Issuu

September 2022 No. 22 $10.95

I have the power!

HE-MAN & THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Zorro makes his mark on Saturday mornings!

zy These cra are a CARtoons ! real drag

TV’s Wild, Wild West • Sitcom legend Norman Lear • Valspeak (Like, totally!) & more! 1

82658 00485

Featuring ANDY MANGELS • WILL MURRAY • SCOTT SAAVEDRA • SCOTT SHAW! • MARK VOGER • MICHAEL EURY He-Man and Masters of the Universe © Mattel. Zorro © Zorro Productions, Inc. Drag Cartoons © The Pete Millar Family. All Rights Reserved.

RetroFan: The Pop Culture You Grew Up With! Remember when Saturday morning television was our domain, and ours alone? When tattoos came from bubble gum packs, Slurpees came in superhero cups, and TV heroes taught us to be nice to each other? If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, TwoMorrows’ new magazine is just for you! Editor MICHAEL EURY (author of numerous books on pop culture, former editor for DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics, and editor of TwoMorrows’ Eisner Award-winning BACK ISSUE magazine for comic book fans) has assembled an unbeatable roster of regular and rotating Celebrity Columnists to cover the pop culture you grew up with: • ANDY MANGELS (best-selling sci-fi author and award-winning pop culture historian) • ERNEST FARINO (Emmy Award-winning visual effects designer, animator, and director) • SCOTT SHAW! (acclaimed cartoonist, animator, Emmy Award-winning storyboard artist, and historian) • WILL MURRAY (pulp adventure novelist and pop culture historian) • SCOTT SAAVEDRA (graphic designer, cartoonist, and COMIC BOOK HEAVEN creator) • MARK VOGER (renowned pop culture newspaper columnist and book author), and others!

RETROFAN #25

RETROFAN #24

RETROFAN #23

RETROFAN #21

RETROFAN #20

Meet Mission: Impossible’s LYNDA DAY GEORGE in an exclusive interview! Celebrate Rambo’s 50th birthday with his creator, novelist DAVID MORRELL! Plus: TV faves WKRP IN CINCINNATI and SPACE: 1999, Fleisher’s and Filmation’s SUPERMAN cartoons, commercial jingles, JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE comic books, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Interviews with Lost in Space’s ANGELA CARTWRIGHT and BILL MUMY, and Land of the Lost’s WESLEY EURE! Revisit Leave It to Beaver with JERRY MATHERS, TONY DOW, and KEN OSMOND! Plus: UNDERDOG, Rankin-Bass’ stop-motion classic THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Christmas gifts you didn’t want, the CABBAGE PATCH KIDS fad, and more! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the stars behind the Black Lagoon: RICOU BROWNING, BEN CHAPMAN, JULIE ADAMS, and LORI NELSON! Plus SHADOW CHASERS, featuring show creator KENNETH JOHNSON. Also: THE BEATLES’ YELLOW SUBMARINE, FLASH GORDON cartoons, TV’s cult classic THE PRISONER and kid’s show ZOOM, COLORFORMS, M&Ms, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

MAD’s maddest artist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, is profiled! Plus: TV’s Route 66 and an interview with star GEORGE MAHARIS, MOE HOWARD’s final years, singer B. J. THOMAS in one of his final interviews, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Feb. 2023

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Dec. 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Oct. 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

RETROFAN #19

RETROFAN #18

RETROFAN #17

RETROFAN #16

RETROFAN #15

Interview with Bond Girl and Hammer Films actress CAROLINE MUNRO! Plus: WACKY PACKAGES, COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE, FILMATION’S GHOSTBUSTERS vs. the REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, Bandai’s rare PRO WRESTLER ERASERS, behind the scenes of Sixties movies, WATERGATE at Fifty, Go-Go Dancing, a visit to the Red Skelton Museum, and more fun, fab features!

Our BARBARA EDEN interview will keep you forever dreaming of Jeannie! Plus: The Invaders, the BILLIE JEAN KING/BOBBY RIGGS tennis battle of the sexes, HANNABARBERA’s Saturday morning super-heroes of the Sixties, THE MONSTER TIMES fanzine, and more fun, fab features! Featuring ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW!, and MICHAEL EURY.

Dark Shadows’ Angelique, LARA PARKER, sinks her fangs into an exclusive interview. Plus: Rankin-Bass’ Mad Monster Party, Aurora Monster model kits, a chat with Aurora painter JAMES BAMA, George of the Jungle, The Haunting, Jawsmania, Drak Pack, TV dads’ jobs, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MICHAEL EURY.

An exclusive interview with Logan’s Run star MICHAEL YORK, plus Logan’s Run novelist WILLIAM F. NOLAN and vehicle customizer DEAN JEFFRIES. Plus: the Marvel Super Heroes cartoons of 1966, H. R. Pufnstuf, Leave It to Beaver’s SUE “Miss Landers” RANDALL, WOLFMAN JACK, drive-in theaters, My Weekly Reader, DAVID MANDEL’s super collection of comic book art, and more!

Sixties teen idol RICKY NELSON remembered by his son MATTHEW NELSON, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., rural sitcom purge, EVEL KNIEVEL toys, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Saturday morning’s Super 7, The Muppet Show, behind-the-scenes photos of Sixties movies, an interview with The Sound of Music’s heartthrob-turnedbad guy DANIEL “Rolf” TRUHITTE, and more fun, fab features!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(Turn to the inside back cover for older back issues of RetroFan!)

The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With

55 Issue #22 September 2022

Columns and Special Features

Departments

Retrotorial

Voger’s Vault of Vintage Varieties Beach Movies

Too Much TV Quiz

Celebrity Crushes Sally Struthers

Retro Television The Wild, Wild West

RetroFad Valley Girls and Valspeak

Scott Saavedra’s Secret Sanctum Actor Michael Dunn

Super Collector Remembering Robb Versandi

Oddball World of Scott Shaw! CARtoons and Drag Cartoons

RetroFanmail

23 71

Retro Interview Norman Lear

ReJECTED by Scott Saavedra

Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning Zorro

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe RetroFan™, issue 22, September 2022. (ISSN 2576-7224 ) is published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to RetroFan, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: RetroFan, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $68 Economy US, $103 International, $29 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. He-Man and Masters of the Universe © Mattel. Zorro © Zorro Productions, Inc. Drag Cartoons © The Pete Millar Family. All Rights Reserved.All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2022 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury

BY MICHAEL EURY

PUBLISHER John Morrow CONTRIBUTORS Mark Ellis Michael Eury Paula Finn Michal Jacot Andy Mangels Will Murray Scott Saavedra Scott Shaw! Mark Voger DESIGNER Scott Saavedra PROOFREADER David Baldy SPECIAL THANKS Act III Productions Michal Beaumont Jonathan Goldberg Heritage Auctions Susan E. Kesler Dave Lemieux Errol McCarthy W. T. Vinson Zorro Productions, Inc. VERY SPECIAL THANKS Norman Lear William Stout IN MEMORY OF Robb Versandi

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions! C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

RETROFAN

My social conscience was shaped in the Seventies by two talented men. The first was Denny O’Neil, writer of the early Seventies DC Comics series Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which used superhero and science-fiction storytelling to address relevant social issues including gender equality, racism, and environmental degradation. And then there was Norman Lear, the creator of many of Seventies and Eighties television’s most pioneering sitcoms including (but certainly not limited to) All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons. Unlike O’Neil, he had no power rings or well-stocked quivers in his creative arsenal. Instead, Lear wielded comedy as his weapon as he and his writers dared to tackle the delicate and divisive social issues of the day in the 30-minute sitcom format. As the rightwing space-cop Green Lantern and the bleeding heart Green Arrow argued society’s ills through their biased perspectives in their DC comic book, so did the characters in Lear’s shows. None were more famous than the often intense verbal battles between the bigoted Archie Bunker and the free-spirited Mike Stivic. Lear’s comedies not only amused and enlightened us, they taught us that no matter how bitter the disagreement between characters, their bond of family or friendship reminded them that while they viewed the world differently, they shared space in it—a lesson unfortunately lost upon our polarized society today. We are honored to have Mr. Lear’s presence in our magazine this issue. Bringing Norman Lear to RetroFan is Paula Finn, a writer with quite an impressive pedigree herself. She’s no stranger to sitcoms, being the daughter of Honeymooners writer Herbert Finn. Her interview is excerpted from her book, Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy by Paula Finn (2018, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Thank you for sharing it, Paula… we hope you’ll grace us with your return in a future issue (maybe with a Honeymooners-related retrospective?). Before you start complaining about this issue being stuck in the Right On Seventies with its Norman Lear/All in the Family feature, stifle, ya dingbat—we also travel before and after that dy-nomite decade in the pages that follow. From the Swinging Sixties, our own Mark Voger stuffs a wild bikini—no, not with his chest hair, but with his column on Beach Party movies, which is perfectly complemented by Scott Shaw!’s column on CARtoons and those groovy gearhead mags that were anything but a drag. Plus guest writer Mark Ellis brings us a history of one of TV’s coolest action shows, The Wild, Wild West—while our own Scott Saavedra digs up some history on Michael Dunn, who played its most notorious villain, Dr. Loveless. And if the Big Eighties are, like, your most awesome of decades, Andy Mangels tunes in to Zorro’s animated adventures, Will Murray pulls He-Man out of the toy box, and our totally tubular RetroFad column looks back at Valley Girls mania. The mere thought of missing this issue is enough to gag you with a spoon! So get ready for another groovy grab-bag of the crazy, cool culture we grew up with! DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS Scott Shaw! informs us that in his Oddball World column in RetroFan #19, the photo of Pauline Peril cartoonist was not Jack Manning. “I’m sorry,” Scott says, “but that’s not Jack, who I knew well and who looked like a combination of W. C. Fields and the character actor Herb Vigran.” Actually, Scott, that was Jack Manning we depicted—but not your Jack Manning. The Jack Manning whose photograph appeared in issue #19 was a musician. RetroFan regrets the error and offers its apologies to the fans and families of both Jack Mannings.

