Fanzines

By JM Cozzoli

Those Enduring Matinee Idols was written and published by Robert “Bob” Malcomson, who self-published it on his own dime. The first issue appeared in October 1969 and the run continued into 1974, in an 8.5 × 11 inch format, at 12 pages early on, with black-and-white stills reproduced throughout and a $1.00 cover price. Issues came out at an irregular bimonthly pace. The complete run comes to 29 issues, and in a nice touch of genre-appropriate wit, Malcomson numbered them as “chapters” rather than issues, the way a serial itself would be played in theaters. The page numbering also continues across chapters, through three volumes, for a total of 432 pages.

Chapter 1 covered Ace Drummond and Battling with Buffalo Bill; Chapter 4 took on The Return of Chandu and The Phantom Empire with Gene Autry; later issues handled Red Ryder, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, and Darkest Africa. It was the kind of information that barely existed in print at the time, since serials were considered disposable movie fare and largely ignored by film historians.

TEMI arrived at the beginning of the serial-appreciation taking place in the growing convention circuit for comics and movies, when 16mm prints were circulating among collectors and screen showings were taking place in hotels. It fed directly into fanzine popular culture that produced later titles, often published-for-love as a one or few-persons operation. Fanzines helped lay the groundwork for books like Jim Harmon and Donald Glut’s The Great Movie Serials (1972). Academic film studies eventually picked up the thread the fanzines laid down. Jon Tuska’s The Vanishing Legion (McFarland, 1982), Scott Higgins’s Matinee Melodrama (Rutgers, 2016), and Marina Dahlquist’s essay collection on Pearl White, Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and Serial Film (Illinois, 2013), all rest on filmographies and interviews that exist because hobbyists compiled them first. There are also more recent books on serials, like Gripping Chapters: The Sound Movie Serial, that are worth reading.

The complete run is up on the Internet Archive.

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Those Enduring Matinee Idols
Vol.1, 1969
Chapter 1Read More »