PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Action!

Every now and again the gods of television offer up something nice you actually want badly. Too often it's something you don't need but buy anyway. The 1999 series Action came out last week. I was wanting that pretty badly. It's such a hoot. It turned out when I put the taped episodes on dvdr I was missing 2 episodes. It's nice to have all 13. Jay Mohr stars as Peter Dragon, head of Dragonfire Films, a small studio in a partnership deal with a larger studio. They have their own section of the lot. As we join their life, already in progress, it's premiere night. Peter Dragon's new summer blockbuster, Slow Torture, is opening. Enter Wendy Ward, played by Illeana Douglas, a former child star, now a hooker. After a great slapstick pratt fall, with lots of panty, Peter hires her to go see his new picture with him. Peter's Slow Torture bombs, and she's the only one who will tell him the truth. It stinks. After spending the night together, Peter hires Wendy to be his new vice president of development . The rest of the series takes us along Peter's path as he tries to resurrect his newly sinking career. And it's a filthy, cus-filled, laugh-fest journey. I loved it, made me laugh, but many in America didn't find it funny and Fox axed the show around it's 8th episode. It ran again on some other cable channel. Now it's on dvd and the swearing is unbleeped. So nice. There was a lot of beeping. There are a great bunch of character actors playing a great bunch of characters. I especially liked Buddy Hacket as Peter's Uncle Lonnie, head of security at Dragonfire films. He's a good man to know, he knows where the blood and piss guy lives. And the blood and piss guy knows Doctor Lee, the shady liposuctionist. These are services you need in Hollywood, especially when your star shows up 50 pounds over weight. Doctor Lee will suck that 50 out of her and do it faster than allowed by law. "Sure, it hurt like hell!" R. Lee Emery plays the director Titus Scroad, he's got an chemical dependency problem, something he shares with the male lead Holden Van Dorn. Lee Arenberg plays the big studio head, he's a real treat, that Bobby G, with his big schlong. Bobby is also the new husband of Peter's ex-wife. There's some twisted shit up in that house. Nice house though. Jarad Paul plays the script's writer Adam Rafkin, said to be based on Adam Rifkin. It's such an angry show, so hate filled, at times uncomfortable. But, with train wreck fascination, it draws your eye. The swearing draws your ear. At least mine, and then the  story hooked me in and kept me there through the end. The story has a nice small arc and ends at a good point. It's like a nice slice of pie. You eat it and you're full, you know there's more, but you don't really need it and that second helping just might not be as good tasting as you thought it would.

Friday Night Movies 47

We got two giant monster movies tonight. And it was sort of an unexpected bonus. The first movie came from the 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics. The Milpitas Monster is a giant garbage monster, but you can't tell that from the blurb on the movies jacket. This image is from the video tape. That's sort of what the monster looks like. It comes out of the polluted lake near the garbage dump for the town of Milpitas California. It's a real town and many of the people were in the movie which was made by local high school students in 1975. It's sure better than the movie made by kids in my high school. It's color for one and at 80 minutes a whole feature. It's not very well made, the sound is often bad but it has a certain charm. One of it's main characters is the town drunk, who lives in an alley with his still. We meet him after the long town history segment at the start of the film. The town history is narrated by Paul Frees, who's voice you'd recognize from Rocky and Bullwinkle's show. The unseen monster is mucking about with the garbage and stealing the towns garbage cans. The townies demand something to be done. In lieu of burning torches they gather up picket signs and storm the city council chambers. The local high school students are planning a dance. There are some dating antics. One sad guy gets dumped at a small carnival. Since no one is an actor it's kind of fun to watch. I liked the blue bath robe guy. There is some fair stop motion animation of the monster, which has transparent wings and big claws. It flies, but unfortunately it forgets to fly away and falls off a cliff. The movie is over. It certainly had 40 cents worth of entertainment for me.