September 2022

VOGER’S VAULT OF VINTAGE VARIETIES

Beach Culture, Frankie and Didi, and the cinematic wave

BY MARK VOGER

It sounds insane, but Frankie, Bonehead, and their fellow boys of summer from the “beach party” movies are male role models. I can explain. (Cue twangy flashback music.) Let’s say you’re a pre-adolescent boy, a little fella, on a beach in the Sixties. (Any public beach will do, but in my case, it would be Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ocean City, Sea Isle City, Wildwood, or Cape May, all coastal burgs in South Jersey.) Let’s say you’re starting to notice the older girls frolicking nearby—but not too nearby—in the sand and surf. Let’s say you’re wondering how to approach such exalted beings, once you get a bit taller and your voice a bit deeper. If you’re a devotee of the beach party movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, you have archetypes to aspire to. You could be Frankie, the coolest guy on the beach (Avalon). Or you could be one of Frankie’s likewise cool wingmen (John Ashley, Aron Kincaid, et al.). Or—as was more likely in my case—you could be Bonehead (Jody McCrea). He was the klutzy, dimwitted guy whose only shot at romance was to meet a girl who found him amusing. It’s too bad the one time this happened, she was a mermaid. The beach party series from American International Pictures (AIP) played no small role in the proliferation of Beach Culture throughout popular entertainment in the Sixties. The films generally teamed Philadelphia-born Avalon, a singer who scored a swoony #1 hit with “Venus,” and Utica-born Funicello, who grew

up before the very eyes of Baby Boomers on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club. They played star-crossed teens Frankie and Didi. He wanted to, as the Supremes sang, hurry love. She wanted to proceed at a more sensible pace. The five (or is it eight?) films in the series—agreeing on a total is a bit complicated—can be goofy and sometimes downright insipid. But they are also clever, breezy, and funny. Culturally, the films stand as a last gasp of naïveté before the hippies came in, with their marijuana and their free love. (The only “high” in beach movies was the rush you got from “hanging ten,” a.k.a. surfing.) At heart, the movies tell a story as old as time: Girl and boy are meant to be together, but not before a bunch of crazy stuff happens. Still, Beach Party and its sequels (ABOVE) weren’t created in a vacuum. There were Annette precedents. (More twangy flashback music Funicello is heard here.) and Frankie Avalon starred BEFORE THE PARTY in American 1953 saw the formation of United States International Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Pictures’ beach Delinquency, which was chaired by the party series. world’s least-fun guy, Estes Kefauver. (He © Metro-Goldwynopposed both EC horror comics and Bettie Mayer. RETROFAN

September 2022

Voger’s Vault of vintage varieties

bikini.’ Which we weren’t. She had a nice form, but it wasn’t what you’d call a bikini form.” According to Arkoff, Disney also complained about the tagline for Beach Party: “It’s what happens when 10,000 kids meet on 5,000 beach blankets!” (Arkoff died in 2001 at age 83.) Added Avalon: “We made the first one. Just had a lot of fun. Had a great director, Bill Asher. From that first day on, we just felt the chemistry—Annette and myself—because we’d been friends. The

(CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT) Poster for Beach Party (1963), lobby card for Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), poster for Bikini Beach (1964), and lobby card for Muscle Beach Party (1964). © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

RETROFAN

September 2022

whole flavor and feel of the picture was just fun. The whole feel of young people.”

FORMULA ESTABLISHED

The formula for AIP’s beach party films was established out of the box: the cast of zany characters (Harvey Lembeck’s blowhard biker Eric Von Zipper was a bloated Brando); the surfing; the pop songs performed amid dancing beachgoers; the slapstick; the celebrity cameos. More or less contemporary players such as Paul Lynde, Linda Evans, Keenan Wynn, Marta Kristen, Morey Amsterdam, and Don Rickles took roles in the films. But for movie buffs, the real fun was to spot screen veterans in cameos and supporting roles, such as silent-era stars Buster Keaton and Francis X. Bushman; horror stars Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, and Price; comedic actress Patsy Kelly; Dorothy Lamour (leading lady in the Road pictures starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope); and Mickey Rooney. Musical stars that performed onscreen include Stevie Wonder, Dick Dale, James Brown, and Nancy Sinatra. Dale—the guitarist behind the surf-rock instrumental “Miserlou”— called the experience “good, clean fun.”

Voger’s Vault of vintage varieties

The gang’s all here! Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, and John Ashley in “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965). © MetroGoldwyn-Mayer.

(LEFT) Harvey Lembeck (CENTER) played dimwitted biker Eric Von Zipper in American International Pictures’ beach party series. (RIGHT) Lobby card for How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965). (BELOW) Donna Loren sang in four of American International Pictures’ beach party movies. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “The majority of it was filmed right there on the beach, even though we did film in the studios, AIP,” Dale said when we spoke in 1998. “We did it at Malibu Beach. In those days, it was true Americana. It was true camaraderie. We all surfed. You’re working with Annette, and Annette was like a sweetheart. We were very, very close together. God bless her. And Frankie was such a perfectionist in everything he did. It was just a fun time. “When we were shooting on the beach, it was like: Hurry up and wait. I would grab my board and I’d run out and I’d be catching a wave. They’d go, ‘All right, where’s Dick Dale? Where’s that damn Dick Dale?’ ‘He’s out there hangin’ ten!’ ‘Get him in!’ They’d take the bullhorns and call me in. I’d say, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted me to do some shots in the background.’ “It was just fun. It was good, clean fun and hard, hard work. You’d be on the set at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, and we’d film all the way through 10, 10:30 at night. Then we’d go back at 5 o’clock in the morning again. People think it’s an easy thing, but it’s not.” (Dale died in 2013 at age 81.) In addition to the guest musical talent, the movies featured songs performed by “house” singers such as Avalon, Funicello, Ashley, and Donna Loren, a onetime Shindig regular. Loren sang in four of the beach party movies. According to the singer-actress, a

commercial sponsor was behind her casting. “Dr. Pepper was involved in those movies,” Loren told me in 2012. “Basically, I was product placement. I really wasn’t supposed to sing. I was just supposed to sit there and hold a Dr. Pepper. But the musical director discovered my jingles that I recorded for Dr. Pepper, and had me sing.” As a child, Loren had appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club, which gave her a special feeling of kinship with Funicello. “Annette was someone I always looked up to from the first time I met her on The Mickey Mouse Club in 1957,” Loren said. “We had quite a history stemming from The Talent Roundup to the beach party movies.”

BONA FIDE SERIES

A box-office success, Beach Party kicked off a bona fide film series, just like 007 or the Bowery Boys. It was followed by Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965). These are the solidly agreed-upon films in the series. But there is debate over whether certain, shall we say, “satellite” films from AIP belong on the list. Pajama Party (1964) has Funicello as Connie, an alternate-reality version of Didi whose boyfriend, Big Lunk, is played by McCrea in goofball mode (as usual). Ski Party (1965) relocates the beach party cast and premise to a snowy resort at which James Brown performs. Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) finds the beach party gang, more RETROFAN

September 2022

Voger’s Vault of vintage varieties

(LEFT) Sally Field on the cover of a comic adaptation of the TV series Gidget (1966). © Sony Pictures Television. (CENTER) Jack Kirby’s surfing super character went solo in Silver Surfer #1 (1968). © Marvel Comics. (RIGHT) Comic adaptation of Beach Blanket Bingo (1964). © MGM. (INSET) Batman and Robin pursue Tiger Shark, a surfing baddie, in this 1966 Batman trading card. © Topps. © DC Comics.

summer, we saw a lot of Betty and Veronica in bathing suits). Dell published a comic-book adaptation of Beach Blanket Bingo with passable likenesses of Avalon and Funicello, and a Gidget TV tie-in series. In the spirit of Petersen Publications’ illustrated hobbyist magazines CARtoons and CYCLEtoons came SURFtoons [see “The Oddball World of Scott Shaw!” elsewhere in this issue—ed.]. Illustrator Frank Frazetta set his memorable anti-smoking public-service comic strip in the surfing milieu. Batman and Robin took to the waves to pursue Tiger Shark, a surfing masked baddie, in Series 2, Card #20 of Topps’ painted Batman trading card sets of 1966. Also in 1966, Jack “King” Kirby introduced his spin-off super-character, the Silver Surfer, in Fantastic Four #48. Kirby’s creation navigated the cosmos while riding… a silver surfboard.

DUSK AT THE BEACH

To be honest, 1967 was a little late for a beach movie. The charming but threadbare It’s a Bikini World was the ignominious end of the line. Just consider some of the other genre films released during this pivotal, tumultuous year: The Love-Ins, Valley of the Dolls, The Trip, The Born Losers, and Hell’s Angels on Wheels. Of course, there has been the odd beach movie since those days, including the disappointing Avalon/Funicello reunion of 1987, Back to the Beach. (Alas, the filmmakers made no discernible attempt to recapture the spirit of the old movies.) While promoting Back to the Beach, Funicello began experiencing symptoms that led to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS). After concealing her illness for several years, Funicello went public with her diagnosis in 1992. When I spoke with Avalon in 1998, he wasn’t sugarcoating the situation. “It’s not easy at all, and it’s not getting better,” Avalon said. “She’s just very brave and very strong, and trying to keep that wonderful attitude up, whatever happens. She’s a sweetheart. She just keeps saying to me, ‘I have this for a reason. I don’t know why, but I have this for a reason.’” 12

RETROFAN

September 2022

The actress established the Annette Funicello Fund for Neurological Disorders in 1993, and died from complications due to MS at age 70 in 2013. Avalon had no illusions that the beach party movies would have been as successful without Funicello. After all, the chemistry between him and Funicello fueled those silly movies, which were shot in about 15 days each, often in the winter on a cold Malibu beach. “Frankie and Annette” became a brand, a symbol—a final flicker of romantic innocence before Beach Culture gave way to the “counterculture.” “What mattered was, there was a close relationship between Frankie and Annette, and a young romance,” Avalon said. “And of course, they’re friends. There was a purity to them. There were morals. The girls were on one side, the boys on the other. It just worked. It was just fun.” By the late Sixties, the whole idea of virginal teenage kids dancing in the sand and riding surfboards had become outmoded and obsolete. It took a while for the squares in the beach party movies to become hip again, but it eventually happened. This was good news for all nerds, shut-ins, wintertime sufferers of “cabin fever,” and the landlocked. When the going gets tough, we can always live vicariously through the shiny, happy girls and boys in colorful bathing suits who gyrate on Malibu to the rhythm of electric guitars that aren’t really plugged in. MARK VOGER is the author and designer of five books for TwoMorrows Publishing, including Monster Mash (a Rondo Award winner), Groovy, and Holly Jolly. Voger worked in the newspaper field as an entertainment reporter and graphic artist for 40 years and lives at the Jersey Shore. His first Aurora monster model kit was “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Please visit him at MarkVoger.com.

RETRO TELEVISION

The Sun Never Sets on

The Wild, Wild West BY MARK ELLIS Genre mash-ups are nothing new, definitely not on network television. Match a medical drama with a crime mystery, you have Quincy. Slap together elements of Forties B-Westerns with Dragnet, shake well, and out pops Cowboy G-Men. To that mixture, add a touch of Jules Verne, a bit of James Bond, and the kind of unrestrained imagination that made most Sixties network execs uneasy, and you have The Wild, Wild West. The brief period between 1964 and 1968 was a watershed mark in television programming. Never before had there been such a wave of imaginative series with such a high caliber of talent behind them. The Wild, Wild West appeared during this short renaissance and quickly established itself as that rarest of commodities—an entertaining anomaly which was so unique it could never be successfully imitated, and in fact is credited with creating an SF sub-genre known as “steampunk.” Although the aforementioned Cowboy G-Men (1953) had a similar premise with government agents in the Old West, it required

(ABOVE) An iconic Wild, Wild, West animated show bumper. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

the popularity of the James Bond films to inspire the crazy-quilt panache that became WWWest’s trademark. Actor-turned-producer Michael Garrison is credited with creating the basic concept. In the mid-Fifties, he and a partner held the film rights to the first James Bond novel Casino Royale—but they were unable to secure backing for a movie and sold their interests in the property. A decade later, with the Bond Craze at full speed [see RetroFan #6—ed.], Garrison brought the idea of James Bond in the West to his friend, Hunt Stromberg, then head of programming at CBS. Ethel Winant, associate director of development at the network, wrote a short prospectus about a group of secret agents who operated in the post–Civil War U.S. The agents reported only to President Grant, all with the last names of points of the compass. Winant recalled, “The others got lost very soon, but Jim West remained.”

