Friday, April 13, 2007

You Can't Be Too Super!

Back in December my new bosses were very wise and gave me a silly Christmas present, one of those 30-inches-tall Superman figures.



In an earlier post about that time I mentioned how Jazra had gone ga-ga over it.




Well, here's proof!


And no comments about how it took until April to get Christmastime photos developed. I know, I know!
Aww, ain't that cute?
In 10 years we hope she is as picky on her boyfriends!

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

...And First in the Minds of Their Federation!

As a junior in high school, I was given a dream job for one school period. My credits were all caught up, so I became a "teacher's aid." And I aided Dear Mrs. Craighead in an interesting way.

Somehow she had come across hundreds of Life magazines from the 1940s through the 1960s. My job was simply to riffle through them and extract "interesting" stories. Stuff that was oddball, or perhaps of historic significance, and so forth.


Boy, I got a great look at mid-20c American living -- the Dionne Quints, the Missile Crisis, Eisenhower's election, and so on.


There were also some Times and Newsweeks in there. This fullpage ad for RCA TVs came from one of those, presumably from fall/winter 1966, when NBC still acted as if it cared whether Star Trek thrived or died.


You probably recognize the larger images in the background as being from "Man Trap," the first aired Star Trek episode.


This was only one ad in a series, all with the same tagline..."When you're first in color television, there's got to be a reason." Other TV shows were featured, alongside other models of RCA TVs. Remember, this was the time when a television set was a honking big piece of furniture, not something you could hang on a wall.


A few years ago I paid Kinko's ten buck to put it on a T-shirt. Cool, huh?

Monday, April 09, 2007

You Are the Master of Superman's Fate!


While moving a Honking Big Bookshelf at home in the study (aka The Fortress of Markitude), I found two books had fallen down behind.


They'd been there at least three years. That's why this one is a little dingy around the edges.


It's from 1983. On the front cover are three Phantom Zone baddies, Faora (the gal), General Zod (in the military cap) and a third guy -- maybe Kru-El? To the right are Toyman, Luthor, and behind them a big buy who, according to page 4 of the book, is "a nine-foot yellow monster."
Depending on which page you pick next, this here monster could either split into myriads of identical monsters, dooming the Earth, or ... he could apologize and leave quietly.
Wow, what fun! And we haven't even read the stories that involve the Phantom Zoners, Toyman, or Luthor!
I can only reflect on how hard it would be to WRITE such a gol-darned thing! But the knack must be handy ... Helfer also wrote at least one other of these things, featuring Supergirl -- the Supergirl of the Daring New Adventures era, complete with headband.
Ah, those were the days!
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© by Mark Alfred