath scene that (in the kid's film context) seemed inappropriately alluring…



I probably wouldn't have noticed if the scene didn't keep going and going, with plenty of close-ups on Kari Michaelson removing each piece of clothing slowly, and then continuously getting interrupted by phone calls and the like.  Granted, there was a shark-fin-headed gill monster lurking in the water of the tub, which was supposed to be suspenseful, but was really more of an irritation that kept the camera off Michaelson here and there during her strip tease.  I don't mind the disrobing scene in the least, it's just sort of weirdly placed in what I assumed was a kid's flick.   Also, is it weird that my wife and I freeze-framed the screen to see the breast covering bubble bikini that Michaelson was wearing to keep the movie clean?



The film takes another turn for the weirdly violent after the monster chases Michaelson throughout the house, and it's finally confronted by a cop (a neighbor of the newly moved-in family who happens to be passing by), who proceeds to shoot the creature in the heard (with large animated blood squirt and all…)



The creature then strangles the cop to death in a very frantically gruesome manner, again propelling the film outside of children's movie territory and into a b-horror film.  Nothing wrong with this, it just makes for a mighty odd combination.  We then slip back into the goofy kid's comedy arena after the family calls an exterminator for an owl infestation (actually it's bats, but the running joke is that they're owls) and they get a house call from none other than Van Helsing himself (played with glee by Severn Darden.)



The flick then see-saws between goofy and horrific as the wife is turned into a vampire by Tambor, and the family soon discovers that they are in fact trapped in the house by the power of the book (getting whipped in the face by a gust of wind and bright lights whenever they try and open a door, yet newcomers to the house seem to negate this effect.)   It's all way-too-darkly-lit montages of monster parties, severed heads, and eyeballs in the coffee as the family (and the live-in Van Helsing) decide how they can defeat the book of evil and the house-crashing vampires.



Saturday the 14th has one more surprise up its sleeve, as the plot comes to a head and we discover that the menace is really Van Helsing, who wants the power of the book to take over the world, and it's Tambor and Andrews who are trying to stop him…



Billy brings the book to the vampires, and a battle of immense strength and wills takes place (e.g. Darden and Tambor make a bunch of silly faces at each other for a few minutes while trying to levitate Billy…)



…and then the real action begins (well not really, but it was fun to type anyway!)  There's plenty of goofy special effects involving Tambor and Darden throwing lightening and fireworks at each other before Waldemar defeats the evil Van Helsing…



In the end, the family makes up with the vampires and agrees to sell them the house (they end up moving across the street into much nicer digs.)



Honestly, I don't know what to think of this film.  It's at times so-bad-it's-good, but mostly it's just bad, and I wonder what I found interesting about it as a kid.  You can barely make out what the monsters look like as the majority of the film is shot in darkness, though this is probably for the best as the costumes seemed to be pretty cheap.  All in all it just seemed like one big schizophrenic mess of a film that could only be surpassed by the sequel, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back…



Again, I've only seen the trailer, but a lot of the imagery (especially the shot of the blonde girl who is huge inside of the house and you only see her eye from a window) and cast strikes a bell with me.  This will certainly be one for me to track down…

Well, that does it for this year's countdown.   Here's to hoping I can find enough material for next year's.  Happy Halloween folks!

Before special edition DVDs and devoted internet fan sites there was pretty much only one great place to find out about all the fun little tidbits and facts on your favorite films, the souvenir film magazine.  Well, they weren't really the only place for info (there were plenty of other magazines, newspapers and books helping to cover the ins and outs of film), but they sure were a good place to find out a lot about a particular movie.   Of course you were limited to only the films that were deemed important enough to have a souvenir magazine, flicks like Rambo: First Blood Part II, the Karate Kid, Back to the Future, and presented today, Gremlins...



Growing up in the 80s I bought, read and re-read the magazines released for the Karate Kid (and it’s sequel), Willow, and Tim Burton's Batman.  Though I was just as obsessed with Gremlins, I never came across the magazine (though I did have an over-sized hardback story book, a book and record set, and a few smaller floppy storybooks that were illustrated instead of featuring film stills.)  When I came upon this copy in a used bookstore recently I couldn't help but pick it up.

These magazines were great, usually featuring a ton of film stills, interviews and peeks behind the scenes.  This particular issue features a ton of storyboards, a poster and a lot of behind the scenes trivia…















I used to cover my walls with this sort of pull-out poster.  In fact when I turned 10 and became a hardcore Metallica devote, I cut out every single picture in the special Metal Edge Metallica souvenir magazine (even went so far as to but two copies so I could get the pictures from both sides of the pages) and cover one entire wall with clippings.  What's weird is that the older I got the more I felt like I needed to grow out of this trend, growing into only hanging full-sized movie posters and such.  Now I don;t even hang posters anymore.  I guess I'm sort of a fuddy duddy that way...



This issue also featured a fun ad for Don Post Gremlins Halloween masks (available in regular and deluxe furry editions!)

When I was out earlier in the year scrounging around for content for the 2008 Halloween Countdown, I never thought I'd find a cool little book that picked up the torch of the Crestwood Monster series (which I've written about both here, and here, as well as in the 1st issue of the Branded in the 80s magazine available for purchase here) in the early 90s, but I did.  While I was browsing the ever awesome Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens, GA (kept up by the ever kind and knowledgeable Devlin Thompson) I spied a little baby blue paperback at the back of a glass case filled with all sorts of monster related goodness from the past 30 odd years.  What immediately caught my eye was the marker attached to the cover which could mean only one thing (that this was some form of the invisible ink books that I grew up loving, having picked up a million and one Yes & Know books on family vacations over the years.)  This was a great find though being monster themed and all and was called the Mark and See Universal Studio Monsters Frightening Facts book (circa 1992…)



First things first, I was so jazzed that the back cover was a perfect copy of the front cover, even including an image of the attached marker, as there was no way I was going to get a good scan of the cover (since the marker bulged out so far.)  Anyway, when I first picked up the book and headed home I assumed that it was just a Universal Monster themed Yes & Know book, but when I got home and really took a good look at it I was floored.  Crammed into its 48 pages is a wealth of material on all of the Universal monster movies and their source material that this one book contains almost the entire Crestwood Monster Series…



There are sections devoted to Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon that feature one page Cliff's Notes versions of the main films, as well as background on the characters and some fun facts on the films…



Though a lot of the interior artwork is re-purposed from the 90s Universal Monster campaign (as seen in the top left of the cover), there are also a lot of nice full page stills from the movies…



Most surprising of all was that the invisible ink marker still works, even after sitting on various store shelves for the last 16 years.  Now that's quality!







The book also features four detachable monster trading cards with some nifty airbrushed artwork.   Snazzy!





Stuff like this really warms my heart as I'll always be a fan of the Universal monsters films first and foremost, and (probably pointlessly) I fear that as the years go on and the films get older and lose some of their relevance to the current generation that more and more kids aren't going to get introduced to them.  Crestwood was there for me as a kid, and Universal themselves were picking up the slack in the 90s, but what about kids today?  What books are out there turning pre-teens into Franky Fans?

New Halloween candy has really been a mixed bag this year.  Overall I was pretty disappointed with the crop, but I have to admit that there were some pretty crazy concepts and designs floating about.  There were some really fun repackaging designs as in the Halloween Nerds that popped up way back in early August…



I mean as Nerds candy goes, it's kind of hard to find new ways to market it outside of pretending that the little candy coated grains of sugar are edible aquarium pebbles.   So when Wonka put 'em in plastic test tubes with monster shaped stoppers and called them antidotes, vaccines, makeovers, and morphs, it was pretty ingenious.  In essence I'm getting a little plastic monster toy, candy, and imagination fodder for pretending that the only thing keeping me from sprouting fangs and draining my wife of her life blood is the test tube of candy that is just outside my reach!  Seriously though, these were a great way of getting me excited about a candy that I've known and loved for years.   It also doesn't hurt that the werewolf figure/stopper bears an uncanny resemblance to A.L.F.!