‘SUCH WAS THE MAN THEY CALLED JIM WEST’

Once the go-ahead was given for a pilot—then entitled The Wild West—the script was assigned to Gil Ralston, a well known TV writer and novelist. Ralston’s script, “The Night of the Inferno,” introduced almost all of the underpinnings of the series: James T. West, former U.S. Cavalry Captain, and Artemus Gordon, former RETROFAN

September 2022

retro television

hero). His appliances and dialects were of such excellence that he was sometimes unrecognizable—at least for a few seconds. Like West, Arte too loved the ladies and, when in the mood, could play the continental playboy, oozing sophisticated charm. He preferred to avoid fisticuffs, but when pressed was as capable as anyone in a fracas—except for his partner, of course. The opening credits of the program were unique even in a time where animated intros were fairly commonplace. An animated Jim West karate-chopped a bank robber, blasted a card cheat, shot a villain with his sleeve derringer and, with a kiss, changed the intentions of a woman about to backstab him. During the second and succeeding seasons after the show transitioned to color, the latter scene was altered. Instead of changing the woman’s murderous impulse with his lips, the animated West used a right cross. Although amusing, the scene was misleading— West never slugged a female in any of the episodes. The title sequence was cued to composer Richard Markowitz’s memorable and hummable theme song. The intro was created by famed DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (The Pink Panther) and directed by veteran Friz Freleng. The design and animation was by Ken Mundie, who had crafted titles for the film The Great

Race (which had co-starred Ross Martin), TV series such as I Spy, Secret Agent, and the final season of Rawhide. Another artistic innovation was the commercial break “bumper graphics.” In the first season, right before the fade-out, the scene would freeze on the principal image and change to a 19th Century–style daguerreotype photo. This trademark was borrowed for later programs such as How the West Was Won (1976–1979) and Wizards and Warriors (1983). Every episode title employed “The Night of…” after the fashion of dime-novel stories and stage melodramas of the 1800s. As far as crafting scripts were concerned, three basic rules were established early on: 1: Have a gorgeous woman. 2: Have a strong adversary. 3: Have something very bizarre. Another key factor lay in the plausibility of the stories, of the willing suspension of disbelief. No matter how outrageous the villain or how over-the-top his motives, the writers and producers took pains to make the destructive technology seem consistent with the era, even it really was not. Famed CBS art director Albert Heschong did an excellent job creating sets and props that were both faithful to the historical period and atmospheric. He made certain that villain’s futuristic lair would look like the

(INSET ABOVE) Bolero-style jackets, strong colors, and form-fitting fabrics were tailored for Robert Conrad’s trim form. This original James West costume netted $7,800 in a June 5, 2018 Heritage auction. Courtesy of Heritage.

Arte often got smaller co-star billing on the photo covers of Gold Key Comics’ tie-in to The Wild, Wild West in favor of spy gadget– spotlighting images featuring the West’s number one secret agent. Covers to (LEFT) issue #1 (June 1966) and (RIGHT) #4 (Dec. 1968) of the irregularly published series. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

RETROFAN

September 2022

retro television

future as envisioned by a 19th Century man—full of steam-driven machinery and pseudo art-deco furnishings. The sets and lighting of the first season suggested the classic black-and-white film noir of the Forties. Another unique aspect of WWWest was its focus on stunt work. Never before—or since— had an action-adventure TV series made stunts such an integral part of its format. Robert Conrad reputedly didn’t care for the men doubling him, and felt he could do a better job. Conrad and his own handpicked team framed all the shots, did all the choreography, and saved the network both production time and money. CBS, initially reluctant to allow the star of the show to perform his own and very often dangerous stunts, finally relented. Due to this, network TV audiences were exposed to martial arts on a weekly basis for the first time, since Conrad was a student of kung-fu. Many of the first season fight scenes incorporated karate, judo, and even tae kwon do into the mayhem. When Dick Cangey joined the stunt team, he convinced Conrad to use a boxing style of fighting since there were far more trained boxers among stunt men than martial artists. As the series went on, Conrad became so involved with the stunts, he preferred handing the lion’s share of a script’s exposition and dialogue over to Ross Martin. This choice gave Martin more screen time and more chances to expand his range. He liked to call Conrad “My pal, the stuntman.” Still, Martin occasionally wanted to be part of the stunt gang, but after he broke his leg during the filming of “The Night of the Avaricious Actuary,” he left the stunts to the experts. Even the experts weren’t immune to injury. Several of the stuntmen were seriously injured in various episodes. Stuntman

Red West had his head split open when Conrad threw him against a prop player piano, and Jimmy George suffered a broken leg and dislocated shoulder. For every injury that required medical attention, the insurance costs rose.

THE WILD, WILD VILLAINS

Creating scripts for the series was always a challenge and called for writers who understood WWWest couldn’t be viewed as a standard Western. Although several of the early Season One storylines were straightforward and could have worked just as well in other Western TV series, later episodes had their basis in classics of literature, from Gothic horror such as Frankenstein to proto–science fiction like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. During Season One, viewers were introduced to the world’s first cyborg (“The Night of the Steel Assassin”), a thief who could move at such high speed he was rendered invisible (“The Night of the Burning Diamond”), and a mad scientist who harvested the brains of his colleagues (“The Night of the Druid’s Blood”), among other adversaries. The rogue who held the top spot in the gallery of foes was the shortest in stature, but the most gigantic in ingenuity and ambition: three-foot-tall Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless. Created by writer John Kneubuhl and splendidly portrayed by Michael Dunn, Loveless was the most classic of villains—an idealist gone wrong. Introduced in “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth,” Loveless harbored explosive ideas for the re-creation of real estate in Southern California. West, of course, thwarted his scheme, but not before gaining the brilliant dwarf’s undying enmity.

WILD, WILD WEST MERCHANDISE In 1998, Berkeley Books published three original novels by Western writer Robert Vaughan: The Wild, Wild West; The Night of the Death Train; and The Night of the Assassin. In 2006, Paramount began releasing The Wild, Wild West: The Complete Series on DVD. A 27-disc set was released in 2008, containing all 104 episodes of the series, as well as both TV movies. In July 2017, La-La Land Records released a limited edition four-disc set of music from the series, featuring Richard Markowitz’s theme and episode scores by Markowitz, Robert Drasnin, Dave Grusin, and other composers. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

For a TV series that was so popular and ran for so many years, The Wild, Wild West had surprisingly little in the way of tie-in merchandise. During the show’s original run, there was a single paperback novel, titled simply The Wild, Wild West, with a story by pulp writer Richard Wormser adapting the first season episode “The Night of the Double-Edged Knife.” Gold Key published seven comic books between 1966– 1969, all with photo covers. A series of notepads featuring the likenesses of Robert Conrad and Ross Martin were produced by Topflight Paper Co. in 1966. In the same year, Transogram released a board game. In 1969, Aladdin Manufacturing produced a lunch box and thermos. In 1988, Arnett Press published The Wild, Wild West: The Series by Susan E. Kesler, a thorough production history and episode guide. In 1990, Millennium Publications released a four-issue comic-book miniseries (“The Night of the Iron Tyrants”), with story and art by Mark Ellis, Darryl Banks, Adam Hughes, and John Hebert, and colors by Melissa Martin and Deirdre DeLay. In 1997, Exclusive Toy Products released a “Best of the West” limited edition 12-inch action-figure of James West.

RETROFAN

September 2022

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

REED CRANDALL

Illustrator of the Comics

MAC RABOY

Master of the Comics

MIKE GRELL

HERO-A-GO-GO!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

History of Crandall’s life and career, from Golden Age Quality Comics, to Warren war and horror, Flash Gordon, and beyond!

Documents the life and career of the master Golden Age artist of Captain Marvel Jr. and other classic characters!

LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

Career-spanning tribute to the Legion of Super-Heroes & Warlord comics art legend!

Looks at comics' 1960s CAMP AGE, when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, and TV's Batman shook a mean cape!

Presents JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s own words to examine the complicated relationship of the creators of the Marvel Universe!

(256-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $13.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-102-8

(160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-090-8

(160-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5

(272-page COLOR paperback) $36.95 (Digital Edition) $13.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1

(176-page COLOR paperback) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6

OLD GODS & NEW

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

MLJ COMPANION

The complete history of ARCHIE COMICS’ super-heroes known as the “Mighty Crusaders”, with in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ history! (288-page COLOR paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0

COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN

Collects all seven issues of JON B. COOKE’s little-seen self-published zine, produced just after the original COMIC BOOK ARTIST ended its TwoMorrows run in 2003! (176-page paperback with COLOR) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $8.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES

FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER SERIES

documents each decade of comics history!

8 Volumes covering the 1940s-1990s

Documents the genesis of JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD series, his gods in THOR and other strips, how those influenced his DC epic, and affected later series like ETERNALS and CAPTAIN VICTORY!

The final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence: Two unused 1970s DC DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales, plus TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE & SOUL LOVE mags!

Digs up the best of FROM THE TOMB (the UK’s preeminent horror comics history magazine), with early RICHARD CORBEN art, HP LOVECRAFT, and more!

An anniversary behind-the-scenes retrospective with publisher JOHN MORROW, JON B. COOKE, MICHAEL EURY, ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY, and others!

(160-page COLOR paperback) $26.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-098-4

(176-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

(192-page paperback with COLOR) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $10.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-081-6

(224-page FULL-COLOR TPB) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-092-2

GROOVY

A psychedelic look at when Flower Power bloomed in Pop Culture. Revisits ‘60s era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, TV, MOVIES, ART, COMICS & CARTOONS! (192-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9

OUR ARTISTS AT WAR AMERICAN TV COMICS (1940s-1980s)

JOHN SEVERIN

TWO-FISTED COMIC ARTIST

Examines US War comics from EC, DC COMICS, WARREN PUBLISHING, CHARLTON, and more! Featuring KURTZMAN, SEVERIN, DAVIS, WOOD, KUBERT, GLANZMAN, KIRBY, and others!

History of over 300 TV shows and 2000+ comic book adaptations, from well-known series (STAR TREK, PARTRIDGE FAMILY, THE MUNSTERS) to lesser-known shows.

A spirited biography of the EC COMICS and MAD mainstay, co-creator of Western strip American Eagle, 40+ year CRACKED magazine contributor, and Marvel Comics artist.

(160-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-108-0

(192-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-107-3

(160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-106-6

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614

SCOTT SAAVEDRA’S SECRET SANCTUM

Michael Dunn The role of a lifetime: Michael Dunn as the brilliant and petulant Dr. Miguelito Loveless from The Wild, Wild West. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA This may sound familiar to some readers. You are a young kid and your rear end has fallen asleep. You are rump-dead because you’ve been sitting on the floor for hours watching television and you had—just had—to be up close to the set to change channels and tune the UHF knob. Seeing me, or any of her kids with faces positioned nearly against the television screen, would prompt my mom to tell her little rug-potatoes to move back or we’d hurt our eyes. We’d comply, but just barely. Nearly all of her now-adult children wear glasses at least part of the time. So… yeah. I’d sit there and watch the shows, often in reruns in the afternoon, that we now talk about here in RetroFan. As I recall there were two things I especially loved to see: a Star Trek episode that was new to me, and a show featuring a favorite occasionally occurring character. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy seeing the stars of the shows. Who doesn’t love Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore or Andy Griffith and Don Knotts? Nobody. That’s just Entertainment Science. However, every time, say, the egotistical, loudmouth boss Alan Brady (played by show creator Carl Reiner) turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show, it was a must-watch-I’ll-get-some-fresh-air-

later-Mom situation. Same for the sorta-not-all-there Mayberry businessman Floyd the barber (Howard McNear) and his appearances on The Andy Griffith Show. But one of my topmost favorite occasionally occurring characters was The Wild, Wild West’s persistent villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless, who very memorably vexed Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon in ten out of 104 episodes. The actor who brought the complex and fun creation of Dr. Loveless to excellent life was Michael Dunn, making an impact with far fewer appearances that some of the others in my gang of favorites. Floyd the barber (whose last name was not actually “the barber,” but Lawson) was an unfocused conversationalist in 80 of 249 episodes. And Alan Brady rattled Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) in 32 of 158 episodes. Michael Dunn, like many good performers, was just worth watching. Certainly, nobody could play frustrated genius quite like him. Part gentleman, part spoiled tyrant. But as a youthful TV-viewing fanatic I used to worry about Dr. Loveless/Michael Dunn. Due to his dwarfism, Dunn’s body didn’t grow straight and he appeared to struggle to do fairly commonplace things like walking. Dunn presented such a deep humanity via his RETROFAN

September 2022

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

performances that he seemed more real to me than many other TV actors. I assume the empathy of youth is part of the explanation and, of course, his unusual height probably factored into my fascination as it did for others. Dunn was right at the top marker for dwarfism at 3' 10", and he was plenty aware that his size was an attention-grabber. Eventually, though, I stopped seeing Dunn on television, put more attention to my comic books and MAD magazines, and my thoughts just moved elsewhere. Turns out that having a regular nostalgia-centric magazine column forces one to look backwards and refocus on memories that I never expected to revisit. And Michael Dunn came to mind.