The Deadly Spawn had more than 40 cents worth of entertainment, pretty good for a film that cost $20,000. It was a bit better than the above anyway. Some fist sized tadpole like alien spawn come to earth in a meteor and eat a couple of campers. Heading for town they hole up in the wet basement of a big house. The spawn starts growing, turning into a much bigger three-headed all-teeth giant worm monster, which eats mom and dad for breakfast. Like the previous movie the acting is not very good and the dialog is often laugh making. There's a bucket of blood splashed around, some fair to good gore effects, and a decent musical score. Tim Hildebrandt is an executive producer and his son plays the main character, a movie monster lovin' kid who helps save the day. Hildebrandt also did the art for the video box. There's a website for the movie. It's a hoot. It seems to have a nice cult following, enough to support a feature rich dvd, or so hopes Synapse Video. If I got one cheap I might pick it up.

Tol'ya I buy anything

I bought 53 movies today. I wasn't planning on it. It just happened. I stopped in at BestBuy at lunch to pick up some dvdr's. Still copying old tapes to dvd. Earlier this week I watched the 6 episodes of This Is David Lander, amongst other things. It's an 1988 tv show from England starring Stephen Fry as David Lander. He's a news journalist who is getting the goods on some low down dogs who are cheating the people. He's investigating a crooked organ legging doctor, a crooked land developer, some scummy politicians, etc. The shows are kind of low key, sort of dry, but there's also a bit of the old boot in the groin. At's a larf. I was watching the first episode and wondered who the young guy playing the screwed over home owner was. After a while I guessed right. Jason Carter, who played Marcus on Babylon 5 in the last two or three seasons. I don't remember if he was on in the second season, but I think he came in the third. I should watch B5 again, but who's got all that time. In a later David Lander episode Jason Isaacs played a scientist. He's currently playing an evil git in the Harry Potter series. At least that's pretty much the only place I'm seeing him. He plays another evil git in The Patriot, one of the few dvd's that I ever got rid of. It's not something I would want to see again.

Not having a repeat viewing of some of the movies I bought today will probably be a reality, but not for the same reason as The Patriot. The 53 movies came in two packages. Three Roger Corman movies in one set and 50 stuffed in a second set. The three Roger Corman movies are Last Woman on Earth, Creature From the Haunted Sea, and Battle Of Blood Island. The first two were directed by Corman and the third only had him in the picture as an uncredited extra. All three have audio commentaries but Roger doesn't participate in any of them. The box says the movies are hosted by Roger, he talks for several minutes before each movie. The Corman trio was 17 bucks at BestBuy, and for a couple of Hamiltons, you can have the 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics. 40 cents a movie. You can barely make a dvd for much less than that.

The 50 movies are: Death Rage, Memorial Valley Massacre, Medusa, Deadtime Stories, Scream Bloody Murder, The Bell From Hell, Metamorphosis, Naked Massacre, Haunts, Christmas Evil, Driller Killer, Horror Express, The Snake People, Sisters of Death, War of the Robots, Oasis of the Zombies, The Witches' Mountain, Deep Red, The Revenege of Doctor X, Bad Taste, Virus, The Milpitas Monster, Funeral Home, Lady Frankenstein, Silent Night Blooby Night, Panic, Messiah of Evil, The Blancheville Monster, Cathy's Curse, The Alpha Incident, The Demons of Ludlow, The Cold, Hands of a Stranger, Gothic, Man in the Attic, The Demon, Crypt of the Living Dead, Track of the Moon Beast, The Ghost, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Dr. Tarr's Torture Garden, The Bloody Brood, House of the Dead, Slashed Dreams, A Bucket of Blood, Horrors of Spider Island, The Legend of Big Foot, The Devil's Hand, I bury the Living, Drive-in Massacre.

Wow, that's some batch of movies. And I've only see about 10 of them. Some I will watch more than once, but I'm betting that some won't get watched again. That's a sucker bet. The copy of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste is pretty poor. I have a real nice version on another DVD. I won't even need to watch this version all the way through. Several of the films are slasher movies and I never been that much of a slasher fan. Seeing human creeps cut up gals just doesn't hold much interest. Seeing monsters doing the same thing on the other hand just seems right. Usually monsters are equal opertunity eaters. Women, men and if the movie is real good, some kids for a snack. The other nice thing about this set is I only had 2 of the movies already. Bad Taste, as I mentioned, and A Bucket Of Blood. I might have a copy of Horrors of Spider Island. I just went to look. Yep, it's in the 50 Movie Pack SCI-FI. Don't expect much from this video pack quality wise. Looks like they take old tape versions and copy those. You can't expect much for 40 cents a movie. I'll let you know some of what gets watched.

