STITCH & FAMOUS

My pal Gayle sent me this pic...

...of a display in the San Diego Airport devoted to the worthy subject of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...just because he's in the foreground, let's give the nod to the towering Land of the Rising Sun version of Frankenstein's Monster from 1965's Frankenstein Conquers the World, as memorably depicted by veteran men's-magazine cover artist Vic Prezio in this '66 Famous Monsters cover...

BORIS BY BASIL

Halloween is next Tuesday, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...it seems like this week's honoree should be one of the all-time classics. So how about...

...Karloff's Frankenstein Monster, in this masterly, iconic rendition from the recently late and much-lamented Famous Monsters of Filmland cover artist Basil Gogos.

Happy (and safe) All Hallows' Eve everybody!

MONSTERS A GOGOS

RIP to Basil Gogos, passed on at 88. The Egyptian-born Greek illustrator painted many covers for the  classic vintages of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, bathing his gruesome ghouls in vivid, indeed lurid colors. An example...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...is this week's honoree, a handsome portrait by Gogos of the title character...

...played by Robert Clarke in the 1959 shocker The Hideous Sun Demon.

HOP CULTURE

After a run at Harkins Camelview, Brett Haley’s touching drama The Hero, starring Sam Elliot, opens wide on a few more Valley screens this weekend. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our honoree this week is the man-eating frog featured in the poster art for 1972’s Frogs…

…as well as on the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland #91…

Elliot played the hunky hero, with the very Sam-Elliot-ish name of “Pickett Smith,” in this silly but nonetheless sort of creepy film. It’s about a murder spree by various crawly creatures against a family of rich Florida cretins led by obtuse patriarch Ray Milland. Even though, as in Aristophanes, they’re the title characters, the amphibians in question (most them actually played by burly cane toads) just aren’t very threatening—all they really seem able to do is stare reproachfully at the humans while spiders, snakes, alligators and the like do the actual killing.

I remember feeling disappointed, as a kid, when I realized that the frog from the ad, capable of swallowing a human whole, wasn’t in the film—not, that is, until the very end of the end credits, when he appears in cartoon form:

BILLY/JACK

RIP to a couple of big names in the macabre: William “Chilly Billy” Cardille, passed on at 87, and Jack Davis, passed on at 91.

Chilly Billy was the revered host of Chiller Theatre on Pittsburgh’s WIIC/WPXI, and played the reporter in the final minutes of the original Night of the Living Dead.

 He also hosted a kid show, Tip-Top Merry-Go-Round, on WICU in my beloved hometown of Erie, PA.

Davis, of course, was the legendary EC Comics and MAD Magazine artist who drew, among many, many other credits… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, the magnificent “Giant Life Size Frankenstein Pin-Up” (OVER 6 FEET TALL!), available in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland for a mere two bucks…

I checked eBay; he sells for a lot more now…

FOR WHOM THE DELL TOLLS

Today Your Humble Narrator enjoyed an excellent lunch at Haiku Grill with Vince LaRue, an up-and-coming illustrator who’s visiting from Normandy. Here we are just after…

In addition to my idiotic squint, I look like late-vintage Orson Welles.

This week (October 8) would have marked the 93rd birthday of Dead End Kid/Bowery Boy Gabriel Dell, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to Count Dracula. That is to say, to Dell’s vinyl version of Count Dracula, from the 1963 spoken-word album Famous Monsters Speak.

Each side of this LP, which was peddled in the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, featured a dramatic monologue, one by the Frankenstein Monster, the other by Drac. The Frankie side doesn’t quite come off, but Dell’s Dracula, speaking Interview With a Vampire-style to a nosy writer who has disturbed his slumber, is memorable (it was scripted, by the way, by Cherney Berg, author of many spoken-word records for kids and son of Gertrude Berg, of radio’s The Goldbergs).

Dell was a comedian and impressionist after his Bowery Boys years, and he hammed his Bela Lugosi voice, which he had already played for laughs on The Steve Allen Show, to the corny hilt on Famous Monsters Speak. It creeped me out pretty good when I heard it at a friend’s house as a kid.

Years later The Wife, having no idea I knew the record, gave me a CD re-release of it. I still listen to it now and then—I just played it last week, to inaugurate October.

A couple more RIPs: To Alex Karras, passed on at 77, who despite his legendary status with the Detroit Lions will for many of us be most fondly remembered as Mongo in Blazing Saddles. I‘ll always disagree with his assertion that “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”

RIP also to Turhan Bey. I was amazed, quite candidly, to learn he was still alive. He was 90; I was amazed he was that young. I always liked him, even when he was sending Kharis the Mummy off to murder somebody.