ESCAPE FROM THE DUST BOWL

Michael Dunn was the stage name of Gary Neil Miller (for reading ease he will be referred to by his better-known stage name). He was born in Shattuck, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1934, as the effects of the Dust Bowl—both the name of a geographic area and the historic dust storms and drought that occurred there—battered the Southern Plains. When he was four, Dunn and his parents moved to Dearborn, Michigan. In an interview with TV Guide (July 8, 1967), Dunn claimed to know, also at age four, that he “was a dwarf.” (Dunn frequently referred to himself as a midget or dwarf, terms more commonly accepted then.) This seems young to have such a self-revelation. Dunn, however, was an unusually bright child, able to read by age three. He showed musical talent early on as well. Dunn’s dwarfism was not medically diagnosed until he was five. But it wouldn’t be his height so much as the related medical problems that proved to be his greatest obstacle. Well, that and social antipathy toward anyone

Phoebe Dorin played one of Dr. Loveless’ minions, Antoinette (seated at the piano). Dorin was in six episodes of The Wild, Wild West until Dunn asked to replace her with his new wife (who didn’t make the cut). This ended Dorin and Dunn’s long partnership and deeply hurt Dorin, but they did eventually reconcile. Note James West's discomfort with having to listen to the music. Dorin would later say that Robert Conrad “adored” Dunn. The Wild, Wild West © CBS Studios, Inc.

RETROFAN

September 2022

“different.” He had dislocated hips that made walking increasingly painful as he got older, his spine curved in a way that made him appear barrel-chested, and his lung growth was constrained due to the size and shape of his ribcage, which brought extra work for his heart. His parents wanted their only child to learn to function in the world, so they refused to send him to any sort of “special school.” The future Dr. Loveless proved to be more than up to the challenge despite having to navigate a world that was not designed for people his size. To Dunn, an obstacle was something to go around or ignore. He could see humor in his size. One oft-told tale had Dunn and his young friends going to the movies, where the small youth asked the person in the ticket booth if his height qualified him for “half price.” It did not. Dunn’s early years were happy. He loved baseball as a sport to study and as an activity. He could play the piano, but hated to practice. He enjoyed singing. He had a fairly high Dunn, writing under his birth opinion of himself (which family name, pens a heartfelt thank-you to and friends would note as well, everyone who helped get him a car usually without rancor). In an to ease his travel difficulties. From interview with the New York a 1952 issue of the University of Post in 1965, Dunn explained Miami’s student magazine, Tempo. that he felt he read more than © University of Miami.

scott saavedra’s secret sanctum

his teachers as a kid and would sometimes be removed from class for getting “lippy.” He won the Detroit Metropolitan Spelling Bee in 1947. The Detroit News both covered and sponsored the event. His win sent him, with his mom, to Washington, D.C., for the nationals. He made it 14 rounds, but was tripped up by “fuchsia.” At Detroit’s Redford High School, Dunn was in the Honor Society, Student Council, choir, Red Hi-C (a Christian group; Dunn was a regular churchgoer), and was on the all-male cheerleading squad as its co-captain. Notes in his Redford 1950 senior yearbook indicate he was well-liked. In 1951, Dunn attended the University of Michigan and was on the staff of their humor magazine, The Gargoyle. He ended up in a three-month hospital stay after being struck by a wave of students coming down a staircase. Thinking a better climate was needed to help him recover, Dunn’s parents moved him to the University of Miami to resume his freshman year. At UM, his educational focus was on political science and journalism. There he was the managing editor of the UM Tempo, a more serious publication than The Gargoyle. And yet, Dunn, despite an IQ reported to be 178, found his interest in education fading and other non-academic activities taking more of his time.

THE IMPROMPTU MAN

Dunn enjoyed singing and performing for people. A quote in The Big Life of a Little Man: Michael Dunn Remembered by his first cousin, Sherry Kelly (Tate, 2011), reveals a less confident side: “I feel like I’m not any use to anybody, but then I sing, and people like it and say so, and I feel better.” Often friends would encourage Dunn to sing wherever they happened to be. The outgoing young man would perform anywhere, anytime. He also performed in plays on campus. He struggled to get around, so fellow students and local businesses combined efforts to buy him a car. Ultimately, Dunn left college without graduating. 1956 began a period of about 18 months that remain a bit of a blank. Of this time, Dunn would tell select friends and family that he had been a secret agent stationed inside a television console and sent to Russia. His claimed spy-murder tool of choice: a piano wire garrote. The people who loved him most wrote this explanation off as just Gary (Michael) being Gary (Michael); someone with an active imagination. This is a quality that would surface in his professional life, where his fabrications would turn up unchallenged in serious reporting. He later claimed, for example, to have entered college at only 15, but was actually closer to 17 when he went to the University of Michigan.

BROTHER GARY GOES TO NEW YORK

Hollywood, California, has long been a compelling magnet for young performers. Dunn drove to the West Coast alone in 1957 with the hopes of finding regular work to support him in his efforts to enter show business, but was unsuccessful. His parents, who were of modest means, paid for everything. While in California he visited a monastery and was drawn to its quiet openness. Dunn stunned everyone in 1958, especially his Baptist mother, when he suddenly announced that he was moving to St. Bonaventure Monastery in Detroit and becoming a Capuchin lay brother. His mother was distressed, partly because she didn’t understand why her son became Catholic, but mostly she hated the idea of his talent languishing in a dark monastery. She needn’t have worried—

(LEFT) Michael Dunn received an Academy Award Nomination for his performance in Ship of Fools (1965). © Columbia Pictures. (RIGHT) Lobby card for Madigan. © Universal Pictures. Lobby cards courtesy of Heritage.

Brother Gary’s stay was fewer than three months. Through it all, his parents remained supportive. Dunn briefly returned home, sang where he could, and then moved to the big city, New York, New York. It was there, living near the famed Actor’s Studio in the equally famed area known as Hell’s Kitchen (causing much worry for his parents), that Gary Miller became Michael Dunn and set about the work of getting on stage to perform. Dunn sang for whoever would have him… small clubs, cafes, anyplace that needed a singer to draw in a crowd. It was at one such “saloon” (as Dunn liked to say) that he was discovered and got his first honest-to-gosh paid professional acting gig in an off-Broadway play, Here Come the Clowns. More plays followed, and it was during this period he met his soon-to-be singing partner, friend, and future Wild, Wild West co-star, Phoebe Dorin. Actor Roddy McDowall, who was doing a photo essay on Dunn for LIFE magazine, suggested they partner as a nightclub act. TIME magazine and The New York Times also took notice. The TIME article was entitled “Elf’s Progress.” Most writing about him tended to lead with puns relating to size. TIME did note that, as a singer and actor, Dunn’s talents “in both areas are considerable.” Good reviews for his off-Broadway work led to roles on Broadway. He played the inside of a robot in How to Make a Man. For his performance in The Ballad of the Sad Café he received a New York Critic’s Circle Award and was nominated for a 1964 Tony Award. He got an Oscar Nomination for Best Supporting Player for his role in his first film, Ship of Fools (1965). In 1966, he got married to Joy Talbot, about whom little is known. The marriage did not last long. More films followed, with notable actors like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Boom in 1968 (not a hit), and Madigan also in 1968 (much better received) with Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda. Television also beckoned. RETROFAN

September 2022

Pop Culture Books from TwoMorrows!

BRITMANIA

by RetroFan’s MARK VOGER

Remember when long-haired British rock ’n’ rollers made teenage girls swoon — and their parents go crazy? BRITMANIA plunges into the period when suddenly, America went wild for All Things British. This profusely illustrated full-color hardback, subtitled “The British Invasion of the Sixties in Pop Culture,” explores the movies (A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, HAVING A WILD WEEKEND), TV (THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR), collectibles (TOYS, GAMES, TRADING CARDS, LUNCH BOXES), comics (real-life Brits in the DC and MARVEL UNIVERSES) and, of course, the music! Written and designed by MARK VOGER (MONSTER MASH, GROOVY, HOLLY JOLLY), BRITMANIA features interviews with members of THE BEATLES, THE ROLLING STONES, THE WHO, THE KINKS, HERMAN’S HERMITS, THE YARDBIRDS, THE ANIMALS, THE HOLLIES & more. It’s a gas, gas, gas! (192-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-115-8 • SHIPS OCTOBER 2022!

Get Mark Voger’s three other books for $99.95! Monster Mash • Groovy • Holly Jolly Normally 120, get this specially-priced trio for only $ 99.95! $

Save $24!

IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB

Since 2000, FROM THE TOMB has terrified readers worldwide. This second “Best of” collection of the UK’s preeminent magazine on the history of horror comics uncovers Atomic Comics lost to the Cold War, rarely seen (and censored) British horror comics, the early art of RICHARD CORBEN, GOOD GIRLS of a bygone age, TOM SUTTON, DON HECK, LOU MORALES, AL EADEH, BRUCE JONES’ Alien Worlds, HP LOVECRAFT in HEAVY METAL, and a myriad of terrors from beyond the stars and the shadows of our own world! It features comics they tried to ban, from ATLAS, CHARLTON, COMIC MEDIA, DC, EC, HARVEY, HOUSE OF HAMMER, KITCHEN SINK, LAST GASP, PACIFIC, SKYWALD, WARREN, and more! Edited by PETER NORMANTON. (192-page Trade Paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490816 (Digital Edition) $10.99

HERO-A-GO-GO!

