July 2024 No. 33 $10.95
You get a big delight in every bite!
THE HEYDAY OF HOSTESS
The
Bionic Duo!
LINDSAY WAGNER & LEE MAJORS By Herbie J Pilato
You’ll flip over
MODESTY BLAISE
FANTASTIC FOUR on Saturday mornings
: S TL s O E Year H E rly H Ea e W Th TV Westerns • Movie Icons vs. Axis Powers • San Diego Chicken & more! Featuring Andy Mangels • Will Murray • Scott Saavedra • Scott Shaw! • Mark Voger • Michael Eury Lee Majors/Lindsay Wagner photograph courtesy of the Classic TV Preservation Society. Spider-Man and Fantastic Four © Marvel. Modesty Blaise © Modesty Blaise Ltd. Hot Wheels © Mattel. Hostess Twinkies © Hostess Brands, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Satiate Your Sinister Side!
“Greetings, creep culturists! For my debut
All characters and properties TM & © their respective owners.
issue, I, the CRYPTOLOGIST (with the help of FROM THE TOMB editor PETER NORMANTON), have exhumed the worst Horror Comics excesses of the 1950s, Killer “B” movies to die for, and the creepiest, kookiest toys that crossed your boney little fingers as a child! But wait... do you dare enter the House of Usher, or choose sides in the skirmish between the Addams Family and The Munsters?! Can you stand to gaze at Warren magazine frontispieces by this issue’s cover artist BERNIE WRIGHTSON, or spend some Hammer Time with that studio’s most frightening films? And if Atlas pre-Code covers or terrifying science-fiction are more than you can take, stay away! All this, and more, is lurching toward you in TwoMorrows Publishing’s latest, and most decrepit, magazine—just for retro horror fans, and featuring my henchmen WILL MURRAY, MARK VOGER, BARRY FORSHAW, TIM LEESE, PETE VON SHOLLY, and STEVE and MICHAEL KRONENBERG!” (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99
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CRYPTOLOGY #2
CRYPTOLOGY #3
CRYPTOLOGY #4
The Cryptologist and his ghastly little band have cooked up more grisly morsels, including: ROGER HILL’s conversation with our diabolical cover artist DON HECK, severed hand films, pre-Code comic book terrors, the otherworldly horrors of Hammer’s Quatermass, another Killer “B” movie classic, plus spooky old radio shows, and the horror-inspired covers of the Shadow’s own comic book. Start the ghoul-year with retro-horror done right by FORSHAW, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, RICHARD HAND, VON SHOLLY, and editor PETER NORMANTON.
This third wretched issue inflicts the dread of MARS ATTACKS upon you—the banned cards, the model kits, the despicable comics, and a few words from the film’s deranged storyboard artist PETE VON SHOLLY! The chilling poster art of REYNOLD BROWN gets brought up from the Cryptologist’s vault, along with a host of terrifying puppets from film, and more comic books they’d prefer you forget! Plus, more Hammer Time, JUSTIN MARRIOT on obscure ’70s fear-filled paperbacks, another Killer “B” film, and more to satiate your sinister side!
Our fourth putrid tome treats you to ALEX ROSS’ gory lowdown on his Universal Monsters paintings! Hammer Time brings you face-to-face with the “Brides of Dracula”, and the Cryptologist resurrects 3-D horror movies and comics of the 1950s! Learn the origins of slasher films, and chill to the pre-Code artwork of Atlas’ BILL EVERETT and ACG’s 3-D maestro HARRY LAZARUS. Plus, another Killer “B” movie and more awaits retro horror fans, by NORMANTON, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, VOGER, and VON SHOLLY!
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The Crazy Cool Culture We Grew Up With
25 Issue #33 June 2024
Columns and Special Features
63 32
3
Retro Television The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman – Fiftieth Anniversary
15
Scott Saavedra’s Secret Sanctum The Heyday of Hostess
25
47
33
Voger’s Vault of Vintage Varieties Movie Icons vs. Axis Powers
33
Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning The Fantastic Four and The Thing
47
72
Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon TV Westerns Ride into the Sunset
58
Retro Toys Hot Wheels: The Early Years
3
63 Retro Comic Strips Modesty Blaise
72 Oddball World of Scott Shaw! The San Diego Chicken
Departments
2 Retrotorial
22 Too Much TV Quiz Sign-off phrases
32 Celebrity Crushes Jerry Lewis
79 RetroFanmail
80 ReJECTED
58
RetroFan™ issue 33, June 2024 (ISSN 2576-7224) is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 4490344. 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: $73 Economy US, $111 International, $29 Digital Only. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner photograph credit: Classic TV Preservation Society. The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman © NBCUniversal. Hostess brands © J.M. Smucker Company. Hot Wheels® © Mattel. Hot Wheels cover photograph credit: Mike Pigott. Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four © Marvel. Modesty Blaise © Modesty Blaise Ltd. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2024 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
BY MICHAEL EURY
Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow CONTRIBUTORS Peter Bosch Michael Eury Brad Farb Andy Mangels Will Murray Mike Pigott Herbie J Pilato Scott Saavedra Scott Shaw! Mark Voger DESIGNER Scott Saavedra PROOFREADER John Morrow SPECIAL THANKS Classic TV Preservation Society Hake’s Auctions Heritage Auctions San Diego Padres VERY SPECIAL THANKS Ted Giannoulas Brian Narelle Kenneth Johnson Lindsay Wagner
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RETROFAN
June 2024
The sound effects. That’s what most of us first remember when recalling Seventies’ television’s handsomest super-heroes, the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman—those “beeps” and “doots” and “clangs” that told us that Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers were using their make-them-better-than-before artificial limbs and body parts on missions for the OSI’s Oscar Goldman. I suspect I’m not the only RetroFan who mimicked those sound effects when running in pretend-slow motion, replicating Col. Austin’s “60 mph” top speed, which we almost always saw on screen in slo-mo. There’s so much to love about The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and we’re leading off this ish with a 50th anniversary salute to creator Martin Caidin’s Col. Steve Austin, everyone’s favorite bionic man. In his footsteps have followed many other cybernetic heroes— including Marvel Comics’ Deathlok the Demolisher and DC Comics’ Cyborg, the latter of whom shares the same name with Caidin’s 1974 novel which introduced Steve Austin to us. Hollywood historian Herbie J Pilato, fresh off RetroFan #31’s crowd-pleasing profile of the beloved star of television’s Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery, returns this ish with his retrospective of the Bionic Duo—and with the concept’s enduring popularity, you can bet on more remakes and reimaginings in the future. But there’s much more than bionics in this issue, into which we’ve jammed enough content to keep you holed up in a warm, fuzzy pop culture coma for hours to come. How many of you played with Hot Wheels? I was a First Generation Hot Wheels buyer (the Beatnik Bandit blew my young mind!) and to this day still own my Hot Wheels Fan Club Membership Card issued in 1969. Diecast toy journalist Mike Pigott drops in for a look at the early years of Mattel’s perennially popular mini racing car line. Another guest author, Peter Bosch, offers a mesmerizing look at the celebrated comic strip, Modesty Blaise. This was a feature I’d heard a lot about—my former boss at DC Comics, Dick Giordano, used to gush over Modesty Blaise, and as you’ll read, even got a shot at drawing the globetrotting heroine in a DC graphic novel—but I knew very little about it… until Peter’s superb piece. That’s one of the many joys I have editing RetroFan—no matter how much I think I may know about pop culture, there’s always so much to learn. We’re lucky to have experts like Peter, Mike, and Herbie share their passions with NEXT ISSUE us. Hey, in case you regular readers think ye ed’s ignoring our regular columnists, think again! The mega-talented Misters Mangels, Murray, Saavedra, Shaw!, and Voger are firing on all cylinders (as usual), bringing with them the animated Fantastic Four, TV Westerns, Hostess treats, the San Diego Chicken, and Axis-fighting cinema stars in fun, fact-filled features that’ll broaden your smile and your mind. I’m taking a breather from my “RetroFad” column for a while, but the feature will return in a future issue. In the meantime, with the aforementioned material and a few other joys awaiting in this issue, you certainly have no shortage of reading material awaiting. So get ready for another groovy grab-bag of the crazy, cool culture we grew up with!
RETRO TELEVISION
Happy 50th Bionic Anniversary to
Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers
A Golden Cybernetic Celebration of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman The Vietnam War had ended, as had the Korean War, World War II, and World War I long before. Man had not yet conquered space, but he at least landed on the Moon. The Women’s Liberation Movement was in full swing decades after those like Susan B. Anthony laid the groundwork for female empowerment. The trials and tribulations of the Sixties were replaced by the slightly more tranquil, but still tumultuous Seventies. The time was prime for a new set of super-heroes, and what better place to introduce them than prime-time television? Astronaut Col. Steve Austin, as played by Lee Majors, became The Six Million Dollar Man — the character and the sci-fi TV series of the same name which originally aired on ABC from 1973 to 1978. Former tennis champion Jaime Sommers, as portrayed by Lindsay Wagner, became The Bionic Woman — the character and the spin-off show of the same name that was first screened on ABC and then NBC from 1975 to 1978. In each case, became is the operative word,
[Editor’s note: This material is edited and expanded material from Herbie J Pilato’s “Special Commemorative Edition” of The Bionic Book: The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman Reconstructed.]
BY HERBIE J PILATO while operative itself is an applicable term. Steve and Jaime, born human, became, as in transformed into, operatives, as in special government agents. Steve and Jaime’s core employment force? The OSO, the Office of Strategic Operations, later known as the OSI, the Office of Strategic Investigations. In the original 90-minute Six Million Dollar pilot film, which premiered March 7, 1973, Darren McGavin gave voice to Oliver Spencer, the OSO’s supervising official. When both The Six Million Dollar Man [SM] and The Bionic Woman [BW] went to series, Richard Anderson as Oscar Goldman became Steve and Jaime’s ultimate government go-to-guy.
(ABOVE) Fifty years ago, Lee Majors first electrified audiences as Col. Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man… and before long he was joined by Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman! The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman © NBCUniversal. Photos courtesy of the Classic TV Preservation Society (CTVPS).
