What's In That Soup?

STARLOG #21 - April 1979 - Romero's Dead

Farewell to the Creature and Universal Monsters Coloring Book

Here's the final page and rear cover from the 1991 Universal Monsters Coloring Book.

This guy is just BEGGING for a little tickle-belly when he leaves his midsection exposed like that.!

 

And we take your leave from monsters who are carefully drawn NOT to look like the actors who originally played them.  That is, the actors whose estates would have gotten some royalties if the original actors' faces were hinted at ....

See you tomorrow, kiddies!

  

The Munsters' Home Life: An Allegory

I understand that, in keeping with the producers' with that The Munsters be an educational show, the following page in the coloring book was originally to be an explanation of why Lily Munster was sewing a spider-shape in her needlepoint project.  It was to show the Munster family watching a TV show explaining the myth of Arachne, who was such a good seamstress that (according to Ovid) she got snooty and Athena turned her into a spider.

The context for this image of Grandpa ascending from his basement lab was to be explained as a political allegory for society's treatment of its elderly.

Of course, the depiction of Eddie Munster dropping a coin into a bank made from a presumably human skull was to provide a commentary on the prevalence of gambling in society.  It's pretty pathetic that in Oklahoma (for example) public education in general is considered underfunded.  Yet a so-called "Oklahoma Education Lottery" raises millions of dollars -- very little of which, proportionately, goes to any educational use.

Eddie is showing where public money SHOULD be spent -- directly on the mind -- instead of investing in the fallacy that tricking the ill-informed into gambling will provide revenue for a public service.

It's all right there in the subtext!

 

Color Lily

Print-n-color your own Mrs Munster.

"The Thing" I Wrote: “Somebody Meets UFO” Revisited

(I “pushed” the contrast/brightness quite a bit to show the horizon line and the yellow aura around the UFO.)

Here’s a revision of “The thing I Saw.”

Whereas the first version was told as a third-person narrative, this is an experiment in story-through-dialogue.

We have more attempts at names -- Jack Millcreace.  ??What??

However, our protagonists are no longer police, but a “Professor” whose assistant gets a phone call of a UFO sighting. Professor Millcreace swings by the Police Station to pick up Captain Scranton before heading over to investigate.

Added is a genre-savvy bit of business about the car’s motor dying in the presence of a saucer.  And little blue men comin’ out of it!

Note the creative choice to use the red part of the typewriter ribbon to show the aliens’ telepathic communications.  Instead of future inhabitants of Venus, this narrative brings aliens with a warning that Earth is about to be exploded by “a planet which you call Pluto!  Its inhabitants are greedy conquerors, eager to destroy all intelligent life on all planets and take them over to add to their Plutonious Empire!”

Don’t you think it kind of counterproductive to add to your empire by killing everybody?  I mean, what’s the fun of being the King if there’s no one around to notice?

 As with the original version, the doomsday weapon is an S-Bomb (standing for silicon).  This word might have been floating around in the cultural air as a swipe from the silicon-based form of life in Star Trek’s “Devil in the Dark” episode.

So, we have these aliens sent to convey a few lucky folks away in a Noah’s Ark concept, just before doom hits.

Then a real brain-bender:  The aliens are from a little planet called “Earth” -- cue weird Theremin music, followed by “The End” and seventeen question marks.

I can only quote my seventh-grade English teacher’s comment on this same device’s use in a different story:  “Avoid.”

Left unexplained (because not noticed by the author at the time) is how the alien ship is from Earth, when the story itself is set in “New Hampshire” (first line on first page)!  Another oops!

Note the authorial note for the ages.  Many years from now, literary scholars will want to know which version of this story came first.  Now they won’t have to guess!

Well, I appreciate your patience, kind reader, as we shared another Hallowe’en horror.  Only YOU can decide of the “horror” lies in the story’s tale of cosmic doom … or in its mere existence.

See you tomorrow with another Munsters image you can print and color!

    

Dracula & Frankenstein in YOUR Mailbox!

More of the USPS's postcards from the Universal Monsters Stamps.

NAME TRIVIA #1:  Explain the significance of our favorite Dracula's "last" name.

NAME TRIVIA #2:  Give Boris Karloff's birth name.



GIVE UP?  Every Monster Fan should have known!