HERO-A-GO-GO! celebrates the camp craze of the Swinging Sixties, when just about everyone—the teens of Riverdale, an ant and a squirrel, even the President of the United States—was a super-hero or a secret agent. RETROFAN magazine and former DC Comics editor MICHAEL EURY takes you through that coolest cultural phenomenon with this all-new collection of nostalgic essays, histories, and theme song lyrics of classic 1960s characters like CAPTAIN ACTION, HERBIE THE FAT FURY, CAPTAIN NICE, ATOM ANT, SCOOTER, ACG’s NEMESIS, DELL’S SUPER-FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA, the “Split!” CAPTAIN MARVEL, and others! Featuring interviews with BILL MUMY (Lost in Space), BOB HOLIDAY (It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman), RALPH BAKSHI (The Mighty Heroes, Spider-Man), DEAN TORRENCE (Jan and Dean Meet Batman), RAMONA FRADON (Metamorpho), DICK DeBARTOLO (Captain Klutz), TONY TALLARICO (The Great Society Comic Book), VINCE GARGIULO (Palisades Park historian), JOE SINNOTT (The Beatles comic book), JOSE DELBO (The Monkees comic book), and more! (272-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $36.95 ISBN: 9781605490731 (Digital Edition) $13.99

AMERICAN TV COMIC BOOKS (1940s-1980s) From The Small Screen To The Printed Page

A fascinating and detailed year-by-year history of over 300 television shows and their 2000+ comic book adaptations across five decades. Author PETER BOSCH has spent years researching and documenting this amazing area of comics history, tracking down the well-known series (STAR TREK, THE MUNSTERS) and the lesser-known shows (CAPTAIN GALLANT, PINKY LEE) to present the finest look ever taken at this unique genre of comic books. Included are hundreds of full-color covers and images, plus profiles of the artists who drew TV comics: GENE COLAN, ALEX TOTH, DAN SPIEGLE, RUSS MANNING, JOHN BUSCEMA, RUSS HEATH, and many more giants of the comic book world. If you loved watching The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, The Andy Griffith Show, The Monkees, The Mod Squad, Adam-12, Battlestar Galactica, The Bionic Woman, Alf, Fraggle Rock, and “V”—there’s something here for fans of TV and comics alike. (192-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605491073 (Digital Edition) $15.99

THE BEST OF FROM THE TOMB This first collection compiles features from its ten years of terror, along with new material meant for the NEVER-PUBLISHED #29 • (192-page Digital Edition) $10.99

LOU SCHEIMER

CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

Biography of the co-founder of Filmation Studios, which created the first DC cartoons with Superman, Batman, and Aquaman, ruled the song charts with The Archies, kept Trekkie hope alive with the Emmy-winning Star Trek: The Animated Series, taught morals with Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and swung into high adventure with Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, Zorro, live-action shows Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Written by LOU SCHEIMER, with RetroFan’s ANDY MANGELS. (288-page Digital Edition) $14.99

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History. Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614

THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!

No License Required SoCal’s CARtoons, CYCLEtoons, Drag Cartoons, and more! BY SCOTT SHAW! Southern California was the birthplace of two unique American cults, custom cars and surfing. Both had been around a long time before they blossomed in the early Sixties, and after they became key themes of multiple Top 40 hits by SoCal musicians like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, many more young Americans found themselves hoping that their parents might move to Southern California. I grew up in San Diego and was also influenced by both cults. My love of hot rods and outlandish custom cars was propelled by the grotesque characters, designs, and rebellious vibes of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Stanley “Mouse!” Miller, and William Campbell’s plastic model kits and T-shirts. I was obsessed with Finks, Weird-Ohs, Silly Surfers, Frantics, and a slob named “Fred Flypogger” [and if you need proof of Scott’s obsession, see his Oddball World column in RetroFan #10!—ed.]. My interest in surfing had nothing to do with the sport itself. I was riveted by two surfing mascots: Rick Griffin’s “Murphy the Surfer” in Surfer magazine and Mike Dormer and Lee Teacher’s “Hot Curl the Surfer,” a seaside statue that became a national fad with its own line of model kits. They were all popular with many kids my age, so I taught myself how to draw them so I could draw monsters and surfers on my classmates’ book covers for a few cents to bolster my allowance. In eighth grade, I even stole Mouse!’s exclamation point to attach to my own name. I went to custom car shows at the downtown San Diego’s Community Concourse to meet Big Daddy and see the latest

(ABOVE) Detail from the cover of Petersen Publishing Co.’s Hot Rod Cartoons #1 (Nov. 1964). Art by George Lemmons.

custom cars. I read every issue of Car Craft magazine to see the latest artwork by Robert Williams in ads for Roth’s T-shirts. I put together so many plastic model car kits that I filled a tall cabinet with leftover parts. I undoubtedly reduced my IQ a few digits thanks to my unintentional inhaling of who-knows-how-many tubes of Testor’s model kit cement and bottles of Testor’s enamel model paint. However, I didn’t know a thing about how a car ran or what it was like to ride a wave. I couldn’t even drive. I was a goofy 14-year-old who was trapped in that Sargasso Sea of powerlessness of pre-adolescence and being eaten alive by my own insecurity, hormones, and goals. I needed someone or something to glue me together. Of course, that mental cement came from teaching myself how to draw, studying the work of my favorite professional cartoonists in print and animation. At the time, there was no better example of the best humorous illustration than MAD magazine, which became like one of my floppy textbooks to me. MAD was rapidly rising in its success while gathering a flock of imitators, mostly with decidedly underwhelming material. But there was one black-and-white comic magazine that really got my attention, due to the cover presence of a cartoonist whose style and name were familiar to me from many of Hanna-Barbera Productions’ cartoons. His name was Willie Ito and the magazine was Petersen Publishing’s CARtoons. I’d seen Willie’s name in H-B shows’ credits, and after seeing his printed work, the first thing that came to my naive brain was, “If Willie Ito is this good, how come his Hanna-Barbera cartoons aren’t better?” Little did I suspect that I was absolutely in the crosshairs of the magazine’s newly targeted market.

RETROFAN

September 2022

The oddball world of scott shaw!

(LEFT) Ed “Big Daddy” Roth runs into difficulties while airbrushing a T-shirt on the cover of CARtoons #14 (Oct.–Nov. 1963). Cover by Wes Bennett. (RIGHT) The ample belly of “Unk” (based upon Carl Kohler) offers one hill-uva track obstacle for the slot-car-racing Varmints on issue #28 (Apr. 1966). Cover by Mike Arens and Jim Collender. © Petersen Publishing Co., LLC. were experts on what kids enjoyed. They also hired young cartoonists with ties to underground comix and experienced mainstream comics creators with incredible legitimacy. And then there were the pro cartoonists whose specialty was depicting cars, auto parts, tools, and kinetic warping of vehicles to infer high speeds. The majority of the contributors wrote their own stories. Combining all of these different aspects of the cartooning industry, CARtoons had no “house style,” but an impressive assortment of written and visual automotive humor, now primarily aimed at a younger readership that had yet to qualify for a driver’s permit. Although MAD had what was arguably the most talented “usual gang of idiots” in monthly humor magazines, it was in every way a New York publication. But many of CARtoons’ readers and contributors felt that it was the MAD of the West Coast, specifically Southern California. Other than Western Publications, a.k.a. Gold Key Comics (which also had an office in NYC), CARtoons was the only mainstream comic that was published on the West Coast at the time, a noteworthy exception to the industry.

A skateboarding cover—and trouble ahead for Unk—on this original cover art, illustrated by Willie Ito and painted by Don Gleason, for CARtoons #22 (Apr. 1965). Courtesy of Heritage. © Petersen Publishing Co., LLC.

RETROFAN

September 2022

The oddball world of scott shaw!

Pete Millar, the original creative engine behind CARtoons, spun off to do his own mag, Drag Cartoons. Covers to Drag Cartoons #7 (Sept. 1964) and 8 by Millar. © The Pete Millar Family. One of CARtoons’ biggest advantages was that its omnipresent automotive publisher had incredible distribution clout; therefore the magazine was easy to find. CARtoons sold especially well in the South [home of NASCAR – ye Southern-born ed!]. And being a magazine rather than a comic book, its higher price tags brought bigger per-issue profits. The original CARtoons featured articles, comic strips, step-bystep how-to drawing pages, and more. Early on, the magazine carried the “Unk and Them Varmints” strip by Carl Kohler and Willie Ito, with Mike Arens drawing the feature when Willie got too busy in animation. They were the magazine’s only character-based stories for well over a decade until they were retired in 1975 due to a big CARtoons makeover. The remainder of every issue was an anthology of short gag-based tales, six pages or less, sometimes just a single page. The material depended on the creator’s humor specialty. The editors usually concocted a nice variety of gags about racetrack mishaps, automotive oddities in the garage, model kits, captioned photos, outrageous stuff mirroring increasingly bizarre designs for custom cars, slot cars, visualized puns, getting stopped by the police, the occasional parody, crowd scenes full of caricatures of actual people in the businesses of auto parts and drag racing, and very legitimate how-to-draw lessons by George Trosley… among many other articles.

In contrast to its outrageously illustrated stories, from 1964 to 1975, CARtoons’ letters page was often quite poignant, filled with messages from its military readership in Vietnam reaching out to correspond with fellow car nuts or female pen-pals.

COMPETITORS AND A ’75 MAKEOVER

CARtoons not only launched the field, it set the standard for automotive humor magazines with multiple readerships. Due to that, it sold extremely well for decades. Petersen eventually expanded its line with Hot Rod Cartoons, CYCLEtoons, SURFtoons, and even SKItoons, which lasted only a single issue. They were all filled with the same sort of stories produced by the same crew that generated material for CARtoons. Of course, at the height of the CARtoons empire’s success, there were a number of lower-quality imitators, as well as Pete Millar’s very legit new rival-zine Drag Cartoons. All of these were diluting the genre. Eventually, the non-automotive titles struggled and faded with the major changes in magazine distribution in the Seventies. The fact that CARtoons publisher Pete “The newsstand is king!” Petersen discouraged subscriptions and encouraged minimal advertising didn’t help either. More ads crept in during the late Eighties, to prevent CARtoons’ cover price from increasing. In February 1975, in its 80th issue, CARtoons underwent a complete overhaul with a new logo, new artists, and new features. Referring to the fact that all of the other Petersen humor magazines had been cancelled, its cover blurb “It’s All In One Bag Now!” was ironically accurate. Illustrator William Stout recalls how he designed “The New CARtoons” logo: “CYCLEtoons editor Dennis Ellefson was made the RETROFAN

September 2022

The oddball world of scott shaw!

CARtoons had become a stepchild of the circulation department, and those who tried to save it simply ran out of arguments against its demise. Viva CARtoons!” In the later Nineties, CARtoons briefly re-emerged in the aisles of—oddly enough—Toys ‘R’ Us as the brand name of a new die-cast line of hot rod toy cars similar to Hot Wheels. None of them resembled any particular vehicle or cartoonist from the contents of the magazine, just the name and logo licensed from Petersen Publishing Company. They were marketed toward adult men who grew up reading CARtoons, who also refused to grow up by collecting die cast toy cars. Kinda ironic, eh? It seemed like the automotive humor magazine industry had finally evaporated faster than open fuel. But in 2015, Ontario, Canada, artist Marc Methot successfully filed for the abandoned trademark of CARtoons despite the fact he had no financing or publication experience. Twenty-five years after Petersen’s CARtoons vanished from the newsstands, Methot’s Picturesque Publishing re-established the magazine in January 2016, and it continues to be published bimonthly in print and digital versions. Classic CARtoons contributors George Trosley (with new “Krass and Bernie” and “How-To-Draw” articles), Fred Boatman, and Errol McCarthy returned to the revived title. The new CARtoons crew includes Kat Ruiz, Ben “Drag Daddy” Mitchell, Dave Beaty, Marcus Mitchell, Larry Williams, Myer Cooper, Jeff Norwell, John Skidmore, Jeff Slemons, Jason Sylvestre, Paul Townsend, Dan Falconer, Mr. Bilbil, Bob Hardin, Chuck Kelly, Joe Krecji, Mike Yapps, and Scott Fisk. Over the years, I’ve been asked, “Did you ever write or draw for CARtoons? And if not, why not?” I’ve always been far more

RETROFAN

September 2022

interested in weird-looking automobiles than in learning how they operate. Therefore, although Dennis Ellefson repeatedly invited me to pitch potential CARtoons stories to him, I never did. I knew I’d have to fake things that would be very obvious, and I never even tried. But I still enjoy assembling plastic model kits, primarily reissues of the same cars I glued and painted 57 years ago… but I’m more careful with the glue now. At 70 years old, I just can’t afford to destroy any more of my brain cells. For 50 years (and counting), SCOTT SHAW! has written and drawn underground comix, mainstream comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, TV cartoons, toys, advertising, and video games. He has worked on such characters as Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew (which he co-created with Roy Thomas), Sonic the Hedgehog, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, the Simpsons, the Futurama gang, the Muppet Babies, Garfield, the Garbage Pail Kids, and yes, even Annoying Orange. His career has garnered him four Emmy Awards, an Eisner Award, and a Humanities Award. Scott is also known for his “Oddball Comics Live!” visual presentation of “the craziest comic books ever published” and for his regular participation in “Quick Draw!” with Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragonés. He was also one of the teenagers who co-created what is currently known as Comic-Con International: San Diego, America’s biggest annual fan event. He can be reached at shawcartoons.com.

