Saturday, October 04, 2014
Friday, October 03, 2014
No Halloween Without the Munsters
A couple of pages from the Whitman coloring book handled by several generations at the ol' Homestead.
Marilyn has finally gotten a date, but per established Munster tropes, he gets a load of her relatives and bolts.
See you tomorrow!
Labels:
Blog-o-Ween,
My Things,
Nostalgia,
Scary Fun
Thursday, October 02, 2014
MA-75 - Fraidy Cat Frolics
Here’s the Halloween compilation for 2014 …
01. Count Rupert the Roué Intro - G Ailard S Artain (1:18)
02. Abbott & Costello Meet
Frankenstein Open and End Titles - Frank Skinner (1:48)
03. Sinister Stomp - Bobby 'Boris' Pickett
(2:19)
04. Nose Goblins - Ren & Stimpy (4:20)
05. The Haunted House Boogie - Happy Wilson (2:30)
06. Skeletons in Your Closet - The 3-D Invisibles (2:37)
07. Halloween Shindig - Ed Twilley and the
Creepers (0:46)
08. The Funeral March - Theremin (2:34)
09. The Ghost and Mr Chicken Main
Title - Vic
Mizzy (2:08)
10. Halloween Evening - The Frighteners (2:52)
11. Monster in Black Tights - Screaming Lord Sutch (2:03)
12. Haunted Lover - Carole Bennett (2:15)
13. Burning of the Witch - Troyka (2:59)
14. Tales from the Crypt Main Title
- Danny
Elfman (2:27)
15. The Transylvania Polka - The Family Arts
Theatre (3:19)
16. The Skeleton Rag (1912) - The American Quartet
with Billy Murray (2:08)
17. Fright Song - Monster High (2:55)
18. Frankie Frankenstein - 'Ivan' (Jerry
Allison) (2:27)
19. Theme from The Bat - The Ventures (2:12)
20. I Hold Your Hand in Mine - Tom Lehrer (1:33)
21. Goolie Get-Together - Toadies (3:47)
22. Scream and Run Away - Gothic Archies (2:23)
23. Count Macabre - Connoissurs (2:19)
24. Werecow - Flippy T Fishead (5:04)
25. The Raven - The Yo-Yo's (2:27)
26. I Don't Stand A Chance With A
Ghost Like You - Sheldon
Allman (2:11)
27. In the Twilight Zone - The Astors (2:41)
28. Skeletons - Inflatable Boy Clams (3:02)
29. The Great Pumpkin - The Jack O Lanterns (2:31)
30. The Munsters Theme - Billy Strange (1:53)
31. Nightmare (Count Gregore Theme)
- David
Barnes (2:29)
We open this year’s compilation with an excerpt from Mazeppa
Pompazoidi’s Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting. You can learn more here.
The last selection is the theme music for Count Gregore,
horror host here in the OKC area for decades.
His Facebook page is here. An online article with more background is this
place. John is a sweet guy who’s
been making appearances annually at SoonerCon
and will return, we hope for many more years.
In the past year or so he also appeared as a Mad Scientist in the film Army of Frankensteins.
Over the next month we’ll share lots of other creepy, scary,
FUN stuff! Mostly, coloring books and
other kids’ hands-on stuff from the past.
See you here every day for … Blog-o-Ween!
Labels:
Blog-o-Ween,
Music,
My Things,
Scary Fun
Wednesday, October 01, 2014
Welcome to Blog-O-Ween!
We begin this year’s look at fun and creepy (and sometimes
silly) aspects of Halloween and childhood with a (purportedly) scary story by
my own twelve-year-old self, turned in as a seventh-grade English assignment to
the long-suffering Mrs Mueller.
As you can see by the intentionally distorted lettering,
this is supposed to be disturbing and scary.
The choice of title for this epic makes me feel that Roger Corman had
better watch his back.
The “1968” date is incorrect, this was 1969. I had turned twelve two months earlier. You can tell by the name of my “protagonist”
that I was heavily influenced by readings from the Golden Age of pulp sci-fi,
in which a strange name coupled with a number was shorthand for “citizen of the
future.” I’m talking about tales such as
Hugo Gernsback’s"Ralph
124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660."
Note the hi-tech (for 1969) concept of reading a book
(Shelley’s Frankenstein) on a “microfilm tape”!
