Coming back off of a hiatus always feels a little herky-jerky, what with trying to dig up some inspiration and cleaning off the cobwebs of my practically non-existent HTML skills.  This year was a little different in that over the last few months I've been bombarded with all sorts of cool things to write about.  One thing that I've been meaning to write about for awhile is the new book by Kirk Demarais, Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads!  For those who don't know, Kirk runs the Secret Fun Spot (as well as its weblog the Secret fun Blog) and is a freelance artist and designer who has been doing some amazing colored pencil portraits of some very familiar families of late.  He's a regular contributor to the Gallery 88 shows and an all around swell guy.  Though I've never gotten the chance to meet him, he's had a pretty big impact on Branded from the get-go, so when I saw that he was having his second book published I was pretty excited.

Mail Order Mysteries is the logical progression of nostalgic blogs, talking a niche topic and really digging into all the nitty gritty (sometimes literally into the Grit of gritty.)  Do you remember all those tempting ads in the backs of comics and magazines like Famous Monsters?  You know, the ones for the $2 Topstone rubber monster masks, the life-size Frankenstein's Monster, or the footlocker full of 100 toy soldiers for only $1.25.  Well Kirk sure does, and he's spent years tracking all of this stuff down, finding out what all this stuff was really like and cataloging his findings in this beautifully written and designed tome.

The book is divided up into 8 sections including superhero related stuff, war junk, monster merchandise, monkey making schemes, mail-order miscellanea, secret stuff, jokes & gags, and all kinds of oddities.  From the facts behind the fabled X-Ray Spex to what that $7 Polaris Nuclear Sub was really like, every single page of this volume is filled with the highs and lows of the mail-order products of the 50s through to the 80s.  Kirk lovingly photographed over a hundred pieces (most from his own collection), as well as including scans of the original advertisements so you can judge for yourself whether or not that allowance was or would have been well spent.  The icing on the cake is Kirk's keen eye for design, both modern and retro, which can be felt all over the book, from the yellowing, newsprint color-scheme of the pages, to the hidden glow-in-the-dark embellishments on the covers and spine.

For those of us who never got a chance to be lucky enough to order our own cardboard Polaris Sub (or to feel swindled by said sub), to join one of those intoxicating selling for prizes clubs like the Olympic Sales Club, or for those who just want to know how those darn X-Ray Spex work, Mail Order Mysteries is the perfect book.  You can see some more preview pages at Kirk's site.

One aspect of the American pop culture experience that I find endlessly intriguing is how certain portions of it so completely subvert class, race, religion, and creed.  It's hard these days to pin down someone's race or religious beliefs based solely on the music they listen to, or the video games they play. We’re becoming more and more eclectic as a nation, but the foundations of this cultural oneness has been steadily built over the last century with some unlikely materials.  If I had to point to one thing that ties most Americans together it would have to involve food as it's something we all need.  Through the lens of pop culture, it's the brands that stand out, the merchandising, packaging, and promotion that we are attracted to and hold dear.  One product over all else really shines through this lens, and is not only an important part of our shared pop culture experience, but also a very important part of one's daily breakfast, Cereal!  It's sugary, sweet, fruity, colorful, corny, wheaty, full of rice, oats, and the occasional marshmallow marbits.  It provides fiber, iron, whole grains, and most importantly for those seeking to break through the walls of the time-space continuum, high levels of riboflavin.  Through over a century of ad campaigns, commercials, and cool prizes we've all been influenced by breakfast cereal, and now writers Marty Gitlin & Topher Ellis have taken a shot at condensing this shared snap, crackle, and pop culture experience into The Great American Cereal Book.

Published by Abrams (for a February 1st release), this beautiful volume chronicles America's favorite breakfast food with a semi-chronological listing of ready-to-eat cereals from seven of the largest manufacturers of the last century including General Mills, Kellogg's, Nabisco, Nestle, Post, the Quaker Oats Company, and Ralston.  Each product listed features some vital statistics including a description, when it was introduced and/or discontinued, the various popular slogans, characters and endorsements associated with it, as well as various tidbits and trivia.  The book is also heavily illustrated with beautiful color photos of many of the more popular and eclectic varieties.  Breaking up the timeline of sweet crunchy nostalgia are a bevy of lists, essays and mascot profiles including a glimpse into the development of characters such as Cap'n Crunch and the Trix rabbit.

What really struck me when I first cracked the cover on this massive tome was the high level of thought and care put into the presentation.  The design of the book is absolutely gorgeous and has a perfect tongue-in-cheek humor imbedded into every page.  The book resembles a box of cereal, from the hilariously placed nutritional chart and ingredients list on the spine, to the rainbow variety of cereals adorning the inside front and back covers.  This book was envisioned and designed with those that are truly a kid at heart.  I also love that the photos lean more towards the kid's section of the cereal aisle, including so many of the sadly extinct varieties like Smurf-Berry Crunch, Pac-Man, Batman, C3PO's, and the dearly missed Croonchy Stars (the Sweddish Chef's Muppet-themed cereal from the late 80s.)

Abrams really has their finger on the pulse of nostalgia when it comes to their line of books aimed at pop culture fans, whether it's their inventive layout and design of their "vault" editions (like the World of the Smurfs and the Transformers Vault), or their stunning art books (like Wacky Packages, More Wacky Packages, and the upcoming Garbage Pail Kids book.)  The Great American Cereal Book is a fine addition to their lineup and would fit nicely on anyone's shelf or coffee table who grew up glued to the television on Saturday mornings watching cartoons and slurping up a huge bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Fruit Loops.

I have my sister Beth to thank for introducing me to music in the early 80s.  It started with her giving me a copy of Weird Al's first album on cassette, and then continued on for years while she endured my constant presence in her room where I'd sit Indian-style in front of her turntable, endlessly flipping through her albums and studying the artwork intensely.  Beth was eight years older than me and as far as I was concerned she knew everything there was to know about being cool.  The record covers, the artwork and design choices made by the bands, photographers, artists and the graphic designers who worked on their albums, was just as important as the music was in helping to define my sister's personality.  After my sister passed late last year my mother encouraged me to take some of her stuff, things that reminded me of her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  All I really wanted was her phone because it held her collection of music, and that was all I wanted since it was stuff that I know was running through her head.  On a trip back down to visit my parents this past July my mom surprised me with a stack of Beth's old records that she found in her closet.  I couldn't have taken them from my sister's house, but I'm glad my mom could because it gave me another chance to feel like I was seven years old again, sitting in my sister's room and trying to decipher her code for being cool.

This isn't the sort of thing that I typically open up about on the site, but it's an example of how visceral and personal music and all the trappings that surround it can be.  As we break new ground funneling our personal collections of albums and singles onto tiny devices and phones I think we're losing an important aspect of the music.  Album covers, specifically the sleeves on 45 singles, added another dimension to the music we loved and gave the musicians an opportunity to explore their ideas even further through art and we're limiting the size of that canvas to half of a credit card.  I've been reading Vincent Price's autobiography I Like What I Know (which is really an excuse to examine his love of art), and he mentions that his first real exposure to the artwork of the world masters was in a book that featured most of the paintings crammed down to the size of a postage stamp.  For him it was the definition of frustration, and he was only liberated when he was first able to travel abroad and see these works first hand in the museums of Eastern Europe.  Liberated is actually an understatement as he describes being devastated by the beauty and intricacy of Rembrandt's full canvases.  While I hesitate to claim that seeing the full-size album artwork will devastate the viewer to provide some special appreciation and insight into the music that an iPod screen won't afford, I do think it’s a shame how we're marginalizing the work none the less.

This is one of the reasons that I'm excited about the release of Matthew Chojnacki's new book, Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s At 45 Revolutions Per Minute, which celebrates the 45 sleeve artwork of musicians like Kate Bush, the Smiths, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, the B-52's, Prince and more…

Chojnacki, who culled the images of the covers from his own extensive collection, has done an excellent job of chronicling the styles, artwork and design of 80s music.  The book is set up so that each cover is featured on it's own page with commentary on the art provided by Chojnacki as well as the artists, musicians and executives that worked on them.  There's some interesting anecdotes on the covers, for example, the hullabaloo surrounding the Smith's third single off of their debut album, "What Difference Does it Make"…

The band initially wanted to use a still of Terrance Stamp from the 1965 thriller The Collector, but after the actor objected they reshot the cover staging a note-perfect parody of the still in question.  I find this fascinating as the whole situation is almost a shorthand for describing the tone of a lot of the band's music, which tends to play with juxtaposition of dark lyrics beautifully sung over very pop-y hooks and melodies.  This dueling tonality is reflected in the band's response at replacing a still from a disturbing film (featuring Stamp's character Frederick standing at a door with chloroform, about to subdue a woman he's kidnapped and held captive - which closely echoes the lyrics to the song) with a similar shot that is so much more wholesome and cheeky (in which Morrissey is holding a glass of milk and looks slightly less depraved.)  Add to that the title of the song, and it almost seems as if the whole thing were planned.

Chojnacki also does a great job of pairing up covers, displaying them in two page spreads, so that you can see the similarities in style and design choices that ultimately defined the era.  Whether it's focusing on the disinterested, heavily made up (almost clownish) portraits of New Wave icons like Pat Benatar and Gary Numan, or showcasing the eerie similarities between the covers of two popular female musicians that couldn't be further apart in style (Kate Bush & Dolly Parton)…

…Chojnacki is really paying a lot of attention to the layout of the book which I find really exciting.