RETRO INTERVIEW

Interview with

Norman Lear BY PAULA FINN

[Editor’s note: This interview is an excerpt from Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy by Paula Finn (copyright © 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved).] Norman, before we start, how much time do we have? We have three days. That will barely scratch the surface! [laughs] Can you talk first about your father’s influence on you and how that led to some of the most poignant scenes in your shows? You know, I just finished my memoir last Friday and sent it east to the publisher, so oh my God, have I covered that question— because that is the central question of the book. But I’m happy to talk about it. I spent my life unconsciously seeking to make up for a father who let his son and everybody else down. He was a rascal; he went to jail because he was such a rascal. And I’m using the word “rascal” because I adored him! [laughs] So I don’t want to call him a crook. But I couldn’t stop loving him, so I fought all my life to make up for him. That’s about it in a nutshell. I was a kid of the depression, so I watched my father and his brothers go belly up. There was never anything. And my own father was one of these guys who

Norman Lear, creator of many of television’s most influential comedies including All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons, in his office in Los Angeles, California, June 2018. © Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News.

RETROFAN RETROFAN

September 2022

retro interview

was gonna have a million dollars in ten days to two weeks. And I did a show about that called P.O.P. with Charlie Durning, who played my father. The theme also came up in an All in the Family episode where Mike and Archie are locked in the basement of Archie’s Place [“Two’s a Crowd,” S8/E19]. And for the first time, Archie talks about how his father abandoned him. He says to Mike, “He goes out, works his fingers to the bone to put food on the table—and you think he’s a bad guy?” Yeah. That was me. [laughs] Did you write that particular scene? I worked on all of the shows; I don’t remember who got writing credit on this episode, but that exchange between Mike and Archie was solid out of my background. And how did All in the Family come about for you originally? I had read about the English show Til Death Do Us Part from some publication, I can’t remember the name of it. I saw some reference to it, and I thought, “Holy sh*t. I grew up with that!” How could I never have thought of that! Because my father used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met. And I would scream at him, “You know you’re putting a whole race of people down just to call me lazy?” And he’d say, “That’s not what I’m doing; you’re the dumbest white kid I ever met!” How would you describe the character of Archie Bunker? He was afraid of the future, afraid of the new, afraid of what disturbs what he knows. Let’s talk about the writing. In general, what kind of guidance did you give your writers? What I used to say to the writers working on all the shows was, “Pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the house, to your families. And read at least two newspapers a day.” I suggested the NY Times and the LA Times. And the Wall Street Journal if you can make a third, just so you know what’s going on. Because we’re going to be writing about what’s affecting us in our lives, so start with the relationships. The expression I always used was, “Scrape the barrel of your experience.” And that’s what’s gonna feed us. And also, for every character that entered, I wanted the writer to know what was on that person’s mind: what was making them unhappy, what was making 48

RETROFAN

September 2022

Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker and Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker, in a Seventies publicity photo from All in the Family. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. All in the Family © CBS.

them happy—whether the person had to tie a shoelace or had indigestion or didn’t get enough sleep last night or needed to fart or was upset with his child or—I wanted the writer to know what was on the character’s mind, not just what they said to the convention of speaking as they were entering a room but what was behind that. In other words—something is on his mind, whatever it is. Know what’s on the character’s mind. Do you believe that humor comes from pain or is a defense against it? I think, when it’s best, humor comes from some understanding of the foolishness of the human condition. There’s a wonderful Huffington Post piece tonight by Marty Kaplan, who runs the Lear Center. I just read it a little bit ago. He writes about a game called Flappy Bird that so many

people were playing, and it was the biggest success. Someone in the Far East put it online, and then they took it down, so there was a big ruckus about that. And Marty wrote—and I’m adding the word “foolishly”—about the amount of time that people foolishly spent on that game. Missing the opportunity to see everything that was in their life at the moment and if what is surrounding all of us isn’t of more value than the time we spend on these games. That’s his suggestion—that there’s more just in nature than playing a game like that. So to answer your question, I think humor comes from a basic understanding of and ability to see the foolishness of the human condition. How much so many kids and others are missing in their immediate surroundings because they’re glued to a TV set or an iPhone or to a game.

retro interview

Do you think humor is related to anger? Well, a lot of humor is used to tear something down, to tear a point of view down, tear an opinion down, tear a person or a cause or idea down. How do you see the world differently as a comedy writer? I saw the world differently, which is why I became a comedy writer. In what way do you see it that others don’t? I have a better understanding perhaps of the foolishness of the human condition! [laughs]

Behind the scenes on the All in the Family set, Carroll O’Connor, TV’s Archie Bunker, takes a load off while Norman Lear (standing, with arms crossed) confers with an unidentified party. © Mike Salisbury/Globe Photos/ ZUMAPRESS.com.

You started writing television in the Fifties. I’ve heard that the pressure was very hard for you. Well, in television, the clock is ticking. And you better get that bloody thing finished. [laughs] The early years of my career were filled with an incredible amount of fear and anxiety. I always wrote in a clutch. By one o’clock in the morning, I had to start writing or else. I remember sitting on the phone with a shrink after vomiting and literally weeping for hours. I had four hours, five hours to get a monologue in. For years I was stopped by fear. I used to call it “sh*t in the head”; I called it that because I couldn’t

identify it. But it was a fear, I guess a fear of not making good. I started to wear a hat because I would sit all those hours and I would pick my head. I was bald. And it was my wife who threw a hat on me one day and said, “Don’t take this off, or you’ll lose your scalp.” Do you still have doubts when you sit down to write? No. No. Somewhere along the line, I began to understand myself. And you’ll see a lot of that in my memoir. Because that inward path is our most important, our most arduous of journeys—just getting to know yourself. A psychiatrist gave me a great piece of advice when I had sh*t in the head. And the one piece of advice that worked and it came years into the process of having that—was to imagine 50 people in a room, and somebody shouts, “Fire!” And there’s one small door, and when everybody rushes to the door, everybody’s not gonna get out. Some of them are gonna be burned. And you think of your ideas that way. It doesn’t matter in what order those people get out; you sort them out afterwards if you wish to. Just get ’em out. It’s the same thing with your ideas. Good, bad, indifferent, they fit, they don’t fit—you’ll sort that out after they’re out the door. It was a great piece of advice, and I’ve given it ten thousand times. And at some point, when I was letting all the ideas out when there was a fire in a crowded room, I picked up a tape recorder. Because that was the easiest way for me to do it. Because then I didn’t see them when they left the room. It didn’t matter who went first! [laughs] So I started to dictate out of that, and just like the other metaphor, the rewrite was a lot easier. Everything was out. Do you have any quirks that help you to write? No. I often play music, but not always. Can you put into words what you feel when you’re writing most creatively? That’s the payoff, I guess, for all the torment. It’s like having great sex. When I was younger, I’d need to masturbate when ideas were flowing; the whole body was flowing, so you either woke up your wife or jerked off. I’ve also compared it to somebody climbing a mountain—the greatest high in the world. RETROFAN

September 2022

New from TwoMorrows!

ALTER EGO #177

BACK ISSUE #138

BACK ISSUE #139

BACK ISSUE #140

Celebration of veteran artist DON PERLIN—artist of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, THE DEFENDERS, GHOST RIDER, MOON KNIGHT, 1950s horror, and just about every other adventure genre under the fourcolor sun! Plus Golden Age artist MARCIA SNYDER—Marvel’s early variant covers— Marvelmania club and fanzine—FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT on Cracked Mazagine, & more!

CLASSIC HEROES IN THE BRONZE AGE! The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Flash Gordon, Popeye, Zorro and Lady Rawhide, Son of Tomahawk, Jungle Twins, and more! Featuring the work of DAN JURGENS, JOE R. LANSDALE, DON McGREGOR, FRANK THORNE, TIM TRUMAN, GEORGE WILDMAN, THOMAS YEATES, and other creators. With a classic 1979 fully painted Gold Key cover of Flash Gordon.

NOT-READY-FOR-PRIMETIME MARVEL HEROES! Mighty Marvel’s Bronze Age second bananas: Doc Samson, Jack of Hearts, Thundra, Nighthawk, Starfox, Modred the Mystic, Woodgod, the Shroud, Thunderbird and Warpath, Stingray, Wundaar, and others! Featuring the work of BUSIEK, DAVID, ENGLEHART, GERBER, GIFFEN, GRANT, MANTLO, MICHELINIE, STERN, THOMAS, and other A-list talent!

DINOSAUR COMICS! Interviews with Xenozoic®’s MARK SCHULTZ and dinoartist extraordinaire WILLIAM STOUT! Plus: Godzilla at Dark Horse, Sauron villain history, Dinosaurs Attack!, Dinosaurs for Hire, Dinosaur Rex, Dino Riders, Lord Dinosaur, and Jurassic Park! Featuring ARTHUR ADAMS, BISSETTE, CLAREMONT, COCKRUM, GERANI, STRADLEY, ROY THOMAS, and more. SCHULTZ cover.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships August 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Sept. 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Nov. 2022

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #29

THE LIFE & ART OF

KIRBY COLLECTOR #84

KIRBY COLLECTOR #85

BRICKJOURNAL #74

STEVE SHERMAN TRIBUTE! Kirby family members, friends, comics creators, and the entertainment industry salute Jack’s assistant (and puppeteer on Men in Black, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and others). MARK EVANIER and Steve recall assisting Kirby, Steve discusses Jack’s Speak-Out Series, Kirby memorabilia from his collection, an interview with wife DIANA MERCER, and Steve’s unseen 1974 KIRBY/ROYER cover!

KIRBY: ANIMATED! How JACK KIRBY and his concepts leaped from celluloid, to paper, and back again! From his 1930s start on Popeye and Betty Boop and his work being used on the 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes show, to Fantastic Four (1967 and 1978), Super Friends/Super Powers, Scooby-Doo, Thundarr the Barbarian, and Ruby-Spears. Plus EVAN DORKIN on his abandoned Kamandi cartoon series, and more!

Amazing LEGO® STAR WARS builds, including Lando Calrissian’s Treadable by JÜRGEN WITTNER, Starkiller Base by JHAELON EDWARDS, and more from STEVEN SMYTH and Bantha Bricks! Plus: Minifigure Customization by JARED K. BURKS, AFOLs by GREG HYLAND, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK (including a LEGO BB-8), and more! Edited by JOE MENO.

DON McGREGOR retrospective, from early ’70s Warren Publications scripter to his breakout work at Marvel Comics on BLACK PANTHER, KILLRAVEN, SABRE, DETECTIVES INC., RAGAMUFFINS, and others. Plus ROBERT MENZIES looks at HERB TRIMPE’s mid-’70s UK visit to work on Marvel’s British comics weeklies, MIKE GOLD Part Two, and CARtoons cartoonist SHAWN KERRIE! SANDY PLUNKETT cover!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Fall 2022

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Fall 2022

SUBSCRIPTION RATES

2022

Print subscribers get the digital edition free!

