Retro Thing

Join The Bozo Army

I go back and forth wondering whether Bozo could return to television. Since Bozo's floppy feet didn't make tracks throughout the whole world, here are are few words about the concept. When TV was relatively new in the US, broadcasters looked for ways to entrance the kiddie set. Lot of times the station would just string together some old cartoons, but more ambitious shows employed a host; a sort of MC to speak directly to camera - or to an in-studio audience. It was really all down to the ability of that presenter (often an Uncle so-and-so or Captain this-and-such) to create something charming and popular, or somethineg amateurish and embarrassing.

Larry Harmon had performed as "Bozo the Clown" for a while when the idea struck him. He could franchise the Bozo concept - he'd help create a framework for a daily TV show starring "Bozo - the world's most famous clown". Harmon would train the clowns, provide the costume, even create a series of cartoons featuring the adventures of Bozo. Any TV channel could have their own home-spun Bozo, and of course every city knew that their Bozo was the best.

Here in Chicago, we were lucky enough to have Bozo on the air from the 60s until around the turn of the century. We were also lucky to have our Bozo genuinely be considered one of the best and most famous (Krusty the Clown's three-pack-a-day rasp is a direct lift from Chicago's Bozo). For as long as there's been standard def color TV, there's been Bozo on Chicago's airwaves.
Bozo lives on in some small merchandising effort, interest diminished since the show doesn't air anywhere anymore. In the 60s and 70s, there was of course far more stuff. One of my favorites is this cloth patch. No need to send in box tops and wait weeks - you could just buy your way into Bozo's good graces for 49 cents. Not only did you get an emblem patch (certified washable by the ominously named "American Institute of Laundering"), but you also got a tear-off membership card at the bottom.

Paying your four bits made you a Bozo Booster, as long as you promised to follow the rules on the back of the membership card. What's more important than eating all your veggies and obeying your parents? Rule #1 of course - your solemn oath to "watch the Bozo TV program faithfully". Goodness knows if the show were still on, I would.

The Original Star Trek, Continued

Forty-four years after the original Star Trek series was cancelled, the USS Enterprise and her crew return to the screen in a kaleidoscope of faux-Technicolor, dodgy gel lighting and vintage musical cues. 

Of course, times have changed since the late-1960s heyday of studio television. This time around, Star Trek Continues has been launched as a Kickstarter pledge drive. Their goal? To boldy continue their rudely interrupted 5-year mission as a non-profit fan-driven web series (with the full blessing of CBS).

The cast includes voice actor Vic Mignogna as Kirk, Grant Imahara of Mythbusters as Lt. Sulu, along with Chris Doohan, son of the original Mr. Scott. 

Following the successful completion of their first episode, the team hopes to raise $100,000 to fund the production of three more episodes that follow the crew on the final two years of their mission. They're about half-way through the funding period and need another $44,000 to make the series a reality. 

To find out more, visit Star Trek Continues on Kickstarter.

RoboCop Reboot - Can The Bubble Bath Be Far Behind?

I haven't been paying much attention to the many needless remakes of classic films over the last few years. I did give a couple reboots a chance (Star Trek 2009; fun. Star Trek 2013; out of ideas already?), but for the most part the originals are just that... original. You can make the argument that the reboots create a new audience for movies that could use more attention. Ehhhh, maybe. I don't think that film producers enter any of these projects with the desire to honor the past. They want to make a buck now, and it's way easier when you're trading on an idea that was already a proven success.

A movie who's central theme has stubbornly eluded the makers of sequels and upgrades is 1987's RoboCop. I love that movie, and I'm not alone. Fans recently raised over $60,000 on Kickstarter to erect a 10 foot statue of the cyborg in RoboCop's fictional home town of Detroit. I'm still proud of having sneaked myself and a date into the film when we weren't yet quite old enough to see it. The sequel from a few years later was okay, but by RoboCop 3 the concept had been watered down to what felt like Saturday kiddie matinee filler. Robo's third outing was saddled with a PG-13 rating, likely in deference to the youthful audience who had watched the RoboCop cartoons that had run on TV for a number of years. Yes, a cartoon based on an R rated film that no kid should have seen.