Speaking of that Kate Bush cover to her single Army Dreamers, this is yet another great example of how the artwork can really accentuate the music.  Whereas the album that the single is derived from has a much more general tone playing off of Bush's overall personality as a musician, the single offers the opportunity to switch gears and focus on the message of the song.  Playing off of the idea of a mother welcoming home her son who has been killed in action, the cover features Bush made up to resemble a 40's era WWII bombshell.  I think it's ingenious how John Carder Bush (Kate's brother and the graphic designer of the cover) pulls out a bit to feature the photo actually pinned to a piece of corkboard, metaphorically showcasing her as a "pinup".  Again, like the Smith's, the image is a little silly and upbeat with the inviting pink background, while the song features dreadfully depressing lyrics accompanied by up beat music.  The design was actually taken another step further with the actual vinyl record which featured a dull military drab green center sticker that plays off of the tone of the lyrics.

All in all, I'm really excited about this book and the chance to flip through a bunch of this artwork from the eighties.  Not only does it give an opportunity to relive the art and design of the era, it also helps to highlight some wonderful songs, helping to put them more in the context of how they were envisioned when they were released. I know these graphic designers and artists put a lot of thought into the covers, and Put the Needle on the Record is the perfect way to explore their work.  Having just come off of illustrating and designing the cover to a friend's debut album (The Serenaders My One and Only You), I can attest to time and effort that goes into the process…

One night when I was about 4 years old my mother was helping me get ready for bed when she asked me a silly question, if I could change my name to anything that I wanted, what would it be?  This was the first time I was challenged with this sort of idea, of being given the power to create my own personality and identity.  Without much thought and with almost no hesitation I declared that I wanted to be named Tiger (most likely because I loved He-Man's steed Battle Cat.)  15 years later I was taking my first plunge into the world wide web and was again presented with the question of picking a name, an identity that would be my handle in that brave new technological community.  I was barely an adult at 19 and was living on my own for the first time.  When thinking about how I wanted to represent myself online there was one thing that I wanted to point to when it came to identity, a childlike wonder.  If there was one thing I knew for sure it was that I'd never stopped feeling like a young boy and I'd since had enough distance from the glamour of barbarian and giant cat fantasies I wanted to come up with something a bit more meaningful to my experience as a kid.  Upon reflection there was a much more iconic and universally identifiable property than the Masters of the Universe that encapsulated what it was like being a kid in the eighties, The Smurfs.  For anyone familiar with the odd linguistic tic of these little blue guys, you'll certainly know their penchant for replacing nouns and verbs with the word "smurf".  I settled on an adjectival use when picking my online handle, Smurfwreck (which is in homage to the final landing thud Brainy Smurf always made after being ejected from the village for being a useless know-it-all.)

30 years ago on a Saturday morning in 1981 I was introduced to the wonder that is the Smurfs, and though I didn't realize it at the time these little blue creatures would burrow their way so deeply into my consciousness that I've been living with them ever since.  Though they were introduced by Belgian artist and entrepreneur Pierre Culliford (better known by his nom de plume "Peyo") as side characters in his successful comic The Adventures of Johan & Pirlouit in 1958, The Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) helped usher in an amazing decade of Saturday morning cartoons for North American children during the 80s and have since become synonymous with the era.  Though the Rubik's Cube might be the most iconic single item from the eighties, I would argue that the decade was personified by the Smurfs (coming out on top of the likes of Michael Jackson, Mr. T, and even ALF.)  Unlike the straight comedic or action cartoons, the Smurfs was one of a few series that really painted an interesting escape into the realm of fantasy that the whole family could get into.

I wanted to talk about the Smurfs today because I recently had the opportunity to sit down with a copy of Matt. Murray's (punctuation his) excellent new book called The World of the Smurfs, A Celebration of Tiny Blue Proportions.  This coffee table book published by Abrams (the same folks who brought us the wonderful Wacky Packages books) is unique in that it combines a beautifully illustrated look at the phenomena of the Smurfs with the styling of a scrapbook that includes replica mini posters, sticker sheets, replica animation cells and model sheets, as well as reproduction mini comics in the same style that the Smurfs were originally printed in the pages of Spirou in the 60s.  I first stumbled across this style of book with the Star Wars Vault (published by Simon and Schuster) that came out during the 30th anniversary of the first film, and this Smurf volume follows in the steps of another Abrams scrapbook, The Transformers Vault, which hit bookshelves earlier in the year.  Though these scrapbooks can evoke the feeling of reading a pop-up book at times, The World of the Smurfs strikes a nice balance between a book and a binder full of props.  It's pretty darn cool to be able to pull out a replica animation cel while learning about the origins of the Hanna Barbera cartoon, or to unfold a detailed map of the Smurf village while reading up on some of the key characters in the universe.  It makes the whole experience one hundred times more visceral than reading a straight prose history, or even a heavily illustrated one.  For the generation of collectors that grew up in the 80s this style of publishing really taps into the nostalgia much in the same way that eBay and other auction sites have helped fans connect to ephemera from their past.  Here Abrams does that legwork for you.

Though the actual book reads pretty fast, not dwelling on any one topic for very long, Murray, the self-proclaimed World's Leading Smurfologist, does a rather decent job of covering the history of the property and its creator without it feeling like a long wikipedia entry.  Actually if there was one thing that I felt was a bit lacking was that after reading through the book I wished there was a bit more coverage of the merchandising.  There are some very interesting images that show some of the various video games, food products and ephemera that aren't talked about or really mentioned.  I also wanted to see more of the PVC figurines that have been produced over the years.  Even so, there are a lot of treasures to be found, in particular the artwork and pictures which dig a bit deeper than what you might find on the average fan site, illustrating the history with some personal photos culled from the Culliford family archive as well as the various Belgian publications that have most likely not seen print before in North America.  Included is also a look into the making of the Smurfs' first foray into live action filmmaking which is set to hit theater screens later this month.

Overall, this volume is beautifully bound and presented and would make a great addition to the library of anyone who grew up during the 80s, in particular for casual fans of animation and the Smurfs property.  Hardcore fans will still enjoy the book, though they might find it lacking as a reference for the toys, merchandising, cartoons or comics.  After reading this volume I immediately did two things, ordered a copy of The Transformers Vault and put in the Season One, Volume Two Smurfs DVD to re-watch the Purple Smurfs episode (Gnap!)  If you’d like to pick up a copy of this book you can head on over to the Abrams site, or you can pre-order it from Amazon (it'll be released on August 1st.)

So it's been almost a year since I stumbled upon a mystery that I like to call "Michal Knight and the Mystery of K.I.T.T. and the Blue Prowler".  The basic gist of the story is that while I was looking up Knight Rider read-along books on eBay I stumbled upon an auction for one that was originally published in Greece.  Though at first it didn't seem all that special, the title font for the book looked weirdly familiar.  It struck me that the company that produced this foreign read-along had used the Transformers font for the book.  Upon closer inspection I noticed a really small grainy picture on the back of the packing highlighting some of the other books in the series and I could have sworn that one of them featured either Prowl or Blue Streak from the Transformers.

As I wrote in the article detailing this mystery, I'm not completely unaware of these sorts of cross product mash-ups, as the Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe comic books were pretty darn popular back in the day.  Typically though, these cross-over events took place between two product lines released by the same company, whereas the idea of Knight Rider meeting a Transformer was just the sort of thing that doesn't happen.  Anyway, I couldn't be completely sure that I wasn't just seeing things as I didn't have an really good proof that this book even existed outside of the tiny grainy photo on eBay, so after writing about it I promptly tucked that memory away incase I ever found some better evidence.

Well that day has come as I've finally managed to track down a copy of this crazy Greek book!

Published by El Gre Co sometime in the early to mid 80s (there is no publication info, at least nothing numerical), this book does indeed feature a giant robot facing off against Michael Knight and K.I.T.T., though I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be a Transformer.  The artists who worked on this book obviously swiped the character design of Blue Streak from the toy's packaging art…

Though I'm not having much luck translating any of the text in the book, there are some context clues in the design that lead me to believe one of two things.  Either El Gre Co was a foreign partner of the Kid Stuff record company, or they completely pirated both properties to make bootleg books.  The Kid Stuff connection, though tenuous, makes some sense as they were the American publishers of the Knight Rider and Transformer branded read-along books.  There's also some design and artwork on the book that's taken directly from Kid Stuff like a "This Book Belongs to" page that is a spitting image for the ones they typically used.  It wouldn't be that crazy to figure that when sending over some sample art for a foreign Knight Rider book they also shipped some artwork from other properties they held the license to.  Heck, maybe there are El Gre Co brand Transformers read-along books out there as well.

Either way, I wasn't crazy and this book does indeed exist.  I have to say that I was a little disappointed after opening up the set as it wasn’t as artistically cool as I'd hoped.  Though the cover is pretty awesome, the inside of the book is filled with some pretty terrible artwork.  Not only that, but the artist was super lazy and continuously re-drew the Blue Streak robot in the same pose as the packaging art it was originally stolen from with only minor tweaks here and there.

There was one cool picture of the robot sprouting a couple sets of helicopter propeller blades and taking to the sky, but honestly it just looks like some really loose fan art that I might have done when I was five or six.  I guess in a way this adds to the charm of the whole book, but only a little.

This all raises yet another crazy mystery though, as the original auction that brought this all to my attention was for another Knight Rider book that had what appeared to be the alien mothership from E.T. on the cover.  There's some pictures in that previous article, as well as on the back of the gift set below…

Though I'd love to track that book down as well, I'm not so sure it's worth the effort as the interior art would probably be horrible.  Maybe the meeting of Michael Knight and E.T. is best left a mystery for the ages.  In fact the image in my head of the two standing next to K.I.T.T. and giving a dual thumbs up could probably never be topped anyway...