Alter Ego (Six print issues) Back Issue (Eight print issues) BrickJournal (Six print issues) Comic Book Creator (Four print issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four print issues) RetroFan (Six print issues)

ECONOMY US

PREMIUM US

DAVE COCKRUM

Follows his career from fandom to redesigning the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES and his introduction of X-MEN characters Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Thunderbird (plus his design of Wolverine’s alter ego, Logan). Includes later work on THE FUTURIANS, unused character designs, and other rare material! Written by GLEN CADIGAN with introduction by ALEX ROSS. (160-page COLOR softcover) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 • Now shipping!

Poly mailer, backing board

Faster service, rigid mailer

Non-US orders, rigid mailer

INTERNATIONAL

DIGITAL ONLY

$68 $90 $68 $49 $49 $68

$91 $121 $91 $65 $65 $91

$103 $137 $103 $72 $72 $103

$29 $39 $29 $19 $19 $29

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

No print issue

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com Don’t miss exclusive sales, limited editions, and new releases! Sign up for our mailing list:

https://groups.io/g/twomorrows

Download our Free Catalog of all our available books and back issues! https://www.twomorrows.com/media/TwoMorrowsCatalog.pdf

ALTER EGO #176

The Golden Age comics of major pulp magazine publisher STREET & SMITH (THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE, RED DRAGON, SUPERSNIPE) examined in loving detail by MARK CARLSON-GHOST! Art by BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, and others, ANTHONY TOLLIN on “The Shadow/Batman Connection”, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, PETER NORMANTON, and more!

ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING

Zorro BY ANDY MANGELS Zorro swings his lightning-quick blade while atop his trusty steed Tempast (Tornado) on this promotional cel set-up. (INSET) Zorro's first appearance. Zorro TM & © Zorro Productions, Inc.

Welcome back to Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning, and prepare for a swashbuckling adventure with swords, masks, pendejos, and pirates as we take a trip to the Pueblo of Los Angeles in the 1700s! There, clad in a black costume, cloak cape, mask, and hat, a mysterious hero named Zorro fights against injustice—and for the rights of the people against tyrants who would rule them—astride his horse, Tornado. With three slashes of his sword, he leaves behind a “Z” mark etched onto all who oppose goodness, fairness, and decency! Like our last two RetroFan subjects, Tarzan and the Lone Ranger, Zorro has been a staple in multimedia since his 1920 movie debut. But as with the other heroes, Zorro has only rarely experienced Saturday morning superstardom… but when he did, he changed the fate of American animation forever! Grab the reins of your horse and the pommel of your sword as we ride into a look at Zorro’s history, including his few Saturday morning heroics!

ORIGINS OF ZORRO

Zorro’s origins date back to 1919, when the character first appeared, cover-billed, in the August and September issues of pulp magazine The All-Story, which promised a new hero in “The Curse of Capistrano” by author Johnston McCulley. “When romance

and rapiers ruled in Old California,” the cover script stated, and indeed, a pretty woman watched as a masked hero with sword and pistol charged to her defense. In the story, set in some vague period post-1781, Señor Zorro (“Mr. Fox”) is a dashing hero who avenges the helpless, aids the oppressed, and punishes cruel politicians. The villain of the tale is Captain Ramon, and both of them vie for the attention of the lovely Lolita Pulido, a noblewoman who has fallen on tough times. Also wooing her is Don Diego Vega, a dull fop who is the son of one of the richest landowners in the area. By the end of the story, readers knew what Diego’s mute manservant Bernardo and ally Friar Felipe knew: that Diego and Zorro are one and the same! The inspiration for Zorro has been traced to multiple sources, including the tales of Robin Hood, Reynard the Fox, and The Scarlet Pimpernel series of books by Baroness Emma Orczy. He also carries traces of real-life characters such as a Mexican-California bandit in the 1800s named Joaquin Murrieta, also known as “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”; an Irish rebel named William Lamport, who was executed in the Mexican inquisition in 1659; and Estanislao, a Native American of the Yokuts tribe who led revolts against both California Missions and the Mexican government in the early 1800s. RETROFAN

September 2022

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

to cheaper non-union labor abroad. The move was costing U.S. animators work, and IATSE 839, The Animation Guild, was not happy. And a storm was coming… Before we get to the brawl that changed the face of animation, let’s back up a bit. Already working on Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, and Batman for CBS, and Flash Gordon [see next issue for Flash! –ed.] for NBC, Filmation was riding high on four of the top six fictional heroes in public recognition. Only Superman—whom they had already done, and who was now animated by Hanna-Barbera—and Zorro were left. Zorro had never been done in animation before, and Lou Scheimer was able to sell it to CBS solely based on its fame. In 2012 interviews with me for the TwoMorrows book Lou Scheimer: Creating The Filmation Generation, Scheimer recalled, “We sold Zorro because it was a recognizable name. It was always difficult to sell shows that had never been seen or heard of before. But with this show, even if you had never seen one of Zorro’s adventures, you knew the name.” At the time, Filmation licensed the rights to the character from Gertz-Larson Productions, a small company run by John Gertz and Nancy Larson that would later become Zorro Productions, Inc. With Zorro sold to CBS, development proper began. Arthur Nadel was in charge of the writing department for the company. The scripts would mostly be written by Arthur Browne, Jr., along with Robby London, Ron and Sam Schultz, and Marty Wagner. “Robby was a fan of swashbuckling stories and told me he even had fencing lessons as a kid!” Scheimer said. “Arthur liked him a lot, and Ted Field, one of the guys in control at CBS, liked his stories as well.” In a 2006 interview with this author, Robby London recalled, “Zorro was the very first series that I worked on at Filmation; my first day there, I was writing premises for Zorro. It was very ironic because, as a child, I was obsessed with Zorro. I mean, so obsessed I made my parents give me fencing lessons as a young child. So, how appropriate that my first writing job would be on this property that I loved and knew very, very well. It was a good match. It was a network series for CBS at the time, and I remember when I first came in, they were having a very hard time getting story premises accepted by the network, and I had one of the first premises that the network just put right through. My premise got submitted to CBS, the executive at CBS, a guy named Ted Field, very tough guy to get stuff by, just seemed to like my work, and I was in. That was an episode called ‘Fort Ramon.’ I went on to write a couple of other episodes of Zorro. I loved the swashbuckling thing.” The basis for the show would take elements from throughout Zorro’s career, while establishing a few new spins of its own. Don Diego de la Vega was now from early Los Angeles directly, and his black horse’s name was changed from Tornado to Tempest. Instead of mute servant/helper Bernardo, Don Diego was aided in his 58

RETROFAN

September 2022

exploits as Zorro by a young swordsman named Miguel, who wore a colorful disguise as the hero Amigo, and rode a palomino horse. The romantic interest was Maria, although a sultry female pirate named Lucia established a flirtatious relationship with Zorro in later episodes. The lead villain was Captain Ramon, leader of a garrison of soldiers, which included Sergeant Gonzalez, a friend to the de la Vegas, but foe to Zorro. Gonzalez was a character in the original “The Curse of Capistrano” story, but had been replaced by Sergeant Garcia in Disney’s TV series. For the stories, other forces that stood against Zorro included pirates, bandits, corrupt military and government officials, and the fury of nature itself. According to Scheimer, “Zorro was the first animated show for certain—and possibly the first U.S. show of any sort—which featured a cast composed entirely of Spanish or Latino actors and actresses.” Indeed, only one other show until after the turn of the century used a significantly Latino voice cast: Ruby-Spears’ 1983 series Rubik the Amazing Cube, which featured three Hispanic children in its main cast. Filmation had long been a champion of diversity on its shows, already featuring the first African-American and Native-American leads on Saturday morning and regularly featuring other ethnic minorities in their casts. Zorro would be no different. Even the traditional informational/educational/“prosocial” messages at the end of each episode—which featured Zorro speaking directly to the viewing audiences—played on his heritage. He often talked about the Latin history of California, or taught viewers Spanish words or phrases. “It was nice to have an ethnic character that no one else had ever used quite like this before,”

andy mangels’ retro saturday morning

said Scheimer. “We did the tags that would appeal to a Spanish audience and yet also be of interest to a non-Spanish audience.” As for that cast? “Originally, we announced that Fernando Lamas would be the voice of Zorro, but in July, as production began, Lamas had to cancel out on us,” said Scheimer. “We chose Henry Darrow to replace him as the voice of Zorro and his alter ego, the wealthy Don Diego de la Vega.” Darrow thus became the first Hispanic actor in Zorro history to play the lead role in an American production. It seemed fitting, as Darrow had been a Zorro fan as a child, when his name had been Enrique Delgado. When Darrow auditioned for the voice role for CBS, the network worried that his voice sounded too sexy in a scene with a señorita when he said, “Buenas noches, señorita”; Scheimer told Darrow to play the part with less expressiveness and ardor. CBS was mollified, and Darrow was cast. Julio Medina voiced Zorro’s faithful sidekick, Miguel, a.k.a. Amigo, and the female leads on the show were Christina Avila, who played Diego’s love interest Maria de Varella, and Socorro Valdez, who played sexy pirate Lucia. Don Diamond—who had co-starred in the Fifties’ Zorro live-action Disney show—played the incompetent Sergeant Gonzales, essaying the role mostly for laughs. Also

featured were Eric Mason as the ruthless villain Captain Ramon; Carlos Rivas as Zorro’s father, Governor General Don Alejandro de la Vega; and Ismael “East” Carlo as the Mission’s priest, Fray Gaspar. Zorro was dressed in all black, like previous versions, with character designs by Kevin Frank, Mel Keefer, Janice Stocks, Tim Gula, and comic-book artist Russ Heath. Zorro himself bore a strong resemblance to live-action TV Zorro, Guy Williams. Captain Ramon also strongly resembled actor Basil Rathbone, who had played the character in the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro. Amusingly, Miguel was drawn to look very much like Zorro’s voice actor, Henry Darrow. A show’s opening narration was always Filmation’s chance to boil the base of their characters down for viewers to quickly understand, and Zorro’s was no different: “The mark of Zorro… Zorro! As Don Diego, I pretend to be afraid. But with a mask as my disguise, I ride into the night, and raise my sword in the name of justice! For I am… Zorro!” Network censors—also known as the Standards & Practices department—were ready to stand in the way of Zorro, but Filmation had an ace in their hand. As recalled by Scheimer, “As with Lone Ranger, we also had an issue with the possibility of violence portrayed by the good guy, as Zorro used a sword and slashed the letter ‘Z’

(CLOCKWISE, LEFT TO RIGHT) Henry Darrow provided the voice for Zorro/Don Diego de la Vega, model sheet image of Zorro riding Tempest, and a turn-around model sheet of Zorro. © Zorro Productions, Inc.