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retro television
was ghost-written by a then-unknown Steven Bochco, who went on to create and produce Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and the controversial hit, NYPD Blue (Emmy winners, all). The manned space shuttle program was diminished. Col. Steve Austin, the youngest astronaut to have moonwalked, was demoted in rank to an experimental flier with the U.S. Air Force. Highly educated, Col. Austin was considered a genius by his fellow astronauts. He maintained five academic degrees in all, including a Masters in aerodynamics, astronautical engineering, and, surprisingly enough, history. Physically fit, Austin enjoyed wrestling, boxing, and fencing, while achieving a black belt in judo and Aikido. He speaks conversational Russian and fluent Spanish. Before joining the Air Force, Steve had a tour of duty with the Army in Vietnam, where he was a chopper pilot. (LEFT) Lee Majors as In 1973, at six-foot-one and Steve Austin and Richard 32 years old, Austin’s trial-run Anderson as Oscar aircraft, the M3F5 (the HL-10 in Goldman in a 1974 ABC-TV the series; the M2-F2 in reality) publicity photo promoting was annihilated in a horrific The Six Million Dollar mishap, and Steve was nearly Man. Courtesy of Heritage. killed. Left a multiple amputee, (RIGHT) Majors and his left arm, both legs and his Lindsay Wagner in their left eye were gone (in the series, signature roles. Courtesy of his right arm was severed). CritCTVPS. ically injured, he was remade as The Six Million Dollar Man. Now bionic, Steve has superhuman strength in both legs, his right arm, and his left eye offers him super-sight. He can also run 60 miles an hour. Yet, he’s human. “What happened to Steve in that crash, is what happens to pilots all the time,” professed Martin Caidin. In fact, the footage used in SM’s opening credit sequence is that of an authentic aircraft accident. On May 10, 1967, NASA lifting body pilot Bruce Peterson, 33, crashed his M2-F2 while attempting to land at Edwards Air Force Base [California], then commanded by Dave Edwards. Distracted by a rescue helicopter and blown off course by crosswinds, his flying machine hit the ground at 250 MPH and rolled over six times, bouncing along from wing tip to wing tip before coming to rest on its flat back, minus its canopy, main gear, and right vertical fin. The crash wreaked terrible facial injuries on the pilot, whose skull was fractured and whose torso was battered by fragmenting sections of the aircraft’s nose. Each time the vehicle rolled, a stream of high-velocity lakebed clay assaulted Peterson’s face. Apparently, if he had just had a second more, he would have landed the aircraft safely. “About what is seen on the TV screens every week is what I remember,” said Peterson, in a 1975 Associated Press interview. “That partial footage was taken by the cockpit cameras. I blacked out about the same time the cameras stopped working. I was landing, fighting a crosswind that had sprung up, when I saw a 6
RETROFAN
June 2024
helicopter in my way. I tried to avoid it, and the landing gear caught in the dry lakebed — and right there I thought that was it. The next thing I vaguely remember is being trapped in the vehicle upside-down.” Though Peterson and other real-life navigators were never fortunate enough to undergo cybernetic reconstruction, the Bionic scribe set out to explore the emotional impact of their experiences, against a backboard of science fiction. But who would Peterson’s essential TV alter ego? At first, Caidin envisioned actor Monte Markham in the role of Steve Austin. Markham, then best known for the short-lived high-concept
sitcom, The Second Hundred Years, had recently played Perry Mason in a failed 1974 TV reboot of the original Raymond Burr series. But according to Caidin, studio executives believed Markham’s eyes were too “steely” to play a hero. While Markham would later surface in the Bionic Universe as the villainous Seven Million Dollar Man in two SM episodes, there was clearly only one man for the job to play Steve Austin: Lee Majors. Already a TV staple, Majors had supporting roles in the mid-Sixties through the early Seventies in TV Westerns like The Big Valley, The Men from Shiloh, and later, the courtroom drama Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. In Law, he played Jess Brandon, young legal sidekick to Arthur Hiller, just as James Brolin had been the young Dr. Steve Kiley associate to Robert Young’s lead on Marcus Welby, M.D. And while the Marshall and Welby shows were produced by David Victor (with Lindsay Wagner guest-starring in both, pre-Jaime Sommers), The Six Million Dollar Man presented Lee with the opportunity to shine with his first starring role. “I’ve advanced one banana at a time,” Majors once observed. “On The Big Valley, I was fourth banana behind Barbara Stanwyck. On The Men from Shiloh, I was third banana to James Drury and Doug McClure. On Owen Marshall, I was second banana. And now, finally, I’ve made it to the top.” Additionally, acting in Owen Marshall was not a pleasant experience for Majors. He was literally not suited to the business-like
retro television
role of Jess Brandon. “One thing that bothered me about the show,” he said, “…is that I’m a country boy from Kentucky. I never really learned how to tie a necktie.” He liked the action and staying in shape. But on the Marshall law show, “all the exercise I ever got,” he said, “…was walking from the counsel table to the judge’s bench in the courtroom on Sound Stage 27 [on the Universal Studios lot where both SM and BW would film].” “It was basically Arthur Hill’s show,” Majors observed. “I had so little to do — and so much time off — that the series made a great golfer out of me.” The relaxed screen-time on Marshall also allowed Majors to appear on two shows at the same time. As Richard Anderson would play Oscar Goldman on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman (even when the latter show switched networks from ABC to NBC in its final season), Majors acted in Marshall, while filming the second two monthly pilot episodes of SM. Then finally, when Steve Austin began filming weekly adventures in mid-season 1974, Majors became a full-time bionic man. And whereas the Jess Brandon part on Law was mis-tailored for Lee, the Austin role on Six Mill fit him like a bionic glove, as did the props for the character’s mechanical parts. As the actor once recalled, Steve’s bionic arm was composed of “plastic skin that looks and feels like real skin. It’s battery-operated. When they hooked it to my shoulder, I could raise and lower it, and even turn the wrist.” In effect, The Six Million Dollar Man was the role Lee Majors was born to play. As “a man, barely alive,” Steve Austin was rebuilt after a horrific accident. He was half-man/half-machine, re-made stronger… faster… better..., just as the opening narration (shared by Harve Bennett and Richard Anderson) would relay. The Austin story was a science fiction story, but told in a credible scientific way with a sensitive human touch. The role is an actor’s dream; to play a super-hero with texture; a history; layers of emotion; a developed physique with a developed soul who rose above what could have continued to be a bitter assessment of a traumatic physical transformation. Steve’s desire to live outweighed self-pity or any extensive emotion of being or feeling different. For Steve Austin, his accident was real. Disabled, emotionally as well as physically, he was alone. Jaime was not there for him like he would be for her during her traumatic human-to-cyborg
transformation. The central support system of having a mutual half-human/half-machine counterpart was missing. Steve would help Jaime through the emotional anguish, the physical pain, and the countless hours of therapy for the mind and body. But who would help him? Austin was without the cybernetic kindred spirit to literally keep him from falling apart. (At least, for now.) Steve awakened in the hospital, where he found himself following his nightmarish accident, and would attempt suicide. The cybernetic physicians were given few options: they were forced to keep him anesthetized. While Steve was comatose (and incapable of judgment), the OSI decided for him that he would become the first to test the newest methods in artificial limb connection. Steve gave his blessing to the OSI to move forward with the experimental operation. But afterward, he was still somewhat surprised with the results. Cognizant, and highly restrained, he was told of his new capabilities. He soon felt intensely isolated and very different. He became unaffected, disagreeable, and entirely unresponsive, even to the allure of his very attractive nurse. Though physically capable, he may have believed his sexual ability to be less than perfect. Or maybe he was thinking of Jaime? (No, she was not yet in the picture; not for the viewer, anyway.) Eventually, Steve pulled up his space boots and left the self-pity party. With his superior engineer’s acumen in full stride, he offered assistance to the surrounding bionic medical community, formulating cybernetic limb procedures that had never before been fathomed. In due time, Steve responded to the nurse’s sincere affection. They became sexually involved. To his employers, albeit, those responsible for saving his life, he evolved into the super government operative recognized as Steve Austin. In the big picture scheme of things, as an aesthetic and workable consequence, the mechanical metamorphosis of both Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers allowed The Six Million Dollar Man and eventually The Bionic Woman to explore prejudice as one of several core themes. For the moment, however, the ratings for the initial Six Million Dollar Man movie were significant to warrant not yet a weekly series, but two additional pilot movies: Wine, Women and War (original air date: October 20, 1973) and The Solid Gold Kidnapping (November 17, 1973). ABC scheduled the follow-up films as alternate choices for its new ABC Suspense Movie franchise on Saturday nights, airing opposite the CBS Seventies powerhouse line-up including All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Wine and Gold did respectably in the ratings, while from a creative standpoint, they were different than the original pilot and the weekly series that was yet to come. Somehow, Steve had gained a James Bond 007 mystique (helped along by guest star and former Bond girl Britt Elkland in Wine). His good-ol’-boy image and
Just look at all this stuff you could buy featuring Steve and Jaime! And this barely scratches the surface of SM and BW collectibles from the Seventies (and beyond)—see our “Super Collector” article in RetroFan #8 for more info! Courtesy of Heritage.
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We’re charmed and walk away with an inspirational thought and positive reinforcement in the process. In this way, the Bionic shows explore certain various strengths. The strength in appeal of two of television’s top classic shows and their stars. The strength in stamina that was summoned by the cast and crew getting the programs on the air. The made-for-TV bionic strength that became legendary due to the twin series. As Lee Majors assessed early on when The Six Million Dollar Man first aired, “We’ll only stay on as long as we can keep up the fancy footwork. We must stay on the side of the line where people say, ‘There could be a Steve Austin with the technology developed by space medicine, and he could do those miraculous things!’ It’s a thin line.” But that has become stronger through the decades. The appeal for both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman is unending. Whereas both shows completed their original runs in the spring of 1978, they continued on into syndicated reruns. Steve and Jaime remained disengaged with any new adventures until a trilogy of Bionic TV reunion movies, which became appropriate as the Bionic multiverse optimally began with three TV pilot movies (all of which were shepherded by Richard Anderson). The initial reunion, Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, premiered on NBC on May 17, 1987. Written by Michael Sloan and Bruce Lansbury (brother to Angela, who produced her unstoppable Murder, She Wrote series), and directed by SM veteran Ray Austin, this first film introduced the world to Michael Austin, Steve Austin’s son, played by Tom Schanley. In this story, Michael is bionically transformed (bionic limbs and laser-power eye), while Lee Major’s real-life son Lee Majors II makes a guest appearance (not as Steve’s son). Other guest stars include the Oscar-winning Martin Landau (from TV’s original Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999), Gary Lockwood (from the second pilot of the original Star Trek series), and future Seinfeld/Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston. Then came Bionic Showdown, which also aired on NBC, this time on April 30, 1989, with a script by Michael Sloan and Brock Choy. Directed by Bionic veteran Alan Levi, this second reunion introduces future movie superstar Sandra Bullock as Kate Mason, The Bionic Girl, and features other notable actors like Jeff Yagher, Geraint Wyn Davies (Airwolf, Dracula: The Series), and Robert Lansing (“Gary Seven” from “Assignment Earth” episode of the original Star Trek series). But most importantly, this time out Steve proposes to Jaime. A few years later, CBS steps up to the plate and airs Bionic Ever After? on November 29, 1994. In this outing, Steve Stafford, former assistant to Lee Majors during the original SM series, takes over as director of another script by Michael Sloan. Some notable guest stars here include Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart (from TV’s Lost in Space), and from the original Battlestar: Galactica franchise, while Dave Thomas, of Wendy’s restaurant fame, makes a cameo. And to the content of Bionic fans everywhere, Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers finally get cybernetically hitched, as in married, sealing the eternal bionic spring of their appeal. After the reunion films, a short-lived, noble, if failed effort to resurrect The Bionic Woman in a new weekly series (without a “The” 14
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Jawsmania—the subject of RetroFan #17’s “RetroFad” column—had such a grip on the public that the Six Million Dollar Man Season Five opener, “Sharks,” a two-parter, was combined into a theatrical movie. How many of you RetroFans saw Sharks in the theater? © Universal Pictures. Courtesy of Heritage.
