PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Avon Fantasy Reader Covers

 

 

I found these covers to some Avon Fantasy Readers online. I thought they were great. I used to have some of these but I can't remember which ones. They were reprints in paperback form of 1930's pulp stories. They came out in the 50's. I have a feeling that the covers are reprints from pulps too but I don't know which ones and I'm too lazy to go check. I have a feeling there are sites that have more covers for many of those old science fiction and fantasy pulps but I haven't checked that. Just another thing to get suckered into collection 'cause it's there. I'll enjoy these for now. 
 

Song of the South

 
For some reason Disney hasn't had a nice dvd release of Song Of The South yet so the bootleggers will have to do if you want to see this 1946 film. You can find copies all over the place. Most seem to be from the Japanese Laserdisc or the British DVD. Someone gave me a copy of what I think is the British DVD. You can find a copy here, here's a place that has it for $7.99. Perhaps someday Disney will do up a nice disc and we can buy that too. It's a tough one, people are unhappy no matter what you do. I'm prefectly happy to watch the one I have right now, but I'd sure like a nice Platinium Edition 2 - dvd set that had lots of production art and the like on it. It could happen. I know it's a hot potato, but once you explain how to handle them, they aren't so dangerous.

It's post Civil War and Johnny and his Mom go to live with his Grandmother who lives on a nice plantation in the south. Lots of black people live on the plantation, working as share croppers. Johnny takes a likin' to Uncle Remus and his stories but mom thinks the elderly man is a bad influence on her son. It gets worse and worse and Johnny is knocked down by a bull. It's sad but he'll be ok. Uncle Remus can fix it with a dose of Brer Rabbit. Johnny makes friends with two local children, both of them poor, one black and one white. You can read a more detailed synopsis of the movie at Christian Willis's site. There's a puppy in there too. It's sentimental melodrama, and I got a tear at the end. It's pretty to look at and the animation is some of the companies best. I even like the songs by Johnny Mercer.

    
That's Uncle Remus in his cabin with the three kids, then it's Johnny, Toby and Ginny. They're all pretty cute. Uncle Remus tells the Brer Rabbit stories to illustrate a moral lesson. The kids learn. There's some conflict with Johnny's mom and just about everyone else. She'll get over that eventually, fixed by singin' and story tellin'. I like stories.

    
 
I really developed an affection for the Brer Rabbit that Paul Murry drew in Walt Disney Comics and Stories. Murry drew a ton of art for Western, all kinds of characters and stories. Western Publishing was the company that made Disney Comics from the 1930's to the 1970's. Disney tried doing comics back in the 1990's but it was a failure. I'm mostly interested in the old books. That's Dell Four Color 129 from December 1946. That's pretty old. It adapts some of the animated parts of the Song of the South. You can read the rest of the tar baby story plus another whole story here. The inking is by Carl Buettner. I really have a great respect for both Murry and Buettner. They created some very entertaining stories and some really nice artwork in their comic stories. For me Paul Murry is right up there with Carl Barks as a comic creator.

Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant - Illustrated by Andrew Colanga

   

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

Andrew posted this 2 part YouTube video and I took a look. I used to listen to that song a lot back in the 70's. It's enjoyable and there's a good melody and chorus. Andrew has illustrated the song with a shit load of black and white drawings. They are pretty enjoyable too, a nice compliment to the song. It's a long song, over 18 minutes, and there are a lot of drawings. Took him a month. I'm getting tired thinking about it. I see Arlo revisited his song 30 years later. I'm kind'a missing the hat. Great job, AC. Have a crime free Thanksgiving everyone. 

Dead Smurfs

  
I recently scanned in some pictures of Dead Smurfs that I had made back in the 1980's. I had been wanting to make some sculpture back then and was out looking at self hardening clay at the craft stores. I found could buy a half kilo brick of Das for $2.50 or I could buy a Smurf Molding Kit for 99 cents. It had a half kilo of clay in each kit. I can't remember which store it was but I think it might have been KayBee. They were in the Malls, they had a craft section, and there were plenty of them back then. Besides the brick of Das clay in each package, there were some accessories and a smurf mold.