In that same vein (oh ho, what a bad pun), we have Confectionery Lane's Halloween contribution this year in the form of a crazily realistic liquid candy Blood Bag!



When I saw Harris Smith write about this candy wonder over at his blog Negative Pleasure, I knew I was going to have to rush out and find the nearest Walgreen's and procure a bag for myself.  This is the essence of perfect Halloween candy, at least in concept.  What kid wouldn't squeal with glee at getting one of these realistic bags of blood plopped into their goody bag come Halloween night?  Unfortunately, as Mr. Smith points out in his post, the liquid candy is pretty awful.  It's way too sour and chemically enhanced sweet that it would be quite the chore to consume the bag without puking up blood colored vomit minutes later.

Also in the fun-in-concept-but-awful-in-execution department we have yet another large gummy severed hand make a debut this year, this one from Amos Sweets…



This severed gummi hand is about the same size as this year's severed hand gummy from Flix Candy, and just about as inedible.  I'm getting the feeling that the larger gummi candy gets the more and more it starts tasting like rubber or plastic…



So, going by this thought one would think that any "normal-sized" gummy candy would probably taste fine right?  Wrong.  I had very high hopes for a late comer in the Halloween candy department, Sherwood Brands line of Gummi Scary Treats candy…



These four boxes of gummi candy had some of the most fun packaging designs I've seen in recent years.  These die-cut wraparound boxes scream love and attention to detail, so it was a real disappointment when the candy housed inside was pretty bland, and a little chemical tasting.



Probably the best effort in the gummi candy department as far as merging a great concept with a good taste was the 3-foot-long Big Fat Hissie Fit Gummy Snake I found at my local Wal-Mart…



This is a pretty impressive piece of confection as it's pretty much a life-sized gummy snake and it's pretty good as far as over-sized gummi candy goes.   I could see myself easily making my way through this monstrosity during a day watching horror flicks, though I'm sure I'd regret it soon after.   How much gummi candy can one eat in a day anyway?

All in all, I think I'm too easily swayed by the wolf in sheep's clothing when it comes to Halloween candy.  I want the crazy insanity of a giant lollipop Halloween mask, but I also want the quality of your everyday Nerds or fun-sized candy bar.   I think this is asking for a bit much though, at least not without a heft price tag.  Who knows, there's always next year…

Wow, this month is flying by.  It's already the week of Halloween, how in the hell did that happen?!?  Well, I stumbled a bit last week in terms of keeping up a daily posting schedule, but it's certainly not the end of the world.  I am on vacation from the stupid day job this week, so I should be able to cram it chock full of Halloween-y goodness.

First up is my half of the Branded in the 80s/Art & Story Podcast cross over event.  When Mark Rudolph, Jerzy Drozd, my wife and I got together to talk about horror storytelling and Halloween we recorded enough material for both of our podcasts.  Their half, episode 61 of the Art & Story podcast is up and available at their site, and now here's the second half.  We end up talking for around 40 minutes about some Halloween memories past (in particular costumes and some fun candy gathering hyjinks) as well as talking a bit about how we celebrate the holiday today.  Talking with these guys is always fun for me, so I hope you can get some pleasure from the conversation as well.  To listen you can either click on the banner below, or right click and save it to your computer for ipod/mp3 player listening and such.



Again, if you enjoy this podcast, take a minute to check out the Art & Story show, as Mark and Jerzy have really put together a great podcast…

I wanted to take a minute and point to one of my favorite podcasts, Art & Story (hosted by Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd), which I had the extreme pleasure to take part in recently.  Jerzy and Mark do an amazing job deconstructing the process of writing and illustrating comics (storytelling in general), and I was invited to the conversation to help get into the nuts and bolts of horror storytelling.  We ended up talking about why people choose to watch and read horror stories referencing our own personal taste in horror movies and such.   I had an absolute blast during the recording and I think we did a good job starting the conversation on horror as a storytelling genre.



We also recorded material that I'm going to use for the basis of another Branded in the 80s podcast, a look down the Halloween-y memory lane, which I'll hopefully have cobbled together and ready for everyone's listening pleasure this weekend.  It's a Branded in the 80s/Art & Story crossover, 80s Marvel comics style!

Also, Mark Rudolph has another great podcast on Metal music called the Requiem, which I also urge anyone interested in broadening their listening horizons to checkout.

Well, this certainly is the week from hell (as far as the day job goes.)  I can't wait for tomorrow to be over because I'll then be on vacation until the end of October.  Anyway, I hated missing yesterday's posting, but thems the breaks.  To make up for it today, I'm going to take a second to talk about the craziest piece of Halloween candy I've found this year, and possible ever, the Tricky Treats Mask Pop from Brand New Products, LLC!



When I saw this on the shelf at my local Wal-Mart I just about crapped myself with a mixture of awe and fright.  Sure, we've all probably seen the giant rainbow colored confections that the Lollipop Guild carried in the Wizard of Oz (a lollipop that is also a staple of the Walt Disney theme park experience), but this Mask Pop sure beats those other suckers bloody.  This insane piece of candy clocks in at just under a pound (at 13 ounces/369 grams, 330 of which is sugar) and has 1400 calories!



Health hazard aside, this is an ingenious product that borders on the sadistic for sucker enthusiast and the parents or loved ones of said enthusiast alike.  It's as if one of Homer Simpson's world-made-of-candy daydreams came to life Halloween-style.  I mean what kid wouldn't love traipsing around the neighborhood on All Hallows Eve, knocking on doors, and screaming out "Trick or Treat" from behind one of these delectably gruesome masks, scaring poor old grandmothers and strong-arming them into giving them sweets, and then, when the night of greedy debauchery is through, getting to eat your own Halloween mask?!?



Now I did mention that this awesome mouthful-of-cavities-waiting-to-happen is sadistic, and here's why.  Being that it's a mask made out of candy, as soon as you unwrap it, it's almost impossible not to make an exploratory lick.  Bust even the slightest bit of moisture near this giant lollipop brings out the sticky, so even if a kid could resist nibbling on an ear, their warm breath trapped behind the mask will certainly make it one giant mess.

I was kind of skeptical about this whole deal, even thorough my near-bowel-moving excitement, as it just seemed too good to be true.  I feared that the pop itself would taste disgusting, if not just bland, and I wasn't sure how well it would work as a mask.  There were a few varieties to choose from including a cat-like demon, a pumpkin head, a witch, and a pretty frightening clown, but this zombie pop is the one that really sang to me.  Besides, a lot of the other pops tended to have the mask eye holes separate from the design of the face (so there were effectively two sets of eyes to the mask), and this zombie was a nice combination of form and function with only one set.  When I got home immediately ripped the pop out of the plastic packaging and had my wife give it a test drive.  The verdict?  This is one creepy-as-hell mask!



As far as the edibility factor goes, it was surprisingly great.  The zombie pops are grape flavored and it was quite tasty.  There's no way in hell I'd ever eat the whole thing, but I nibbled off an ear and chipped off some sticky goodness here and there.  What's kind of funny is that the mask only gets more and more disturbing the more little bits you eat off of it.  This is an amazing piece of candy, though it is pretty damn unwieldy, especially after you start eating it (there really is no going back from that point…)

Well, the day job is certainly doing its level best to impede my work on the Halloween countdown this year.  I'm not writing to complain about the woes of the working life though, nope, I'm here to share a crazy piece of Halloween-y goodness (one endorsed by the California Raisin Advisory Board none the less.)  For today's entry into the countdown I present the wackiness that is the California Raisins in A Haunting We Will Go! (circa 1988.)



The book was written by Mark W. Lewis and illustrated by the elusive Pat Paris Productions (elusive because the only info I could find on the world wide intertubes was that she/they illustrated not only the rest of the California Raisins books, but also Lady Lovely Locks and the Pixietails books as well.)