Friday Night Movies 46

It's was a friggin' cold night last night. 13 below as I started to write this at 11:40 PM. I thought about staying home earlier, not from the cold but from being so tired. Luckily a short nap helped me get through the mind numbing pair from 1981. They were both about 90 minutes. This helps. Not as much as 1.5 speed, but short good. They were both borrowed.

First up is Evilspeak, also a first for Clint Howard. His first starring role. Clint's been around since 1963 and he seems to be working all the time, as many as ten things in a year. What a guy. Check out his internet variety show. It's short and has a lot of swearing. Guests get 15 bucks and a turkey. Something made me laugh. I won't tell you what. I don't care if you guess. In Evilspeak Clint is an orphan enrolled in a military academy where he's being bullied by some of his class mates. He sadly lacks the social interaction skills to stop his becoming a target. We are told repeatedly Clint has a high IQ, but we don't see him doing much with it. He tries but blunders and is beaten down. After finding the vault of evil in the academy's church, he puts evil spells into his 1981 computer, and unleashes Estaban. The last 10 minutes have some wholesale slaughter as a possessed sword wielding Clint runs amuck killing everyone. Most everyone on that campus was a prick anyway, I didn't give a shit about any of them. There are pigs that eat people. You don't see that too often. Unfortunately, not very scary, more sad, those pigs. They made me laugh, but that didn't make up for the long boring bits where Clint is bullied, or worse, the longer bits where he stands mute while someone yells at him. Luckily I didn't buy it.

Nor did I buy Dawn Of The Mummy. Lucky me. Grave robbers, high fashion models, photographers, mummies and zombies all compete for screen time in this boring slow moving film, some of which was really shot in Egypt. There's a crazy zombie fighting ending that everyone seemed to like but the previous 80 minutes takes a toll for that meager payoff. For a brief few minutes I was fascinated by John Salvo's amazing acting style. His hair had me going too. It doesn't seem right. Not much does in this movie. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't interested in seeing all the zombie movies made. No matter what the cost. Still, it's nice someone else bought this and lent it. Maybe someone will lend it to you, or maybe you'll be lucky and they won't.

Carl Barks Article

Back in October Chris Budel over at the Nostalgia Zone asked me to write him an article about Carl Barks. You can see it on the Nostalgia Zone site.

Variety

I like a bit of variety now and again. I don't like looking at the same sort of show or movie, read the same sort of book, comic. Et cetera! Still, I tend to swim in familar waters, occasionally returning to spawn.

Star Wait was one of those familar territory things. And it was only 3 bucks at Target. I read on the IMDb that Target was the only place to get it. I think I remember a sticker on the one that I bought that proclaimed Target Exclusive! Amazon has used copies and DVDPlanet doesn't have it listed at all. It's a 74 minute documentary by some guys about some other guys. The other guys are waiting in line, for 6 weeks, to see the new Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones. Some of those guys are of the female gender. You probably saw them guys getting made fun of in the mainstream media. It's an interesting enuf documentary, with a whole bunch of extras. Everyone in line had a badge, and some of the badges had light up lightsabers and the dvd has pictures of them, hidden in an easter egg. There are 4 commentaries with some celebrity guys which included some early Mystery Science Theatre 3000 guys - Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu and Josh "J. Elvis" Weinstein, two guys from Freaks and Geeks - Sam Levine and Joh Daley, and some other movie guys I don't give much of a shit about. I haven't listened to the commentaries, just too damn busy, so I don't know why they're there. Gotta get me some free time, but I know I'd just waste it, watchin' movies.