in the title), starring Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers aired on NBC late Fall/Winter in 2007. Like Sandra Bullock’s Kate Mason, Ryan’s new Jaime had more integrated bionics (as well as both super-sight as well as super-hearing). But the essence of what made the original Bionic Woman so remarkable (e.g. Lindsay Wagner) was sorely missing. In the time since that unsuccessful Bionic Woman reboot, there has been inconsistent talk, rumors, and development for years of an intended Six BILLION Dollar Man motion picture. First, there was a potential parody starring Jim Carrey, which didn’t happen (thank heavens), and then another planned attempt with Mark Wahlberg, which also never transpired. Assuredly, the multi-million-dollar Bionic universe will one day somehow expand either on the small or big screen or maybe somehow in some other media method that had yet to be invented in what would be the ultimate A.I. experiment, to say the least. Until then, the original Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman television adventures will continue to have a place in the loyal legion of hearts of billions of Bionic fans around the cybernetic world. Born in Rochester, New York, writer, producer, actor/performer, and TV personality HERBIE J PILATO graduated from Nazareth University in the spring of 1983, with a trimester in Television and Film at UCLA. One year later, began his career as an NBC Page at the network’s facility in Burbank, CA, and was cast in bit roles on General Hospital, The Bold and the Beautiful, Highway to Heaven, and The Golden Girls. In 1992, Pilato published his first book, The Bewitched Book, followed by other classic TV companions. He then began producing and appearing on retro media documentaries for Bravo, A&E, TLC, and the Reelz Channel, while he’s also done the same for several DVD and Blu-ray retro releases for Sony, Warner Bros., and Universal (including the award-winning Blu-rays for The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman). Pilato is also the Founder of the Classic TV Preservation Society (CTVPS), a nonprofit that advocates for the positive social effects of classic TV, and has hosted, co-created, and co-executive-produced his own TV talk show, Then Again with Herbie J Pilato (which is still streaming on Shout! TV and Amazon Prime). In addition to the “Special Commemorative Edition” of The Bionic Book, Pilato has authored Retro Active Television (which the Los Angeles Book Festival named 2023’s “Book of the Year,” and subsequently, Pilato, “Author of the Year”), Connery, Sean Connery, Mary: The Mary Tyler Moore Story, and more. His upcoming books include One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg and Christmas TV Memories: Nostalgic Holiday Favorites of the Small Screen. For more information, visit www.HerbieJPilato.com.
SCOTT SAAVEDRA’S SECRET SANCTUM
The Heyday of
Hostess BY SCOTT SAAVEDRA The heyday of Hostess® is when you were a kid. A time when you were most open to new taste treat sensations and didn’t give a fig about empty calories. For many of us, that could be during the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties. Except for me, I didn’t get Hostess treats as a little kid (that I recall). But the days of you ending your junk food innocence and getting a tasty introduction to a Twinkie® or a Ding Dong® or a Ho Ho® is your Hostess Heyday. You lucky, lucky you. I guess that’s that. Enjoy the rest of the magazine RetroPals! Easiest article to write ever. Of course, you know that there has to be more. Actually, if you were the right age in that junk food sweet spot during the Fifties to the Eighties, you were a witness to the Heyday of Hostess (originally a brand and now a company name). The success of the Twinkie snack cakes were the most important driver of the Hostess heyday. But the story of Hostess is about more than just Twinkies. It’s the story of sweet snacks remaining popular over generations. It’s a story of junk food becoming popular culture icons. It is a mighty chronicle of loss, loyalty, and obsession (yes indeed). A saga packed with advertising (some of it making questionable promises). A uniquely American narrative (thesaurus. com folks, I utterly, wholly recommend it) of how our tastes and lives have changed over more than a century. But mainly… It’s the sometimes weird, wild, but never ribald account of some of our favorite Hostess snacks that moms (not mine) would put into school lunchboxes.
FAMILY BUSINESSES
James Ward and his son Hugh came to America from Ireland and began a modest bakery in New York City in 1849. At press time, that’s 175 years ago. The route from there to the Hostess of today
(LEFT) Mom goes a bit nuts grabbing up all of the snack cakes in this screen capture from a 1970-era Hostess® commercial (who shops like this?). (INSERT) Howdy Doody shills for Hostess in a more subdued manner in this 1950-ish screen capture from the Howdy Doody Show [say howdy to Howdy in RetroFan #31]. Hostess © Hostess Brands, LLC. Howdy
involves a fair amount of business activity that’s not as interesting as snacks. It is important to note that the Ward Doody Show © NBC Television. family did get the ball of dough rolling. Hugh Ward’s son Robert moved to New York in the early 20th Century to found the Ward Bread Company. By 1911, two new Ward baking factories were opened; one in Brooklyn and the other in the Bronx. According to a large ad in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Nov. 7, 1911), the factories were the “brightest, whitest, cleanest places in all New York.” Food safety was on the public’s mind in those days and they were invited to visit the factories to see just how clean they were.
DON’T EAT THAT! PART ONE
Upton Sinclair was a writer and activist who wrote the novel The Jungle dealing with, among other issues, unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry. First published in 1906, the book kicked up such a ruckus that it led President Theodore Roosevelt to press for the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1907). This was beneficial to the general public, but Sinclair was not universally beloved. Time magazine once claimed that Upton Sinclair had “every gift except humor and silence.” Ouch.
FAMILY CONSUMPTION
Ward’s Bread Company advertised its product as 100% pure, and that was thanks to their amazing bread-making machinery which didn’t require a single human hand to touch the bread loaves along RETROFAN
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the way. The company would continue to stress purity and cleanliness in the its advertising. Salesmen wore white outfits and gloves and drove electric trucks (circa 1911) to make deliveries in a move away from unsanitary horsedrawn vehicles. Ward’s Bread was soon purchased by James Ward’s great-grandson, who had started his own company, United Bakeries (there are other versions of this story; bread history is inconsistent). United had purchased some smaller bakeries as well, and then renamed the whole group the Continental Baking Company. One of the purchases was the Taggart Baking Company. Taggart’s signature product was Wonder Bread®, and it would have a big impact on the success of the company (once shoppers became more comfortable buying factory-made bread; it wasn’t an immediate hit). Continental quickly became America’s largest commercial bakery (though its reach then only extended to the Midwest). Continental Baking would be composed of two brands: Wonder for bread products and Hostess for baked goods. There would be more changes ahead for Continental Baking, but at this stage of the company’s life the Hostess side had already produced what would lead to that brand’s first signature hit.
CUPCAKES: FROM ELEGANT DESERT TO LUNCH BOX TREAT
The first Hostess baked success is, strictly speaking, not still with us, but it and the Hostess brand name arrived in 1919. Originally called the Hostess Chocolate Cup Cake, it did not have all of the features we now associate with the modern Hostess CupCake®. There were two basic types: devil’s food cake with chocolate frosting and devil’s food cake with vanilla frosting. Early advertising for the cupcakes was more elegant in design and salesmanship than the more playful type of advertising seen by later generations. However, the “5¢ for two” price was an important part of the sales pitch, and that certainly appealed to shoppers of all types. In the early days, these cupcakes were hand-frosted, a departure from the “no human hands” of the Wonder Bread side of the business. There were other hands on jobs, too. That of the “cake dumper” is fairly self-explanatory: you take baked cakes and dump them out of pans onto a table. You don’t have to be clever to do it. Fortunately for Continental, cake dumper D. R. “Doc” Rice was a competent young fellow when he joined the company in 1923. Rice worked his way up through the ranks and by the late Forties he was working in the experimental bakery at Continental’s headquarters in New York. It was there that Doc Rice would alter the company’s rather basic cupcake into the easily recognizable Hostess CupCake that we know today. Partly, this was thanks to the Twinkie. The cream filling of Twinkies was originally inserted by hand with a special foot-
(RIGHT) Hostess magazine ad, circa the Twenties. Note the fancy Hostess boxes in the lower left of the grocery store counter. © Hostess Brands, LLC. 16
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A Ward’s Bread ad detail from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Nov. 7, 1911) promoting food cleanlines, something of a new concern for the new century. Ward’s Bread was eventually bought up by United Bakeries, which became the Continental Baking Company, home of the Wonder Bread and Hostess brands. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library. activated device that was easy to over-fill (and become a snack for the operator). Given a directive to improve cupcake sales, Doc Rice put Twinkie cream filling inside the cupcakes which, in 1947, had to be a “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” type moment. Long time coming or not, the addition was well received. A white line of frosting on top was the finishing touch. A straight white line of frosting. This quickly changed to the loopy line we know today. According to Doc Rice in a late-in-life interview (United Press International, May 10, 1989), sales for Hostess CupCakes with the
scott saavedra’s secret sanctum
filling and loopy line shot up 25% past sales for the standard Hostess CupCakes. It wasn’t long before the standard cupcakes were phased out.
TWINKIES: BLAME THE STRAWBERRIES
Hostess’ original tube-like shortcakes were called either Hostess Little Short Cake Fingers or Hostess Little Shortbread Fingers (depending on source). They were created as a convenient component of the popular strawberry shortcake desert (you bring the strawberries). The season for fresh strawberries lasted around six weeks. That left the Finger pans empty for the remaining 46 weeks of the year. With Hostess sales weakened during the early days of the Great Depression, James Dewar, a manager at a Continental Baking factory, added banana cream filling to the shortcakes. While considering names for the new treat, Dewar and a friend noticed a sign for Twinkle Toe Shoes. The friend suggested “Twinkles” or “Twinkle Fingers” (you know the drill) as a name for the snack, but Dewar felt that “Twinkies” would be more appealing to kids who were the intended market. And so Twinkies it was. The “two for a nickel” snack was a hit that would go on to become an iconic American snack product… just not with its original banana cream filling. World War II needs hampered access to bananas and the vanilla cream filling replacement became the standard. James Dewar had to be very happy with his concoction because he is reported to have eaten at least one Twinkie every day.