This week brings yet another set of vintage book club flyers from the 80s, though sadly it's also the last.  So far I've covered the Troll and Weekly Reader flyers, and for this last installment I'm going to take a look at the largest of the various clubs, Scholastic.  As I mentioned last week Scholastic was the last book club company standing after the various mergers and acquisitions over the past decade, most likely because they're not just a book distributor, but also a publishing house as well.  Another way that the Scholastic book club set itself apart was by really developing its branding.  Though both Weekly Reader and Toll had different catalog flyers aimed at the various grade and age groups in public school, Scholastic differentiated these flyers by issuing them under unique brand names.  For instance, the grades 4-6 received the Arrow book club flyers, while middle school and high school students received copies of the TAB club flyer.   This splintering of the main brand was just one of the ways that Scholastic tried to stay relevant to students, who would quickly outgrow the various clubs and would be looking for stuff that appeal to them and seemed more tailored.

Like Weekly Reader, the Scholastic book club flyers came bound inside a monthly educational newsletter.  This was where you got a chance to see the main company branding as the handout was called the Scholastic News…

Another way that Scholastic set itself apart from the other clubs was by offering back-issues of their entertainment magazines like Dynamite, Hot Dog, Maniac, and Bananas.  Actually, I didn't see any full-on subscriptions for these magazines in the book club flyers below, so I wonder if this was the only way to get access to these magazines to begin with.  I don't remember seeing any of them on the newsstands or spinner racks growing up.  Maybe Scholastic would hook you by offering up an issue each month and then you could get the exclusive subscription mailer inside of the actual magazine.  Anyone out there remember subscribing to any of these or finding them outside of the Scholastic book club flyers?

Anyway, for this last vintage book club article I have four more flyers to share from the collection of Esteban, who runs the awesome Roboplastic Apocalypse.  Three of them are from the Arrow club which was handed out to grades 4-6, and the last one is from the TAB club which was handed out to the 7th-12th grade students.   First up is the January 1985 issue of Arrow…

So after looking through a number of these book club flyers from the various companies I have to say that I am surprised by the gusto with which Heathcliff was advertised compared to Garfield.  In the battle of the little orange tabby cats, Heathcliff always comes out on top (front and center, page one) of these book club flyers.  I wonder if the various companies sold flyer space like ad space is sold in newspapers?   If so, Ace books sure were willing to shell out a shinier dime than Ballintine.  Either that or because Garfield was most likely much more popular in brick and mortar stores, the company didn't feel the need to compete in these school book club flyers…

I also thought it was interesting, from a design standpoint, that the guys and gals that worked on these Arrow flyers chose to highlight the publisher imprint logos on a lot of these book listings.  So when you see a listing for a Twist-a-Plot book like the one on the 3rd page of the flyer above, the T-a-P logo was separated out and placed at the top of the blurb.  I know I was always on the lookout for specific branding when it came to books, as even at a young age I was responding to the various publisher and series logos.   Again, it's another in a long line of examples in how Scholastic was trying harder to reach these kids (and in turn reaching into their parent's wallets…)

There are a couple of cool books in this first flyer, in particular Robot Race which was part of the Micro Adventures series of paperbacks that were trying for a sense of interactivity back in the day.   Instead of letting the reader guide the story as in a Choose Your Own Adventure style book, the Micro Adventures stories featured BASIC style computer programs printed through out the book that he reader could program into their home computing systems to play games and solve problems from the story.  I'm amazed at just how many ways the writers and publishers of the 80s were trying to heighten the reading experience for kids.

As I mentioned above, there were a handful of entertainment magazines published by scholastic in the 70s and 80s, two of which were available in this flyer, Maniac (aimed at high school kids that were in tune with the MTV generation), and Dynamite (which I've written about before.)

The first thing that jumped out at me in this February 1985 flyer is the rock and roll themed poster/sticker sheet combo.  Stickers were typical of these flyers, but I've never seen a sheet that listed the artist and gag writer before.  Apparently R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps fame and who often whet by Jovial Bob Stine) got together with B.K. Taylor (the artist for the Awesome All*Stars! sticker cards as well as a regular feature artist in the pages of Hot Dog and Dynamite) and whipped up a sheet of rock inspired stickers.  I'm guessing that they were featured because they both worked at Scholastic on the various magazines, but it's still a little weird…

This May 1985 flyer is also pretty interesting as it's an example of the end of the school year edition.  Since the kids would be out of school in the first week or so of June, May was the last good chance Scholastic had to sell some swag, and I think it's interesting that they eschewed the standard flyer for a two page blow-out sale…

Though I don't remember the Arrow book club, or any of these end-of-the-year blowouts, being the bargain shopper that I am I think I would have flipped for the flyer in May of '85.  In particular I would have really dug picking up multipacks of the Micro Adventures and Twist-a-Plot series all for the price of one book.  It even appears that there was some really old stock being pushed, as the 1983 Return of the Jedi storybook was bundled with a 1980 Empire era poster of Darth Vader.  I know for a fact that there was a metric ton of overstock on this particular Jedi story book as I've consistently seen brand new copies of this book in dollar stores and overstock book stores over the last 20 years.

The last vintage book club flyer I have to share is from the Scholastic imprint called TAB which was aimed at 7th graders and above.   This particular edition is from February of 1987 and barely survived to be shared…

My first impression of this flyer is that it's sort of schizophrenic in its odd mixture of offerings.  On the one hand there are some more adult fare like teen romance novels, classics (such as the Count of Monte Crisco, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and Dracula), and books on writing term papers, but on the other there are still kid oriented books (like one about race cars) and sticker collecting kits.  Then again, when I think back to my 7th grade days I know I was going through a similar period of weird reading habits, bouncing back and forth between thousand-page Stephen King epics and cracking open Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing for the umpteenth time.  I guess the 7th grade really does mark an awkward transition period for children.  Most are turning thirteen, and depending on individual predilection, most are probably also facing that time when it isn't cool to collect toys, read comic books, or bring your lunch to school in a lunchbox anymore.  I know that I personally rebelled against the idea that these things had to stop, but I was also far from popular...

As a special bonus, friend of the site Jose Anibal Gonzalez (who has a great art blog by the by), went above and beyond and sent in a scan of his daughter's current Scholastic book club flyer from this past January.  It's the perfect way to end this series as we can see how these flyers have changed over the last quarter century.  Thanks Jose!

So this week I thought I'd dig a little deeper into the whole school book club flyer phenomenon of the 80s while also taking a look at one of the more recognizable clubs, Weekly Reader.  Again, all of these scans come from the personal collection of the Evil King Macrocranios, or Steve if you prefer, to whom I am indebted.

When I was originally looking for some examples of these book club flyers to share them, I was a bit uncertain as to who the actual companies were that produced them in the 80s.  After doing a little digging there were a few names that sprang up, namely Weekly Reader and Scholastic, but I know that there were others that I remembered more fondly like Troll and Arrow.  This past week I shared a few Troll flyers, and I'll have some Arrow flyers to post about next week.  The big question that was still sort of hovering over all of this for me was were these all difference companies, or were they just different imprints aimed at certain regions or age levels there were all from the same corporation?  Turns out, it's a little bit of both.

From what I can gather off the fine print of the various Weekly Reader and Scholastic websites, back in the 80s there was a whole bunch of different companies distributing discount books through catalog flyers in classrooms.  Some of the services, like Troll, seemed to be more concentrated on liquidating discount books, while others (namely Weekly Reader) seemed to be interested in selling books as well as distributing their own branded periodicals providing news and articles for teachers and students.  Over the last 20-odd years there has been a lot of focus-shifting and consolidation and there seems to be only two companies left, Scholastic (who bought up a lot of other clubs like Troll and Trumpet) and Weekly Reader who seem to have strayed away from regular book distribution and begun offering mostly their own branded products (teaching aids, study books, and WR non-fiction picture books for young kids.)  These days Scholastic provides a whole slew of book club flyers aimed at various age groups and it appears that they've also taken over most if not all of the in-school book fairs, but we'll talk a little more about that next week.   This week it's all about the Weekly Reader…

These WR book club flyers were distributed as a part of the Weekly Reader Eye periodical handout, and were a bit different in terms of layout and advertising.  Again, there seemed to be a dual motive with this company in that they seemed to want to educate as much, if not more, than they wanted to distribute books in the classrooms.  Another variation of their magazine was called Senior Weekly Reader and seemed to delve into some much more adult topics and current events including the crack epidemic, the Challenger disaster, homelessness and the government's plans to create an anti-nuclear missile defense system in space.  All of this seems pretty heady for preteens who were most likely more concerned about whether or not their friends would think they were dorks because they still wanted to order Choose Your Own Adventure books in middle school…

You have to hand it to the publishers though, they were trying their best to not write down to middle-school-aged kids.   Actually that reminds me of similar memories I have of watching the fledgling Channel 1 in my homeroom when we had TVs installed in our high school class rooms back in the early 90s.  The snippets of news stories seemed to be almost on par with what my mom and dad were watching on the evening news.  Of course it bored me to tears back in the day, but there's a part of me that appreciates what they were trying to do education-wise now that I'm a little older. 