In 1994, a live action RoboCop hit first-run syndicated TV. The series actually did come close in later episodes to understanding what made the original film so great. When you strip away the violence and the tech, at its heart RoboCop is a black comedy, a satire on the excesses of the 80s, and a world where high-priced executives are no better than the street thugs they're determined to wipe out.

RoboCop3, the various cartoons, and the TV series meant more tie-in merch on shelves than ever. I can understand an action figure line, model kits, video games, comics. Those all make a kind of sense. But bubbles and bubble bath? An allegorical fantasy about the triumph of human spirit against encroaching technology in a world that had lost its soul... immortalized by bubbles.

The bubble bath is just that. Pry off Robo's head and wash behind your ears. "RoboCop The Series Bubble Buddies" includes scented bubbles (long since evaporated), a bubble wand built into the cap of the bottle, and a "removable pocket pal". That's right. You can pull Robo off (complete with his flamethrower arm) the top of the bottle and stuff it in your pocket. Fun. He's your pal.

There's certain to be another flurry of merchandise around the new RoboCop film set for release in 2014 (A February release too - never a good sign). The trailer doesn't exactly inspire confidence (several shots owe a great debt to Iron Man). I'm certain that we'll have a lot more to say as the release comes closer, and we'll see more and more crazy merchandise hit store shelves. Will the new film inspire gear as low as the original film's bubble bath? Bubble bath?!?!?!

Learn Cut-Out Animation With Terry Gilliam

Before the Monty Python boys created their landmark show that changed comedy forever, they worked on other shows. We've written about "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and "At Last, the 1948 Show" before (what remains of both series is available on DVD). The guys all got together and agreed that they wanted to do something very different with comedy. They had tired of the conventional structure of setup-punchline, setup-punchline. They liked the idea of creating a premise without having to wrap it up in a neat bow every time.

"Do Not Adjust Your Set" showcased Gilliam's trademark cut-out animation. Partially this was a method to save on time and budget, but mostly it was a quirky style Gilliam made his own. Traditional animation is more or less set in stone long before the animator snaps the movie camera's shutter on the first frame, but with cut-out animation you have room to improvise your "performance" while clicking away. You're not simply recording sequential drawings as in conventional animation. You toddle little paper figures around before the lens, inviting you to make impromptu tweaks. The process is almost musical that way.

The Pythons credit Gilliam's unhinged animations with inspiring the freewheeling creativity at the core of the Monty Python show, and also with providing them with a method of segueing between sketches. Again, the animation is a mix of the artistic and the totally practical. Maybe it's this pragmatic yet freewheeling approach that continues to inspire animators today. What is South Park, and practically every Flash animation you've seen, if not an outcropping of Gilliam's work from (gulp) 40 years ago?

This video clip features Gilliam on Bob Godfrey's "Do It Yourself Film Animation Show" in 1974. Gilliam talk you through the steps he takes to created his demented animations, but notes that it's all about the story. My favorite quote:

“The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn’t really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.”

You know who gets this idea? Young animators and filmmakers on YouTube. While I rue the absence of classic cartoons on broadcast TV, YouTube offers such an amazing and inspiring collection of animation styles. You used to have to wait until an animation festival his the local artsy movie house to get a load of so many new visual ideas. Yes, there's sure a LOT of junk out there, but creative visual artists do get that it doesn't matter whether you create your project with a camera phone, Flash, or a 16mm Bolex, your piece is going to stand or fall on its story.

We've seen Gilliam give voice to his warped imagination through animation, acting, filmmaking (I decided to go to film school after seeing his film "Brazil"). It matters less how he says it, it just matters that he has something to say.

A side note: sadly I can't imagine a presentation as simple as this video clip on broadcast TV today. The "lesson" would be so dumbed down as to be useless, the segment would be 3 minutes at the most, and the "personality-driven" hosts would keep interrupting. When will today's TV producers realize that frenzied panic is not the best way to tell every story?

Early Japanese Animation: Tobor The 8th Man

TV kiddie animation today is dominated by cartoons made in Japan, as well as shows inspired by the look of Japanese anime. TV animation has always faced tight budgets and even tighter deadlines, so the efficient anime style is a good fit for rapid affordable production. Osamu Tezuka created Astro Boy for the printed page, and then set out to find a way to bring his creations to life in cartoons. Disney cartoons were a huge influence on him, but Tezuka knew that he had to reduce the normally high cost of animation to make his projects financially feasible in 1960s Japan.