I watched Red Garters and really liked it. Last April I mentioned that I remembered the seeing of it in the early 60's. I hadn't seen it since then but the memory of seeing the movie and being impressed by the uniqueness of the story telling method stuck with me, even though the details of the story have eroded away in mine noggin. I hadn't realized it was out on dvd until I saw it sitting on the shelf at Best Buy. Plunk, right into my manual shopping basket. It's a 1954 western musical romantic comedy with Rosemary Clooney as a dance hall girl, Jack Carson as the town big shot, Guy Mitchell as the stranger, Pat Crowley at the pretty girl, Gene Barry as a mexican, Buddy Ebsen and Frank Faylen as townsmen. Some of the names you might recognize, some for sure not. It's a rather typical plot, stranger comes to town to find the man who killed his brother, then faces a moral challenge. What isn't typical are the amazing sets and costumes. The movie sets are very stage like. Doors and windows have no walls, often hanging suspended on wires. There are some marvelous giant trees in the outdoor sets which have a golden backdrop that envelopes everything. It's like they are shooting it in a perpetual magic hour, that last golden bit of sunshine. It's rather beautiful. Inside the walls are color coded to the various locations. Doors, windows, and stairs are all white. The women's costumes were created by Edith Head and the men's by Yvonne Wood. I'd heard of Edith Head and had seen a lot of the movies she has done costumes for, but I haven't seen much of anything that Yvonne Wood worked on. Both women do a great job, the costumes are varied, frequently changed, and fit the stylized settings. There are several dance numbers and some solo singin', most of which seemed to move the story forward. I'm not a big musical fan. I can only think of two others that I have, Cannibal: The Musical and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The songs in Red Garters were mostly ok, the writers don't quite have quite the satirical punch of a Trey Parker but they wrote fun songs, especially for the 50's. If you grew up watching westerns as a kid like I did, all the stuff you saw in those 50's and 60's westerns is here, even the singing, just turned into a Broadway play. Red Garters was originally released in 3-D. I can't even begin to imagine what that might have looked like in the theater. When I saw it, no 3-D. The colors on the dvd are great looking, it's a nice transfer and the soundtrack is great sounding. There's lots of gun shooting, and that's also a big part of what the story is all about. The guy over at DVD Verdict liked it a fair bit, and he takes more time to outline the story. I hadn't heard of this site before tonight. I read some reviews and it seems very fannish, if you know what I mean. Back to the violence and the Code of the West. Hats off. Red Garters pokes fun at the frontier justice model where you have to go kill the guy who killed your brother. Even if your brother deserved to get gunned down. Even if he deserved to get shot in the back. While he was asleep. Drunk. You still gotta get that guy. It's the Code of the West. Hats off. Luckily, the movie takes light hearted approach and the only people disappointed at the end of the movie are the town people. They don't get to see someone gunned down. They are a bit blood thirsty. But that's comedy.

Visiting and Revisiting

There's a nice review of the forthcoming dvd of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on this BBC page. It sounds good to me. The dvd comes out March 7. Still a bit of time to wait. It won't seem like anything, 4 weeks of the same old same old. Work, tv, more work, more tv. I'm actually watching tv while I work on this. I know, Iknow, this isn't much like work, although some of my regular day job work involves wasting time sitting at a pc. I'm looking forward to seeing Goblet of Fire again, especially the dragon bit. GoF was one of the few movies I went to see in the theater last year. I'd rather watch stuff on dvd at home, where it's more comfortable, and you can rewind. In your underwear.

I've been going through more old tapes and dubbing the old vhs onto DVD+R. Yesterday I finished up the 6 episodes of Dynaman. This was some of the oldest video that I have, taped in 1988. I don't have many tapes of stuff that I recorded before 1990. I purged my collection regularily. A few things I kept. Dynaman was one of them. There were 6 episodes that played on Night Flight, which ran on the USA cable network back in the mid to late 80's. Night Flight had lots of weird short stuff and occasional odd movies. Dynaman was a Japanese tv series that was re-scripted and re-dubbed with a new story. A story full of jokes. Here's a good page with the real story of the Japanese series. It dosn't seem to have many jokes. Dave Foley and Bruce McCulloch of the Kids In The Hall were writers on this Toronto produced series. It was fairly funny and I enjoyed watching them again. It's doubtful that anyone will release a real dvd but I found some on eBay that had even more material than I have. That's the nice thing about the internet and eBay, they bring people together to swap money for bootleg dvd's. It's nice not to have to drive over to criminal town and take the risk of winding up face down in a parking lot. Some lady got shot in the eye the other day. The bullet went through the back window, bounced off the front window post and put her eye out. Driving through a crappy part of north Minneapolis. That can happen anywhere, I guess, anywhere where assholes hang out anyway. Dynaman is all silly and funny and nice to watch and filled with bad jokes that occasionally made me laugh. I still use the wonderfully descriptive phrase, Comic Relief Machine, now, here in the 21st century.