Anyway, back to the meat of this post and on to our first Weekly Reader book club flyer, which is from November of 1984…

The first thing I noticed while flipping through these was a slightly less commercial feel to the design.  They're printed in mostly black and white with a single accent color that I'm sure was intended to lessen the printing cost (which was mostly likely deferred to help supply the news portion of these handouts.)  They're also a bit less shilly in that it was much easier to obtain the "free" posters as you only had to buy a single book instead of the requisite three from clubs like Troll.  These flyers also had a secondary, longer term, incentive program in what they called PaperBucks.  For every item that you purchased from the catalogs you’d received one of these Paperbucks (see the 4th page of the flyer below for an image) which could be saved up to "pay" for specialty items like sticker sheets, plush dolls, instant cameras and posters…

This flyer also has some pretty damn nifty offerings including one of the Mr. T Antioch sticker books (featuring stickers with B.A. Baracus skiing), another of the Serendipity books by Brian Cosgrove (called Morgan and Me), a Masters of the Universe picture book (always loved the art in these), a Fraggle Rock poster and an offer for 100 stickers for only $0.75!  Oh, to go back in time with 5 bucks and access to one of these flyers…

Next up is the December 1984 flyer/insert…

This flyer also has some great books, but what really got me excited was the offer for a sticker collecting wallet for only $0.95.  I've seen official sticker collecting books, photo albums, stapled together sheets of construction paper, and even childhood furniture used to house a sticker collection, but never a wallet.  How neat would it have been to whip out a bill fold to show off your stickers on the go?!?

There's also an interesting special offer on the Garfield collection in this flyer which comes with four Garfield branded brown paper lunch sacks.  However neat these would have been to carry my lunch to school when I was in-between lunch boxes or in that gray area where I was getting too old to bring a lunch box, they still seem like a pretty weird thing to bundle with a comic strip collection.  It's like winning a contest and getting new socks or something.  Practical, but not exciting…

The last flyer I have for both today and for the Weekly Readers was released back in February of 1985…

This flyer is chock full of awesome swag including a Go Bots picture book (featuring art by none other than Steve "Spiderman" Ditko), another Serendipity book (Flutterby), and a sweet Break Dancing poster…

There were also a couple of interesting Choose Your Own Adventure style books with offers for an Indiana Jones Find Your Fate paperback and one for one of the more obscure brands, Wizards, Warriors, & You.

Last, but certainly not least, we have a handful of Weekly Reader posters which were a bit different than their counterparts in the Troll book club flyers.  Granted, I'm only going on a selection of three flyers from each club as reference, but the Weekly Reader posters seem to be a little less generic.  Not only do they feature some pop culture icons like E.T., the cast of the Empire Strikes Back and Wicket from Return of the Jedi, but even the goofy kitten and puppy posters are a little neater with printed titles on them.  These posters often featured ads for books on the back as well…

Next week I'll be back with a closer look at the Scholastic book club called Arrow…

Since I started sharing Ste-vil King Macrocranios’s collection of vintage school book club flyers this week, I thought it would also be a cool opportunity to take a closer look at some of the stuff one might have ordered back in the day.  Today I thought I'd take a look at a rather odd read-along storybook featuring the characters from the 80s sitcom Webster.  It's also an opportune time considering that the show was finally released on DVD this past Tuesday from the fine folks at Shout! Factory…

Before I get into the book I wanted to talk about the series for a second.  Webster was part of an interesting subset of sitcoms released in the early to mid-80s that were aimed at a younger than typical audience including shows like Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, Charles in Charge, and ALF.  This explosion of new kid-centric series came in the wake of the success of shows like Diff'rent Strokes and its spin-off The Facts of Life, as well as the popularity of goofier sitcoms like Mork and Mindy which certainly catered to a younger demographic.  I think it was also in response to the booming Saturday morning and weekday syndicated cartoon markets, which was proving to be lucrative for advertising dollars.  I'm sure the big wigs at the big three wanted to try and get some of these viewers watching in prime time with their parents so they could scream "buy me that" a bit more often.

Anyway, all network and commercial jadedness aside, even though the networks were all scrambling to address this audience, the ratings numbers must not have been stellar because this fad of kid-vid in prime time died down pretty quickly.  Shows were getting canned by the big three left and right, including Webster, but there was an interesting turn of events in store for a number of these series.  Again, based on the booming first-run syndication boom of cartoons at the time, the producers of these shows decided not to throw in the towel and instead shopped these canceled shows to local affiliates to run new episodes in the post-cartoon/pre-prime time slots between 6:00-8:00pm.  Shows like Charles in Charge, Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, and Webster found reprieves and would stay on the air a couple more years (in most cases long enough to complete a 4-season backlog to ensure there were enough episodes to qualify for regular re-run syndication packages.)

So, getting back to the meat of today's post, this read-along book is called Webster's Great Space Adventure which was released by Kid Stuff Records back in 1986.   Though the sitcom was firmly grounded in reality, this book takes a very Muppet Babies-esque ride on Webster’s imagination train (or space capsule in this case), rocketing Emmanuel Lewis into the stratosphere and beyond.  Weirdly enough, the last episode of the sitcom before it was ended featured a similar plot in which Webster is beamed aboard the Next Generation Starship Enterprise and guest stars Michael Dorn reprising his role of Worf…

The book was written by Michael J. Pellowski and featured illustrations by Walt and Cheryl Schoonmaker.  I don't have a list of the voice actors that narrated the accompanying tape, but I can honestly say that the cast didn't include Emmanuel Lewis, Alex Karras or Susan Clark.  You can listen to the audio for this read-along here (or you can right click on it and save it for your own listening pleasure.)

The basic gist of the story involves the Papadapolis' taking a trip to a Chicago area space museum.  Webster gets a chance to sit in a real rocket capsule, but then quickly falls asleep and dreams of taking a ride into outer space…

After experiencing some meteor turbulence, he crash lands on a crazy planet with huge flora and insane freaky human-headed bee-people!  Yikes!

The freaky bee-people help him back into space and he goes on looking for a new adventure.   He encounters a crazy used spaceship moon and realizes that aliens are just as un-protective of their environment in an oddly placed PSA about litterbugs…

The last stop involves Webster docking at a space station populated by a couple of the freakiest robot Papadapolis' adoptive parents ever.  David Bowie, eat your heart out!

As a quick side note, I think it's really interesting how dedicated Alex Karras and Susan Clark were to each other.  A real life married couple, I've pretty much only ever seem them acting together.  In addition to co-producing and starring in Webster, they were also both in Porky's, a couple of made-for-TV movies, not to mention appearing together in a bunch of furniture advertisements in the 70s and 80s.  I wonder if they ended up with any of this art for their personal collection?  I know I would have wanted it...

Honestly, as weird and insane as some of the imagery from the book is, it's not nearly as wild as I thought when I first flipped through it, though it is probably one of the most heavy-handed 16 minute PSAs about littering that I've ever heard…

Even though it's cheesy, I do love these old read-alongs, in particular the catalog offered by Kid Stuff. In addition to Webster, they were also the company that brought us branded titles like Transformers, G.I. Joe, the Marvel and DC super heroes, Rainbow Brite, Masters of the Universe, Care Bears, the Sectaurs, Knight Rider, the Smurfs, and I believe the A-Team as well…

I wanted to start off 2011 and the end of my winter hiatus with something that I think is pretty damn cool.   One of my goals with this site was to try and track down and share some of the more obscure things that I was really fond of as a kid.  Sure, talking about the Transformers and G.I. Joe is cool, but so are the Donruss Zero Heroes sticker cards and issues of Stickers magazine.  Trouble is, the majority of the obscure stuff I'd love to track down and talk about isn't all that easy to present in an interesting manner.  It's one thing to just talk or write about something, say the Screwball brand sherbet/bubblegum treats that used to only be available on the various ice cream trucks back in the day, but it's hard to provide that heady feeling of instant forgotten memory recall without some sort of scan-able packaging, or a theme song, anything that's a bit more visceral.  So I have a list of stuff, a wish list of sorts, that I'm patiently waiting to dig into when I have something more tangible to share.

Well, this past December, a very awesome friend of the site dug deep into his archive of school papers and ephemera from over 25 years ago, and he came out with some very amazing pieces of newsprint. Esteban, the Evil King Macrocranios, the ruler of the kingdom roboplastico home to muchas robots fantasticos and metalicos, not to mention the host of the Roboplastic Podcastalypse (which if you dig any of the podcasts I've done in the past you'll probably love this show), found his old stash of elementary and middle school book club flyers which he has very graciously scanned and sent over to be shared here, and I can't thank him enough.

Much like vintage food packaging, school book club flyers are in my opinion so of the rarest pieces of ephemera as there is absolutely no reason to archive them.   It's rare enough that kids would keep their homework and school paper work longer than it takes to peel off a congratulatory scratch and sniff sticker, let alone any peripheral materials that would just clog up your backpack, but for it to survive for 25 or more years is just astounding.  Even if these flyers were kept, it's not there’s any sort of market or demand to get them out into the hands of collectors.  The closest thing would be the very niche market of people selling old Saturday morning cartoon ads on ebay, but it seems like no one is selling book club flyers.  Hell, I remember wracking my brain just to try and remember a single name of one of these book clubs when I first started this site and I couldn’t find anything on the interwebs that really helped.  Either people don't care or these book clubs have become obscure enough nostalgia-wise that there isn't really anyone talking about them in the shadow of conversations about potential Thundercats movies, Smurfs as CGI, and Return-of-the-Jedi-themed jungle gyms.  Honestly, that's all right, because this is the stuff, the more obscure stuff, that still gets me the most excited nostalgia-wise…

So thank you Esteban for braving your old pile of school papers to dust off these amazing gems.  I'm going to be sharing his collection over the next couple of weeks, and today I'm going to start with a few Troll Book Club Flyers, the first of which is from April of 1982…

For the most part my memories of these book club flyers surrounds the excited jolt I'd get when the homeroom teacher would hand out them out each month.   In fact, I was kind of a nerd for anything that involved school and spending money; be it browsing for cool figural erasers and themed pencils in the school store, the occasional book sale held in the library, or the yearly Christmas fun raisers where we'd sell gaudy wrapping paper and off-brand meat & cheese gift-sets, I always got excited at the prospect of spending money at school.   Maybe it was because I didn't typically buy my lunch in favor of a packed lunchbox, but I always felt so independent and grown-up when I'd be trusted with a few dollars to spend any way I saw fit.  These flyers were a monthly opportunity to tap into the bettering-Shawn's-schooling fund and to pick up some nifty stuff like stickers and posters along the way…

With this first flyer, I realized that at least one company, Troll, issued different monthly fliers for the various grade ranges.  This one represents books available for kindergarten through 1st grade, and mostly features the large format floppy picture books and read-alongs.  Highlights for me include the Astrosmurf which featured artwork by Peyo (I wasn't sure if his work was repurposed back in the 80s or if it was all derivative stuff based on the Hanna Barbera cartoon adaptation of the comics), and Leo the Lop by Stephen Cosgrove.  Leo the Lop was part of a series of books by Serendipity written by Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James that really knocked my socks off as a kid (illustration-wise.)  Also included in the series were books like Little Mouse on the Prarie, Trapper (about a little while seal), and the Gnome from Nome (my favorite.)  You also get your first glimpse at the book club flyer up-sale which includes the concept of a free poster with the purchase of three or more books.  For a kid in the first grade back in the 80s, I'm sure that 11x17 of two white rabbits peeking out of a top hat was mesmerizing.

