From Zombos' Closet

Undersea Kingdom (1936) Rerelease Pressbook

Here's the rerelease, 1949, pressbook for Undersea Kingdom. This and Phantom Empire are on my top favorites list for movie serials (Mystery Science Theater 3000 be damned!). Watching guys running around in their shorts must have been pretty thrilling for audiences back then. I still want a few Volkites and definitely a Juggernaut to drive them around in. Interesting that the Reflector Plate gizmo showed up on Star Trek's Mirror, Mirror episode, but with a more deadly function. The Volkite robot became the go to automaton for Republic as it showed up in later serials. Wikipedia has an unusually extensive article on Undersea Kingdom, listing the re-shot cheats used in the movie. Cheats were cliffhangers that often fudged what happened at the end of the last episode with new shots of the "previous" action that changes what the audience had seen. Pretty cheeky if you ask me. So is the use of technology like rayguns and robots, while still using swords and catapults to fight with. One of the pleasures of watching these fantastic serials is to see how creative the wardrobe and prop departments were with a tight budget.

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Rhythm of the Islands (1943) Pressbook

Here's another pressbook courtesy of Joe Dante and Charles Largent (Trailers from Hell). Acquanetta, known by all monsterkids as the exotic and wild jungle woman, appears in her first credited role in Rhythm of the Islands. Later she would go ape for Universal and swing with Tarzan in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman. I will also note that Jane Frazee makes an appearance in this movie too, because...fans of The Honeymooners will recall TV or Not TV, where Ralph and Norton pool their money together to buy a television set. Bad idea from the start, but Ralph mentions Jane Frazee for a laugh as the two of them squabble over who gets to watch what. My favorite episode for sure.

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Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938) Pressbook

Bulldog Drummond heads to Morocco in this thirteenth outing in a whopping twenty-five movie run. It's a shame audiences are no longer thrilled by foreign intrigue themes with their spys and mysteries of foreign locales. I'm sure to theater audiences in the 1930s through the 1940s, it must have been thrilling to think about other countries and cultures. Now, of course, politics, easier global travel, and the Internet pretty much take the mystery and intrigue out of it.

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Witches Tales Vol.1, Issue 9 December 1969

How could any self-respecting monsterkid pass up on such a cover? Of course, once snatched from the magazine rack, one would need to be vary careful around one's mom and employ subterfuge and guile to keep such a magazine carefully hidden. Just saying. I learned my lesson with Vampirella No. 1. My mom outsmarted me THAT time. She threatened to dial up Warren Publications and organize all manner of mayhem against them. No telling what she would have done if she saw this issue of Witches Tales. Speaking of witch (hey, a pun!), this issue is gruesomely drawn and vile in its depictions of victims and sinners. Perfect!

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River Gang (1945) Pressbook

Here's another pressbook courtesy of director Joe Dante (Trailers from Hell).  What makes this one rather special is the inclusion of a cost sheet, typed on onion paper (you young whippersnappers can Google onion paper). The cost of 8000 pressbooks (six pages for this one) for this movie was a stiff .13 cents per pressbook (rounded off). 

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Phantom of the Paradise (1974) Pressbook

By the 1970s, pressbooks became rather dull affairs, usually black and white, and with an emphasis on poster art (for the newspapers) than pre-canned articles. This 8.5 x 14 inches pressbook shows all its pages, but I placed them out of order to move the poster pages toward the end. If you download the reader version, it will show the pressbook's pages in their correct order. Phantom of the Paradise is one of those odd movies that, while fetching, doesn't quite make sense, but just go with it for the rock horror opera aesthetics wrapped around a Faustian bargain and the dread of Dorian Gray. Of course the box office didn't know what to do with it, at the time, but it's now a cult movie and rightly so. Brian De Palma went wild with it and it has Paul Williams music. And that works for me.

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Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 1963 Release Pressbook

You can't simply live by horror movies alone, no matter how much of a fan you are. There are so many movies that are beautiful, ugly, happy, sad, and just plain mind-expanding or my eyes! dreadful. That's the wonder of cinema: you have the trashy to the sublime to the breathtaking; whether in the eye or the ear or the cadence of the story itself, it's really filled with many emotions. Toward the breathtaking side of things there's Lawrence of Arabia. This 1963 release pressbook for the movie, after it had won a box-full of Oscars, is breathtaking too, in its own way.  

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Forbidden Planet Movie Herald

I know of two movie heralds made available for Forbidden Planet. Both feature Robby the Robot. Here's the second one. The theater would add its information on the last page.

Appointment with Murder (1948) Pressbook

Interesting to note that this low budget movie does get a nicely produced pressbook to promote it. I like the mustachioed clock with the skull pendulum. It's an odd little embellishment that, while not exactly well placed, does hint of pressing danger. I've not seen the John Calvert Falcon movies, three in all, but this pressbook does wet my appetite to see this one. My favorite series is Boston Blackie with Chester Morris. I've yet to come across any of those pressbooks. But it is only a matter of time.

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Buck Jones in White Eagle (1941) Pressbook

Wasn't it great knowing the good guys from the bad guys? The early Westerns always kept it simple. Perhaps too simple. By the time they rolled around to television, we expected everything to be wrapped up nice and neat by the end, even with the commercials. Buck Jones starred in the 1932 movie, White Eagle, and followed his role into this serial, the eight from Columbia. From Ron Backer's The Gripping Chapters, the Sound Movie Serial book: "There were apparently a lot of mountain lions roaming the Wild West, as can be seen in the cliffhanger to Chapter Ten of White Eagle (1941)...One lesson to be learned from many of these serials was how easy it was to dispose of a large ferocious beast with a very small knife."

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Scars of Dracula (1970) British Pressbook

Christopher Lee may have disliked how his famous count was being treated by Hammer, but each movie was always a treat for me to catch in the local movie theater. The 1970s were a great time for horror movies and conventions. Hammer, and especially Lee's Count Dracula, were still the icing on the fandom cake. While Scars suffered from a lack of attention and commitment, it's still a fun, bloody romp.

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Fantacon 90 Convention Program September 1990

The problem with being a disorganized collector is that you tend toward acquiring things and promptly forget about them. I had made photgraphs of this convention program back in 2016, but, well, here you go. Memory Lane Alert! When I went to conventions, back in the day, they weren't the slick-slacks affairs they are today; where your wallet goes bust and your body is crushed trying to fit into spaces not even Einstein had thought about. And you got a REAL convention program. I mean a honkin tome you could actually read and enjoy, along with the cool bag-o-stuff it was tossed in. Highlights in this Comics Buyer's Guide Fantacon 90 Convention Program include I Was a Zombie in Night of the Living Dead by Dennis Daniel and Editing The Famous Monsters Chronicles by, oh yeah, Dennis Daniel again (man, he got around). The other highlights are the cool advertisements and the tids and bits regarding the con itself. 

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