The entire premise of a story’s “main character” as a
passive viewer of a set of vignettes portrayed on a time viewer, is obviously
based on the umpty-hundred stories featuring just this scenario in DC’s
Superman line. Often Superman (or Supes
with Batman) will use his Super-Ultivac to view the past, or what might have
happened if one thing had changed.
Here’s a fine explication
of this trope. Read the first comment,
by “Commander Benson,” for a list of stories involving time viewing. Since I didn’t have more than a few dozen
comics to hand, or the inclination to bust through them to steal somebody
else’s term, I called my time-viewer a “light-sound wave capturer.” Literal, not poetic.
The second paragraph above the row of asterisks is the
writer’s attempt to pound his reader on the head with the GOSH-WOW of it
all. “Thousands of years ago”! This must be astounding, right?
Well, maybe for a twelve-year-old.
At the bottom of the page, the tale of the monster’s killing
the family on the lake is a sad demonstration that I had bought into the
patriarchy’s image of brute-as-killer.
Shame on me!
As you can tell by the fact that this “page two” jumps
backwards to before the picnic
murders, obviously there was another typescript floating around somewhere. Be glad that it too is “lost in the darkness
and distance.”
I kind of like the top paragraph’s term “the false
man.” And I don’t make any attempt to
justify my story’s title “Frankenstein on the Loose” with my evident
understanding that my story is about not Frankenstein (the scientist), but his
monster.
I don’t know the state of portable photography around 1911
in England, but I don’t think somebody could pull off a candid pic as
described.
It is certainly probable that I had seen the 1966 Time
Tunnel TV show’s tale concerning the characters ending up on the Titanic. Still, it seems pretty creative for a
kid. Notice that I at least got the
correct point of origin for the cross-Atlantic jaunt.
The last line of the page is a perfect example of the amateur
writer’s tendency to tell, not show: “He
was shocked, understandably.” A better
writer (if stuck on this yarn) would probably describe Loxx as dropping his
sandwich forgotten to his lap, leaning forward towards the screen, bugging his
eyes out, and choking back a gasp. Or
something.
I got a few things correct, but of course the Titanic
didn’t sink in a ball of flames. Or have
a mast! Of course, many survivors DID
report one of the smokestacks ripping away and falling into the sea separately,
but I was unaware of this. I do kind of like the conceit that you can’t read
the name of the ship until a flaming piece of wreckage falls into the water,
its passage illuminating the ship’s moniker of doom.
It’s a cheesy and dramatic touch to inform the reader that
nobody else but our stalwart hero will ever find out the truth of the
Frankenstein monster and the Titanic. Darn ol’ one-way lightwaves!
This was the first version of my story. A revised version was turned in and graded,
below.
So, I had to hand-write corrections, as you can see.
This version of the GOSH-WOW explanation (now the first
paragraph following the first asterisks)
ups the rhetorical ante by adding! exclamation! points! because otherwise! you might not get! the drama of it! all (any
influence by the Shat was subliminal)!
I do like the wording towards the bottom “Came the
inevitable crash” -- that kind of verb-object inversion shows a *touch* of
craft, don’t you agree?
The attentive reader (hah!)
will note that we have a different epilog.
Evidently it was decided to replace the “never to be seen again”
original with a more ruminative, dare I say dramatic,
ending, as Loxx recalls the novel’s narration of the monster’s last words. And by golly, if you think about it, being
burned “alive” in the hold of a flaming, sinking ocean liner might qualify as a
“funeral fire,” too!
I can only imagine Mrs Mueller’s facial expressions and
thoughts as she fell off this avalanche of florid impulse, to land at the
bottom of “The
End (or is it?)”. Imagine her
restraint as she merely writes,
“avoid.” I must have watched the ending for 1958’s The
Blob recently!
I’ll say I had a good vocabulary! But I wish I had my own “light-sound wave
capturer” to see what other students’ assignments might have ranked higher than
my paltry score of 92%.
Regarding typing … this typewriter was my dad’s first
machine, given to me at Christmastime a few years earlier. I must confess that I wore that thing out -
literally - a few years later. What
happened was, I struck the keys so hard that the metal strikers chewed up the
rubber roller. After a while I had to
have three sheets in the machine at once to try and smooth out the words’
appearance.
Tomorrow … the 2014 Hallowe’en music compilation!
Labels:
Blog-o-Ween,
My Things,
Nostalgia,
Scary Fun
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copyright © by Mark Alfred
copyright © by Mark Alfred