The story is pretty simple (how could it really be all that convoluted anyway), everybody's favorite sun-dried R&B a cappella choir runs out of gas late at night near a broken down abandoned manor that just so happens to be the site for some ghostly birthday celebrations.   The ghosts have a broken phonograph and a need to boogie, and the Raisins can't stop boogie-ing if they tried and need a place to crash.  Hilarity and a good dose of Scooby Doo inspired antics insue…











I was surprised by the art in the book. It's not amazing, but it's still pretty fun and I like the wrinkly style (especially in the 300 year old Shadowy Lady.)



I'll tell ya, I've never seen a group of raisins secrete so much flop sweat in my life!



I do have to say that even though I've been aware of the raisins since their inception, I never really paid all that much attention to the story or characters.  After reading the book I'm sorry to say that they don't get much deeper than the goofy claymation commercial shorts they originally starred in.  Proof of this can be found in their names (Shades and Tux are a couple of the amazing examples of how deep the character design goes…)  I never had any of the Raisin's swag, but I always wanted some of the little PVC figures you could get at Hardee's when you ordered their raisin biscuits for breakfast.



Anyway, the Raisins are another shinning example of anthropomorphized food items that should turn kids off of eating the sun-dried fruit ("Mommy, I don't want to eat Shades, he's my friend!"), but ironically fueled a temporary fire of raisin purchases in the 80s.  Weird.

This is going to have to be a quick countdown entry today (work is crazy stupid killing me today.)  This is from the Fall 1986 issue of the He-Man & the Masters of the Universe magazine.  Make your pumpkins the mightiest pumpkins in the universe!



Hopefully I'll get a chance to update later with the cover to the magazine and some other interior treats from the issue…

**Update**

Here's some more from that issue of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Magazine including the cover...



...this really fun PAAS Halloween make-up kit ad (I always thought PAAS was just about the Easter swag..)



...and this Pineapple Kids Club ad (notice those four Glow Ghosts!)



Hopefully I'll have more time tomorrow!

Last year during the ghouliest season of the year I wrote about a piece of Halloween candy that completely floored me as it was the single craziest, and largest gummi I'd ever seen called the Mad Lab Frog Dissection Kit (which was part of the Target-specific branded candy under the Edgar & Ellen heading.)  Though I was completely dazzled by the kit, in particular the molding on the frog gummi itself and the concept in general, I sort of lamented a couple of the design elements (or lack thereof.)  The set came with some gummi flies that were tucked away in a little baggy hidden in the hollowed-out belly of the frog.  Personally I thought this was a missed opportunity as the set is a 'dissection' kit, and it would have been so cool to have to cut into the frog (with the provided plastic knife) to liberate the flies.  I also thought that it might have been cool to include some sort of liquid candy (like the innards of a Squeeze Pop) to give the impression of a gruesome reptilian autopsy.

Well I was pretty happy this year when I first glimpsed the 2008 Target candy section and saw that the gummi frog dissection kit had made a comeback.  It's a bit smaller, though just as heavy, and I hoped as I was standing in the checkout line that it's reduced stature and increased heft might mean that there were some dreamed of improvements…



Target ditched the Edgar & Ellen branding this year in lieu of their new Domo theme (as I mentioned in the inaugural post for this year's countdown), and the new dissection kit has since been relegated to the normal Target monster character branding (as well as being a great example of the design of this year's offerings, package-wise.)  It's been re-dubbed a Gummy Dissection Kit (a bit more generic to give room for other varieties as we'll see in a minute), and is pretty much just a pared down version of last years affair…



Basically the gummi flies and a good bit of the molded details have been dropped, and though the frog itself has shrunk, it's now solid and has an opaque section of gummi layered on top of the more standard green translucent base.  As I plunged the little orange plastic knife into the tough gummi flesh I still had hopes that there was a liquid surprise inside, but I was disappointed as it's just one sold gummy frog.  Also, it's still green apple flavored (not my favorite by a long stretch) so I didn’t really care for the taste, though it has a better consistency than the Flix gummies I talked about a couple days ago.

This year we can also choose a second dissection kit if the frog doesn't float our boat.  The gummi heart is a welcome addition to the stable of oversized (almost life-sized) confections around this season.  It's exactly like the frog with no fun little discoveries tucked inside, and is strawberry flavored, so it might be more palatable for those of us who don't care for green apple candy flavoring.



All in all, I'm still a little disappointed at the missed opportunity of putting more 'dissection' elements into the candy, but it's still a neat idea that I'm sure kids are going gaga over.  Maybe next year, huh?

So if the fact that I'm doing this Halloween countdown weren't enough of an indication that I love the season and horror themed entertainment in general, I just have to take a moment to say that I love the scary.  Ever since I was a little kid I've been infatuated with the macabre, be it grotesque Garbage Pail Kids artwork, the array of insane Halloween masks that used to be on display at Spencer's in the 80s, the addictive VHS covers to all the horror films at my local video store, and especially in the fiction I chose to bury myself in.  I've written many times of my love of the Crestwood Monster Series in past countdowns, and when I started ignoring chapter and Choose Your Own Adventure books for more adult fare it was Stephen King that I first picked up (around the time I turned 12.)  Another example of some ghoulishly fun reading that I did when I was younger is a short series of books starring a character named Samantha Slade.  I mentioned the series a couple years ago in passing, but I thought I'd take a second today to look at the books a little closer, in particular the wonderful cover art by the very talented Jody A. Lee.  The series was published between 1987 and 1988 by Archway Paperback Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, and was written by Susan Smith (an author who I haven't been able to find much information about.)



Of the series, I must have read this first installment (SS: Monster-Sitter) the most (at least 10 times if not more) since my mom picked it up for me in 1987.  The series was probably cashing in on the craze of the Babysitter's Club and the rest of the book series in that ilk.  I certainly wasn't against dipping into series that were more or less meant for the other gender (I loved the more girl-centric Judy Blume books for example), but what really grabbed me wit this series was its creepy theme in that Samantha is a babysitter for what amounts to an amalgam of the Addams Family and the Munsters.  Basically, Samantha plays Marilyn to the Brown Family's monsters, spending the majority of the first book unaware that the kids she's sitting for are actually monsters (believing that the family is just eccentric to a T.)  Between heading up the planning committee for her school's annual haunted house, taking on this new babysitting gig, and trying her darnedest not to embarrass herself in front of a boy she has a crush on, Samantha just doesn't get a break.  With the help of her best friend Iris and some unexpected aid from the Brown kids (Lupi, a real life werewolf, and Drake a mad scientist in training) she manages to pull everything together and put on a legendary haunted house party.

One of the aspects of the first book that's always stuck with me is all the crazy food that the Browns (an unbeknownst to her, Samantha as well) consume including crunchy spider's legs (seen on the cover above.)  There's a scene in the book where the Brown kids help Samantha make burgers out of, well, it would be indecent to say.



As far as the rest of the series goes, I wish I had found them when I was younger.  Though I loved the first book to death I never found any other entries in the local used and new bookstores around the central Florida area.  There was an ad in the back of the first book which teased me with and informed me to look out for the second installment, Confessions of a Teenage Frog, and for years I was curious about the continuing adventures of Samantha Slade.  It wasn't until the amazing gift that is the internet that I've managed to track it, and the rest of the series down in the last 10 years.  Confessions picks up where the last book left off with Samantha now the permanent sitter for the Browns.  While attempting to run for class president she partakes in Drake's "Greatness Formula" which does little for the campaign, and in fact turns her into a frog.

In the third installment, Our Friend: Public Nuisance #1, Samantha is introduced to Lupi and Drake's pet dinosaur Bubbles.  Drake invents an invisibility formula that makes Bubbles disappear, but he escapes the starts ravaging the town.  Samantha has to snap to action to corral the dinosaur and keep him safe from the nation guard and the angry townspeople as the invisibility formula begins to wear off.