This next flyer is for a slightly older set (grades 4th through 6th) and was released in February of 1985…

This is a bit more of what I remember from back in school.  Though I have all sorts of fond memories of these flyers aesthetically speaking, I have to believe it's mostly just nostalgia.  I mean look at the horrible job on that curved block font around the dog poster.  Don't even get me started on the six million different fonts used for the various book titles in the descriptions.  Wowzers.   I mean using the specific font as an image lift from a book like with the Heathcliff offering is one thing, but mixing in the serif and sans serif fonts is hurting my eyes a little.  Anyway, enough grousing about design, I mean look, original solicitations for Choose Your Own Adventure books are in this flyer!

I also love the fact that even though some of these posters are super cheesy, they were al least also super cheap.  $0.75 for 24"x18" poster?  Hell, I'd have a hard time passing up the one with the collies at that price.   Also, notice the solicitation for Mad Libs #11.   Though I never had any Mad Libs books as a kid I know they were huge and these book club flyers were most certainly one of the main places to score them.

Book club flyers were also a place to score stickers, and if memory serves there was also a sheet of stickers in the flyers offered by Troll. 

Lastly, one of my favorite stand outs from this first '85 flyer is the special on the break dancing book on the back.   I'm sure this was the gateway for a bunch of fourth graders to get the instruction they needed to properly pop and lock like a pro…

The last Troll flyer I have is from December 1985…

Featuring more Heathcliff and Mad Libs, as well as Encyclopedia Brown, a handful of classics, and a trio of different Choose Your Own Adventure Style seris (including CYOA, Indiana Jones Find Your Fate, and Zork books), this was one heck of a flyer.  My favorite listing is for yet another of my holy grail items, the 1985 Antioch sticker book, Hogan Wins the Belt.  I've managed to find the majority of the Antioch book and sticker sets (from the Ghostbusters and Karate Kid, to Mr. T and the Bigfoot Monster Truck), but this WWF Hulk Hogan wrestling entry is proving one of the harder ones to find (at least with the stickers intact.)  So it's pretty awesome to get a glimpse at the stickers that were included with this book…

Rounding out this book club flyer are a sweet looking generic BMX book and a How To on Babysitting for Fun and Profit…

But before I end this post, I have a few more treats.  Along with these flyers Esteban also found some of the sweet posters that he and his sister ordered back in the day.  I'll let the Evil Macrocranios set the mood for these:

"Among my childhood school papers were some of the posters of horses and kittens and puppies we got from various book clubs.  It all seemed silly to me and as I unfolded yet another sickeningly cute poster of kittens I asked my mom what kind of little boy likes this stuff.  Then my three year old son walked into the room and when he saw the poster he started yelling 'CATS! CATS!' and he did a little dance and grabbed the poster from me like it was the best Christmas present ever.  Troll sure knew their audience."

I think I've written about this before, but there's aspect to American pop culture that I find endlessly fascinating; this deep need for sustainable continuity.   Though we're fanatics for origin stories, once an idea is set into motion we very rarely want to see it end.  So when a successful sitcom invades our television schedule, the hope is that it will be continually produced for as along as possible, ten, twenty years down the line. When it ends, there's still hope in our hearts for spin-offs, and reunion specials, and when all else fails, hopefully it will eventually end up as a big screen adaptation (which will hopefully be successful enough to garner a trilogy.)

I'm not sure what it is in our culture that makes us so clingy as an audience.  Maybe subconsciously the idea of a story having a distinct ending echoes fears of our own eventual mortality.  Maybe we just love a good success story and nothing says success like sequels and long running TV which have a validating effect on our own enjoyment.  I loved Ghostbusters something fierce growing up and I pined for the eventual sequel that seemed to take a million years to materialize.  Sure, I'd watch the original when ever it came on TV, but somewhere in the back of my mind I felt that I deserved to see the continuing story.

Battling against this cultural yearning are the hopes and dreams of the very people who makes these stories possible.  Sure, Dan Akaroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Sigorny Weaver seemed more than willing to make a sequel but how did Bill Murray and Rick Moranis feel?  Word is that they weren't all that keen on the idea, that as actors and creative-minded individuals they were more interested in pursuing something new, something that was interesting to them at the time.  Often this creative reluctance to suit up for a sequel is what quashes projects, but it's not necessarily the end of the story.  There are other outlets for continuity, especially for entertainment that feeds the all-ages sensibility of an audience.  The cartoon spin-off for instance.  While waiting the five years in-between Ghostbusters films, DiC started production on the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, which featured the continuing adventures of our favorite spectral sleuths.  But for various reasons the creative yearnings of writers, and the monetary needs of the studio forced the story to change.  Egon became blonde, the group all began wearing colored coded jumpsuits, Janine became a punk, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man became an ally and Slimer switched from being a chaotic-neutral villain to a bungling, Baby Huey-esque sidekick.

This leads me to the gist of today's subject, which is the continuing story of the beloved plant-friendly alien, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in his only sequel story, The Book of the Green Planet.  Published in 1985 and written by William Kotzwinkle, the same gentleman responsible for the film-to-book novelization of the original story, Book of the Green Planet follows E.T.'s adventures after reuniting with his species as they travel back to the home planet to study the flora specimens they've been collecting from Earth over the millennia.  In the original novelization we got a peek into a different view of the movie as Kotzwinkle tended to write from E.T.'s perspective, giving the reader an insight absent from the movie.  In that book E.T. comes across as a wholly different character, at times a centered peaceful monk-like being wise beyond his ten million years of age (yup in the book he's 10,000,000 years old for crying out loud), a others a tired curmudgeon afraid of offending Elliott and his siblings as he sees them as the rulers of the planet.  It's an odd balancing act that takes a weird shift in the follow-up sequel novel.

Unburdened by adhering to a script, Kotzwinkle decides to let loose in the sequel revealing that E.T. is not merely an alien from another world, but a traveler from outside of our universe/dimension.  Kotzwinkle also decided to mold the character more into the image we get in the film, drawing him as playfully ignorant, continuously spouting incorrect English to his friends as if he had learned to master the language during his layover on Earth.  He's also shown depressed, having left his newfound friends behind, never to see them again, yet I find this awkward and weird considering that he's literally lived throughout the millennia.  Was this experience with Elliott so profound, and if so, how boring was the rest of his existence?  Besides, for a being of that age who travels through out dimensions and across galaxies with ease, isn't it a bit naive to assume you'd never see your friends again?

Anyway, the basic plot involves E.T. returning home only to be demoted for his shenanigans on Earth.  Sad and lonely, it becomes his quest to find a way to travel back to the Milky Way and to his beloved friend Elliott.  The book flits back and forth between E.T.'s adventures trying to secure a vessel to make the trip and a slightly older Elliott on Earth who is struggling with puberty and his newfound obsession with girls (which troubles E.T., through their psychic connection, to no end.)   Trying to help (but coming across as a dumped ex stalker) E.T. sends astral projections of himself towards Earth in the hopes that they will meld with Elliott's troubled soul and help him to find peace (as well as the nerve to finally step up and mingle with the girl of his dreams.)  In a sort of anticlimactic ending E.T. grows a ship (making it easier to hide from his people) and embarks on the long journey back to Elliott, though the story ends before the trip is finished leaving the book open to an obvious sequel (though unlike this one, a sequel that never materialized.)

All in all, this book (and the original novelization) gives the audience what it craves, a continuation of the story with so much more to explore.  It's weird and not much like the original film, but it is something which in and of itself is sort of a treasure.  Also, believe it or not, with the re-release of this book in 2002 there was a teacher's guide printed that has artistic rendering of a couple of the odder creatures mentioned in the book including the ellusive flopgopple!

One of the most vivid sense memories I have from when I was a child is of lying on the floor and trying to pry apart two short, flat Lego planks (2x2s) with my teeth.  The tips of my fingers kept painfully slipping off of the bottom piece as my incisors clamped tight on the other, but I needed these separated desperately so that I could finish my masterpiece, a replica of the Airwolf helicopter.  When I finally managed to get the two bricks apart (opening just enough space between them to pry them loose with a fingernail), I can still remember unceremoniously spitting out the one between my teeth as I affixed the other to the undercarriage of the helicopter's cockpit section which helped to secure a section of unstable bricks.  Though Lego bricks weren't the only toy I played with as a kid, they were the one constant that I've always found myself going back to from around the time I was five, up until today.