SNO BALLS, DINGS DONGS, AND ALL THE REST
Hostess Donuts first appeared in the Thirties. They were followed up by the Hostess Donettes® (1940), which were simply smaller donuts. Donuts have their roots in fried olykoeck, a doughy Dutch recipe brought to the New World around 1622. It was Hanson Gregory, a sea captain, who in 1847 put the hole in donuts so that they may be digested more easily. This was genius because a hole is empty and therefore very much more digestible than a hole with donut in it. He got a plaque for his effort. The Hostess Sno Ball® first appeared in 1947, the handy work of one Ellis Baum. The Sno Ball was originally a chocolate cake covered by a white marshmallow topped with shredded coconut. Cream filling was added in 1950. By 2007 the good people of St. Louis, Illinois, ate more Sno Balls than any other city in America. High Five, Gateway City! Introduced in 1960, the Suzy Q® was a slab of devil’s food cake interrupted in the center by a creamy filling (the center goo getting everywhere is apparently a feature, not a bug). The name Suzy Q was inspired by the name of the daughter of a company vice president. Both the perfect and delicious Ho Ho® and Ding Dong® snack cakes arrived to enchant the snack–cake eating public in 1967. Back then the Ding Dongs were wrapped in thin foil and it was a bit of a
(TOP LEFT) Hostess CupCake. (TOP RIGHT) Twinkie in the raw. (ABOVE) Twinkies in the box. (LEFT) Ding Dongs. (BELOW) The Suzy Q. Packages courtesy of Worthpoint. Snack food photos by Evan-Amos/ Wikipedia. © Hostess Brands, LLC.
challenge to secure the round treat without cracking and losing any of the chocolate cover. These were a very rare treat when I was a lad, and I wasn’t going to waste a bit of it. A number of years later… One Christmas day my four-year-old daughter was having “the best Christmas ever.” A few hours later my wife and I were at the RETROFAN
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VOGER’S VAULT OF VINTAGE VARIETIES
s i ! x A e m o S k Let’s Kic movie characters ic n o ic en h W r? le The Stooges vs. Hit joined the fight
BY MARK VOGER I’m a freak over the Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone. Don’t get me started! But the first one I ever saw—I must’a been in sixth grade—confused me a mite. It was called Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943). In it, Holmes and Watson (Nigel Bruce) get on a plane and fly to the U.S. in search of a top secret microfilm stolen by German spies. I was young, and more inclined toward comic books than classic literature. (Still am, actually.) I had yet to read my first Arthur Conan Doyle story. My vague picture of Sherlock Holmes was from London of long ago—horses and buggies, gas streetlights, men in top hats, women in bustles, fog. So what was Sherlock Holmes doing hopping planes and fighting Nazis? There’s a fascinating subgenre in the history of cinema: World War II Propaganda Disguised as Entertainment. Sherlock Holmes in Washington fell into that subgenre, if not a sub subgenre: Movies About Familiar Pop-Culture Characters Fighting the Axis Powers While the War was Ongoing. In pursuing that microfilm, Holmes and Watson joined other iconic (and heretofore politically neutral) characters who heard the call such as Superman, Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy, the Invisible Man, the Three Stooges, the East Side Kids, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Popeye. It sounds weird today, but there’s a practical explanation. Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government established the Bureau of Motion Pictures (a division of the Office of War
Holmes and Watson travel to America in search of a top secret microfilm in Sherlock Holmes in Washington. © Universal Pictures. Information), which worked directly with film studios to encourage movies with powerful anti-Axis content. Two important notes before we dive in. I will concentrate on films released during World War II, which lasted from 1939 until 1945, with America entering in 1941. (So the Marvel movie Captain America, which was set during World War II but released in 2012, doesn’t qualify. Nor do “peacetime draft”-era movies like 1941’s “Buck Privates” starring Abbott and Costello, which depict training but not war per se.) There’s something about the fact that these films were produced in the midst of this historic global conflict that stirs the emotions in a more immediate way. Imagine: When Rathbone and Bruce walk past sandbags piled six feet high on a Universal backlot doubling for London, it was a Hollywood reenactment of something that was going on in real time. Important Note #2: Keep in mind that on a good day, old-timey Hollywood movies reflect systemic racism (a subject for another column). But during the war, all bets were off. Anti-Japanese slurs were a fact of daily life. (A movie like Let’s Get Tough starring the East Side Kids was a twofer on the Racism-O-Meter. Pejoratives were thrown around disparaging Black as well as Japanese people.) I will only quote such dialogue when pertinent, but if you later track down and watch these films, well, caveat emptor. OK? And now... on to victory!
COMIC BOOK HEROES
The first depiction of Superman on film happened in cartoons. Five of the eight animated Superman shorts released by Famous Studios (following its takeover of Fleisher Studios) were war-themed. In the non-PC-compliantly titled Japoteurs (1942), Clark and Lois hop a plane in an animated short with a title that could only have happened during World War II: Japoteurs (1942). © DC Comics. RETROFAN
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Voger’s vault of vintage varieties
(LEFT) This caricature of a Japanese spy from the Superman short Japoteurs (1942) is mild compared to many of the offensive stereotypes that appeared in mainstream animation during the war years. (RIGHT) Robin (Douglas Croft) and Batman (Lewis Wilson) flank Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish, wearing prosthetic eyelids), ringleader of a Japanese spy ring, in the 1943 serial Batman. Colorized photo © Columbia Pictures. Superman, Batman, and Robin © DC Comics. enemy agents commandeer an American invention, the “world’s largest bomber plane,” during its maiden voyage. In The Eleventh Hour (1942), Superman is in Japan (!) committing acts of sabotage. Lois Lane is abducted by the Japanese military, who hang posters putting Superman on notice: “Warning! One more act of sabotage and the American girl reporter will be executed at once!” In Destruction Inc. (1942), Lois works undercover at a munitions plant suspected of enemy infiltration. In Jungle Drums (1943), Superman sinks a fleet of German submarines, while an extremely unhappy Adolf Hitler receives the news via radio. Secret Agent (1943) follows a beautiful undercover operative as she delivers an intelligence-rich dossier to Washington. [Editor’s note: See RetroFan #25 for columnist Will Murray’s deep dive into the Fleisher Superman cartoons.] The serial Spy Superman’s BFF Batman got in on Smasher (1942) is the act too, this time in live-action. based on the Fawcett In Episode 1 of Batman and Robin’s Publications comic first-ever depiction on film, Lambert book hero. © Republic Hillyer’s 15-chapter serial Batman Pictures (1943), the viewer is told: “They (Batman and Robin) represent American youth who love their country and are glad to fight for it.” In the plot, Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft) pursue Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish), a Japanese spy based in 26
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America. Twice-Oscar-nominated Naish was considered Hollywood’s chameleon who could play any “foreign” type. Of course, Naish is wearing those dreadful fake eyelids as Daka, and playing him as a broad caricature. It’s what the times demanded. Daka’s headquarters is hidden in a section of Gotham City called Little Tokyo, which is now all but desolate. Quoth the narrator, “Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs”—don’t shoot the messenger—“it has become virtually a ghost street where only one business survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity seekers.” That business is the Japanese Cave of Horrors, which is something like the Tunnel of Love but with tableaus of Japanese tyranny rather than ghosts and skeletons. “I am Dr. Daka, humble servant of His Majesty Hirohito, heavenly ruler and prince of the Rising Sun,” Daka declares in his first line of dialogue. He can turn men into zombies, though plenty of American traitors work for him without the need for brain-snatching. William Witney’s 12-chapter serial Spy Smasher (1942), based on Fawcett Publications’ comic book hero, stars Kane Richmond as the titular hero who matches wits with a Nazi saboteur (Hans Schumm). [Editor’s note: To read more about comic book-inspired movie serials, we enthusiastically recommend Christopher Irving’s book, Cliffhanger! (TwoMorrows, 2023).]
HORROR MOVIES AND WAR
One of America’s earliest World War II-themed movies was a low-budget horror film starring the screen’s Dracula, Bela Lugosi. In William Nigh’s Black Dragons (1942), Lugosi plays a plastic surgeon who alters the faces of Japanese spies to resemble American industrialists. In Edwin L. Marin’s Invisible Agent (1942), Frank Griffin, Jr. (Jon Hall) is the grandson of the original Invisible Man. Two Axis oper-
Voger’s vault of vintage varieties
atives, Stauffer (Cedric Hardwicke) and Ikito (Peter Lorre), overpower Griffin and demand he turn over his grandfather’s invisibility formula. Griffin refuses to allow the formula to be used as a weapon, leading to the following exchange... Stauffer: “Weapons are created to be used. There’s no place for weakness on this Earth.” Griffin: “Typical German thinking.” Stauffer: “Precisely. German thinking is the clearest in the world. As a graduate of Oxford, I can attest to that.” Griffin somehow wriggles free from his captors. He offers the invisibility serum to the U.S. military under one condition: that he alone can use it. Next thing you know, Griffin is injecting himself with the serum moments before being parachuted into Germany, where he rendezvous with Maria (Ilona Massey), a gorgeous German who is working undercover for our side. Invisible Agent then lapses into slapstick for a (LEFT) In Black Dragons (1942), Dracula star Bela Lugosi plays a plastic spell. Pudgy German officer Heiser (J. Edward surgeon who alters the appearances of Japanese spies to resemble Bromberg) brings Maria some choice items from his American industrialists. © Monogram Pictures. (RIGHT) Even the Invisible “meager rations” for a (hopefully) romantic dinner: Man joined the fight in Invisible Agent (1942). © Universal Pictures. cheese from Holland, champagne from occupied France, fowl from Denmark, lobster from Norway, and caviar from Russia. “Every country we conquer feeds us,” he In Landers’ atmospheric The Return of the Vampire (1943), German brays in the hopes of impressing Maria. bombers bring about the resurrection of the title bloodsucker. In Meanwhile, Griffin is hovering around unseen—he’s invisible, London following a blitz, two civilian rescue volunteers (Billy Bevan remember?—pinching food, gulping champagne, and slathering and Harold De Becker) search through rubble for victims dead or Heiser’s uniform with his own dinner. Despite the funny bits, alive. They discover a corpse with a spike through his heart, not Invisible Agent builds to a no-nonsense climax with lots of firepower, realizing he is a vampire (Lugosi) who was killed a quarter century earlier. Mistaking the spike for debris caused by the bombing, the not to mention grisly deaths for Stauffer and Ikito. men remove it. This, according to the strict tenets of the horror Frankenstein star Boris Karloff joined the fight as a mad movie, brings the vampire back to life to stalk victims anew—one doctor—a patriotic mad doctor, but a mad doctor nonetheless. more thing to blame on those “Jerries.” In Lew Landers’ horror comedy The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), Karloff plays an eccentric professor who keeps a laboratory in the DELINQUENTS AHOY cellar, where he lures “volunteers” to get zapped in an electronic Wallace Fox’s Let’s Get Tough (1942), the ninth film in Monogram’s contraption that he hopes will transform them into supermen to hardscrabble East Side Kids series starring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, help fight the Axis powers. Bobby Jordan, and “Sunshine” Sammy Morrison, opens with a But so far, there have been no survivors of his experiment. parade of soldiers marching to the strains of patriotic music. (I’d bet Laments Karloff of one such failed attempt: “He would destroy anything the parade footage is from World War I.) Pumped up with Berlin! He would throttle Tokyo! But for a monkey wrench in his pocket, that man would be winning the war for America right now!” patriotism, the East Side Kids race to the nearest recruitment office
(LEFT) Two civilian volunteers (Harold De Becker and Billy Bevan) discover a vampire’s corpse amid the rubble following a destructive blitz in The Return of the Vampire (1943). (RIGHT) The vampire (Bela Lugosi) writhes in pain as he faces the dawn while stumbling in rubble caused by German bombs in The Return of the Vampire (1943). © Columbia Pictures. RETROFAN
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CELEBRITY CRUSHES
Jerry Lewis, My Favorite Star BY BRAD FARB
This is not so much a celebrity crush as just a reporting of lifetime examples of how far one goes in admiring a favorite star. I discovered Jerry Lewis in the late Sixties from viewing his TV variety show and such cinematic efforts then as Hook, Line and Sinker at an indoor movie theater and Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River at a drive-in, all in Louisville, Kentucky. And I tried to see as many showings of his comeback feature, Hardly Working, before moving to another state in 1982. Once his annual Labor Day telethon to fight muscular dystrophy began airing in Louisville in 1971, I faithfully viewed it, enduring sleep deprivation until his last one in 2010. I volunteered at call centers in Louisville and Harlingen, Texas (a friend taped the first and last eight hours of the program on videocassette—before I owned a VCR—and acquired for me a life-size standee, though it became beheaded!). A Sunday school classmate’s bar mitzvah interrupted that first time, but I timed watching in that later locale to my quitting a newspaper job. And because of the host, the Muscular Dystrophy Association became the single cause to which I contributed. Related accumulated items included a carnival kit, buttons, posters, T-shirts, and skate-athon patches.