Even older than the two Dynaman tapes is the tape that has three Star Wars documentaries on it. One for each of the first three movies. I taped these some time after the third movie came out in 1983. Looks like they were on PBS at one time or another, I found a PBS logo and there aren't any commercials cuts. They don't look too bad for something recorded at ep. These documentaries haven't been released on dvd and probably won't.  Some guy in Portugal is currently selling the set of three and the Star Wars Holiday Special on two dvd's for 16 bucks. Some of the material has turned up in other documentaries, especially the little pieces of behind the scenes video and film clips. Unfortunately, no matter how you repackage it there are only so many stories you can tell, and pictures you can show, about the making of Star Wars. Fortunately, I haven't gotten that tired of hearing, and seeing, them again. I must have a dozen different documentaries on Star Wars. And I don't have nearly all.

It's kind of fun going through the old video collection, seeing that stuff again. I hadn't seen the documentaries for several years, and the Dynaman for 8 or 10. I have always enjoyed going back and re-visiting the things I liked in the past, books, comics, tv, movies, all that crap. It's either really good and really re-watchable or there is some sentimental or nostalgic attachment. Falling in the later catagory is the DC Showcase reprint of The House Of Mystery. 21 issues, 174 to 194 running May 1968 to Sept 1971. I used to have some or all of those original issues and remember them fondly. I don't really remember any of the art or the stories, it's just a vague fond feeling. DC has just started to reprint some of their older material in cheap black and white reprint books. This one has 552 pages, all but 6 of which are comics, for the cheap price of $16.99. There's a bunch of Berni Wrightson in here and a few othere artists that are ok. I'll be finding out sometime in the future what the stories are like. I have bought, but not read, the Metaporpho collection. Again with the fond memory. There are a few things over at DC that would be nice to re-read but the cost of getting old issues is prohibative. It's expensive enough collecting old Disney comics and those are still around and often reasonable. Some of those old DC comics I read as kids are much more expensive than the Disneys that were published the same years. DC Showcase has a Haunted Tank collection coming in May, which might be good, and a Superman Family collection next month, which collects the first 22 issues of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. I was always more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan, and of course, no one was more liked than Disney.

Friday Night Movies 45

Vampyres is a 1974 Brit horror film with a heaping help of nudity. There isn't much else to recommend about it. Two naked girls are gunned down in bed. They turn up fine after a quick flash forward, although they have developed a bit of a taste for the jugular juice. Some dumb men and a pair of holiday travellers come into contact with the naughty ladies, none of the victims doing a very good job of surviving to the end of the movie. Fortunately, we all survived, mostly from enjoying the nudity. I have a complaint. There just aren't any traditional vampires in this movie. The two girls really are blood sucking spirits. I'm giving a bit away but I can't imagine anyone rushing out to buy this. We actually watched the 2003 Blue Underground version. This cover is for the 2000 Anchor Bay dvd. The BU version has a bunch of extras, including lots of nude pictures from the film. I guess they know what their customers want. The blond woman on the cover is Anulka Dziubinska who was also the May 1973 Playmate of the Month. She's nasty and naked. I still don't think I need to go out and buy one.

I did buy Sahara when I saw it in a big dump of movies at the Bloomington Cub Foods. The Cub is nice and close to work and I needed to go to the bank and get pop. I also got a copy of the US dvd of Shaolin Soccer. 8 bucks each. I liked Sahara. It's a nice, fast paced, fun action movie like The Mummy or National Treasure. Maybe not as silly as the first one. It does have imaginary antiquities like National Treasure, and there is a bunch of blowing up. No nudity. I liked Matthew McConaughey in this, and I really enjoyed Steve Zahn. Zahn is always fun to watch. I'm not as big a Penelope Cruz fan. She's ok. I'll certainly watch this again, it's the sort of action movie I like. The movie is based on a Clive Cussler book. Cussler has a great classic car collection. I haven't read any of his books, which I hear are very archeology laden. A guy at work reads them and seems to enjoy them. I just don't want to start another writer.