The last installment revolves around Samantha and the kids starting up a band (called simply enough Blood) and entering into a battle of the bands.  This is probably my favorite cover in the series as the realization of the band in full glam/glitter rock glory is awesome…



I think these hold up pretty well, and aside from the questionable first person perspective (it gets old having Samantha explain and give internal commentary on everything), I was surprised at how enjoyable it was to read through them.

It's funny, I've spend a ton (for me) on candy for this Halloween season, but I've yet to talk about any of it yet, so I thought today would be a good day.  The crop of interesting new stuff in the stores right now can hardly be described as a banner year for Halloween candy.  Like most years, 90% of the treats are your basic fun-size output from the major companies, so you won't have a hard time finding any Snickers or Reese Peanut Butter Cups, and of the remaining 10% most of it is retreads of last years new products.  Don't get me wrong, I'm just as happy to see Ghost Dots on the shelves again as finding something new, but it sure doesn't help me with content for the site.

Anyway, I don't really have a preferential list of favorites, but I do have a handful of candies that feel like they deserve to be at the bottom of a proposed list, so it's as good a place to start as any.  Basically this year, some of the candy I was most excited about picking up ended up being some of the worst tasting dreg I've ever shoved into my mouth.  Flix Candy is sort of making a name for themselves in the odd/grotesque department with a whole assortment of gummi stye candies, ranging from the mildly amusing (Gummi Popcorn), to the out right nauseating (Zit Poppers gummi pimples.)  I first rand across them a couple Halloween seasons ago with one of their first big entries into the market their Fresh Box of Boogers.  What caught my eye initially was the super detailed mascot character on the packaging and the very odd concept of snot gummis.  Back then I didn't care for the flavor and consistency of the product (they fell into the category of sugar coated gummis that were on the sour side, not some of my favorite things), and even though they supposedly have been improved in the past two years I haven't been able to bring myself to picking them up again.  This year I couldn't help but notice how much the company has grown (in terms of product offerings), so I decided to give them another chance and I picked up 4 varieties including Zit Poppers, Bed Bugs, Freaky Fingers, and a life size gummi Gecko that I didn't bother to photograph after trying the rest of this stuff (it too was awful.)

Zip Poppers…



These are packaged in a very similar manner to the Boogers from a couple years ago and I was expecting them to be the worst of the bunch.  Inside the box is a bag full of wet, translucent flesh-colored gummies with angry looking red tips that are filled with a bit of liquid candy (they are billed as Ozzy, Sticky, Goo Filled Zit Gummies after all.)  Comparatively these are the best tasting candy I've sampled from Flix Candy to date, though they aren't nearly as good as most common brands of gummi candy and I'm not a fan of the sticky messy factor as it feels like an "eat-the-whole-bag-or-throw-the-remainder-away" kind of candy.  The "zit-popping" aspect was lackluster at best (I've had better oozing experiences with Freshen Up gum), though there are quite disgusting to look at…



Bed Bugs …



I was really impressed by the quality of the design on the Bed Bugs candy, as it's pretty rare to find gummies with this many colors and this much detail in the molded design.  Taste-wise their pretty damn horrible and a bit too tough for my gummi palate.  If there was one saving grace (beyond their interesting appearance) it would have to be that fact that 4 of the 8 included gummis had a camouflaged candy sugar coating that make for a ghastly and realistic (I'm assuming here) bug crunch that really took me aback…



Freaky Fingers…



I’ve come across two large sized gummi severed hands this season which in and of itself is cause for celebration.  For this Flix candy severed hand installment I was really jazzed by the coloring and the detail in the molded design.  This looks like a perfect gummi zombie or decompsed corpse hand, though unfortunately as far as taste and consistency goes, this was horrible.  The candy tastes like it's laced with a low quality gasoline or petroleum product of some sort, and it was tough as all get out.  Maybe this is the trade-off for such a nice appearance and design, but if that's the case give me less detail and colors and a better taste and mouth-feel.  This is candy we're talking about and it shouldn't be a chore to eat it.



If nothing else, I hope Flix candy keeps plugging away at their formulas and hopefully they can find a nice middle ground between appearance and taste.  They are trying which is something I can't say about a lot of other companies out there…

If I had to pick my favorite scary, creepy, Halloween-y character ever, it would most likely be Frankenstein's monster.  There's something about his sad, lumbering, misunderstood figure that I can identify with.  Over the years I've amassed a small collection of Shelley's book, as I'm always willing to pick up a new copy when I find a cover I really like, or (gasp!) if it's illustrated.  One of my favorite permutations of the book is the 1988 Step-Up Classic Chillers adaptation by Larry Weinberg (published by Random House.)  It's not the adaptation that I love, but the creepy cover (painted by Lisa Falkenstern), and the interior pen and ink illustrations by Ken Barr…



There's something very menacing about the way the monster is pulling back the shroud on the cover; there's a bit more of the spark of life in the character's face and intent in his posture.

As far as the interior illustrations go, I was surprised by how influenced they were by the classic Universal version of the creature's visage (I always thought that Universal was pretty litigious when it comes to squared-off, flat-topped interpretations of the monster.)  Ken Barr's illustrations are really fun and are in the vein of 70s and 80s era comic book art (which makes sense considering Barr did a lot of work for Marvel and D.C., as well as men's adventure magazines.)  If I'd have found this particular version as a kid I would have flipped for it…



In particular I love how aged and weather beaten the monster's face appears, with the hard worn wrinkles and deep crags around his eyes and the evil looking laugh lines around his mouth.  Granted, I also love the more standard vacant or innocent look the creature is given, but every once in awhile it's refreshing to see the seething anger just below the surface of the monster, if not outright as it is in this book…

As a quick aside from the Halloween festivities here at Branded, I thought I'd take a second and point to a fun project that Diana Nock put together on her newly re-designed site…



If you were ever curious about seeing over 150 different artist's interpretations of swashbuckling, romantic, fuzzy, blue, teleporting elf Nightcrawler (of X-Men, Excalibur, and six million other Marvel comics fame), then take a second and check out the Nightcrawler Sketchbooks.  It's a hoot.

Well, I did some podcasting this weekend, though it wasn't what I thought I might be doing.  I won't go into the specifics until they're final, but I'll be a guest on another show in the coming weeks, and I snagged some audio for a Branded podcast that I'll hopefully have up this coming weekend.  Should be fun.

For the countdown today I present a few comics by the mega-awesome Sergio Aragones which he did for the October 1987 issue of MAD magazine.  They all center around A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors…

Well, today wraps up a week-long look at my collection of animation cels from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, an even though I'm not familiar with the episode this particular set of three cels comes from, it's my favorite example from the show…



When I first started picking up animation cels my wife was a bit skeptical.  Even though she still adores cartoons in general, she wasn't sold on the idea of animation cels as interesting or as a piece of art.  We came to the conclusion that she was really missing the overall appearance of the cartoon in that there were no backgrounds to go along with the still images I was showing her.  I guess character cels out of context just didn't seem as much a part of the show, even though these are the exact cels that were filmed.  There's just something to be said for the aesthetics of a complete image, even if it's not exactly feasible to obtain painted cartoon backgrounds.  For one some backgrounds are very large paintings that encompassed entire environments and were "zoomed in on" or cropped as the 8"x10" or 11"x14" cel layers were placed on a section.  Others were used repeatedly in many episodes and are much rarer (especially in terms of being packaged up with the photographed cels and stored after a series was done.)

So when I happened upon the set pictured above, I knew my wife's eyes would light up as it's a much better example of a cartoon micro-second frozen in time.  Now technically this set doesn't have a traditional background included.  The cloud of purple smoke rippling behind the three anthropomorphized animal creatures is also a single cel that included its own moving aspects.  It's enough to fool the eye though and that's all that matters (at least to my wife.)