(ABOVE) Future Nutty Professor Eddie Murphy was only two years old when Jerry Lewis—at his manic best—originated the role in Paramount’s classic 1963 comedy. The Nutty Professor © 1963 Paramount Pictures. Poster courtesy of Heritage.
Collectibles grew from audiocassettes, LPs and singles (I bought a record of his son’s group, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, for his picture on the album’s back), and videos to DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs. I likewise bought a never-played board game for his photo on the box cover. Clippings (including autographs and magazine articles) and books (autobiographies, biographies) led to ongoing online alerts of his name. I collected his The Adventures of Jerry Lewis comic books [see RetroFan #25 for the scoop behind Lewis’ and Bob Hope’s days as stars of their own DC Comics series—ed.], movie posters, and lobby cards. My car sports a photo-linked air freshener, no longer effective, on the rearview mirror and a faded rear license plate frame that originally read “I’d Rather Be Watching…” In person, I saw Lewis in Las Vegas shortly before a telethon (turning that into an article for the newspaper where I then worked) at Sea World in San Antonio, Texas; both shows in McAllen, Texas; and at a Louisville leadership conference appearance. Of course, eyeglass frames helped in my vocal impression of his Nutty Professor character. I named a diving board dive at swimming pools as my “Jerry Lewis cannonball.” And I was recognized with a high grade for a Sunday school graduation year report at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue on his interfaith marriage. BRAD FARB of Louisville, Kentucky, is a former entertainment journalist and haunted attraction performer and works as a longtime movie theater usher.
Hey, lovelorn, quit sobbing into your pillow and writing diary entries—instead, share your Sixties/Seventies/ Eighties Celebrity Crush with RetroFan readers! You can become famous, get three free copies of the magazine, and earn a whopping $10 as well. Submit your 600-word-maximum Celebrity Crush column to the editor for consideration at euryman@gmail.com. 32
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ANDY MANGELS’ RETRO SATURDAY MORNING
FANTASTIC FOUR
and THE THING BY ANDY MANGELS Welcome back to Andy Mangels’ Retro Saturday Morning, your constant guide to the shows that thrilled us from yesteryear, exciting our imaginations and capturing our memories. Grab some milk and cereal, sit cross-legged leaning against the couch, and dig in to Retro Saturday Morning! This issue, we’re taking you Fabulous Fans on a dive into three Saturday morning shows that starred members of Marvel’s most Famous Family… The Fantastic Four! Marvel Comics’ premiere super-team is the Fantastic Four, a cosmic ray–powered quartet who’ve thrilled fans since their debut in 1961. The “FF” (as fans know them) was created by Stan Lee, the head of Marvel, and Jack Kirby, one of the preeminent and most creative artists in the comics industry. Little did the pair know just how far their creations would take them. The Fantastic Four have spent a lot of time on the animated front, as well as in their own radio show, and in several feature films! But not every member of the FF was treated the same on the air, with one member being snuffed out for a season, and another getting his own very weird spin-off series. Read on for the history of foursomes, robots, and other things…
MARVEL HEROES COME TO TELEVISION
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961), they were the world’s greatest dysfunctional—and most powerful—family. While traveling in scientist Reed Richards’ experimental rocketship, pilot Ben Grimm, Reed’s girlfriend Sue Storm, and her brother, Johnny Storm, were exposed to radioactive gamma rays which changed their molecular make-up and gave them remarkable powers. The now-stretchable Reed called himself Mr. Fantastic; the shy Sue became the disappearing Invisible Girl; the hot-headed Johnny shouted “Flame on!” to become the ball of fire named the Human Torch; and the bulky Ben got the raw end of the deal, becoming a super-strong orange rock-covered creature known as the Thing. Using their powers to aid mankind, the quartet known as the Fantastic Four would soon protect the planet from such cosmic threats as world-devouring Galactus, Latvertian armored dictator Doctor Doom, angry Atlantean monarch Sub-Mariner, and shape-changing alien invaders known as Skrulls. Along the way, the foursome become (ABOVE) Cel set-up from Hanna-Barbera’s The Fantastic Four (1967). © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage. RETROFAN
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andy mangels’ retro saturday morning
(LEFT) A colored cel featuring the Fantastic Four as rendered by Alex Toth. Toth was tasked with simplifying the more detailed comic book art of Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby. (BELOW) Galactus character sheet by Toth. © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.
known by fans for their squabbling relationships as much as for their heroics. Super-heroes were going through a revival in the early Sixties, but their popularity wasn’t noticed by networks until 1966. That same year, as the new Batman series became a campy live-action hit, a new cartoon studio called Filmation premiered The New Adventures of Superman on Saturday mornings [see RetroFan #25]. Also on deck weekday afternoons on syndicated stations was Grantray-Lawrence’s group of untried “tyro” heroes: the Marvel Super-Heroes series [see RetroFan #16]. Grantray-Lawrence was founded in 1954 by businessman Robert Lawrence and animators Grant Simmons and Ray Patterson. Lawrence bought the rights to most of the Marvel properties in the early Sixties: Captain America, Thor, Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Hulk, X-Men, and Spider-Man. According to Lawrence, The Fantastic Four was one property on which he didn’t have the option. Animation “old-timers” Hanna-Barbera were looking for something new to dip their cels into, and super-heroes looked to be just the solution. Eyeing the high ratings of the Superman cartoon and the relative success of Marvel Super-Heroes, plus their own successes with Space Ghost and Dino Boy, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara wanted their own Marvel series. And what they wanted was The Fantastic Four. In the crossover world of the Marvel Universe, Grantray-Lawrence was in a bind when they prepared to animate a Sub-Mariner story that strongly featured the 34
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Fantastic Four. Because they couldn’t use the quartet, they substituted the comparatively new X-Men characters in their stead. They didn’t bother to change the designs for the Baxter Building, long the established FF headquarters, and Doctor Doom remained the villain. Bits and pieces of the stories from Fantastic Four issues now became X-Men adventures. Hanna-Barbera had already started developing the Fantastic Four series by the time the Sub-Mariner episodes aired. Charles Nichols, a Disney director, was given the job of directing the episodes, while writers Jack Hanrahan and Phil Hahn all went directly to the comic book source material for their stories. “They were easy to write,” said Hanrahan. “We just went and took the stories directly from the comics. I would tear the comics in half and write up to the midpoint, and give the second half to Phil to write. Having worked in radio, I was used to the timing, and we could do a script in a day-and-a-half. After a while, I used the Dictaphone, because it was faster than typing.” He chuckled, adding, “Stan Lee thought we did a terrible job on the scripts. Compared to the later Fantastic Four cartoons, though, I guess we did okay.”
andy mangels’ retro saturday morning
Hanrahan and Hahn were a team of writers for Hallmark and American Greetings cards who were also part of the early MAD magazine stable, where they wrote the first Captain Klutz book. After a New York job on The Jackie Gleason Show, they moved to Los Angeles to get into screenwriting, and picked up their first job on Hanna-Barbera’s Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles show [see RetroFan #18]. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Fantastic Four. Later, they were to become one of the hottest comedy writing team of the Seventies, doing sketches for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, The Sonny & Cher Show, and Get Smart, among others.
According to Hanrahan, “When we went to Hanna-Barbera, they did cartoons the old theatrical way. They preferred writers who could also do their storyboards. I had been an artist, and Mike Maltese taught me how to do rough storyboards over one weekend. I was one of the last writers to work this way, and I did about half of my shows over the time I worked for Hanna-Barbera.” Hanrahan didn’t lay out many of the FF shows; that work went to Bob Singer and his crew. Singer, a long-time Hanna-Barbera employee, did the original presentation boards that sold the show. He then worked with master comic artist Alex Toth (whom he had talked into staying with H-B after a fight Toth had with producers over Space Ghost in late 1965) on redesigning the characters, simplifying Jack Kirby’’s original forms for the limited animation style affordable to H-B. Singer put together crews of four to six animators so that one episode a week could be produced. “We tried an experiment on the show,” said Singer. “We used a New York operation to lay out some episodes, as we only had about 65 people in layout to produce all of Hanna-Barbera’s shows. I flew into New York to give these six layout guys lessons in how to do the Fantastic Four, but most of them were freelancers and they didn’t work well together. They finished their episodes, and we paid them, but didn’t use them again.” Singer also recalled that some H-B work was sub-contracted to Grantray-Lawrence and other small studios, although Fantastic Four (ironically) never was. “The Fantastic Four was possible only because we had done Adventures of Jonny Quest in ’64,” Singer said, “and we were probably the first studio to cut our teeth on a realistic adventure-style show. We learned a lot of valuable lessons doing Jonny Quest, and the next year we did Space Ghost and Dino Boy. Jonny Quest was too expensive, and we had to figure out how to reduce costs on layouts and models. By the time Fantastic Four came about, we had solved the problems. We made all our deadlines on the series.”
(ABOVE LEFT) Dr. Doom character sheet. (LEFT) Various Skrulls including the Super-Skrull. © Marvel. (INSET) Artist Alex Toth. RETROFAN
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IT ROSE FROM THE TOMB
WORKING WITH DITKO
JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE
BEST OF SIMON & KIRBY’S
MAINLINE COMICS
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IT CREPT FROM THE TOMB
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KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID
AMERICAN TV COMICS
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!
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REED CRANDALL
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HERO-A-GO-GO!