Friday Night Movies 44

I have been a fan of Paul Bartelt's Private Parts for years. Hey! Don't be thinkin' that. I'm talkin' 'bout his first feature film, for MGM in 1972. I'm pretty sure that I saw this movie sometime around the release of Eating Raoul in 1982. There was a period where I was into Paul Bartel. I used to hit the video stores looking for all the films by him or others I was interested in. Bartel also directed Death Race 2000 and Lust in the Dust with Divine and Tab Hunter. Bartel acted in many more films than he directed. Private Parts is a twisted sexual thriller, but I didn't get uneasy like this guy. There are some pictures and spoilers galore in the review. Ayn Ruyman is a curious and naive teenager living with her girlfriend and her girlfriend's guy. She leaves there under a dark cloud with a stolen wallet and heads for her aunt's hotel. Lucille Benson plays Ayn's strict aunt. She's great. She lets Ayn stay in her dingy, skid row hotel with it's handful of unsavory characters. There's the naughty reverend with his homo erotic secrets, the crazy old lady who yells, the drunken layabout, and the photographer who looks like Frankenfurter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He's all pouty lips and curly black hair. There's murder goin' on in this hotel of repression, but the sexuality is what threw MGM for a loop. They hated it and the film got little release. Perhaps that's why Paul didn't work for 3 years. It was out on vhs tape a long time ago. I had a dub of that release for years. It recently came out on dvd. It's a pretty weird film for any period, but we all agreed it's nice that the weirdos have a place to live. There's a few laughs, a few shocks, some nice twists, some stabbin' and some nudity. There were some complaints about man-ass early in the film, but that was balanced by a nice and slightly disturbing bathing scene with the cute Ayn in the buff. There were some complaints of Private Parts being slow moving but to me it's an old friend, all cleaned up and lookin' good.

Dead and Breakfast looked pretty good, and it was ok. Six friends are RVing to a wedding. They stop over at a Bed and Breakfast run by David Carradine and Diedrich Bader, who aren't in the film long enough to do much of anything. Bader gets a knife in the neck and David drops dead all on his own. There's a lot of comedy mixed with some gore as the group slowly gets picked off between interviews with the local law enforcement. They aren't getting to that wedding on time, nor in one piece. Hardly anyone gets out with all their bits intact in this one. The cast all did a good job. The zombies are created with a spirit box, but they still need a decapitation or bullet to the brain to drop them. There's a drifter who shows up with day savin' info but he's a tad late and the whole town has been taken over. It's short and fun, especially the sound track, parts of which are performed live.

Annette and the 60's

I like series books. There's no getting around it, I like 'em. Since I got hooked on the Potter series I have been looking for other young adult titles that are good readin'. One of my regular stops is the Half Price Books over in Highland Park. That's in Saint Paul. It's just across the Mississippi River, 8 and a half minutes from my house. That time's dependent on the light rail not coming by. HP has a huge shopping area right next to the Ford Plant that's been in the news lately. The Ford Plant is slated to close in a year or two, punishment for making those large trucks no one wants anymore. Here's a site with some pictures of the area. Besides the HPB, I occasionally shop at the Lunds for groceries, and the Barnes & Noble for books I can't get through DreamHaven. There's an OCB I eat at once in a while. They even have a page on their site that tells customers how to eat at a buffet. Fill plate, stuff face. Repeat until full.

When I was at the HPB a couple of saturdays ago I picked up a box set of Annette Mysteries. They are 2003 Disney Press reprints of the Whitman Authorized Editions from the 60's, featuring ANNETTE, star of motion pictures and television. On clearance for $6.98. A 9 dollar and 1 cent saving. Nice. Four Swell Stories in One Super Slipcase!. That's what the slipcase tells me anyway. There was a fifth book in the series, at least that's all I could find on the internet. Doris Schroeder wrote the first four, and Barlow Meyers wrote the fifth. I don't have that one. I am thinking of getting one off of ABE. There's a shit load of them there. It even crossed my mind to get copies of the other four originals but that passed, when I couldn't quickly find them all in one place and it had gotten late and I was tired. You know, I rarely get tired of buying new books. I more often find myself tiring of having those books.