Tezuka simplified the Disney house (mouse?) style, and reduced the number of drawings per second of screen time. At first this was an expediency to keep budgets down, and to be able to deliver cartoons with an inexperienced staff. What started out as a budgeting and scheduling shortcut evolved over into a style and aesthetic all its own.

For most english-speaking audiences, their first contact with anime was with black and white series in the 60s. Astro Boy was first in 1964, and the show was a massive success. TV syndicator Fred Ladd bought up a number of other Japanese series to make up the second wave of anime with series like Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion, and Tobor the 8th Man. These early series were somewhat less stylized than the anime that came later.  At the time, these series were simply cheap imports to sell to local TV stations after a quick dubbing session.

8 Man started out in Japan as a comic (manga) before hitting the small screen with 56 episodes. In the US dub, the character was renamed "Tobor" ("robot" spelled backwards, donchaknow...). Other characters received similar kooky identities - Police Chief Fumblethumbs, Professor Genius... Also unusual is that the dubbed-in dialogue is a little irreverent at times, as if the voice artists had quickly become bored with the job. There are a few weird moments when characters come across on-screen text written in the original Japanese. I remember one episode in a museum, where characters complained that it would be a lot easier to find their way around "if all the signs weren't in 'Oriental'". Hmmm.

The premise of Tobor is a bit grim. Tobor is a detective run down in after an alley fight. Professor Genius picks up the dying detective, and conducts his 8th attempt to transfer the consciousness of a person into a robot body. The procedure works, and the super-powered Tobor goes back to work. His plastic skin can transform into any face, and when trouble strikes Tobor is able to convert to robot form. When he needs a little power boost, he has his "energy cigarettes". Ahem.

8th Man isn't as well remembered as some of those early shows, though fans still argue of Tobor's significance. I suppose there's some chance that Robocop was influenced by the show's premise. If you want to relive the thrills of Tobor, the series in is in the public domain so you can find episodes on YouTube. If you're a connoisseur, there's a DVD collection that's been "restored" from 16mm film prints, with audio remixed for Dolby (from the examples I've watched online, it seems that there are new sparkling sound effects layered over the old mono lo-fi recordings).

With fewer and fewer smokers these days, I wonder how long it'll be before Big Tobacco rolls out "Tobor Energy Cigarettes".

Help out Retro Thing when you pick up the restored 8th man on DVD from Amazon

8 Inch Mego Action Figures Still Stand Tall

Throughout most of the 1970s, Mego was THE name in action figures. Mego had mostly been known for toys that cost under a dollar, but they saw an opportunity in 1971. 12" GI Joe's flag was flying at half mast due to negative sentiment over the Vietnam war, while Barbie wasn't exactly scoring points for Women's Lib. Mego created a slightly smaller 8" figure with good articulation and poseability, and the line was a massive hit for nearly 10 years.

Key to being able to offer such a varied lineup of figures is they all shared the same body, only the vinyl heads and costumes were different. They also reused a lot of outfits and accessories between lines to save on costs. The reduced size of the figure brought overall material costs down, and by aligning themselves with established pop-culture properties a lot of their marketing was already done for them. Mego's 8" figure became the standard size action figure for most of the 70s.

Mego's first score was with an original character; Action Jackson. He was a generic hero type with cheaply made accessories and vehicles. Unusually, he was available in three different styles: caucasian (fuzzy bearded and clean-shaven) and African-American. This one line offered kids an adventurer, dangerous occupation aspirational playsets, and a sort of low-rent Evil Kenevil.

Greater success came later with Mego's many TV and movie licenses. Mego was right there at the birth of extensive media tie-in merchandising (that title may have to go to the massive Six Million Dollar Man toy line), though they sure made some strange choices. They are probably best remembered for their line of comic book superhero figures, but they also licensed properties like "Our Gang" and "The Waltons" (imagine the excitement of finding a John Boy figure under the tree on Christmas morning...)
The comic book offerings were unusual in that Mego was able to license both DC and Marvel characters together. The also marketed the toy in other countries. South Africa got a figure to accompany the adventures of radio hero Jet Jungle (a figure so rare, the few known examples trade hands for thousands of dollars). The UK got most of the hero line though Palitoy, and Denys Fischer brought us the unconventional TV heroics of Tom Baker's Doctor Who.