RETROFAN

September 2022

THE

CHARLTON COMPANION by JON B. COOKE

An ALL-NEW definitive history of Connecticut’s notorious all-in-one comic book company! Often disparaged as a second-rate funny-book outfit, Charlton produced a vast array of titles that span from the 1940s Golden Age to the Bronze Age of the ’70s in many genres, from Hot Rods to Haunted Love. The imprint experienced explosive bursts of creativity, most memorably the “Action Hero Line” edited by DICK GIORDANO in the 1960s, which featured the renowned talents of STEVE DITKO and a stellar team of creators, as well as the unforgettable ’70s “Bullseye” era that spawned E-Man and Doomsday +1, all helmed by veteran masters and talented newcomers—and serving as a training ground for an entire generation of comics creators thriving in an environment of complete creative freedom. From its beginnings with a handshake deal consummated in county jail, to the company’s accomplishments beyond comics, woven into this prose narrative are interviews with dozens of talented participants, including GIORDANO, DENNIS O’NEIL, ALEX TOTH, SANHO KIM, TOM SUTTON, PAT BOYETTE, NICK CUTI, JOHN BYRNE, MIKE ZECK, JOE STATON, SAM GLANZMAN, NEAL ADAMS, JOE GILL, and even some Derby residents who recall working in the sprawling company plant. Though it gave up the ghost over three decades ago, Charlton’s influence continues today with its Action Heroes serving as inspiration for ALAN MOORE’s cross-media graphic novel hit, WATCHMEN. By JON B. COOKE with MICHAEL AMBROSE & FRANK MOTLER. SHIPS NOV. 2022! (256-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-111-0

THE

TEAM-UP COMPANION by RetroFan’s MICHAEL EURY

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics— DC’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS, Marvel’s MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes. Go behind the scenes of your favorite team-up comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from NEAL ADAMS, JIM APARO, MIKE W. BARR, ELIOT R. BROWN, NICK CARDY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE GERBER, STEVEN GRANT, BOB HANEY, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, PAUL LEVITZ, RALPH MACCHIO, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARTIN PASKO, JOE RUBINSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated readers during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. By BACK ISSUE and RETROFAN editor MICHAEL EURY. (272-page SOFTCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-112-7 • NOW SHIPPING!

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History.

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation Publication Title: RetroFan Publication Number: 2576-7224 Filing Date: May 16, 2022 Issue Frequency: Bi-monthly Number of Issues Published Annually: 6 Annual Subscription Price: $68 Address of Known Office of Publication and General Business Office of Publisher: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 Contact Person: John Morrow Telephone: 919-449-0344 Editor: Michael Eury, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562 Publisher and Managing Editor: John Morrow, TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 Owner: John Morrow, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders: None Issue Date for Circulation Data: May 2022

(3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS®: 4897 (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail®): 60

Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 5683 No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 6100

I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/ or civil sanctions (including civil penalties). John Morrow, publisher

Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): 340 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): 0

Total Paid Distribution: 5297 Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: 107 (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0105(3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail): 0 (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 2 Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 107 Total Distribution: 5404 Copies not Distributed: 696 Total: 6100 Percent Paid: 98%

WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON Here’s He-Man! An early Masters of the Universe (MOTU) promo poster. Courtesy of Heritage. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe © Mattel, Inc.

BY WILL MURRAY An alliance between a toy company and an independent animation studio led to the wildly popular syndicated television program He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and a billion-dollar merchandizing phenomenon that continues to this day. The concept burst upon the world in 1982 as a Mattel Toys playset. Previously, Mattel had passed on licensing Star Wars toys—consequently losing a small fortune in revenue. So the company went looking for something similar in order to reclaim market share. Conan the Barbarian had been a hit film in 1982, and before that Thundarr the Barbarian had run for two seasons as a Saturday morning cartoon on ABC, ending in 1981. The “sword and sorcery” sub-genre, pioneered by pulp writer Robert E. Howard in the Thirties, was enjoying a revival in virtually all media. Howard’s

Conan, King Kull, and related characters were selling millions of paperbacks and Marvel comic books. Initially, animated commercials were planned to promote the Mattel action figures. But when Mattel’s Tom Kalinske pitched the new line to Toys R Us, he was rebuffed. “Boys don’t read,” was the cold response. On the spot, the Mattel executive explained that a He-Man cartoon series was in the works. But one wasn’t. He had to act fast. Filmation executive producer Lou Scheimer took the call. “The Mattel deal actually started right after we did [the sci-fi cartoon series] Blackstar. They came to me and they had this product. They had this deal with the Conan people. I didn’t know they had this guy coming out of the forest with a sword, and [they] wanted to know if I could sell it to the networks. I said yeah, I would try. I really didn’t like the story; it was pretty much a long toy commercial.” The project might not have gone anywhere except for fact that Westinghouse acquired Filmation, improving the company’s financial strength. Scheimer said, “We went back to Mattel and told them if they let us develop it the way we think is appropriate, give us a shot at it, we would try to sell it into syndication. And, on top of that, I got Westinghouse to finance it!” Fortunately, FCC chairman Mark Fowler had just relaxed the rules to permit toy-based cartoons so long as the toys were not advertised on the show they inspired, freeing up Group W and Filmation to launch the show. Scheimer oversaw the redevelopment of the characters and conceptualized the series. The first working title, “Lords of Power,” was rejected as sounding too religious. Originally, the Mattel concept had called for a “He-Man Trio,” consisting of a hero who would dress as a barbarian, a soldier, or a spaceman. This proved cumbersome, so the focus shifted to the barbarian as the star. Designer Roger Sweet produced the first prototype, making He-Man resemble a helmeted Viking. This was rejected for a more friendly blond-haired look. Mattel had commissioned writer Donald F. Glut to script a quartet of He-Man mini-comics that created a backstory and introduced additional characters destined to become subsequent toys. But Scheimer thought Glut’s grim post-apocalyptic concepts unsuitable for his vision of a kid-friendly program. RETROFAN

September 2022

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

“I went back to Mattel with the concept of Prince Adam, a father, son, mother, a family,” Scheimer explained. “Well, they didn’t know what to do with it, but we made a deal with them to give us creative control. We financed it, and it was a good deal for us—the money that came in from syndication, which was good back then—but it was all luck. If the show hadn’t worked, it would have been death. We ended up doing about 223 episodes. That’s a lot of stuff!” During this period, Mattel turned to DC Comics for cross-promotion. Out of this collaboration emerged a Masters of the Universe (MOTU) miniseries preceded by an issue of DC Comics Presents where Superman visited Eternia to help He-Man in his ongoing struggle against Skeletor, and a 16-page preview of the miniseries, which further developed the nascent MOTU milieu. The preview was included as a free insert in select DC titles cover-dated November 1982. “We received very little input from Mattel,” writer Paul Kupperberg recalled. “They really hadn’t developed much beyond character names and powers and some basic background information; the details were left up to us.”

REJECTED BY THE NETWORKS

It was not the smoothest launch. Scheimer expected to sell the series to one of the three major networks for airing in the Saturday morning TV time period. All three passed, one objecting to Filmation’s pro-social approach. It was a blessing in disguise. “If we were doing it for a network,” the producer later admitted, “they would be pounding for more action, more stuff on screen— keep those kids watching! By going into syndication, we were able to get more content, humanity, real personality, fun into the shows.” The lifting of the FCC ban on TV cartoons based on toys was another key development. Although the restriction no longer applied, executives understood that they still had to be careful how they presented the series. “This is because when Filmation decided to do He-Man,” explained scripter Mel Gilden. “[T]hey went in knowing that the various TV watchdog groups would be watching He-Man very closely. It’s a guy with a sword, after all. He was basically Conan with magic. And so what Filmation did was impose their own standards. They hired a child psychologist and carefully went over each script to ensure there wasn’t anything in it to forestall any problems that they might have had right at the source.” Lou Scheimer’s background animating the likes of Superman [coming in RetroFan #25–ed.] and Star Trek [see issue #1–ed.] served him well. “We created a super-hero character who has a family, responsibilities and an alter ego. He gets into situations that try him as a human being, and that gives us an exciting, enter72

RETROFAN

September 2022

Model sheets for He-Man and some of his MOTU cohorts. Courtesy of Heritage. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe © Mattel, Inc..

taining way to present kids with certain problems. We worked hard on getting values into the shows. It’s easy to do a violent show, but who wants to? The figures look inherently violent, and I didn’t want action for the sake of action. First of all, it’s not right. And second, it just doesn’t work. Kids want some content, some inherent social value. We try not to have He-Man hurt any living creature, and the good guys always win. He-Man is heroic, but not omnipotent. He does make mistakes.” It worked. Debuting as a five days a week program, in September 1983, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe grabbed young viewers and didn’t let go. “The year we went on the air, our ratings were phenomenal,” claimed Scheimer. “Advertisers loved it, because with no significant children’s programming off-network, they had been relegated to the Saturday-morning ghetto. It became apparent that this was a much better market for us, both financially and creatively.” Sixty-five episodes were produced that first year. It was a magic number because it meant any single episode aired only four times in a calendar year.

Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon

There was one hitch. The owners of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian sued over what it perceived as an attempt to usurp their character. They lost, but for years false rumors that Mattel had been inspired by Conan circulated. In July 1982, Lou Scheimer had attended the National Association of Television Company Executives, giving the trade their first glimpse of the He-Man universe—and leading to an amusing encounter. “I had all of our drawings and some storyboards there,” Scheimer recalled. “It was interesting. People came up and they saw these drawings. They liked these characters. We talked about how we were going to do them with pro-social values built into the show. I looked at one guy, and he was looking at these drawings. I said, ‘That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger!’ And he was looking at these drawings and [going] Hmmm. You could tell he was ticked off!” Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian was still in theaters.

TV’S TOY BOX

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe opened the door for a new approach to syndicated animation, where the program was toy-driven. It also blazed the trail for other syndicated action cartoon shows that followed, luring audiences and advertising revenue from Saturday morning—ultimately forcing the networks to abandon Saturday morning as a programming block for original cartoons. “I was interested in creating a new marketplace,” Scheimer elaborated, “because I thought Saturday morning was becoming a dreadful ghetto of bad concepts and cheap shots. I don’t think the audience is well-served.” He-Man was Prince Adam of the Planet Eternia, whose running war with Skeletor of Snake Mountain over control of

Castle Grayskull drove events. Grayskull was the repository of universal knowledge, which the Elders of Eternia placed there for safekeeping. Skeletor sought this knowledge, which Prince Adam was sworn to defend. By lifting his sword and shouting, “By the power of Grayskull!”, Prince Adam transformed into He-Man, a superhuman warrior— and the most powerful man in the universe. “I have the power!” was his signature saying after each transformation. Each rival possessed half of the Power Sword. Only by using both swords simultaneously as giant keys could Castle Grayskull and its secrets be opened. Their struggle was over possession of both blades. “Interestingly enough,” observed Filmation staff writer Robby London, who scripted the pilot, “there was some confusion about the phrase Masters of the Universe. I don’t think that Mattel or Filmation was really clear on who was being referred to in the phrase. Whether it was the villains, or whether it was the good guys, or both together. I suspect there was some sort of shift or revision on that thinking, because my first script referred to the villains as the Masters of the Universe. And subsequent scripts referred to the heroes. But in my personal mind, as I think of it today, they’re all the Masters of the Universe. The good Masters versus the evil Masters.” Originally, Skeletor was from another dimension. But as the series evolved and expanded, his backstory was revised to hint that he is the half-brother of King Randor, Prince Adam’s father. Skeletor soon acquired a cohort of fellow villains, among them Beast-Man, Trap-Jaw, King Hiss, and others. The mini-comics that preceded the TV show and established the original barbaric milieu were increasingly ignored. Scheimer dismissed them as “monstrous.”

(LEFT) He-Man and Skeletor premiered in comics in a Superman team-up in DC Comics Presents #47 (July 1982). (CENTER) Soon thereafter, DC published a MOTU miniseries. (RIGHT) A few years later, Marvel Comics briefly published the series as part of its kid-friendly Star Comics line. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe © Mattel, Inc. Superman and DC Comics Presents TM & © DC Comics. Marvel logo © Marvel.

RETROFAN

September 2022