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JOHN SEVERIN
TWO-FISTED COMIC ARTIST
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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.
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ALTER EGO COLLECTORS' ITEM CLASSICS
Master of the Comics
MAC RABOY
History of Crandall’s life and career, from Golden Age Quality Comics, to Warren war and horror, Flash Gordon, and beyond!
Looks at comics' 1960s CAMP AGE, when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, and TV's Batman shook a mean cape!
Biography of the EC, MARVEL and MAD mainstay, co-creator of American Eagle, and 40+ year CRACKED magazine contributor.
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WILL MURRAY’S 20TH CENTURY PANOPTICON
Too Many Westerns BY WILL MURRAY
For the first 25 years of television broadcasting, one genre stood strong. The Western. After a slow start, Horse operas took over. Yet by the Eighties, they were all but extinct. The pioneer TV Westerns were kiddie shows. The Lone Ranger drifted over from radio in 1949. The Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy were among the first TV hits. Hopalong Cassidy started as recycled William Boyd movies cut into half-hour segments, then new episodes were shot. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers likewise transitioned from the silver to the small screen in 1951. [Editor’s note: Roy’s wife and screen partner, Dale Evans, was the subject of an article in RetroFan #29—still available at twomorrows.com.] For years, television aimed its Westerns at small-fry Baby Boomers. Annie Oakley and Kit Carson were torn from history. Sky King was about a modern-day rancher who piloted his personal plane, the Songbird. All were syndicated. During TV’s formative Golden Age, networks didn’t take the genre seriously. When Walt Disney televised Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier in 1954-1955, it triggered a national merchandising craze. That year, 20th Century Fox entered television production with My Friend Flicka, a literal horse opera which was set on a Montana ranch. It replaced another drama built around Gene Autry’s horse,
(ABOVE) Welcome to the ABC-TV Corral in this 1959 publicity photograph teaming the network’s stars from their respective Warner Bros. Westerns. (LEFT TO RIGHT) Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot Brewster, Sugarfoot), Peter Brown (Johnny McKay, Lawman), Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick, Maverick), Ty Hardin (Bronco Laine, Bronco), James Garner (Bret Maverick, Maverick), Wayde Preston (Christopher Colt, Colt .45), and John Russell (Dan Troop, Lawman). ABC promotional photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Bronco, Cheyenne, Colt .45, Lawman, Maverick, Sugarfoot © Warner Bros. Television. Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Branded, The Virginian, Wagon Train © NBCUniversal. Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel © CBS Television Distribution. The Big Valley © ABC Television. Daniel Boone © 20th Century Productions. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp © Wyatt Earp Enterprises. Cowboy in Africa © Ivan Tors Productions.
The Adventures of Champion. My Friend Flicka, however, couldn’t compete against ABC’s The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, a Western about a dog. Although based on a 1940 film, My Friend Flicka debuted four months after the similar Fury, which outlasted it by three years. All were aimed at moppets. The sole exception was Death Valley Days, an anthology series hosted by “The Old Ranger.” After 15 years on radio, it switched to video in 1952 and ran 18 more. Early on, the film industry looked down at television—until audiences switched to watching their home sets. Hollywood Westerns started maturing. Broken Arrow. High Noon. Shane. Television executives noticed.
WARNERS GOES WEST
ABC lit the fuse on the prime-time Western craze in 1955 when the network hired Warner Bros. to produce an hour-long “wheel” series called Warner Brothers Presents. It was an anthology show consisting of three rotating features based on previous Warner Bros. films. Only one broke out into its own series: Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker. Walker had been a Las Vegas deputy sheriff until actor Van Johnson discovered him. Cheyenne was TV’s first hour-long Western. Cheyenne Bodie was a giant of a man raised by the Cheyenne tribe after a different tribe murdered his parents. Warner Bros. wanted part-Cherokee James Garner in the role, but the actor could not be located in time. Garner’s time would soon come. In an unusual move, ABC slotted The Life and Times of Wyatt Earp starring Hugh O’Brian in the half hour after Cheyenne. Ratings jumped. That same year, Gunsmoke, a pioneer realistic Western program on radio, migrated to TV. It would run for two decades, expanding to an hour and eventually going to color. After dismissing actor Richard Boone as “too ugly” for the part of Marshal Matt Dillon, the producers went with James Arness. Boone’s time in the saddle was also fast approaching. RETROFAN
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Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon
(LEFT) Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain in an autographed ABC-TV publicity photo promoting The Rifleman. (If only the horse had also signed this…) (RIGHT) Connors’ custommade corduroy tunic, his primary Rifleman costume. Both, courtesy of Heritage. favorite TV horseman only owned one suit of clothes. It was just accepted. Another one-suit hero was Daniel Boone, who wore buckskins and a coonskin cap. His series came into being when a TV producer wanted Fess Parker to revive his Davy Crockett portrayal for a weekly series. Walt Disney refused to release the rights, so Parker once again donned his familiar regalia—but as Daniel Boone, for six successful seasons. The demand for new Wild West heroes meant shooting expensive pilots which might not ever air. A shortcut was discovered: Introduce a new character in an existing series as a way of testing his audience appeal. Writer/director Sam Peckinpah recounted, “I did this one script for Gunsmoke that Charles Marquis Warren turned down— said it was a piece of crap! I knew it was one of the best things I’d written, so I took it back, and reworked it, and Dick Powell at Four Star bought it as the pilot for The Rifleman. I went along with the property as part of the bargain.” Johnny Ringo, The Westerner, Black Saddle, and Trackdown also debuted on Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre. Wanted: Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen, got its start on an episode of Robert Culp’s Trackdown. Laredo spun off from The Virginian. And the short-lived Dakotas began as a episode of Cheyenne. Michael Ansara, who previously starred as Cochise on Broken Arrow, played a different Apache in two episodes of The Rifleman, Marshal Sam Buckhart, the hero of Law of the Plainsman. 52
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Western programs so dominated the airwaves it was tough to sell anything else. Writers Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadows concocted a modern adventure series about a soldier of fortune who would fly to any trouble spot on earth for a price. They pitched the idea to CBS’s Hunt Stromberg. Recalled Rolfe, “So, Hunt immediately said, ‘Make this a Western and you’ve got a deal.’ We, of course, said, ‘Sure.’ Then, we walked out in the corridor, looked at each other and said, ‘How the hell do we turn this into a Western?’” The result was Have Gun – Will Travel, starring Richard Boone as the sophisticated gunman-for-hire, Paladin. Actor Nick Adams asked Andrew J. Fenady to create a TV show for him. “We didn’t want a Western,” remembered Adams, “but sponsors won’t buy anything good until you put a horse on it.” He found himself astride one as an ex-Confederate soldier in The Rebel. Every type and time period of the Old West was represented on TV, from Riverboat—a “Midwestern”—to Hotel De Paree, whose gun-hero wore a gimmick hat that blinded opponents.
TOO MANY WESTERNS?
In 1959, audiences rebelled. This was the turning point. Variety reported: “The Western fever has subsided. For the first time since 1956, the new entries failed to take off like a house on fire.” Only one new Western was renewed: NBC’s Laramie, which ran to 1963, the year Cheyenne was unhorsed.
Will Murray’s 20th Century Panopticon
Lawman’s John Russell defended the genre. “At one time there may have been too many Westerns on the air, but that does not mean that all of them will go. Millions of Americans find this the most satisfactory kind of story and drama, so there will always be Westerns on the air to fill this insatiable demand.” Famous last words… By 1964, the TV Western was thought to be dying. Yet in the Fall of 1965, seven new saddle-soap operas debuted, for a total of 11 video oaters. One, Bonanza, spawned a fresh trend in Westerns—family dramas set on scenic ranches in Western states. The Big Valley substituted the Nevada patriarch for a California matriarch in the person of Barbara Stanwyck as Victoria Barkley. Two years later, producer David Dortort left Bonanza to launch The High Chaparral, set in Arizona. Lancer was yet another attempt to cash in on the Cartwright family’s appeal. After Pernell Roberts quit the show, Bonanza kept on rolling along. The death of Dan Blocker finally killed the program in 1973. One of the most astounding developments of the Western boom of the early Sixties was The Virginian. While other Westerns were a mix of half-hour and hour shows, The Virginian was shot in Technicolor as a 90-minute TV movie every week. This was NBC’s response to losing Wagon Train to ABC. James Drury’s character was never explicitly given a name. This was in keeping with the source material, Owen Wister’s seminal 1902 novel, The Virginian. Not to be outdone, Wagon Train also went to 90 minutes. Cimarron Strip debuted at 90. Horses and actors soon wore out. During this frenetic time, the industry needed script writers who knew the Old West. Many were recruited from the dying pulp magazine industry. One was Frank Gruber,
Dell Comics’ long-running anthology series Four Color featured comic book adventures of many of the TV Westerns in our RetroFan rodeo, including: (TOP) Hugh O’Brian in Wyatt Earp (Four Color #890, 1958) and Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford in The Rifleman (#1009, 1958); (CENTER) Robert Horton and Ward Bond in Wagon Train (#1019, 1959) and Wayde Preston in Colt .45 (#1058, 1959); and (BOTTOM) Will Hutchins in Sugarfoot (#1098, 1960) and Clint Eastwood and Eric Fleming in Rawhide. A sharp-shootin’ sextet of photo covers! RETROFAN
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RETRO TOYS
Hot Wheels The Early Years BY MIKE PIGOTT
The Mattel company was founded in 1945 by husband-and-wife team Elliot and Ruth Handler and their partner Harold “Matt” Matson, the brand name formed from a combination of “Matt” and part of “Elliot.” The partners originally produced wooden picture frames out of a garage in Los Angeles, but found that making doll’s house furniture from wooden offcuts was more profitable. Moving into the toy industry, Mattel had great success producing miniature musical instruments. In 1959, Ruth Handler introduced the Barbie doll [if you missed our Barbie history a few issues back in RetroFan #30, you can still order a copy at twomorrows.com!—ed.], the first teenage fashion doll, which was copied from a German “den toy” based on a popular racy comic strip. During the Sixties, Mattel had great success with dolls, but less luck with boys’ toys. The company made a wide range of realistic toy guns, but these were becoming less popular due to concerns over violence. As toy guns used diecast components, Elliot Handler suggested that the machinery used for these could be repurposed to manufacture miniature cars. Diecast cars had become very popular in the post-war years, with the U.K. being the biggest producer. Brands such as Dinky, Corgi, and Lone Star sold well in both Europe and America, but the market leader was the Matchbox series of affordable, pocket-sized vehicles made by Lesney of London. The Matchbox range had won the American Boys’ Toy of the Year Award twice in the Sixties, and Handler was frustrated to see his grandchildren playing
Early Hot Wheels International catalog from 1967. Hot Wheels © Mattel. Unless otherwise noted, all product images shown with this article are courtesy of Mike Pigott. 58
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with these imported toys when his firm was one of the largest toy companies in the U.S.A. Colleagues at Mattel were against entering the diecast market, believing there was too much competition and that it would be too difficult to break the stranglehold Matchbox had on the market. However, Handler believed that a new diecast line could be successful if Mattel offered something different. His team looked at all the diecast cars on the market and found three problems: most cars had thick axles and didn’t roll freely; there were few American cars produced, with many being unfamiliar foreign marques; and that few featured much in the way of play value, being more like collectibles than toys—this was certainly the case for ranges like Matchbox Models of Yesteryear and Corgi Classics, which were clearly aimed at adult collectors.