When I first saw Jonathan Bender's book, Lego: A Love Story, I was hoping that he managed to tap into my lifelong fondness for these universally loved bricks, and I wasn't disappointed in the least.  It seems that when it comes to writing about nostalgia laden topics, two extremes seem to dominate the landscape, the overly saccharine sweet or the dismissive, snarky and sarcastic.  Both show a level of fondness, but both are also hard to plow through as any extreme viewpoint can be.  It’s a battle I fight every time I sit down to write something for this site and it's sort of rare that you can find someone who can actually manage an evenhanded voice when writing about nostalgia.   Bender has done just that with his first book in which he reacquaints himself with Lego brick building after having put the toys away as a preteen almost twenty years ago.

Though I'd hesitate to call myself an AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego), it seem that there hasn't been a time in my life when I have had at least one set worth of Lego bricks hanging around the home or office.  I feel like I have a decent handle over the general history of the toy, yet Bender manages to uncover all sorts of interesting tidbits of information, from the split between Lego traditionalists and the customizers, to the rules, habits and vernacular of the dedicated Lego fandom.  Did you know that gluing pieces together or painting them is a cardinal sin to some purists?  But it's not just about the hardcore fans.  Through his own experience dipping his feet back into the world of Lego, Bender does an excellent job of relating to the common fans by sharing his childhood building stories as well as showcasing new attempts at building his own creations (called MOCs, or My Own Creations by the fan community.)

One tidbit that stuck me was that feminine hairpieces for the mini-figures tend to be rarer because most of the figures are geared towards boys and men (like most toy-lines actually.)  It reminded me of a good friend I had back in high school who used to customize his Lego mini-figures to look like Marvel comics characters (way back before Lego started putting out so many licensed sets) and he'd always have to make female character's hair out of hot glue (which he shaped while it was hot and then painted later to get the likeness just right.)

I found it fascinating that Bender approached the bricks so apprehensively, where he seemed almost ashamed of sharing his creations for fear of rejection by the experienced fans and masters he's met while researching the book.  It's also amazingly heartening to find out that so many of these master builders don't think twice about Bender's novice status, applauding his multicolored delivery vans and biplanes and encouraging him to build bigger and better stuff.  This is the wonder of Lego in that at it's core the toy is about creating and learning and it attracts (for the most part) a legion of fans who completely believe in these principles.

At the end of the day Jonathan Bender has done a wonderful job of showcasing Lego in a way that I think anyone would find interesting, from the kid who packed away their bricks when they were twelve to the hardcore fanatic that thinks they know every fact and facet about the toys.  It's personable, funny and interesting, not to mention taking an honest and thoughtful look at the nostalgia for Lego without slipping into the too-sweet or too-jaded that we tend to see in similar books, articles and homages.

For this week's Awesomely Overdue Books column I thought I'd continue on with some more Find Your Fate books from my collection, in particular some of the more girl-centric volumes.  First up are three volumes of the Jem FYF series, titled Jewels in the Dark (written by Rusty Hallock), The Video Caper (written by Jean Waricha) and The Secret of Rainbow Island (written by Judith Bauer Stamper) respectively.  There were three published Jem Find Your Fate books, though there are an additional three rumored unpublished volumes.

Though not quite as action packed as other shows animated by Sunbow back in the 80s (like G.I. Joe, the Transformers, and the Visionaries), Jem was still exciting, filled with intrigue and had its fair share of science-fiction elements, so much so that I never felt weird watching it after school.   In fact it shared a lot of the aspects that made She-Ra feel more like a cross demographic show, and not just another girl's cartoon.  When I first cracked the cover on the Video Caper I was curious if these books would have the same bad choice pitfalls that he Transformers books featured. I was curious if you could end up getting Jem or one of the Holograms (her fashionable band-mates) killed by choosing too hastily.  I couldn't help myself and I broke one of the cardinal rules of CYOA-style books, I flipped forward to find some of the ending pages, and sure enough, there is a death scene.  I still find this really disconcerting considering these are branded properties and kids can get really invested in the characters, even if they could make different choices next time and have Jem save the day.

Anyway, another concern I had when cracking open these books are just how well the authors handled the material.   Were they "written down" to a kid's level?  Were they just sort of knocked-out considering the format, or did they try and put a little more effort into them?  With the Video Caper I can honestly say that Ms. Waricha dropped the ball a bit.  One of the first lines in the book is so hackneyed it's laughable, "Before you leave , you can't help but notice yourself in the mirror and think how truly outrageous you look…"  'Cause you know that Jem is truly outrageous right?  Truly, truly, truly outrageous.

Along these lines, the choices, or more accurately the paths that you take after making choices, are poorly handled as well.  The initial choice forked in two directions, and if you pick path A, lit leads to path B anyway without advancing the story or adding anything.  It's almost as if there really is no choice.  Also there are only a handful of choices to make with each ensuing path, with most of the pages instructing to turn to a specific page with no decision-making needed.  Actually, in the Secrets of Rainbow Island there are only four choices in the entire book.  Heck the plot even gets left behind in a number of the paths.  In the Video Caper the build up to the story involves a couple of speed-bumps that are completely left out of the second half of the story including the fact that Jem and her alter ego Jerrica are expected to tour London together with Jerrica's more-or-less boyfriend Rio (and unless Synergy projects a hologram version of one or the other, this ain't happening.)  Also a princess is abducted in the first half of the story and in the second half this plot point is forgotten in some of the paths.

I was also surprised to see that the books were written in the second person, so the reader is not only a character in the story, but takes on the role of Jem. The Transformers books, a couple of which were also written by Judith Bauer Stamper, were in a more comfortable 3rd person narrative where the reader was urged to make choices for the Autobot and human characters.  So not only can a path end with Jem's death, in essence the reader dies along with her.  Again, for kids I would think this could be heady stuff.  All in all I'd have to say that these Jem Find Your Fate books are pretty much at the bottom of the CYOA-style book barrel.  Not only are they painful to read, they're also not illustrated, so there isn't even fun stuff to look at.  These were a total cash grab by Ballantine who must have done the math and figured anything with the Jem logo would turn a profit regardless of who badly written they were.  It's a shame too because the cartoon was pretty good and I'd hate to think there were any girls turned off to the series because of the books.

The other book I wanted to mention is titled Morgan Swift and the Kidnapped Goddess (written by Sara Hughes in 1986.)  From what I can gather the main character Swift, was created by Random House/Ballentine as an answer to Indiana Jones for girls.   Swift is a high school science teacher with a keen fashion sense and a penchant for exploring jungles and pyramids in her off time.  There are two Swift Find Your Fate books (including M.S. and the Treasure of Crocodile Key), as well as a few prose books also published by Ballantine/Random House in 1985-6.  The two Swift FYF books are actually part of a larger series of Find Your Fate books that also includes a series of Indiana Jones and James Bond (all based on A View to a Kill) books.  I suppose this was considered their action/adventure line of Find Your Fate books, though all of the books really fall into that category.

This volume is also written in the second person, which is a format very common to CYOA-style writing and one that grates on my nerves.  Probably the lest used in the history of fiction, the second person narrative is by design an affront to the reader's sensibilities, forcing them to agree with statements of character and desire.  For instance, in the Morgan Swift book there's a passage that reads:

"She's your science teacher, only the coolest thing to grace the halls of Coolidge High.  She's wearing a dark purple jumpsuit and her red leather cowboy boots.  She never looks like anybody else, and she always looks great."

Now I can get onboard with the idea of the author using the second person perspective to force one idea on the reader, say that we think Ms. Swift is the coolest thing on two feet.  But to further suggest that the eye-piercing matchup of a dark red jumpsuit and red leather boots looks great is just too much for me.  At that moment I'm ripped from the story and all good faith from the author's words are gone.  My suspension of disbelief is shattered, and yes I realize that this is just a kid's book, but it shouldn't matter.  I never feel this way reading Judy Blume or James Howe, both of which hold up to adult scrutiny.   Again, the second person is just a very difficult perspective to sell to the reader.  You have to REALLY be able to target the intended audience, and people, as much as we might believe can be completely predictable, are usually too varied to target in such a manner.

Similarly there's an issue with prior knowledge that is in my opinion impossible to pull off without some sort of amazing familiarity to back it up.  Another line in the book reads, "It's on the tip of your tongue to ask, 'Is that when you were in the monastery?'"  Before this reference we literally know nothing about Ms. Swift except that she's qualified to teach high school science, has horrible fashion sense and has spent at least a day in Southeast Asia.   So the author is forcing the reader to have instant background knowledge of Swift, and it's very jarring.  This is where second person leads and it's a very perilous and annoying road.  At least after this reveal the reader is informed of a slew of other rumors about Ms. Swift (she used to date Sting!), so later on this sort of trick will work better as we actually have prior knowledge.  Anyway, even though the book is written in the second person, this time you play the sidekick, a student, Shortround to Morgan Swift's Indiana Jones.

When it comes to decision making time this raises another unfortunate issue as Swift is the main protagonist and it's laughable that when the chips are down she'll rely on you to lead the way.  The first choice is presented after it's revealed that your town has a traveling art exhibit from Meronga.  After bumping into Ms. Swift at the museum she explains a little bit about a priceless wooden statue, when all of a sudden three masked men burst in and steal the artifact.  Without thinking or hesitation you follow Swift outside to her car and speed after the thieves when you're presented with a choice of two paths.  Honestly at this point Swift is in control so why is the reader prompted to decide?

Anyway, even for these pitfalls the book reads much better than the Jem volumes.  The Swift character is strange, a mix between Indiana Jones, MacGyver and a witch.  The book does have some great illustrations by Ann Meisel as well.

In future installments of Awesomely Overdue Books I'll get to at least one other "mostly for girls" series, a handful of Dungeons & Dragons branded romance CYOA-style books.