Besides the completeness which appeals to me, I also think it's a perfect example of the great animation that existed on the show.  The rest of the cels I shared earlier in the week all seemed a bit rougher in terms of graceful line work, and since they were taken out of context of the scenes they were originally in you don’t get a feel for the over all compositions and color schemes from the cartoon, which I am still a big fan of.



These figures are alao a heck of a lot more dynamic in terms of shape and depth because there is a layer of shadow and highlights to the figures that I'm not finding in a lot of the other cels I've purchased.  This is an aspect of animation that really resonates with me, and it's why I was so drawn to anime when I first discovered it in the early 90s.  When you compare a lot of traditionally animated fare from America (whether or not it was physically animated overseas) and most anime you'll notice this is one of the big differences, the use of layers of shadows and color variation that really makes animation pop.  When I first started coloring my own art digitally, adding these additional layers was the "eureka" moment I needed to understand the process better (I wrote about this awhile back here.)  I wonder if this is a step that tends to get skipped because of the possible expense in terms of time and energy spent on an aspect that will most likely be ignored by the target audience?





Also, I wanted to take a second to remind everyone that the complete Real Ghostbusters series is going to be available for purchase soon.  You can pre-order your set at the Time Life website (which is the only place outside of used copies that might end up on eBay) for $179.  Though I'm currently coveting the set, I don't think it's going to be one that I can work into my DVD budget at that price (an in the complete series format.)

So this closes the chapter on Halloween-y animation cels for this year's countdown.  For the next couple weeks I'm going to keep the posts a little more random, though mostly 80s influenced.  Also, I might be back this weekend for some more movie commentary podcasting, but first I need to watch more flicks…

A bunch of Real Ghostbusters animation cel posts wouldn't be complete without one red-haired, sassy, bespectacled receptionist extraordinaire named Janine Melnitz!



In film and in TV Janine Melnitz gets credit for being one of my first real crushes (in good company with Faye Grant from V, Mitzi Mozzarella from the Showbiz Pizza Rock-Afire Explosion Band, Jacqueline Bisset circa 1983 in the flick Class, and of course Adrienne Barbeau.)  One aspect of the character that I always found interesting was that she was pretty different style-wise in the cartoon than in the first movie, but by the time the second movie rolled around, the writers and designers (or at least Annie Potts) decided to co-opt the look from the cartoon.   I did think it was kind of a cop-out that she dropped her interest in Egon in the 2nd film for of all people Louis Tulley.



Anyway, back to the cel, as you can see above this cel is a prime example of the damage that can be done over time by storing them directly on top of the pencil under drawings.  The under drawing adhered to the paint and was destroyed, forever merged with the cel.  Granted, I don't think studios ever thought of the post-photographed cels as any sort of asset and I'm sure stuff them into boxes and packed 'em in un-climate controlled storage facilities to gather dust until the day when some unsuspecting citizen bought them in a blind storage auction.  Being a huge fan of 80s cartoons, and considering these cels as pieces of art in and of themselves, I think it's a downright shame that they're mistreated and I'm sure a good portion of them are lost to time because they've either deteriorated or become one huge merged stack of cel, paint and paper.

Oh well, at least I’ve managed to find a few and give them a good home.  More or less rounding out the main cast of the Real Ghostbusters cartoon is one of my least favorite characters, Slimer, the ugly green spud himself.



Though I didn't mind him as a humorous villain in the live action flicks, his presence in the cartoon added an unwelcome air of Scooby Doo-ness.   Now don't get me wrong, I love Scooby Doo, but I never thought the Ghostbusters needed a pet-like mascot, and besides the odd relationship between Lydia and Beetlejuice in the BJ cartoon, I wasn't very find of twisting around the hero/villain roles for cartoon adaptations of movies.  It doesn't help that as the series went on it morphed into an almost all-Slimer show which was nowhere near the quality of the proceeding seasons.

Honestly, I'm not quite feeling the Halloween-y with these Real Ghostbusters cels, so to remedy that a bit, lets skips past more cast members and get to some of the nifty monsters from the show!  These rat-like subway creatures are some pretty gnarly customers.  I think they're a nice example of the non-ghost cryptozological wonders that our four heroes battled against on a regular basis in the cartoon…



As for interesting aspects to this first cel, I really dig the pencil under drawing that I scored with it.   I'm not sure if the under drawing is hinting at the next drawing (which I suspect), or referencing the previous drawing and cel, but I love the alternate view of the creatures with their sharp-toothed mouths all agape.  The creatures sure seem a heck of a lot more fierce that way to boot.



Here's another cel of the same creatures from a later scene…





There, that's a bit more in the mood I'd say…

Today's cel completes the core line-up of the Ghostbuster crew with Winston Zeddmore (Zeddemore in the movies) and Ray Stanz.  As opposed to yesterday's cels, both characters are painted on the same layer which I think is kind of weird.  Like I mentioned, I'm kind of confused as to when animators will combine characters on the same cel or split them up.  I sort of figure that characters would be separated when one or both are "moving" so as to make it easier to keep them independent or save on mistakes, but in this cel it appears that Winston and Ray are having a conversation which would imply movement, at least in their heads and mouths.  I don't know…



Also in the vein of yesterday's discussion, I wanted to note that Winston also underwent a change between the movies and the cartoon in that the character seems much younger and enthusiastic, while dropping the almost burnt out mellowness of Ernie Hudson's live-action portrayal.  I think character-wise he ended up changing the most, probably to make him more appealing to kids.



One of the other aspects that this cel illustrates is how much cheaper the actual paint stock seems in comparison to cels from other cartoons.  It's thin enough so that you can clearly see the photocopied line work on the cel through the layers of paint.



Lastly, even though I always felt that the Real Ghostbusters had much better animation that a lot of its contemporaries, I'm not so sure now.  Looking at the pencil line work above for instance there seems to be a less sure hand at work.  It's either that or it was drawn super fast as a lot of the lines don't connect or feel kind of wavy, not nearly as fluid as some of the other pencil under drawing work that I've seen.  Again, because of super hectic animation schedules or less experienced animators, I'll probably never know…

Well, I didn't get off my lazy butt for a Sunday post, but the world isn't ending because of it (there are so many blogs doing Halloween countdowns this year I think we can all stand to take a break for a day here and there.)  This week I thought it would be fun to have my normal subject matter and the Halloween countdown converge with an entire week of animation cels from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon.   I recently picked up a bunch of nice cels and have been talking about them in my regular Cartoon Commentary! column.  So break out the proton pack, warm 'er up and get ready to bust some ghosts (or do something more creative like redecorating your house with the portable nuclear generator strapped to your back, or rescue some helpless kittens in trees by blasting them off the branches, it's up to you.)



I picked up these first couple cels as a set.  In this scene Peter Venkman and Egon Spengler are walking together.  Now one of the things I love about going over these animation cels is trying to learn more about the process of making cartoons by studying the art and how it was put together.   These cels raise the question of scene construction for me.  Now I always assumed that a scene with multiple characters would be broken down into many layers of cels, each with one aspect of the scene painted on it.  For this set of cels there's one for Egon, one for Peter, and I assume there was at least a background (and possibly another layer of background objects that might be moving.)  On the other hand, I figured that if two of these aspects come into contact (outside of the background which is typically not on a cel, but rather a painting that the cels are shot on top of, or which are transposed onto later in the process) that they'd end up being painted onto the same cel.  I've seen examples of this in cels available on eBay where characters grabbing each other, or layered on top of each other are on the same cel (in fact the cel that I'm going to share tomorrow has Ray and Winston together on the same layer.)

Well since this set is in two layers, it makes me wonder why.   My best guess is that one or both of the characters won't stay static for very long, so it would be easier to just paint that character again on a new cel to show the movement, and there would be less of a chance of screwing up and less work in general than having to paint both characters over again.