Another sci-fi saga was a huge hit for Mego; "Star Trek". When the figures came out in 1974, the show had already been off the air for a number of years. Mego got the license to the dead series for a song. You can see why a line like Trek would be interesting to a thrifty company like Mego. The uniforms are all the same, the accessories are the same. Mego's timing was perfect. Trek's unexpected success in reruns and the roll out of a new animated series made Mego's Trek offerings popular. Back then, that early breed of Trekkers were ready to snap up anything with the "Star Trek" name on it. "Planet of the Apes" was another hit line, especially after the movies were re-run on television and the Apes returned a weekly TV series.
In 1974 and 75, Mego's 8" figures were on the list of top 10 best selling toys in the US. Some estimates put their production at 12 million figures per year. With so many hot TV & movie licenses, and such a simple development cycle to creating new characters, what went wrong?

In 1976 Mego was invested in bringing Takara's Micromen line (called Micronauts in the US) to these shores. They were offered the license to a sci-fi movie that was slated to come out the next year called "Star Wars". Mego's David Abrams was reluctant to license every "flash in the pan" B-movie. Instead Kenner got the license, and enjoyed unprecedented sales on movie tie-in toys. Mego tried to play catch up afterwards, licensing "Moonraker", "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", "The Black Hole", "Buck Rogers", but none of these properties could keep up with the unending demand for Star Wars and Mego shut their doors in 1982.

Since then there have been modern-day reissues, and there is continued interest in collecting the old 8" guard. An unexpected market is in low-budget and hobbyist stop motion animators (prominently the guys making "Robot Chicken") use the cheap articulated bodies to create cartoons. There's also a collecting magazine called ToyFare that uses the posed figures for oddball photo comics about collecting action figures. It's a bit too meta for me... Fortunately with so many years of Mego production, the 40 year old 8" figures can be a relatively cheap pop-culture collectible.

link:

online Mego Museum

007's Lotus Esprit Submarine Car On The Auction Block

Among James Bond's many gadgets, his fabulous cars are remembered with the most fondness. Fans still go back and forth whether the best is his classic Aston Martin DB5 or the Lotus Esprit from 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. The Esprit's radical look was one of the first angular "folded paper" designs from Giorgetto Giugiaro (who would go on to design the DeLorean DMC-12). In James Bond's world, Q Branch added a few options to the car not yet available from most Lotus dealers. 007's car transforms into a cozy two person submarine that fires sea-to-air missiles. Natch.

The prop submarine car is going on the auction block this September. To create the effect of the car converting into a mini sub, the film's producers used several full sized props (not miniatures!) at various stages of the transformation. The vehicle on auction is the fully functional mini submarine nicknamed "Wet Nellie" that was used in all of the underwater scenes showing the vehicle in operation. Surprisingly the vehicle was found a few years ago as part of a blind auction to buy the contents of a New York storage locker. Imagine the new owner's surprise when they pulled back the tarp and found out they'd bought an important part of Bond movie history.

It's difficult to predict what a famous prop car might go for on the auction block. Bond's Aston Martin DB5 used in Goldfinger and Thunderball got 4.3 million dollars at auction just a few years ago. The Lotus isn't quite the icon of the film series that the DB5 is, but I still think they'll do okay auctioning the world's most famous functional submarine car. After all, this submersible Lotus was expensive to start with. Perry Oceanographic in Florida made the Lotus seaworthy at a cost if $100,000 - about a half million in today's money.

So if you're a well-heeled Bond fan, you can find out first hand which is the best Bond car - though moisture may be a problem. This submersible prop isn't in fact watertight, nor does it feature much of an interior. The driver was a retired US Navy SEAL named Don Griffin who had to have full scuba gear on while operating the vehicle. Yes, you'll be cruising the coolest (non) wheels in the ocean, but it's not going back up on land like in the movie. Don't expect to make any points with the bikini ladies when you roll up on the beach and hand a kid a fish.