Recently a couple of blogs that I frequent celebrated their four-year anniversaries (Old Man Musings and Cavalcade of Awesome), and it got me thinking about Branded’s upcoming 4-year (which hits this coming Wednesday the 17th), but not necessarily about any jubilation. Though I’m glad to have stuck it out this long and I’ve met all sorts of great people since starting this site, what I really started thinking about was the fact that I have all kinds of stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years, specifically to write about, which has been pushed to the side. On a side note, my wife and I have been watching an inordinate amount of episodes of Clean House recently and though we’re no where near as clutter intensive than any of those families, we’ve been asking ourselves what we would do in their situation (where they’re encouraged to donate or sell the majority of their stuff for the good of an organized clean house.) The wife had even commented on my ever growing collection of Choose Your Own Adventure style books the other day, wondering when I was ever going to get around to reading them and I mentally put myself in the Clean House mode and tried to imagine getting rid of them.

All I could think of was Hell No. But I have to admit that they’ve been sitting for over two years unread (in fact, here’s where I first mentioned getting bitten by the CYOA collecting bug almost exactly two years ago), and I began to wonder when I’d have the time to tackle them. Well, now is as good a time as any I guess. I decided to start with my run of Transformers Find Your Fate books.

The Find Your Fate books published by Ballantine were potentially the biggest single competitor of Bantam’s Choose Your Own Adventure series bringing all sorts of brand-name properties to this style of children’s book entertainment. With such branded luminaries as Indiana Jones, James Bond, Dr. Who, G.I. Joe, Jem, Tales From the Crypt, Thundercats, the Three Investigators, Golden Girl and Transformers, Ballantine was betting on character familiarity to win out over the originality and popularity of the CYOA series. Ultimately Ballentine published sixty seven books under the FYF heading and they ended the series in 1987 (trying unsuccessfully to revive the franchise in 1995 with a single volume of Find Your Unfortunate Fate Tales From the Crypt), bowing out to the CYOA empire (which ran until 1998 initially and had over two hundred entries published.) Though these two publishing houses clashed throughout the 80s on the CYOA-style adventure book front, the ultimate irony is that both companies are now divisions of Random House.

Anyway, as far as the Find Your Fate series is considered, for a nostalgia buff like me, these books are all gems because of their branded nature. Though I didn’t have any Find Your Fate books while growing up, I can imagine how awesome it must have been to more or less get a chance to control the actions of some of your favorite cartoon and movie characters while reading about their adventures. To me it seems like one step closer in getting into that character’s head than just playing with a toy, and much more involving than any of the branded Atari games of the period (for all of their generic boring adventures, e.g. E.T.) So what were the Transformers books like? First off they were part of the Junior subset of FYF books, so they only clock in at around 75 pages, and they’re slightly larger in format, sort of like a pre-chapter book.

There were nine books in the series, the first six of which were released between December 1985 and April 1986 and were concerned (more or less) with pre-Transformers the Movie events in the timeline, while the last three books were published in September 1986, a month after the movie hit theaters and they involved the post movie characters. Here’s the list:

#1, The Dinobots Strike Back (written by Casey Todd)

#2, Battle Drive (written by Barbara & Scott Siegel)

#3, Attack of the Insecticons (written by Lynn Beach)

#4, Earthquake (written by Ann Matthews)

#5, Desert Flight (written by Jim Razzi)

#6, Decepticon Poison (written by Judith Bauer Stamper)

#7, Autobot Alert! (written by Judith Bauer Stamper)

#8, Project Brain Drain (written by Barbara & Scott Siegel)

#9, The Invisibility Factor (written by Josepha Sherman)

William Schmidt handled the artwork on all nine of the books, and was responsible for executing one of the more interesting aspects of this series of books, namely the choice to use the toy designs for the characters rather than the cartoon incarnations. This was sort of a running theme with a lot of the Transformers merchandising, in particular the early Marvel comics and a bunch of stickers and lunchboxes (which heavily used repurposed toy-packaging art.) Though a lot of toys resembled their cartoon counterparts pretty closely, there are some glaring exceptions like Ironhide and Bummblebee who look quite different, and in Ironhide’s case not at all like a robot. Also fans of the toys will surely mock Megatron’s, um, manly stature as the design of the action figure ended up with an unfortunate placement of his gun-mode’s trigger. So to see these weird designs pop up in the artwork of the books can be kind of comical at times. Also, it’s kind of weird to see Schmidt re-draw some of the characters from their exact pose on the toy packaging artwork, again something that longtime fans will notice immediately. My favorite contribution by Schmidt though involves his use of reference material for some of the background elements in the ninth book, The Invisibility Factor…

The design of a scientist’s spaceship is a direct rip of the Millennium Falcon and later on in the story the Autobots are flying through an asteroid field in a ship that is unmistakably one of the Imperial Shuttles from Return of the Jedi. I sure hope those Autobots have the proper code clearance to get by the Star Destroyers and to continue on to Endor…

Schmidt also worked on a series of Star Wars novels in the 80s, the Lando Calrissien books, so my guess is that he had some SW reference material lying around and decided, "Why not?"

Along with the choice to use the character designs from the toys as opposed to the cartoon, the writers were also given notes that appear to have come from the Marvel comics instead of the Sunbow show. The most obvious example of this is the inclusion of the human character Buster Witwicky in place of the more common character Spike from the cartoon. In both the comics and the cartoons (and the new movies as well, though Shia Labeof is playing a variation named Sam) the Autobots are aided by the Witwicky family, namely Spike (in the cartoons), Buster (in the comics), and their father Sparkplug (comics and cartoons.) Whereas Buster was initially the same character as Spike for the comic book continuity, he was eventually retroactively turned into Spike Brother when Spike was introduced into the comic series as the Headmaster counterpart to Fortress Maximus (as he was also on the toy.) Anyway, the books feature Buster, which leads me to believe that the authors were probably given a series bible that related to the comics, as well as character designs from the actual toys. My guess is that this was a little bit confusing to kids who didn’t read the comics and were just fans of the cartoon.

Similarly some of the Tranformers characters are miscast in the last three books of the Find Your Fate series, in particular Hot Rod who hadn’t turned into Rodimus Prime even though the books feature Galvatron, so the stories are definitely post-movie in continuity. Maybe the writers were working from a bible that didn’t reveal the ending of the movie? Also there are a handful of characters that pop up in these last three books which were killed off in the movie, namely Prowl.

All in all, as CYOA-style books go, these Transformers Find Your Fate Junior books are sort of on the annoying side in that they read as if there is only one true path through the story. Though I’m not steeped in the CYOA community (if there even is one, and I’m sure there is), my guess would be that there is a fundamental rift between fans as to how the books read in terms of decision-making. The are two camps as I see it, one in which the decision trees give the impression that there is a right and wrong choice, and by continuing to make the “right” decision leads to the some sort of prize (be it a longer more satisfying read or the “best” ending), and a second in which the decision-making is less about winning the adventure and more about crafting the story as you go.

As a kid I fell into the former camp, but as an adult reader I’m way more interested in the latter concept, that this style of writing is to make the adventures more involving by giving the reader a chance to participate. This also strengthens the idea that you could read these books numerous times choosing differently each time to get a completely different, yet satisfying experience. The thing is that not all CYOA-style books are written so that you can feel satisfied in making whatever choice you desire, in particular these Transformers volumes. In a lot of cases the choices are clearly right and wrong, and by choosing the “wrong” option you’re directed to a bitter end for the characters involved. This in essence punishes the reader for making a hasty, in most cases violent or greedy, choice and promotes the idea that there is only one correct path through the story and the trick is to find it. In most of these Transformers books there is one point that a choice leads to a character’s grisly death. I actually find this kind of disturbing as it really puts this outcome in the reader’s hands, and for some kids this must have been heart wrenching. Heck watching Optimus die in the ’86 movie was bad enough without me having to feel responsible on top! Little Bobby is so excited about the prospect of defeating Galvatron one and for all that he decides to have Hot Rod and Kup take an invisibility device away from it’s designer, only to have Hot Rod disintegrated by a booby trapped self-destruct option on the device.

On the other hand, maybe this is the sort of tactic that really hammers home moral responsibility, much more so than the famous PSAs at the end of so many of 80s cartoons. Taking the horror movie route and illustrating that bad behavior results in death.

I do have to say that the stories end up mirroring the three act structure of the cartoon episodes pretty well, and the overall concepts are relatively fun. The various writers do a pretty good job of sticking to the overall character traits as well, so these are a fun way to expand on the universe of the cartoons and comics if you’re a fan of the Transformers. Oh and for all you kids out there, if we are going to treat these books as if they’re a game to win, don’t cheat by writing in the book…

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?

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.

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.

I thought I'd take a moment and talk about my current nostalgia obsession. I've been spending the last three or four months scouring my local used bookstores for all the Choose You Own Adventure style books that I can find. I only had a handful growing up, most of which were books from the actual Choose Your Own Adventure series, but there were a couple others that I read and re-read a few times including a Marvel Super Heroes Gamebook featuring Wolverine, and one of the Which Way series of books starring Batman. Though I loved both of these latter books because of the characters, I always sort of thought of them as CYOA knock offs because they didn’t have that branding.