 
 
I got about 20 of them. I drove all over the Twin Cities over the weekend. I didn't keep a box that I know of and most of the molds are gone. I still have a couple of them and the Pac Man. I had a girlfriend at the time, Karen Trego, who hated Smurf's for their bad grammer. It was like a death sentence for anything Smurf. I always thought they were cute but like a rabid dog I turned instantly to slaughtering the little blue guys. There were plenty of instruments of destruction in the kit. Knives, swords, ski poles, bindles, clubs and ice picks. More than 50 ways to kill your smurf. We made some for Christmas and people seemed to enjoy them.

 

Not content to use just the supplied accessories I started using other action figures and their accessories. I found a bunch of Rocky's cheap and soon he was blasting or chopping or slashing some poor smurf. I made a half dozen with Rocky. I must have made more than 100 pieces. Some were given away and many were sold at science fiction conventions. I don't know where they went, hope people enjoyed them. There were even earings. Someday I'll get the slides scanned. You can see the rest of the pics over at Flick'r. 
  

I got more elaborate, using doll house furniture and other toys, to create scenes of mass destruction. Then I stopped with a few unfinished. They are still in the box. Maybe I'll get them finished some day, probably not. I don't miss the sanding and painting. I never was a good painter. I like that you don't have to paint LEGO.  

Red Shark by Andrew Colunga

The whole title is Red Shark - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter Thompson. I think it looks pretty darn cool. I love the eyes on Hunter and the way the car seems to be popping out of the picture. You can see more pictures over at Andrew's MOCpages post. I read that book back in the 70's and a couple of other Thompson books. Haven't read anything since. Never felt much need to. It's almost better in my memory. I like the movie versions, both of them for different reasons.

Jade Mountain

The Jade Mountain is one of the reason's I still occasionally visit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. One of the biggest pieces of carved Jade outside China, at least according to the sign. You can see more pictures at the new Photo Album that I created. My pictures do not do the color of the piece justice. It's a more subtile green in varying shades.

Alice In Legoland by Legohaulic

This guy sure can build the heck out of his parts. There's a wild assortment of interesting parts here. I'm so much more literal in my parts useage and this twisting of the pieces into something amazing is thrilling. There's power miner helmets, a chrome lightsaber, space helmuts, hair pieces, tentacles, skeleton heads, a batarang, tan legs, hydraulic hoses and a gold colored bowl. Alice is partly brickbuilt with odd parts including white rubber bands and lots of minifig hands. The caterpillar sure is fun to look at. Every now and then someone comes along and pushes the envelope a bit. Makes my head hurt. Be sure to check out Legohaulics Brickshelf gallery and his Flickr page.

Color Your World - Erik Smit

Every now and again someone makes something more artistic with their bricks. Erik Smit pulled this rabbit out of his hat and I'm not sure what it all means but it's a good trick. What the hell, it's entertaining to me. You can see a few closeups on his Flickr page where he goes under the name eti. It's hard keeping all these people and their fake monikers straight. Here's his MOCpages page and his photoblog.

The Bumblebee Building

That's the Bumblebee Building. It's a Micropolis building originally built in the 1920's for The Faternal Order of the Bumblebee, a local businessmen's group. Long gone. I had been wanting to build a building with yellow. I had seen several buildings over the last couple of years and recently Brian Kasprzyk had built his Micropolis version of The Empire State Building. It won the Reasonably Creative Micropolis Bad Day contest. Then Matija Grguric posted his yellow building Art Pavillion - Umjetnicki Paviljon - Zagreb. You can links to them on my MOCpages page.