There is a funny bit of an emotional hiccup in the movie. Right as the car is about to plunge into the water, Roger Moore douchequips "Can you swim?" as the lovely Russian agent played by Barbara Bach panics. Underwater the spy-ette continues to worry, until a few scenes later she is completely laid back and admits to having stolen the plans for the sub two years before. Clearly being a sexy cold-war era Russian secret agent is a real emotional roller coaster.

Move Over Superman, It's Superpup!

Retro Thing's SuperWeek comes to a close with possibly the oddest tie-in to Superman we've found. As if the live-action of adventures of Superman weren't intriguing enough to children, the producers of the 50s TV show wanted to target an even younger audience. They shot a pilot for "The New Adventures Of Superpup", and boy... it is odd.

It was 1958. The star of TV's Superman was dead under mysterious circumstances. Show producers were left in a quandry. Reeves was so closely associated with the Superman character, that recasting the role didn't seem like an option. So producer Whitney Elsworth came up with "The New Adventures of Superpup". Shot on the same sets as the George Reeves series, "Superpup" reimagined all of the characters as dogs. Clark Kent became "Bark Bent" and Lois Lane became "Pamela Poodle" in an all-dog universe with no human beings.

Rather than cast trained dogs (that would have been silly!) Superpup stars a cast of little people with (frankly gorgeous) oversized dog masks making their way through a puppy-sized Superman-styled adventure. Aimed at the kiddos, there are a few weak attempts at jokes for the grown-ups watching. Oh, and there's a little puppet mouse who lives in Bark's desk that speaks right to the audience... of course...

Though Superpup may seem like a peculiar idea (because it is!), fans of anime and Japanese video games see this concept all the time. Otherwise serious characters may suddenly morph into exagerrated cartoony versions when showing strong emotions, when used in ads or doing cameos in kiddie cartoons. These versions are called "super deformed" or "chibi" versions. Today popular characters are often reimagined and reproportioned into all manner of things (witness the loathesome "bobblehead" craze) just to come up with more ways to sell the same idea, but back in 1958 I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this idea was still more than a litle perplexing.

The project never got past the pilot stage. It was too soon after Reeve's death, and the premise was just too peculiar for TV stations to be interested. The pilot was thought lost for decades, relegated to being dismissed as an improbable rumor. Then in the 1993, Chuck Harter wrote a book called "Superboy and Superpup: The Lost Videos" with stories from people who claimed to have seen the show. Shortly after that, the pilot film was quietly released onto the bootleg VHS circuit to prove that the show had really happened.

Today you can get the show as part of the massive 14 DVD "Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition", but we've got it right here for you (with a truly awesome generic announcer intro). Half of the episode is in color from a nice film print, the second half is in black and white from a poorer video copy.

link:

14 DVD Superman film collector's tin on Amazon

Superman - Heroic Animation That Still Astonishes Today

In the early 40s, Superman was a big hit in the comics and on the radio. Paramount held the rights to bring the Man of Steel to the silver screen, but they knew it would be expensive and difficult to depict Superman's amazing abilities in live action. They turned instead to Fleischer Studios, the animation studio run by brothers Max & Dave Fleischer and home of Betty Boop and Popeye. The Fleischers were slowing production of Betty Boop cartoons, thanks to the Hayes Code (an early form of movie content censorship) which demanded that the Fleischers cool down what they viewed as Boop's salacious antics. Superman could be another hit for their studio, a technical showcase for amazing new animation effects work, and of course the chance to work in dazzling full Technicolor.

The Fleischers feared that a Superman cartoon might be TOO significant a challenge to bring to life. It wasn't impossible, of course, but the difficulty also stemmed from having a studio staff much more accustomed to drawing funny bouncy animal characters. Hoping to spook Paramount, the Fleischers budgeted the first Superman cartoon at an unheard of $100,000 - many times greater thant the cost of any theatrical short. Surprisingly Paramount didn't flinch. They so wanted to cash in on the Superman craze that they negotiated the Fleischers down to $50,000 for the pilot film, and $30,000 per monthly episode (nearly $450,000 in today's money, and twice what it cost to make a Popeye cartoon).