ENTER: HOT WHEELS
In 1966, Handler assembled a team to develop his model car range. The design team tackled the problem of rolling wheels; instead of
A Hot Wheels catalog page reveals all of the new toys’ features.
The series was given a name: Hot Wheels, because they were HOT cars with fast WHEELS. They were packaged on die-cut blister cards and included a collector button.
TRACKS
using metal rods for axles, fine wire intended for toy guitar strings was used. The thick, two-piece wheels were made from a lowfriction polymer plastic that allowed them to roll very fast. Initially the axles were U-shaped to provide torsion-bar suspension, but when these proved unreliable, straight axles were used, with a plastic strip riveted on top. The wheels were imitation mags with chrome hubs and the fashionable red-stripe tires. Mattel advertised for auto industry stylists to design the range of cars. Harry Bradley, who had worked for General Motors and Chrysler, became the first Hot Wheels designer. Accustomed to developing real cars, he struggled to design toys until Handler suggested that Bradley’s own car was what he was looking for. This vehicle—a souped-up Chevy El Camino with an exposed engine, side exhausts, and mag wheels—became the basis for Custom Fleetside. Bradley then designed most of the other early Hot Wheels cars, which were “California styled,” mildly customized American sports cars, plus some custom-built show cars. To give extra play value, several had opening hoods or other working parts. In contrast with the model cars produced by other companies, which were often in dull, unimaginative colors, Mattel chose to give its cars a shiny, eye-catching finish like the candy colors used on custom cars. Called “Spectraflame,” it wasn’t actually metallic paint; instead the car bodies were given a shiny zinc plating, which was then sprayed with a tinted clear lacquer, giving a metallic look.
After the cars, the most important element was the track system and accessories. Initially one of the design team bought some extruded plastic strips intended for building insulation, and used this to test how far the cars could run. The others thought this was a great idea, and began developing the Hot Wheels track. Inspired by daredevil stunt-driving shows, features like loops and jump-ramps were designed, with manual and battery-powered boosters added later.
THE MODELS
Sixteen models were released in 1968. Nine of these were based on customstyle American muscle cars: Custom Mustang, Custom Corvette, Custom Barracuda, Custom Cougar, Custom Firebird, Custom Fleetside, Custom Eldorado, Custom Camaro, and Custom T-Bird. In addition there was one European car, Custom Volkswagen; plus Hot Heap, a Model T–based hot rod, and Ford J-Car, a GT racing car. The other four items were custom show rods, including the bubble-topped Beatnik Bandit, based on a car designed by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth [see RetroFan #10 for Big Daddy’s story, you dig?—ed.]. Python and Silhouette were show cars created by Bill Cushenberry, and Deora was a heavily customized Dodge pick-up built by the Alexander Brothers—the Hot Wheels model had a pair of surfboards clipped on the back.
(ABOVE) The Beatnik Bandit, an iconic Hot Wheels from the original 16 models. (RIGHT) Tracks set Hot Wheels apart from other metal cars, as seen in this 1968 promotional material. RETROFAN
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retro toys
HOT WHEELS COMPANION LINES Hot Wheels cars proved such a hit that the designers at Mattel created similar series in the hope that these would prove equally successful. Probably the best known of these lines was Sizzlers, introduced in 1970. Sizzlers were plasticbodied Hot Wheels cars with electric motors powered by rechargeable Ni-Cad batteries. They worked well and could run at incredibly high speeds along Hot Wheels track. Sizzlers were discontinued in 1973, but were later revived in a slightly different format. To avoid creating internal competition, many of Mattel’s other lines also ran on Hot Wheels track, meaning a child could buy products from other ranges that would be compatible with his existing track. In 1971, Mattel released RRRumblers, a range of motorcycles in 1/32 scale. Each motorbike came with a clip-on stand with low-friction wheels that allowed them to race on Hot Wheels track. Early releases were fairly realistic road and racing bikes, but by 1973 had become increasingly bizarre, with choppers shaped like skeletons, lions, and eagles! Introduced the following year were Chopcycles, similar to RRRumblers but powered like Sizzlers. These were even more weird, but being plastic were quite fragile and are hard to find today. Produced only in 1971, HotLine was a futuristic train set which was powered like Sizzlers and ran on Hot Wheels–compatible track. Released
around the same time was the Earthshakers range, consisting of a bulldozer with various trailers and accessories. These also used the rechargeable battery system, but geared to run at a realistic low speed. This line was mostly diecast, but did not run on track sets. Available only in 1972 were Farbs, a set of four crazy cartoon characters fitted with wheels and engines. HotShots were ripcord-powered dragsters that shot out a shower of sparks when activated. While neither of these ranges were marketed as Hot Wheels, both were intended for use with Hot Wheels track. Mattel even produced a track product aimed at girls! Small Shots were little dolls fitted with diecast roller skates which could run on standard track. Two ranges that were related to Hot Wheels, but didn’t run on track, were Zowees and Hot Birds. Zowees were tiny little vehicles with diecast bases and plastic bodies that were shaped in myriad weird designs such as a shark, a skull, and a bed. Hot Birds were futuristic diecast aircraft finished in Spectraflame paint. They had clip-on hooks that allowed them to “fly” along a length of string. All of these ranges were discontinued by 1973. The only new gimmick range introduced in 1973 was the rubber band-powered Revvers, which were painted in enamel colors.
Hot Birds.
Farbs.
END OF THE SPECTRAFLAME ERA
Zowees.
range. In 1974, the Hot Wheels range was relaunched as Flying Colors, and all cars were now in bright enamel colors with vivid, permanent designs printed on them. Several new models were introduced, and there was a move away from fantasy designs to more realistic items such as emergency vehicles, trucks, and even military vehicles. The red-stripe wheels were phased out in 1977.
Unfortunately, 1972 was the last year that Spectraflame paint would be used. It was an expensive process, and reports that the clear varnish may be toxic put the final nail in the coffin. The 1973 models were painted in much less appealing enamel paints. Only three new items were introduced, and the remainder of the range consisted of recolored existing castings, many having been “dumbed down” with plastic parts deleted, and opening features Paddy Wagon. sealed shut, in order to cut costs. At this time Mattel was seriously considering pulling the plug on Hot Wheels, as it had done with RRRumblers, Sizzlers, and other related lines. However, the powers-that-be at Mattel reconsidered when given a demonstration of pad-printing, which was ideal for brightening up the Hot Wheels 62
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MIKE PIGOTT is an Australian writer based in London who specializes in diecast models and pop culture. His work appears in every issue of Diecast Collector Magazine, and he has also been featured in Collector’s Gazette, Diecast Model World, and Back Issue. And check out RetroFan #15 for Mike’s article about Evel Knievel Diecast Miniatures!
RETRO COMIC STRIPS
BY PETER BOSCH How to describe my infatuation with Modesty Blaise? Well, let’s start with the basics. I’m a writer and I thrill to great writing from others. And Modesty Blaise is either the best-written comic strip you’ve never heard of or the best-written strip you know about and love. There is no in-between. Of all the comic strips that have ever been, none to me equals the sheer storytelling skill by Peter O’Donnell in Modesty Blaise. (His other fans have included Neil Gaiman, Walter Simonson, Dick Giordano, and Quentin Tarantino.) And then there are the novels! Fans of the novels are quite easy to tell. Their copies of the paperbacks are ones that any author would be proud to see…multiple creases in the spines from being read attentively, and well-worn covers from carrying the book in their pocket wherever they went. In total, there were 95 newspaper strip adventures (over 10,000 strips), 11 novels (plus two short story collections), a separate comic-illustrated story, a screenplay, and a DC Comics graphic novel. And every one was written by Peter O’Donnell. Modesty Blaise was his creation and he wrote every strip and book of those 38 years.
BUT WHO WAS MODESTY BLAISE?
Book reviewers called her an adventuress, the female answer to James Bond (though that is the most incorrect way to think of her, and something O’Donnell took umbrage with). Modesty Blaise was probably the most capable woman in action fiction. Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, Pussy Galore, and Honey West could come at her en masse and Modesty would put them down easily. She started out life as a young child in a Nazi prison camp in Greece, not knowing her name or even how old she was. When the woman whose hand had held hers ceased to breathe, the child escaped and wandered alone through Turkey and Persia, begging or
(ABOVE) First Modesty Blaise novel by Peter O’Donnell, with Jim Holdaway dust jacket (Doubleday, 1965). (LEFT) The first two Modesty Blaise strips, May 13 and May 14, 1963, in the Evening Standard. Introduction of Sir Gerald Tarrant, his assistant Jack Fraser, and the woman herself, Modesty Blaise. Art by Jim Holdaway. All images, scripts, and novel writings of Modesty Blaise and other characters from the Modesty Blaise comic strip and books are © Modesty Blaise Ltd. All images accompanying this article are courtesy of the author.
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retro Comic strips
Holdaway, who would later draw Modesty Blaise, was assigned to do the art on the latter strip. In addition, in 1961, O’Donnell adapted the Ian Fleming novel Dr. No for the James Bond comic strip. In 1962, Bill Aitken, the Daily Express’ cartoon editor, asked O’Donnell to create a new strip for the paper, and it could be whatever he wanted. It took O’Donnell several months to fully develop it, but out of this came Modesty Blaise. However, he ran into a snag when the artist Aitken wanted, Frank Hampson (of Dan Dare fame), provided sample strips
that were completely unsatisfactory Jim Holdaway at his to O’Donnell. O’Donnell had initially drawing board. asked for Jim Holdaway, and now he got him. The strip was ready to go, but then hit another problem—the publisher of the Express decided to not run it because he viewed Modesty as a fallen woman, the opposite of the image of the newspaper he wanted to project. Aitken quickly offered the strip to the Evening Standard which, like the Express, was also part of the Beaverbrook newspaper empire, and they grabbed it.
Holdaway could indeed draw beautiful women, as shown in this Romeo Brown 1959 newspaper strip written by O’Donnell. © The respective copyright holder. for their publication Gallant Detective. He also drew for various other U.K. publications, including Mickey Mouse Weekly, in which he illustrated Davy Crockett. And then, in 1956, an offer came for the British daily newspaper strip Romeo Brown. That was the break of his career, but Holdaway almost turned it down because they wanted him to draw as many skimpily dressed females as possible. Holdaway had deep concerns, doubting he could draw women (he had been drawing Western comics)—but it turned out he could and they were some of the sexiest to ever be seen on a newspaper daily page! O’Donnell and Holdaway became good friends over the course of the Romeo Brown run through 1962. When O’Donnell was in the process of creating Modesty Blaise, as previously related, he asked for Holdaway and got him. Their collaboration was a very productive one. (O’Donnell dedicated the fourth novel in the Modesty Blaise series, I, Lucifer [1967], to Holdaway, and his artwork can be seen on the covers and/or in spot illustrations for four of the novels, including the last one, Cobra Trap.)