Another aspect to this set that I found interesting are the pencils for Peter that I picked up along with the cels.  The whole form that appears on the final painted cel isn't in the pencils.  Again, this suggest to me that the animators used the body that was already drawn for the previous cel and just changed his head.  This seems like a pretty standard way of saving on drawing time.  What I'm curious about is how they merged the two sets of pencils (this head with the previous body) for photocopying onto the cel above.  Since this drawing of Peter's head is still on a full sheet of paper and not cut out and pasted over the previous body drawing's head, how did they get the new final image?  In the examples of this time saving practice that I've seen before, the new pencils are typically added to a photo copy of the previous drawing, which when copied onto the cel looks like one smooth set of line work.  I guess the animators in Korea could have photocopied this drawing of Peter's head and pasted it over the other drawing.  Again, it then raises the question of how they store their finished work when it's done and what sets of pencils to keep with what finished cels.  Actually that's more of a nitpicky question that seems a bit too pointless to wonder about (unless I'm planning on getting a job collating for an Asian animation house.)



These cels are a nice example of how not to over work one's self as an animator.  Notice that Egon's right shoulder is missing the Ghostbuster's logo patch.  Obviously there's no point in drawing it, and then wasting paint when the shoulder is just going to be covered up by Peter in the shot.  Of course I wonder where it's best to draw the line on this sort of practice.   I mean why not leave off most of Egon's right arm while you're at it?  Seems sensible enough, though maybe the logistics of not finishing the drawing might make it a little more difficult or tricky to animate (like if the cels where laid down in the wrong order, there would be one weird looking armless Egon instead of him just missing his BG patch.)





I do have to wonder why the producers and designers of this cartoon decided to make the characters so different, not only from the original movie, but between the various character designs.   I suppose this was an extreme and early example of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon where it would be easier for kids to tell the characters apart if they had their own color schemes, in particular with the hair colors.  I always thought it was a very odd decision to make Egon tow-headed instead of having dark hair.  Not only does it seem really out of place when comparing him to his real life counter part played by Harold Ramis, but it changes the characters possible Jewish ancestry to something more Nordic (or Jewish new wave/punk.)  What's even weirder to me is that I never questioned it as a kid.  Egon was Egon, and that was all there was to it.

Well, I decided to record a podcast about some of my movie watching this Halloween season, and hopefully I'll get it in just under the wire for day 4 of the countdown.  It's about 25 minutes long, so it won’t melt your brains or anything, and for those of you brave enough to make it through the whole show there is a little treat at the end.  I basically talk about two movies, The Abominable Snowman (the 1957 Hammer Yeti flick starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker) and the 1972 Amicus adaptation of Tales From the Crypt (also starring Peter Cushing and a young Joan Collins.)  Below are some screen captures of interest and the original movie posters.  Enjoy!





Above are stills of the amazing Peter Cushing, and Forrest Tucker (star of F-Troop and the 1975 Filmation Ghostbusters live action Saturday Morning show that I talked about some time back.)

Below is an example of the surprising cinematography in the flick…



I love how the Yeti were handled visually in the film.  Subtle, but effective.



Below, the awesomely creepy poster for the Amicus adaptation of Tales From the Crypt…



Here we have some still from TFtC including our unsuspecting tour patrons, and the understated Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper…



Below we have some hints as to the dreadful fun that this flick contains…



Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with a look at a couple of the 80s horror flicks that I loved growing up.

So how is everyone digging this years Halloween blogfest across the internets?  I know I sure am.  Seems like I'm bending the space/time continuum to do it, but I'm finding the time to both post and read a good bit of everyone else's posts as well.  Here's to keeping up that pace (and since I'm playing with astrophysics, I'm going to take a crack at that sticky time travel issue that everyone seems to think is improbable…)

For today's countdown post I'm going to do my last Halloween themed Peel Here column for the foreseeable future (as I'm running out of sticker fodder to post in general, and haven't found all that much in the Halloween-y vein to begin with.)  It will be a beaut though as it's a huge set of Donruss baseball/monster-themed sticker cards from 1988 called Awesome! All*Stars…



The copy of the set that I procured is actually from the Canadian subsidiary of Donruss, Leaf (which I hated while collecting Baseball Cards growing up since they seemed like counterfeit cards, no offense to my brethren from the great white north intended.)  The set consists of 98 different sticker cards and 1 checklist card, which one of the biggest sticker card sets I've seen (much more in line with the other Donruss sets, the CHiPs and Zero Heroes sticker cards I talked about awhile ago.)  For one thing, the whole set is made up of stickers instead of just having a smaller subset, but it's still over twice as large as anything that Topps has issued since the early 70s (even Garbage Pail Kids sets typically only contain 40 or so unique stickers.) 

Not only that but I have a theory that these are also all drawn/painted by the same artist, and I think I've even pin pointed his name, B.K. Taylor.  Actually it was sort of a bit of kismet figuring this out as I have another separate item that I'm going to take about this month, a Monster joke book published in the late 80s that contains illustrations eerily similar to the work in this set (as well as having some baseball themed monsters that are pretty damn close to one of the characters in the set.)  When I was researching him online I also stumbled upon a set of cards I'm positive he did called Odd Rods (in another odd coincidental bit of kismet, a reader of Branded asked me to help him identify this sticker card set this past month!)  You can see more of Mr. Taylor's artwork here.  I'm a pretty big fan of this style of goofy monster, a descendant of Big Daddy Ed Roth's Rat Fink...











I was kind of excited while flipping through this set for the first time.  These are set up in that G.P.K.-esque tradition of taking a name and combining it with an attribute to give the characters a little more personality, and for the first time that I can remember there was not only a "Shawn" card, but it was spelled like my name (and not like apparently every other Sean or Shaun out there.) Of course, this rare Shawn, is also Shawn the Sissy, a nail biting girly monster in a tutu (as you can see in the upper left below.)  You can probably imagine my football-pulled-out-from-under-Charlie Brown-like scream of "AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH" when I came upon it.  Sheesh.















The card backs were split two ways, with half of the set getting short little punny bios, and the other containing puzzle pieces to make a giant poster…



Seriously, this set has a pretty big card back poster (at 28 cards, four rows of seven cards), though it's not quite as big as the CHiPs card back poster (which contained 66 card backs.)



I was surprised that with a set this big there wasn't a ton of repeated jokes, though there was one instance that was pretty glaring in terms of repeating the funny…



All in all I'm in love with these stickers and I kind of lament that I was "out of" sticker collecting by that point or I'd probably have been introduced to it decades earlier.

So the rough plan for this month is to only post on weekdays, but I'm still toying with the idea of doing some spooky movie commentary on the weekends.  We'll see how that goes, or in what form it might take…

So, ever since last year I've been keeping my eyes peeled for anything that seems to fall within the realm of Halloween-y goodness, particularly from the 80s.  Last year one of the only things I managed to find from my favorite decade was a monster themed Muppets comic from a weird magazine-like children's book called Muppet Madness.  I was curious at the time if the material in the book was culled from the run of Muppet Magazine, and I've since learned that it wasn’t as the magazine was published later on in the 80s.  I lucked out and my good friend Kevin has had a copy of said magazine tucked away for the last 23 years, which he let me borrow for some site content…



Well, even though there's nothing that really screams Halloween (in Jim Henson's Kermit voice as he shakes his head about in exasperation no less), but there is something that kind of qualifies.  Since I'm going to talk a bit about the Real Ghostbusters cartoon this month (all next week so be prepared), I wanted to share this Muppets movie spoof comic called groaningly and punnily enough Grossbusters, written by one Jay Itzkowitz and illustrated lovingly by Jon McIntosh.