Superman's Black-And-White Flights On The Silver Screen

Many mere mortals think that the 2013 Superman movie is the character's sixth outing on the silver screen, but the Krytptonian hero has found his way onto the big (and small!) screen many times over the last 75 years.

1948 marks the first live-action movie appearance of Superman. This was in a 15 part black and white serialized adventure simply called "Superman". Serials were played at movie matinées, with each installment ending in a cliffhanger to goad audiences back the following week to see the resolution. Serials were churned out as cheapies to fill out the bill with feature films, and even a big name character like Superman was no exception. The character's flight was depicted through cost-effective cartoon animation.

One funny consequence of this hybrid animation approach is that it worked relatively well for depicting takeoffs, but not landings. The footage transitions between live-action Superman on the ground to animated Superman taking to the air fairly well. But landings were so difficult to animate that Superman lands behind cars and buildings an awful lot. Better yet, he seems to often overshoot where he's going, disappears out of camera range, just so he can run back into frame. Oh, and Superman flies past the same rocky hill in every installment.

Superman On The Radio Takes On Real-Life Klan

75 years ago, Superman started his humble pulpy life. Something about his story quickly outgrew the funny papers and he became an icon of "the American way" (to use his own words). Here in this anniversary year, there's yet another big-budget film that re-tells his origins. At this point, is there anyone left who doesn't know this modern fable? Escaping the fate of his doomed home planet Krypton, baby Superman ("Kal-El" to his friends) gained super-human strength when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Everyone knows THAT story.

Superman isn't just a hero to comic book shop owners and movie studio impresarios. Superman is a 75 year old media giant that has made enough green to make Kryptonite jealous. There are still plenty of untold tales of how the Man Of Steel conquered the world outside of comic books. All this week, Retro Thing will unearth a few of Supe's lesser known media adventures - no X-ray vision required.

After Superman was a hit in comic books in 1938, the next move was to the funny papers where Superman's creators fleshed out the character's otherwordly origins. In 1940, Superman hit the airwaves in a daily 15 minute serialized show called The Adventures Of Superman. The radio show cemented even more elements of the Superman mythos; the hero's weakness to Kryptonite, and his co-workers Perry White and Jimmy Olsen. The show ran in various forms (mostly with the same cast) for more than 10 years and over 2000 episodes. Bud Collyer (a name familiar to game show fans) was the voice of both Superman & Clark Kent, and the narrator was Jackson Beck who later provided the voice of Bluto in the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons.

I happen to love "old time radio", though contemporary audiences will often criticize the pace of the shows - especially serialized adventure show for children. Those radio shows have an aesthetic of their own, and yes... we may have to slow down our internal clocks a little, but these adventures are enjoyable in their own right (especially on long car drives or cleaning the garage). You can find lots of episodes online, including the origin story. What will surprise you is that even in those early episodes, Superman comes off (and I usually don't talk this way on RT) as an exasperated dick. That alone might be worth the price of admission.

Turning away from Superman's fictional powers, the radio show flexed some genuine muscle when it took on a serious issue in the real world; racism. Stetson Kennedy was a noted human rights activist who infiltrated the KKK and other terrorist hate groups. Kennedy feared that the Klan might have people in positions of influence to act against him when he went public with his findings, so he attacked the group another way. He approached producers of the Superman radio show, and proposed a storyline where Superman battles against the Klan. Since the radio show was in constant search of new enemies (radio Superman often battled rather prosaic bad guys rather than later fantastical super villains), the producers agreed.

"The Clan Of The Fiery Cross" was a string of 16 episodes that took on the issue of racism head-on. For years, the story has been that Kennedy provided details of the real-world Klan's rituals and codewords, which found their way into the radio show. In reality there are no such secrets spilled, but that doesn't blunt the impact of this important story.

The hope was that by trivializing and demystifying Klan goings-on, there would be some impact on the hate group's recruitment and membership. Klan leaders reportedly denounced the show and called for a boycott of sponsor Kellogg's "Pep" cereal. As it turned out, the story returned spectacular ratings, and Kellogg's stood behind the producers of the show.