Well, when I first started buying up all of the CYOA books I could find I was getting a little discouraged because I wasn't finding all that many. In fact, without resorting to eBay I only managed to find about 20 (there were something like a hundred and fifty or so I think), and another 5 that my friend has had since he was a kid. One of the reasons that I wanted to track these books down was to get some more material for the site as I’m getting towards the end of my sticker collection (I have a good 6 months worth of material left, but I've sort of tapped that reservoir), and 25 books just isn't going to cut it. Then I remembered the Batman and Wolverine books and it got me thinking about what other CYOA style paperbacks were available in the 80s. Let me go on record as saying that there were a ton, and I've been buying them left and right. I was sort of blown away when I started taking stock of the books that are stacking up on my shelves. I've found no less than 20 different series that range in branding from generic/original (like CYOA, Find Your Fate, Which Way, Your Amazing Adventures, and Wizards, Warriors and You) to a ton of popular 80s properties (including Marvel, DC, D&D, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Thundercats, Jem, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Star Trek, and even Blackstone the magician.) I've even discovered the world of paperback gamebooks (including stuff like Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy, and Sagard), which are basically one player role playing games that act a lot like CYOA style books except you use dice and make decisions based on what weapons and spells your character has amassed.

What's kind of crazy is that I'm currently about a hundred or so paperbacks in to a collection that I think might just be gargantuan. The good news is that I should have plenty to talk about when I finally tackle how I want to approach these books. The bad news is that since there are so darned many of them I'm not sure where to start. I guess there are worse problems to have though. Anyway, I thought I'd share a few cover scans to give an idea of the kinds of books I've found and what's going to come up eventually on Branded…

First up we have an entry in the Twist-a-Plot series (I don't have the date handy as I type this.)  I was completely unaware of these books growing up and though I've been scouring the kids section of used bookstores for years I never paid any attention to these because they're kind of light on the page count. I have a couple that are around the CYOA standard (which is around 110 pages), but most seem to be around 50 to 60.

Next we have book one in the Lazer Tag series published by TSR (again, don't have the book in front of me so the date escapes me.) TSR, the publishers of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game system, seems to be the second largest publisher of CYOA style books (next to Bantam who were responsible for CYOA, the Time Machine series, as well as the Be An Interplanetary Spy series.) Not only did they publish about 50 novels in their D&D branded CYOA series called Endless Quest, they were also responsible for a series of Marvel Super Hero books and the above Lazer Tag books.

Last up today is one the rarer series (well at least in suburban Georgia), the Heart Quest books, which were also published by TSR and took place in the D&D universe. These were aimed at girls and I believe are more in the vein of romances (which ought to be a trip to read.) They even have die-cut covers, so that when you open the book you get a full version of the picture on the cover. Classy. Anyway, I thought I'd throw these up on the site since I haven't made an update in awhile. Hopefully I'll get back on schedule with more Peel Here columns next week.

I've mentioned my love for a set of elementary school library books called the Crestwood House Monster Series on the site before, but I figured it would be fun to delve into one for the Halloween countdown this month. Probably referred to as those 'Orange Monster Books' (because of their deep orange back cover and spine) by kids like me who weren't astute enough to notice the publisher's name, these relatively short (at around 50 pages) hardback books were a treasure trove of monster related trivia and information for a generation of kids in the 70s and 80s.

There were at least 15 books in the series including Frankenstein, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Dracula, The Mummy, The Blob, The Wolf Man, Godzilla, Mad Scientists, King Kong, The Phantom of the Opera, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, The Invisible Man, It Came From Outer Space, and The Deadly Mantis as you can see on the back cover of my tattered copy of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman…



I'm not positive, but I think some of the later editions had a purple back cover and spine.

Now, growing up in the 80s I wasn't inundated with monsters to the degree that the generations before me were, at least not the more classic monsters, though we did have our fare share of newer creations, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Filmation villains and horror movie slasher icons. Fangoria had supplanted Famous Monster of Filmland by that time, and merchandising for the classic monsters (like monster models and the like) had become few and far between. My only real introduction to the Universal stable of monsters was through watching a couple of the films with my parents, the one time that one of our local channels teamed with 7-Eleven to broadcast Revenge of the Creature in 3-D (you could pick up a free pair of 3-D glasses at the stores), and the Crestwood House series.

So what's in these books you ask? Well, why don't we take a look at my copy of Frankenstein and see…



I'm not sure if that’s the Glen Strange or Bela Lugosi incarnation of the monster on the cover there (I prefer Karloff.)

**UPDATE**  As has been pointed out many times in the comments thread, The above picture is of Lon Chaney Jr. under the make-up.  That is all...

On the title page we can see that the book was first written in 1977 by Ian Thorne, though I believe that Thorne is a pseudonym for Julian May an active science fiction writer who published these Crestwood books with her husband in the 70s and 80s…



The book begins with a summation of the events in the first Universal Frankenstein movie, along with some really gorgeous still photos (Forrest J. Ackerman actually provided photos for the Crestwood series) including this one of Fritz terrifying the monster with a torch.



Now honestly, most children's books on Frankenstein would probably stop there (though it would also probably have a short section about Mary Shelly and her novel), and this is where this series really shines. Not only does it include a bit on Shelly, but it also goes into the history of Frankenstein on film, going so far as to mention Edison's version of the film from 1910.  Luckily a print of Edison's 15 minute film was found, though I think it's sort of being held hostage by the guy who discovered it (here's the story), but thanks to the internet you can now watch it for free here.



There's also a close-up on Boris Karloff and some of the other Universal incarnations…



…as well as a bit on The Munsters.



Though there's a little bit of unneeded criticism on I Was a Teenage Frankenstein by Thorne/May, it still amazes me that it was brought up at all, as well as her invocation of the Hammer version of the monster as portrayed by Christopher Lee…



There's even a bit at the end about a made for TV version of the story.

Though I'm sure the content of this book isn't nearly as revolutionary as I'm making it out to be, I can't help but feel that it is. I've read a few books on horror and monsters, and it wasn't until I picked up David J. Skal's The Monster Show as an adult that I read about all the various incarnations of Shelly monster on film, and to think that it was all (mostly) in this children's book just amazes me. I guess this also points to how much I think I missed out on growing up without magazines like Famous Monsters, and not really getting all that much on TV (at least in central Florida where I lived at the time.) Here's a question for all you monster kid parents out there, are there books out there for children that are this well versed in monsters?

Here's a nicer (less damaged) version of the back cover (though it's also an earlier copy without the full set of books listed)…

Today I thought I'd take a moment to share one of the oldest books in my collection, not by publishing date, but a book that I've had for what seems like forever (it's really only 20 years.) It's a short book of ghost stories called The Restless Dead which I ordered from one of those awesome Troll book club fliers in the fifth grade. I'm not sure if elementary and middle schools are still pimping books through these types of book club fliers (I think there was also a Scholastic club and a third that I can't remember the name of), but when I was a kid it was an exciting moment to get one of these order forms handed to me. They usually consisted of one sheet of colored newsprint folded in half (or maybe quarters) with sections on fiction, activity books, comic strip collections, and even stickers and posters as well. It was probably around Halloween in 1987 when I saw this book by Daniel Cohen listed…



The cover art totally sold me on the book and I'm know I rushed home and begged my mother to order it for me. Like the Halloween Horrors record I posted about earlier in the week, the artwork mesmerized me, and I'm sure I worked up a story that connected the ethereal figure of the lady on the cover of the book to the unfortunate ghost in the main story on the record.  I also live the skull worked into the clouds (and outlined by the spindly trees) behind the ghostly lady, as well as the super creepy shrouded figure in the background (who I can only assume is the reaper.)


There are a few generally scary or gruesome tales, my favorite of which revolves around a very demanding husband and his wife. He asks her to cook him a nice liver dinner, so she runs out to the market and fetches the best liver the meat monger has for sale. She then spends the afternoon slowly cooking it, taking little nibbles here and there to check on it. A little bit before her husband is due home she caves and devours the whole thing, feeling guilty and scared immediately afterward. Her solution is to go next door to the mortuary where an elderly lady who had just passed had been laid out by the mortician. She snatches the old lady's liver and quickly cook sit for her husband. He loves the dinner, but then soon after the household is plagued by the ghost of the lady whose liver has been eaten. The husband finds out what happened and does the only thing that makes sense to him, which is to carve out his wife's liver so that he can replace the one eaten.  It works like a charm.

How crazy of a tale is that?!? It reminds me of some of the more gruesome Grimm brother's tales actually. I re-read the entire book (I say that like it was a challenge at it's hefty 100 pages) and though some of the stories didn't connect quite the same as they did when I was a kid, I still really enjoyed what Mr. Cohen had put together. Now, if I can find the time to break out Bunnicula and Samantha Slade: Monster Sitter…

I don't remember if I've given it a shout on the blog before, but on the left list of links you'll see a one for Read-Along Adventures, an awesome site dedicated to those wonderful children's book & record sets from the 60's, 70's and 80's.

I've mentioned a couple of these sets before, namely Planet of the Hoojibs, which was an early chapter in the Star Wars extended universe (before there even was an EU in fact.) I had stumbled upon a site, Check the Cool Wax, which is graciously sharing nice MP3 files of the record portion of this set as well as a bunch of other titles.

Well at Read-Along Adventures these book and record sets are being shared in a most unique fashion, one that mimics best the experience of sets. The books and audio files have been arranged into a Flash file where you can flip through the book at will, and with each page, the corresponding audio file will play. The sound file will wait to start until you load the next page as well, so this is the best virtual experience for reading along to a record.

The site was just updated with two Star Wars classics, the afore mentioned Hoojibs, as well as The Ewoks made for TV movie adaptation of The Caravan of Courage. These join the ranks of some great read-alongs, among which are The Goonies, all three Indiana Jones sets, E.T. (in two separate editions, one read by Drew Barrymore and one by Michael Jackson which is pure insanity), not to mention the original Star Wars trilogy and Willow. Anyway, you can check out the list of titles available (Here for Flash users) and (Here for non-Flash users.)

I can't wait for The Ewoks join the Fight, as that was another one of my favorite record books sets.