In planning out this week, I decided that today was going to be the buffer between movie reviews. I also decided it was time to do a new installment of this feature that would go back to what I meant for it to be: Not just another toy-blogging feature, but also a survey of some of the more surprising and unclassifiable artifacts that crop up in my collections. In the further course of my latest review, I hit on something I had thought about a few times before and knew I had to cover while it was in my mind. It's a very little book I picked up a few years back that seems unremarkable at face value, but as we will see momentarily, it is a true tip of the iceberg, part of a series that was not just successful in its own right but instrumental in how a generation of kids learned about older movies. To get things rolling, here's another shot of the cover plus a pic of the opening pages.
As you may be able to make out above, this book is one of the more eclectic entries in what was simply called the Monsters series, otherwise known to those who read them as the orange monster books. The series was dedicated to science fiction and horror movies that were old even then, with a focus on the Universal Monsters quasi-franchise of the 1930s onward. A total of 15 of the things were published from about 1977 to 1987 by Crestwood House, marketed primarily to libraries and schools. The vast majority were written by Ian Thorne, now known to be a pseudonym of science fiction writer Julian May (d. 1917). Where most of the books covered an individual monster/ franchise, such as Dracula, King Kong and Godzilla, this book opened the field to a wider theme, covering movies about "mad" scientists and their various discoveries and creations. Several later entries were dedicated to individual movies that received no direct sequels, such as It Came From Outer Space and The Deadly Mantis. Photos exist of a "Monster Reading Center" that appears to have included tapes and copies of the books in a paperback or magazine format.
As already alluded, the bare facts only begin to cover the impact of these books. Judging from the volume of content about them, they were everywhere in the late 1970s and '80s, with many undoubtedly circulating much later. In another sense, however, they were nowhere, as the vast majority equally undoubtedly remained in school and public libraries rather than passing on to the kids who read and remembered them, very possibly right up to the point of outright self-destruction. Those that survive at all go for very high prices, with prices over $50 being quite routine and anything under $20 being an outright steal. This clearly high demand has persisted despite growing notoriety for factual errors, most notoriously a report that two different endings were filmed for King Kong Vs. Godzilla. (Wikizilla more charitably reports that the series entry on Godzilla was the first Godzilla book of any kind released in the United States.) Even in the era of the internet, their appeal persists, at least for those who grew up on them. For me in particular, the pull was strong enough to take a half-way decent price for one of the ones I had the strongest memory of. Here's a couple shots of what I got.
The format of the book covers two individual movies, the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man (the subject of his own somewhat later volume), before proceeding to an overview of the genre. It offers what is still a decent mix of "classic" and semi-obscure movies, including Island of Lost Souls (see Island of Dr. Moreau 1977 and 1996), Dr. Cyclops, Tarantula and The Man They Could Not Hang. The photos, many of them credited to the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman, remain impressive at full size, though they tend to look more faded than the age of the book alone can account for. After a few pages, however, it begins to sink in: This is (pardon my Serbo-Croatian) total kaka. To show my point, here's the part that triggered all this, a synopsis of the 1936 Boris Karloff movie The Walking Dead, which I reviewed in my previous post.
Here's what the book has to say about the movie, in big enough print that you might be able to follow along in the pic: "When John Ellerman, played by Boris Karloff, was framed for murder and executed, (actor Edmund) Gwenn brought him back to life. The experiment was not a complete success since Karloff was turned into a revenge seeking zombie. He destroyed each of the evil doers who had framed him, He then died, once again his savage work being done." That's barely a paragraph of information about the movie, and it gets almost everything wrong. If anything, this makes the Kong vs. Godzilla blooper look minor and forgivable. Karloff's character is in many ways an archetype of later movie "zombies", but he also differs in many ways, above all being of "normal" intelligence. And, as I pointed out at length reviewing the damn thing, he never deliberately kills any of the villains who got him executed. And the name is Ellman, not Ellerman! Fungghhh!!!
Even as I write this, I'm trying to find a defense. These were barely into the days of VHS, never mind IMDB and Wikipedia. They were covering a wider range of movies than other books in the series, and nobody could afford to watch a whole movie to check a paragraph of text. Maybe, if it comes to that, this was just the one that wasn't as good as the others. I honestly find myself fervently drawn to the last possibility, especially as I remember the other books. I remember the eerie stills from The Deadly Mantis, very possibly the best of them all. which very possibly stirred up my interest in real insects and biology. I remember the overviews of the many adventures of Kong and Godzilla, the almost scholarly tone of the book on Dracula, which covered not only the Lugosi movies but other vampire movies like Blacula and The Night Stalker. And against all of these, I must count the all too obvious cons. We were kids. Even if we had a TV and a VCR, we weren't going to watch every movie mentioned. In the end, we didn't know better.
And with that dispiriting note, here's the last page of the book, which is dated 1977 for the material and 1980 for the printing (and apparently still 4 years before the 1984 date the library apparently acquired it). Note that this includes only 6 of the 15 titles in the series, which absolutely crowd the back covers of later books. And note the tape, in itself a good indication of just how determined the librarians and patrons were to keep these books available.
At this point, I'm ready to wrap this up just to avoid getting any more discouraged. The best upside I find in all this is that the whole idea of kids being drawn to whatever is new and "cool" is a preposterous myth. Children love to learn about the past at least as much as anyone else, or books like these would never have existed. There's also plenty to be happy about in the vast improvements of access to older movies. Just for example, The Empire Strikes Back is now as old as The Walking Dead was when this book was printed, and imagine the fallout if someone printed that the movie ended with Luke Starwalker killing Dark Vader. The most important lesson is that there are things that are meant to be outgrown, which is why I for one have long since moved on without delving any further into the series. That's all, more to come!
While I'm at it, here's my first link list in a while:
Branded in the 80s series overview
Titans Terrors And Toys tribute; alas, a link for the reading center kit is dead.
Sicko Psychotic comprehensive list of the books and referenced movies.
And finally a Cinemassacre video on the series.
No comments:
Post a Comment