Aliens, and Agents, and Robots, Oh My! Part 1

Tis the season. The LEGO Imagination Center had some new sets in last week. Some are for existing lines like Agents, Castle, etc. There is a new series of sets for an old line. Space Police returns with four new sets. I picked up the two cheapest ones of the bunch. I also picked up the cheapest and the second most expensive of the new Agents series offerings.  Neither are themes that I am that excited about.  Usually I think of the sets as part packs to be sorted out in to my building stock. There are some new parts and new minifigs. Might be useful. Since I picked them up the thurday before the TCLUG meeting on saturday I decided to build them and bring them over to Brian's house. I have mixed feelings about them.

Squidman Escape is set 5969 for those that are all about the numbers. It's the cheap set. $5.99 for 42 parts. Not a great cost per part but two of them are minifigs. The Bricklink Inventory lists 33 parts, two minifigs with 9 parts between them, and four extra parts. There is the new alien minifig - Squidman. I would think he'd have some tentacles if he is supposed to be a squidman. And his eyes point up! What's up with that? You get a new Space Police figure. It's Officer #1 according to Bricklink. Squidman has a name, even if it's Squidman but the poor officer has no name. I'll call him Simon. For no reason. Simon's got a little vehicle. Some sort of space scooter. It's not too bad looking. Simon has to lie face down on it to drive. Weird, huh. Remember that tv series from years ago called Space Rangers. It only lasted a season after it debuted in 1993. It had Marjorie Monihan on it. A 6 foot tall blonde woman who could kick my ass. You might remember her from Babylon 5 where she played Number One, the leader of the Mars resistance. She seduces Doctor Franklin, when he makes the trip to Mars with Marcus, in a rather comical manner. No matter, it just endeared him to the ladies, and made him the envy of every red blooded fan boy. That's her in the pilot seat of one of the star fighters the Space Rangers use. The pilots have to lie down on their fronts to pilot their spaceships. Which is stupid. I thought it looked lame, and it seemed unnatural to have to keep your head tilted back. Ever heard of fatigue.

   

Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 AD, the great 60's comic book by Russ Manning, had flying cars that had the same problem for me. Just doesn't make any sense to be lying down like that. I still liked the series. It was fun, interesting, and action filled science fiction. The human society had gotten dependant on robots. The robot pampered rich were hidden away in the tallest parts of the city, while the poor got the dirt, with an extra side of no sun. Not much has changed from today, huh. The city of NorthAM covers the whole of North America and the buildings are miles high. Along comes Magnus, a guy who can kick the ass of most robots, to bring a change to society. But what really made the series so memorable was the Russ Manning art. I loved it then and still do today. Manning wrote and drew the first 21 stories starting in 1963. It came out quarterly. There was a reprint of the first issue in #22, then Dan Spiegle and some other guy did new stories for issues 23 to 28. Those stories aren't so good. With issue 29 reprints of the Russ Manning stories started and the mag folded with #46. You can get a 3 volume hardcover set of the 21 Russ Manning stories from Dark Horse. They list for $50 a volume. Volume 1 is now pricey on Amazon, which lists volume 2 and 3 for $33 each. They are a mixed bag. They were nicely made books but the comic art was scanned from actual comic books. Not as nice as some of the other reprint books, that use the black and white art and add new coloring. I got the Dark Horse series when I had a bunch of nudey magazine credit at DreamHaven and I wasn't using my own money. I had another minor issue with the Dark Horse reprints.They did not reprint the Russ Manning backup feature The Aliens. It was a 4 pager that had some humans and aliens meet in a first contact situation. Some of each crew go with the other ship and each race heads back to their own homeworld. It was a good series too. I remedied this lack by getting on eBay and finally filling in the gaps of the real comic books I needed. They weren't more than a few bucks each, but that was three or four years ago. There is a series from the 90's, don't bother with that. Looks like some people are selling scans of old comic book series on dvd over at eBay. I know there are plenty of sites that have comic scans.

I'll get back to reviewing the other LEGO sets tomorrow. It's getting late and I'm due for a snooze.