THE MOVIE
The comic strip caught on early and O’Donnell fielded offers from various production companies for a movie version. However, one cannot always foretell what a studio or a director will do to
JIM HOLDAWAY
James Holdaway was born May 28, 1927 in Barnes Common, London. He showed a talent for drawing from an early age and won a scholarship when he was 14 to the Kingston School of Art, but in 1945 he was required to join the National Service and he became part of the East Surrey Regiment. After being discharged, he looked for freelance work as an artist, but only got a job as a rubber engraver (a person who produced dies for ads on cardboard boxes). In 1952, Scion Books hired him to draw stories 66
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The first panel of strip #110 (ABOVE) was a pasteover, covering this drawing underneath. Clearly, this original version lacked the clarity and emotional feeling O’Donnell hoped for, and Holdaway redrew a much more satisfying panel. From the collection of the author.
retro Comic strips
(LEFT) 1966 movie poster for Modesty Blaise. Art by Bob Peak. (RIGHT) Miscasting all around—Dirk Bogarde as Gabriel, Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise, and Terence Stamp as Willie Garvin. © 20th Century Productions.
a project once they have the rights. The original screenplay was written by O’Donnell but then was rewritten by five other writers. There was only a line or two of O’Donnell’s left when it went before the cameras. Some movie adaptations of famous fictional characters are done earnestly, trying to be faithful to the source. In the case of Modesty Blaise, however, 20th Century Fox took O’Donnell’s serious strip and turned it into a farce. They even described it in the film’s pressbook as an “‘op-pop-bop’ color production,” “comedy thriller entertainment,” “directed by one of the world’s most avant garde film makers,” “satirically caricatured arch villain Gabriel,” and “way out comedy of the absurd style.” While I am loathe to even discuss the movie, it is so easy to spend more space than I have available here to vent on just how appalling it is. From the opening shot of Modesty (Monica Vitti) lying on a giant flat bed in her apartment in London, with a bank of computers as the only other furniture, you know the great comic strip is in trouble. Plus brunette Vitti insisting on playing Modesty for most of the film as a blonde was a crime in itself, but not the least of all the hair offenses perpetrated. Willie Garvin, a blond, was
played by Terence Stamp with the actor’s normal dark hair (however, nothing was more upsetting than Stamp’s high-pitched giggling like a ventriloquist’s dummy throughout the movie). (When originally conceiving the strip, O’Donnell saw a young, fairly unknown actor and thought he was an ideal model for Willie. And he would have been. The actor’s name was Michael Caine.) The other top star in the film was Dirk Bogarde, playing the villainous Gabriel with a silver wig—which, even more strangely, Gabriel rips off near an end scene, revealing Bogarde’s own dark hair. One nauseating scene follows another, including a climax where she and Willie sing to each other how they should have had sex before but decide to do it now, something the comic strip Blaise and Garvin would never even think about. (Modesty and Willie’s relationship was based on friendship, willing to die for each other if need be, but never sex.) O’Donnell said in later years that even the thought of the movie made his nose bleed. However, there was one good thing to come out of this mess—it led to a series of Modesty Blaise novels.
THE NOVELS
Publishers wanted to have a Modesty Blaise novel adapting the film prior to its release, a common practice for many years. O’Donnell decided upon Souvenir Press, which went on to publish all the others in the series, a relationship lasting 31 years. The novels by Peter O’Donnell were exceptional, each a very intricately plotted adventure.
Trade paperback edition, with painting incorporating Monica Vitti as Modesty (Fawcett, 1966). RETROFAN
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THE ODDBALL WORLD OF SCOTT SHAW!
How the
SAN DIEGO
CHICKEN Became America’s Tastiest Mascot BY SCOTT SHAW! “A pet chicken for a radio station? How bizarre.” –The KGB Chicken Growing up in San Diego, I was introduced to radio by my parents, who constantly listened to one of the local stations, KCBQ—which played the Top Forty hits—in the mid-Fifties on their cars and in our kitchen in the morning. One day, when I was five, I discovered an inflated balloon in our backyard. At first, I thought it had drifted over from our neighbors, who were always having birthdays because they had six kids. But as I examined it, there was a tag attached to the balloon... from KCBQ! It was a promotional gimmick for a free .45 RPM record to anyone who found any of the hundreds of balloons that KCBQ’s helicopter dropped over San Diego. My choice was the Cadets’ outrageously funny classic, “Stranded in the Jungle” (1957), a tune I’d still love to adapt into an animated short. As a pre-teen, I’d follow different deejays on different San Diego AM rock stations. My favorite was Lee “Baby” Simms, one of the outrageous influences on the creation of WKRP in Cincinnati’s “John Caravella,” a.k.a. “Dr. Johnny Fever.” While in college, I’d hang out at the local radio stations to draw cartoons outside the booth to entertain the nighttime deejays. That’s when I realized how similar cartoonists are to disc jockeys: we both work alone in a room trying to be funny to a faceless audience. By 1972, I was living in Orange County, north of San Diego, but its theme parks, car and wax museums, and alligator farms weren’t for me. I still commuted to San Diego on weekends to see friends and work in plans for San Diego Comic-Con, but finally dropped out of college—I’ve never been asked if I had a degree for a single job as a cartoonist until the digital age—and 72
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(ABOVE) Radio station KGB’s San Diego Chicken energizing the crowd at a sport event. (INSET) Model billboard of KGB’s “chicken” ads. Unless otherwise noted, all images accompanying this article are courtesy of Scott Shaw!
moved back home to start drawing underground comix while day-working at book stores and libraries. There, I first saw a wide billboard that introduced a new character that would eventually wind up as San Diego’s unofficial ambassador as well as a nationally recognized comedic performer. It was a giant chicken, who looked like it had just smoked a joint or two with Sid and Marty Krofft. Suitably, it was the new mascot for San Diego’s AM/ FM station KGB. With my background, how could I not have been drawn to “the KGB Chicken”?
BRIAN NARELLE
The character was created by Brian Narelle, a creative fellow with a fascinating career that includes a major role in the live-action sci-fi comedy Dark Star (1974), an animation character designer for Sesame Street, and the supervising animator on George Lucas’ feature film Twice Upon a Time (1983). Now living in the Wine Country of Sonoma County, Brian is currently a cartooning teacher at the Charles Schulz Museum. Here’s how Brian Narelle recalled his essential role in the hatching of the chicken…
“I graduated from USC Cinema in the early [Seventies] and about New York. I now had to stay in San Diego and animate and immediately began writing animation for Sesame Street. I moved direct the commercial, which I did. Eventually I got to New York. down to San Diego from L.A. to write and animate a promotional “When I returned a week later, I was backing out of a parking film for a new, small animation studio called Odyssey Productions. spot on the street in La Mesa. When I looked out my back window, a I was working on the promo film when I overheard my producer bus had stopped behind me. A huge ad on the side of the bus filled discussing the need to submit a proposal for an animated TV my windows with my chicken!” commercial for a local radio station, KGB, that had both an AM and Of course, a well-designed cartoon character usually makes for an FM presence. a good mascot, but in local markets, animated mascots are simply “There was some mention of a chicken involved, though I too expensive. But it’s possible with a talented individual who, couldn’t understand why. After all, I was just eavesdropping with pantomime only, doesn’t require a big budget to convey a at the time. Soon humorous and likable persona to kids and adults. after I approached my According to Brian, “I have never understood what a producer with the idea of chicken had to do with a radio station. I still don’t know. animating a short bit of I don’t know who made the first costume. It was buttfootage with a chicken in ugly. It was featured on billboards, having appeared it in order to include with to have sprayed the graffiti message ‘Rock Around the the next day’s proposal. Cluck,’ that I had penned for the second round of adverHe agreed. So I stopped tising. The first chicken ad appeared in 1974. Dark Star what I was doing and had been in production for about three years prior to its created 45 seconds of premiere in ’74. I drove up from San Diego to attend the animation in pencil of a Filmex opening with John Carpenter. The radio station chicken hitting ridiculous found Ted Giannoulas and acrobatic poses. This tiny studio being situated in stuck him in that suit to hand (TOP) Neon an office building in Mission Valley, the footage was out promos. They had no sign for developed in a sink in the men’s room and hung up to idea who they were dealing KGB radio dry by its sprockets in a closet using paper clips. The with. Ted is responsible for station. next morning the producer rolled it onto a spool and everything that evolved (RIGHT) went to pitch the project. I prepared to take a break afterwards. That is a long Original and fly to New York City, where my college sweetie story. Early on Ted urged me version of was in medical school. I was soon informed I couldn’t to create a comic strip with the KGB leave because I was now responsible for scoring the the Chicken, which I did. Chicken. contract.” Because it was an adverAs Brian recalled, “I whipped up some storyboard tising ploy at the time for ideas for the TV spot and hoped I could depart the next day. KGB Radio—no one paper would touch the strip. Understandable. Several animators submitted chicken designs. When the client I had been offered to take over the whole ad account by the third and ad agency folks surveyed it all, they chose one of my spots and go-round with KGB but I elected to move north by then. I was no declared the chicken they wanted was the one in the storyboards longer involved. I merely observed from afar.” (that I had whipped up 45 minutes before they got there). Forget
TED GIANNOULAS
British poster for the 1974 sci-fi film Dark Star, featuring Brian Narelle. Dark Star © 1974 Columbia Pictures. Poster courtesy of Heritage.
So, who is this Ted Giannoulas? Ted Giannoulas is a five-foot-four man who has had a five-decade career entertaining spectators around the globe while wearing a head-to-toe chicken costume, of course! Ted was born on August 17, 1953 in Canada’s London, Ontario. His parents, John and Helen, emigrated from Greece to Canada in the early Fifties with just $17 to their name. “My godparents moved to San Diego in the late 1950s, and when my dad visited them in the mid-1960s, he loved the coastal city, saying it reminded him of the climate in Athens,” said Ted. The Giannoulas family applied for residency and their application was accepted in 1969. They left Canada in the family station wagon during the Woodstock Music Festival. Ted vividly recalled that cross-country trek while he was 16 years old. “I enjoyed all the stops along the way, and was especially fascinated by all the big-league stadiums we passed en route.” As his family settled in San Diego, Ted enrolled at Herbert Hoover High School, where he took journalism classes in hopes of one day becoming a sportswriter. He immediately began winning California state awards for high school journalism and was soon named editor of the school paper. “I actually declined becoming RETROFAN
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