Question #1:   Lovely Bela hailed from the town of Lugos, in Hungary.  His birth name was Bela Blasko (minus a couple of middle names).

Question #2:  "Starring William Henry Pratt" just doesn't have the same cachet as "Starring Boris Karloff," does it?

See you tomorrow with another piece of deathless prose that should have died long ago!

 

After Lily's Beauty Appointment

STARLOG, March 1979 - Preview of ALIEN

From Starlog #20, March 1979, we have this preview:

No indication if an industry-changing chestburster, or of the psyche-ruining oppressions of those lightly mentioned Giger designs.

Upon seeing this film at the movies, I was stirred and creeped out, and thrilled!

See you tomorrow.
 

The Creature from the Paper Book!

 

Here's a fine example of coloring technique by a twelve-year-old who is now twice that age.

Your inner twelve-year-old can color this one.

That Silly Lily Munster -- She's So Vain

 Note the beauty parlor's  name.  There ARE "Shady Lawn" cemeteries in such places as Georgia and Kentucky.  But I imagine the name is meant to evoke the idea.

 It's a nice touch that Lily reads "Fantastic Tales" while in the chair.

 

It's not certain exactly WHAT HAPPENS when Lily Munster goes to the Beauty Salon.  But as with all Munster interactions, the point is on watching the "normals" react to the Munsters' outre appearance.

See you tomorrow!

Color Herman Munster!

Another blanked-out coloring page from 1964.  Now you can color Herman Munster in his Halloween Costume!

This is from a coloring-book sequence that mirrors the first episode:  Herman and Lily become a hit at a local costume party.  When Herman removes his knight-in-armor helmet to show his real face, he's congratulated on the clever idea of "a second mask."

Wait 'til THEY find out THE TRUTH!
 

H27Fe3 -- A Tale of Authorial Overreaching

Here’s a bit of daring sci-fi horror composed around 1970, when I was thirteen.

The chemical formula, needless to say, was made up and I’m sure it is impossible.  Any chemists out there was to comment?

A dramatic idea, the idea of a “layered” gas that would give you a few feet of breathing room below its bottom edge.  Evidently the author has never considered the effect of a stiff breeze on this wonderful concept.  Oops!

The last line on the page is sooooo dramatic:  “as if breathing for everyone in the world.”  What a deep breath that would make!  What sheer poesy!

On our next page of this mercifully brief composition, you will wonder why the world government or “Security Council” decided to send a truck with an almost-empty gas tank on such a momentous mission.  Even if it’s a long trip and requires several refueling stops, you might next wonder where the heck is its military escort?

You may laugh at the next-to-last paragraph’s description of George Freeham’s choice of words.  He “swore obscenely.”  You know why?  Because the thirteen-year-old author had no practical experience with cuss words or bad language.  He didn’t hear it at school, didn’t hear it from his (few) friends. and definitely was not exposed to it at home.  Believe it or not, it’s true!

Left for the reader to imagine are the magic nursemaid robots who would care for these infants for a dozen or so years until they could provide for themselves!

Well, thank you for participating in this depiction of world destruction.

  

Monster Stamps Postcards

This first postcard is, as you can see, a repro of a sheet of the stamps.

Erik, that poor misunderstood romantic soul, gets pride of place (as chronologically he SHOULD), in our roll-call of Universal Monsters.

As you can read from the copyright cutline, these came out in 1997.

See you tomorrow, kiddies, for some more scary "creative" writing from junior high days past!

More Munster-ific Coloring Pages

I'm not sure, but I think we're about one-third of the way through ....

Good-bye until tomorrow!
 

Jekyll & Hyde - A Portfolio

From Starlog #18, December 1978:

Universal Monsters Coloring Book Stumbles On!

 Down the home stretch to finish this un-colored monstrosity, the last critter featured is the Gill Man.

Looks like Yogi Bear with a soggy pic-a-nic basket ....

See you tomorrow, kiddies!

The Flower Girl from Frankenstein

Scary Monsters Magazine is well intended but wastes a lot of reader's time on amateurish, uninteresting comics (Vampire mermaid?  please!)

But they have featured tons of fun articles on various spooky subjects, such as this one from its September 1997, twenty-fourth issue:

 

She knew the ol' Monster was just a big softie at heart!

See you tomorrow!