We've linked to MP3s of "The Clan Of The Feiry Cross" so that you can also enjoy this unique moment in radio history. Certainly there are those hokey plot contrivances that come with the territory in any serialized show that needs a cliffhanger ending every 15 minutes, but in this case there's much more than that at play. Superman ultimately saves the day, but the show gives its intended young listeners the tools to understand what's wrong with racial stereotypes and fear-mongering. It's amazing to hear how this decades-old radio show battles an important issue that still plagues us; a battle that still can make heroes out of regular people every day.

link:

Download all 16 chapters of "The Clan of the Feiry Cross"
More fun MP3s of Superman

Tiny 1979 Article About "The Empire Strikes Back"

One great thing about looking through old magazines is reading about something we now know to be a big deal, before anyone knew it was going to be a big deal. I was thumbing through the spring 1979 issue of Cinefantastique - one of the most consistently outstanding sci fi film and tv magazines until it ceased publication in 2006. I bought the issue because of the lengthy cover story about Forbidden Planet (a film that I occasionally become obsessed with to this day).

The Forbidden Planet article was fascinating, but also fascinating were the tiny little blind items sprinkled through the magazine about upcoming genre films. In one of the margins was this modest little tidbit...

The Empire Strikes Back in 1980

Shooting title of the Star Wars sequel is "The Empire Strikes Back" which began filming on March 5 in Finse, Norway, on locations which will double as for an ice-covered planet. Directing is Irvin Kershner from a script by Larry Kasdan and the late Leigh Brackett. The recent casting a black actor Billy Dee Williams is a revealing move, executive producer George Lucas' token gesture to those who objected to Star Wars' lily-white universe.

Makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, assisted by his wife and son, is creating a mechanically-operated puppet, described as a 3 1/2 foot tall alien who looks like a "wizened old man, human-like, very ancient and wrinkled. Motivated via a series of offstage wires, this creature is important in teaching Luke Skywalker about the mysteries of "The Force".

A miniature land vehicle to be used with animated people inside it is part of the stop motion effects to be supplied by John Berg and Phil Tippett. The film will be released by 20th Century Fox in 1980.

Not exactly breathless with excitement, are they? This may seem a timid description of the sequel to "Star Wars", but audiences really didn't know what to expect. This issue is from 1979, only 2 years after the release of "Star Wars". After the success of the first film, Lucas opened up a bit about Star Wars being just one chapter in a "saga"... but in the movie biz that's just called a "sequel", and sequels didn't traditionally perform as well as the original. For this reason, even after the dramatic worldwide success of Star Wars, Lucas had difficulty raising the money he wanted for Empire. Few wanted to bank on a sequel to what they saw as a fluke hit (releasing blockbuster films in the summer wasn't even popularized yet), especially when the sequel was going to be so expensive.

We all know what happened. "Empire" turned out to be the best film in the series (remember how innocent we all were when we thought that "Return of the Jedi" was the suckiest Star Wars movie?), and Lucas could go on to make any movie he wanted. Like "Howard The Duck", but that's another story.

Confirmation of Star Wars' staying power was still a year away from that issue of Cinefantastique. Before modern-day spoiler alerts, internet script leaks, and trailers that ruin any sense of surprise or suspense, back then we had to rely on genre magazines to report on even the tiniest morsels of info about these films that would go on to change the movie business forever.

Classic Buck Rogers Rocket Sculptures

In the early days of Retro Thing, we wrote about Cool Rockets, model maker Jeff Brewer's series of superlative rocket powered sculptures. Originally inspired by the 50s, Jeff has gone back further in the past to bring us farther into the future. His newest models are from the world of Buck Rogers, that wild 1920s comic strip that helped give birth to science fiction.

I got to see the Buck Rogers battle cruiser and the Asterite craft recently, and they continue the tradition of high quality coming from Brewer's spacedock. Hand-finished and poised for liftoff, each ship is fueled up and ready to go on those post-depression adventures of the funny pages. While his prior Cool Rockets were imbued with a spark of attitude (several of the designs looked ready to flex and spring into action), the Buck Rogers ships play it straight, serving as a tribute to those designs that launched so many imaginations so long ago.These Buck Rogers rocket sculptures are limited to a thousand pieces, so they won't be in our orbit for long. You can click below to find one on Amazon, and you'll be helping out Retro Thing along the way.