Honestly, I'm sort of surprised that Itzkowitz didn't make use of the Muppets own weird science wonders Bunsen and Beaker, who I think would have made an awesome addition to the spoof Grossbusters cast (especially instead of Rizzo and his pals on page 4 panel 3.)  I did however think that Janice was a great stand-in as the Janine character.  I also really dig that their Grossmobile was modeled off of the Muppets bus more than say the original Ghostbusters Ecto-1.  Lastly, how about Gonzo really pushing that peanut butter & macaroni sandwich with a side of coleslaw joke?  Man, he must have been storing that one up.

So, for this first day of October, and for the first official post of the Halloween countdown this year I thought I'd go over some of my pre-season shopping experiences at the usual suspects like Target, Wal-Mart, the Spirit Store, Spencer's, and Toys R Us.  To tell the truth, I was looking forward to the seasonal macabre sections in these consumer megaplexes even more than usual this year, if nothing else to get my mind off of work.  It didn't help that I was super excited to see what the various stores came up with this year as most of the stores had some great stuff last year (from mascots to candy and décor.)  Unfortunately, it's beginning to seem like a bust (at least for my tastes) as most places don't really seem to be in the spirit and the one who are, seem to be a little bit lazy or schizophrenic about it.  I think I just wanted the shopping experience to be way to splendiferously awesome that I've harshed my own mellow with expectation.

The other aspect to perusing the Halloween-y store shelves this year that was sort of a downer was a weird crack down on inside-store photography.  Granted, it's usually best to seek permission before walking into a place and snapping a bunch of pictures, but I'm more of the sneaky sneak when it comes to this sort of tradition.  Well, all of the Halloween specialty stores in the area have started posting "No Photography" signs everywhere.  As silly as this sounds, I can't help but think I contributed to this as I was "caught" in a couple places last year and almost but not quite grilled about my spooky store shutterbug hobby.  Granted, I'm sure my antics don't hit on the radar of the big wigs at these places, but at the same time I know that a lot of these places are owned by the same companies (The Spirit stores are a Halloween liquidation front for Spencer's), so many a memo went around.  Heck maybe a lot of bloggers have been caught snapping pictures of these fine institutions and it's becoming a concern.  Who knows.  At the end of the day it was sort of a bummer, though to be honest, there wasn't a whole lot to photograph.

Basically the only two places that seemed to merit a little bit of photo archiving are Target and Toys R Us, and the latter isn't all that interesting as far as the in-store stuff.  So practically all my photos this year are from Target, though I did go ahead and snap a picture of a new seasonal store called Halloween USA…



Inside it was basically an exact replica of the Spirit store, though a little more spacious as it was housed in an old department store location.  This place did have an advantage over the Spirit store in that they had a larger selection of props, general Halloween goofery, and décor, though this is a segment of holiday shopping that seems to be shrinking across the board.  The Spirit store has almost entirely scaled back to pre-packaged costume sets, though they still have a decent (though somewhat stagnating) selection of costume props.  I'm missing the lack of plastic/wood/ceramic skulls, fake torn-off limbs, little monster shaped baubles and the like though.  Maybe stores like this require you take a break for a couple of years so as to not burn yourself out.  I'm sticking to that thought…

By far, and as in most years, my favorite showing was at the local area Targets.  This year (like the previous) Target has decided to base their basic seasonal design around an already established property, Domo, which according to wiki is the mascot of the Japanese NHK television station.  The character is apparently a "strange creature who hatched from an egg" (according to the official site), lives in a cave, passes gas when he's nervous or upset and doesn't like apples.  Besides the fact that he looks like an adorable monster, I have no idea why Target decided to co-opt Domo for their Halloween advertising as there's noting spooky or really Halloween related about the lug.  There are a ghost and a couple of bat characters in the Domo universe (you can visit all the characters here), but none of them are used in any of the Target marketing as far as I can see.  Color me old and out of touch, but I just don't get it.  He is cute though…



 

 

 

What's kind of weird about the Domo Halloween branding is that besides all of the signage and there is only a small endcap of Domo Halloween products.   Everything else is covered in what I assume is Target specific Halloween branding, an evolution of their cute monster characters from years past.  This is sort of what I was referring to as schizophrenic branding.  Why go to all the trouble of securing the rights to Domo when the majority of your store branded merchandise features a completely different design campaign?

They've also seemed to scale back on the Mexican Day of the Dead theme to a lot of past years products (like my beloved mariachi skeleton), focusing instead on the black laser cut metal baubles and faux statuary…

 

They do have one heck of an awesome Day of the Dead skull Bucket, though it's so large that I have no earthly idea what I'd do with it.



As far as their own character branding, it's pretty prevalent though out the department, and it even shows up on a bunch of name brand products like Bounty paper towels, Zip Loc sandwich bags, and Softsoap hand soaps.  Again, it's kind of weird and unfocused.  I assume if you aren't as anal about useless pop culture non-sense, you know, a normie, you wouldn't even realize there were a set of Target branded characters floating around out there…

 

Most of the candy from previous years has shown back up on the shelves in new packaging like the large gummy tongue/vampire fang sets, the finger lollipops, and test tubes full of powdered or Halloween themed Runts-like candy…

 

I was surprised to see a new section crammed in next to the candy though.  Apparently Target is taking another shot at pushing the idea of a more personal family oriented Halloween celebration in the form of themed party games (in the past couple years they've been featuring more and more candy products that stray from the traditional fun-size neighborhood trick-or-treating fare, going for a more celebrate by yourself giant gummy frog type of deal.)

 

As is now tradition, there was a whole new crop of Jones Soda products in a bevy of odd flavors to wet one's gullet.  They've nixed the Gruesome Grape and Spiced Cider from the mini can line-up and added Spookiwi, and Buried Pomegranate.  They've also dropped the jack-o-lantern theme to the can design and ushered in a awesome line of classic monster mugs.  I’m especially fond of the werewolf design, though I can't stand their candy Corn flavored soda…

 

 

As I mentioned above I was also very impressed with Toys R Us this year, though not for any great products or branding in the store.  I'm surprised that they took their design aesthetic from last year with the super deformed, almost vinyl toy-looking, mascots and put it to a broader use.  There was a ton of cheap toys and games with the fun looking trick-or-treat monster mascots.  Here are scans of the main characters (there's also a cat and a Princess that aren't quite as cool):

    

    

I was hoping to find the same sort of brand building at Wal-Mart this year after I fell in love with their Frankenstein's monster branding from last year, but instead they went in the total opposite direction packaging all over their stuff in horribly boring plain orange packaging.  You couldn't make it look more generic and cheap.   I didn't even bother dragging the camera into the joint as it was just too boring.  Oh well.

Hopefully I've gotten the ranting side of things out of the way for the rest of the month and now I can concentrate on looking back a couple decades into the Halloween-y stuff of the 80s.  Tomorrow's post will echo a puppety one from last year that I enjoyed.  See you in 24 hours or so…

Oh my god, time is flying.  I took an unofficial break from blogging this past month in the hopes of recharging my batteries (and giving a little more time for the day job which has been hectic) and getting ready for the Halloween season.  Well it's here way sooner than my internal clock expected.

Anyway, here's my up to the minute announcement of my month-long Halloween-y blog-a-thon dealy, or what ever you want to call it.  I plan on keeping a weekday posting schedule, taking the weekends off to catch up or to possibly do some movie commentary podcasts (80s creepy flicks that I love, and no, not full commentaries, but just my thoughts on the flicks.)  Also, as I mention in the podcast attached to this post, I'm going to try and concentrate on some 80s-esque Halloween fun for this year's countdown.  I've got some themed weeks planned coming up as well as some miscellaneous odds and ends.  Hopefully it'll be a blast.

I'm going to try my darnedest to be back this evening for a more official post in this years countdown, so break out last years candy corn, dust off your formal-wear cape, dredge up that cackling witch laugh, and get ready for some spooky Branded fun!