Walt Disney's Annette Sierra Summer is the first from 1961 and it's the longest at 286 pages. There are 22 full page illustrations. The full page illos and the chapter heading illos are printed in the same color ink. This one is all red. The end papers of each book have the same 8 small b&w silhouette illos which surround a large silhouhette of Annette's head in the same color as the books illos. You can see the head silhouhette on the box set above. In this universe Annette's name is McCleod, and she's a dark beauty. It gets mentioned a couple of times anyway. She's an orphan who lives in LA with her uncle and aunt. The uncle and aunt are brother and sister. I don't think it means anything. Annette has a white convertible called the Monster. I think that means something. I'm not sure what though. The Monster is what she drives to visit her mother's brother and family. They live in the Sierra foothills. She had spent the summer at the Bori house in Lost Creek when she was 9, and while they don't come out and say it, she's got to be 16 or 17 now. She can drive and goes alone on a few hundred mile trip, in a convertible, with the top down. Once in Lost Creek she gets involved with the locals and their Pioneer Days Celebration. The mystery is pretty simple. Most of the book is taken up with romance and personal conflict. There's a bit of kidnapping near the end. Annette leads the charge and saves the day and it all has a happy ending.

The second book is The Desert Inn Mystery, which came out in 1961, and the illustration color is a weird blue. Annette and her friend are off to Pine Mesa, Arizonia in the Monster. They figure to get there and back to LA on 19 bucks worth of gas. Oh, those were the days. Probably would have been a good idea to start backin' off the oil teat then, huh. This mystery involves a 20 year old mine disaster and stolen money. Annette figures out the mystery but again with the romance. It's all mostly school girl type crushes. It's Disney, so it's all good and clean. All the books are pretty formula and after the first they are much shorter, just 200 pages each. There's always a girl for Annette to hang out with, girls who have romantic problems and are blonde. There are two or three boys who hang around, one always has a bit of a temper, and one who's cute or dreamy.

Walt Disney's Annette and the Mystery at Moonstone Bay is the third book, published by Whitman in 1962. Instead of leaving town right away, like the first two books, Annette is stuck in town. She's waiting for her Uncle to return with an old army buddy and his daughter. The new blonde girl needs some behavior modification, then there's some exciting horse back riding and by the middle of Chapter 5 Annette is driving a hundred miles up the coast to Moonstone Bay. The blonde girl's dad had made it rich in the oil fields of Texas. He's buying a big house in California, and the Glaven Estate is a biggun. It's even got horses, so there's more riding. Some one told me that young girls have a thing for horses. Not something I'm much interested. There's some robbin', stolen jewels and a bit of romance. The interior illustrations are green.

Walt Disney's Annette and the Mystery At Smuggles' Cove was originally published in 1963. I like the covers on these books, but Smuggler's Cove is my favorite. Annette is with her aunt and uncle at their Laguna Beach cottage. I don't know if that is even a real place. That's the thing with fiction, sometimes it's all lies, sometimes it's not. There's lots of sail boating in this book and it's a good primer on putting on a fake luau on a budget. There is some scuba diving but the reader never goes below the surface with the boys, and neither does Annette. There are some South American revolutionaries, an exiled president, and a cute little kid. Luckily no one gets killed but a older boy with a bit of a temper gets a punch in the head. Not like he didn't need that. The interior illustrations are greenish blue. The mystery has something to do with the South Americans and a yard long tube that falls into the Cove.

All told a nice fun bunch of books. If I get the fifth, I'll mention it. I found a copy of the Whitman novelization of The Missadventures of Merlin Jones. Annette is in that but not as Annette. The real Annette Funicello has a line of toy bears that she sells, part of the proceeds goes to multiple sclerosis research. Annette has MS herself.  The bears are very cute, sugar diabetes cute, as you can see.