Add Buck Rogers' Battle Cruiser to your fleet

¡Ay, caramba! El "Great Video Game Crash" En Español

You can point your joystick a whole lot of directions to try to target the exact cause of the Great Video Game Crash of the early 80s. Home computers were on the horizon, reaching a level of sophistication that 70s era game console hardware couldn't touch. There were a couple of high profile failures at Atari in the form of that poor anemic Pac-Man, and the much maligned E.T.. Then there was the avalanche of atari 2600 shovelware littering shelves.

The Atari 2600 didn't have any sort of built-in security, so anyone could figure out the workings of the system and develop a game for it. [Nintendo was able to reboot video gaming a few years later by building a lock-out chip into their NES system so only licensed games bearing the "seal of quality" would run.] The tremendous profits that Atari was raking in attracted developers who were less invested in creating cool games, than they were in cashing in on the fad.

Genuine games from Atari cost $30-40 back then, but this new breed of budget releases were hitting shelves at $10-20 driving the overall market down. Many of these poor games made the Atari 2600 look even longer in the 8 bit tooth, weakening confidence in the market.

Here's a TV commercial from the mid 80s that bundles together several third party games (with doubtful claims of the games' value) into a mega-bundle deal for $19.95. The Game Crash may have been over, but there was still a lot of crap game inventory to blow out. It's a long ad too - 90 seconds to offer UHF audiences everywhere (at least in Chicago) about this Five Pack of not-so-great games. Even at this price, it wasn't that great of a deal. My local Zayre was already selling these titles at 88 cents a piece at that time.

No cash grab is complete without reaching the largest audience possible, so here's another version of the ad (that's even 30 seconds LONGER!) en Español as it was broadcast in Chicago on Sunday June 9th, 1985.

Television's Future - A Prediction From 1981

"The decade that just ended, may mark the finale of television as we have known it, an industry dominated by three corporate mastodons, geared to the mass market. Crowding the horizon are new creatures - videocassettes, videodiscs, pay television, satellites, a growing public-television system, ad hoc networks, superstations."

"The television of today will probably be transformed into the home video center of tomorrow which will harness the new technologies into one all-purpose unit. Even Ma Bell is steadily creeping forward to grab a piece of the telecommunication action."

"For the first time since television entered our homes, the territory monopolized by the three networks is in danger of shrinking. The question now is whether the interlopers, if successful, will transform the wasteland into a forest of genuinely diverse vegetation or litter it with more of today's trash."

- From the introduction to "Up The Tube", Sally Bedell's 1981 book on the 70s TV landscape under TV network executive Fred Silverman.

Except for the references to videocassettes and video discs, this could almost be an assessment of TV today. Sure there are some shining spots, but network tv is slowly fading to black. I just started reading this book telling the story of Fred Silverman's amazing career which winds its way through network TVs most powerful days. As with so many historical accounts, I find myself scratching my head at how many similarities there are to today.

It's also interesting to see Bedell's prescient view of TV's future, though some parts of her prediction took until recent years to take root. The very idea that a telecommunications company would be involved with broadcast content must have seemed outlandish in 1981. The past few years have seen a number of old media/new media conglomerations like AOL-Time-Warner, and MSNBC. Apple's content deals pave their long-rumored path to the living room... and even stodgy old Intel has their sights set on television. Not content to merely power other people's products, Intel wants to provide content just like a broadcast network. Rumors are that they are engineering a product that operates less like a computer or DVR and more like... you guessed it... television.

The national and international views made possible by television back in the 50s is still one of the best tricks ever in retro gadget-dom. It's just unfortunate that executive bravado, lowest common denominator programming, and just plain ignorance of what the audience wants is pushing network TV further and further on the back burner, displaced by technology companies.  It seems like when broadcast TV strikes paydirt, it's in spite of what network execs do, not because of what they do.

Broadcast TV's stubborn evolution/diminishing relevance is edging closer and closer to Bedell's prediction from 30 years ago. So for about half of TV's existence, this prediction has been on the table, and now that it's here, TV executives are caught as if by surprise? What I'd like to know is just how much longer the old guard can hold out...