By the by, there are about 6 million others participating in this year's Halloween blog craziness, and these are just a few (swiped with permission from the great John Rozum, feel free to pass it along!):

All Eyes and Ears
Azathoth's Abode on the Plateau of Leng
Azathoth's Abode on the Plateau of Leng:The Dungeon
Branded in the 80s
Bubba Shelby
Cavalcade of Awesome
Cool-Mo-Dee
Creepy Los Angeles
Dave Lowe Design!
Distinctly Jamaican Sounds
Diversions of the Groovy Kind
Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular
Dr. Squids Smorgasbord of Terror
Drunken Severed Head
Frankensteinia
Franklin Mint
Halloween Addict
Harvey's Midnight Hour
The Holiday Queen
The Horrors of it All
Houses of Wax
I-Mockery
John Rozum
Monster Crazy
Monster Memories
Monster Rally
Monsters and More
Mostly Ghostly
Music From the Monster Movies 1950-69
Music You (Possibly) Won't Hear Anywhere Else
Neato Coolville
Negative Pleasure
Nostalgia Factory
A Nostalgic Halloween
Oh the Horror
Orange and Black
Para Abnormal
Plaid Stallions
Plastic Pumpkins
Pumpkin Hollow
Pumpkinrot
Random Acts of Geekery
The Retropolitan (?!?)
The Sexy Armpit
Sweet Skulls
13 Visions
Tikiranch
Trixie's Treats
Universal Horror Sounds
Valhella
Vinnie Ratolle's Records
Weird Hollow
Wonderful Wonderblog
X Entertainment

What a week. I never realized just how insane an office move could be. Even though the physical aspect is over, the residual ripples are still keeping me swamped. I do have to say that the step up in quality in the new office is great. 20 inch flat screen monitors on adjustable arms, hidden PC towers under the desks, so much better than the ancient set up we had before. Now if I can just find the time to blog. BLARGH!

Anyway, the most exciting thing going on outside of crazy work moves is the coming Halloween season. I’m already seeing signs for the seasonal stores popping up, and Party City has already started rolling out its spread. I can’t wait to see what the Target displays look like this year, as well as beginning the hunt for interesting goodies. Can’t wait.

In the interim here’s the first of a handful of Bravestarr animation cels from around 1987. I figured I should begin with the show’s namesake, Marshall Bravestarr himself…



Bravestarr makes the end of the 80s cartoon era, at least in terms of shows that I remember fondly as a kid. For some reason it seemed like interesting shows dried up for a couple years as there didn’t seem to be that many shows that really entertained me. Of course this was also around the time that got into Metallica and started “acting more adult” as the ripe old age of 10. Anyway, Bravestarr also marks the end of an era for Filmation studios as it was their last big show before they closed their doors.

When I was hunting for cels I couldn’t find that many of Bravestarr that featured a nice shot of his face, or a full body shot. The above cel was about the best I could find. I wasn’t sure what he was holding in the scene, but I’ve since found the episode and realized that it was some sort of canister with a rope coming out of it.



One of the complaints I’ve heard about the quality of the Bravestarr cartoon is actually one of the aspects that I love the most, the sketchiness of the black line work. The cartoon feels very rough around the edges this way but I think it adds both character and enhances the western feel of the show.

Today's Cartoon Commentary! is going to be a quick one as I'm so busy at work I feel like I need an extra set of legs so that I can run in two directions at once.  This cel is another from the She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoon (circa 1985-86) and features one of the Horde Troopers on his wonderous flying machine.  I originally picked up this cel to showcase an example of a more rigid technological item instead of the more common fluid character cels.



What I found really interesting about this is that even though vehicles like this come off very straight-edged and technically perfect, when you get close up to the image you can see that it's not quite so.  Some of the line work looks like it was done by hand instead of with rulers and stuff, though I don't have the pencil under drawing to see this for sure.  Because it looks like it was mostly drawn free hand I can only imagine how much of a headache this could be while animating, trying to match up all the little parallel lines and connections between the metal plates and stuff.  Maddening actually.



Next week, less stress at work (laugh) and some cels from Bravestarr!

It's been forever and a day since I saw the movie that the stickers below are merchandised off of, so all I have to go on when it comes to Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend are some vague happy memories of watching the sort of realistic dinosaurs and only partially making the connection that they were being saved by non other than the greatest American hero himself, William Katt.


Though typically I'm a proponent of practical effect over CGI, I have to say that looking back at these Topps sticker cards from 1985 I think I would have a difficult time coming to the defense of the effects in the film.  The baby brontosaurus looks just side of papier-mâché or perhaps a piñata as far as quality goes and I'm sure it must have been difficult for Katt and Sean Young (who play's Katt's wife) to try and act alongside it.  When I look back on films that put actors in similar situations like E.T., Short Circuit, Gremlins, Spacecamp, and heck even Critters, I don't see the same issues.  Maybe there needs to be a size limitation on the animatronic acting counterpart or something, I don't know.  You can tell the production team had their hearts in the right place though and maybe just overreached their limitations a bit after the blockbuster success of flicks like Star Wars.


One thing I'm really not fond of is how the designers of the DVD packaging for this flick are trying to rip off Jurassic Park (as you can see here in the new logo.)  It's like reverse timely vampiric marketing.

Looking back on it I'm not exactly surprised that this flick had an entire card and sticker set merchandised off of it, I'm actually surprised that there weren't more products since typically toy lines and such are developed in advance so they can be ready in stores after a film's release.  I guess either the producers weren't sure about the marketing, or the various companies bidding for the property weren't interested.


These sticker cards are pretty standard fare interms of Topps film merchandising output over the 80s.  11 stickers and one cardback puzzle.

I feel like I'm so behind in keeping a regular posting schedule around here.  My day job is sapping so much of my time lately, and yeah, blah, blah, blah I know no one wants to read about my day job woes.  Anyway, there is a bright light on the horizon though as things are starting to fit into place and are getting back to normal (which means a regular schedule and routine), so hopefully I'll be back to normal soon.

In the mean time, here is another edition of Cartoon Commentary!, and yet another piece from my 80s animation cel collection.  This week I'm going to take another look at a cel from the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, circa 1984-85.  This one features another one of my favorite characters, Battle Cat, the alter ego of Cringer and steed/side kick to the muscled man himself, He-Man.



I think when it comes to Masters of the Universe I tend to fall in love with characters based on their design more than their personality per-se.  So as far as design goes, I really dig Battle Cat, in particular his gnarly helmet/mask, which highlights his almost serpentine yellow eyes.  I also love that the toy and cartoon designers managed to use the red and green color scheme without evoking even a lick of Christmas, which I have to say seems almost an impossible feat.  As far as personality goes, I like that they managed to turn give the Scooby Doo archetype a bit of a twist with his transformation from the meek fraidy cat Cringer into the bold and gruff Battle Cat.

Also, I managed to get a more overall scan of the cel this time so the production notes are included at the bottom (like I've mentioned, my scanner isn't all that big.)  I haven't managed to decode all of the notes yet, but I do know that the MU-92 refers to Masters of the Universe episode #92.  I'm not positive but I think that this cel is part of a sequence in which Battle Cat is about to leap up, and not the play bow that it appears to be.  Here's a closer view of the cropped image…



There isn't a whole lot to learn from this cel and its pencil under drawing.  The one thing I did notice that is kind of interesting is in the pencil drawing.  The animator made sure to color in a couple areas in Battle Cat's mouth, I'm assuming to show the final ink & paint artist where there would some color variation in that area.  You can see that whoever painted this cel could have misinterpreted the area to the right of Battle Cat's teeth as another place to paint in a darker red as it appears to be colored in like the area to the left, but upon closer inspection this is just where some of the blue pencil lines came close together.  I can see where it would be easy to miss-color something in the painting process, and again where Filmation benefits from having it all done in house where the communication would be better.



I have one more cel, from She-Ra, to share next week before I move on to another Filmation cartoon that I loved growing up, Bravestarr.