Spider-Man and His Amazingly Craptacular 70s Merchandise

One of the first outlets where I could express my burgeoning geekhood was in my toy collection. While I would inevitably stuff my room to capacity with all things Star Wars, that wasn't my first experience with toys from a major nerd franchise. My first obsession with collectible playthings in the mid- to late-70s was with none other than ol' Web Head himself, Spider-Man.

Looking back, my Spider-Man collection was a modest one. I had some Spider-Man t-shirts, some ViewMaster and Pocket Flix sets, a few comics and even the classic Mego action figure. Then again, most things related to Spider-Man were pretty modest back then. Don’t let the picture above fool you; back in the late 70s, it was hard to come by some top-notch, non-comic-book Spider-Man stuff.

During that time, there was only one Spider-Man cartoon on syndication, there were no video games, and the only live-action adventures could be seen on Electric Company and a short-lived TV series featuring Nicholas Hammond. That was as good as it got. No big-budget big-screen Spider-Man movie in the works (let alone a big-budget big-screen Spider-Man reboot after a trilogy of big-budget big-screen Spider-Man movies), no Spider-Man action figures with 20+ points of articulation and highly-detailed plastic sculpting and paint jobs, and certainly no high-end video games such as the recent Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

Reflecting this dearth of Spider-goodness, here is a list of the four most disappointing Spider-Man toys that I owned back during these dark ages of superhero merchandising. (All pictures for this post have been provided by the ever-fantastic Mego Museum and Plaid Stallions sites.) Read on ...

4. The Spider-Car: My folks bought me this toy to go with my 8" Mego Spider-Man action figure. The Mego Spider-Man figure was fantastic; of all of the product lines that Mego produced, its lines of 8" cloth-suited DC and Marvel superheroes were its crowning achievements. However, the Spider-Car left quite a bit to be desired as an accessory toy for Spider-Man (which is surprising because according to Mego Museum, Stan Lee himself came up with the idea for this toy). After all, if you've got a super-posable figure made in the likeness of a superhero who is known for agility and acrobatic skill, it's pretty counter intuitive to give the figure a car as an accessory. No one in my family could figure out how to get the "web" to stay attached to the web trap device, so the toy's single novelty feature was a complete bust for me. Nevertheless, the car did sell well, and Mego also made a smaller version of it for their 3 3/4" Pocket Heroes line.

All of my complaints aside, you have to give this toy a few extra geek points because it's one of the most unintentionally morbid accessory toys ever made for a superhero figure. Think about it: The only way that the car's web trap could practically work as a villain-capturing tool is for Spidey to commit vehicular homicide. Because the web is set up to quickly grab the hit-and-run victim's body for later eyewitness-free disposal elsewhere, the Spider-Car is the perfect vehicle for any friendly neighborhood reckless driver.

Then again, even if the Spider-Car ever did become part of official Marvel Universe continuity, I doubt that Spidey would have the chance to drive it--other Marvel superheroes with severe anger management issues (say, Wolverine and The Punisher) would be too busy borrowing it for days and weeks at a time. Furthermore, in the area of unintentionally morbid superhero accessory toys, the Spider-Car ranks third behind the Batmobile and Supermobile toys from the Super Powers action figure line by Kenner back in the 80s. The Batmobile had a spring-loaded Bat-Claw for holding villains built into the car's rear bumper, while the flying Supermobile had handcuffs built into places where landing gear would normally be located. Use your imagination.

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3. The Remote Control Spider-Car: Another car toy for Spider-Man, but with no room for an action figure and no other features to speak of other than the fact that it was remote controlled. Unfortunately, the features of this toy from Azrak Hamway International (AHI) were horrible: it only moved in two directions (forward and turning in reverse) and it required a total of five batteries (four AAs for the car and one 9-volt for the controller) for it to do just that much. The front wheels were purely cosmetic, since a hidden fifth wheel underneath the car determined which direction the car would go. Thankfully, I think that only two of these kinds of remote control toys were made for Marvel characters: one for Spider-Man and one for Captain America (see the pic above). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the next toy on this list.

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2. Energized Spider-Man: Even though this 12" Remco toy looks like an action figure, it wasn't. No parts on the outside moved--none of the limbs, and not even the head. It was just a hollow plastic mold of Spider-Man with a tiny winch mounted inside of it, which was powered by a C battery. The winch had a roll of fishing line that had a plastic hook on the end of it, and it spooled through Spider-Man's raised hand. (See the original commercial here.) To play with this toy, you had to:

• Mount a clamp that came with the toy to the side of a table, chair, or whatever else to which you could mount the clamp.
• Pull some fishing line out of Spider-Man's hand and then attach the line's hook to the clamp.
• Flip the switch on the side of Spider-Man's waist to activate the winch, and Spider-Man ascends the fishing line--his "webbing"--until he makes it to the clamp.

That's it. All the toy could do is go up, but not down--the winch didn't have that option. This Spider-Man did have a plug jack on the other side of his waist for accessories (most of which were sold separately), but all that did was route power from the C battery into the accessories--it would make his flashlight glow, his helicopter blades spin and so forth, but it didn't make the Spider-Man figure any more flexible. Once the winch stopped working, there wasn't much else you could do with this toy. I suppose you could re-purpose it as a Spider-Man statuette--that is, if you consider holding an overhead rail while traveling in a subway train to be a suitable action pose for this mighty Marvel superhero. (For perspective, compare this toy to the latest Iron Man remote controlled action figure. The differences will blow your mind.)

This is me back in the 70s, before I learned

the valuable lesson that just because a toy

requires batteries doesn't make it a good toy.

For such an underwhelming toy, Remco didn't stop with Spider-Man. It also released other 12" figures of Superman, Batman, the Hulk and the Green Goblin. Each were equally joint-less, and had the internal winch and the plug jack for other accessories. Superman would "fly", Batman would ascend his Bat-Grappler line, and the Hulk would pull down a wall (I'm not sure what the winch did for the Green Goblin). After the initial 12" energized toy line, Remco released a smaller 9" "powerized" line of mostly the same heroes that did some of the same stuff but this time without requiring batteries. Also, the Green Goblin was dropped from the second line and was replaced by Captain America. What did Cap do? In addition to a grappling hook, his iconic shield would spin. Wheee!

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1. Spider-Man Webmaker: This item was what was known in toy manufacturer circles as a "rack toy". According to Plaid Stallions, rack toys were "low cost toys (that) were produced mainly by companies that never did any sort of TV advertising and their items seemed to be more commonly found at drug and grocery stores." There were plenty of cheap, easy-to-break toys to be found in this category of playthings, but this particular product from Chemtoy included some kind of freaky glue-like substance that was supposed to emulate Spider-Man's webbing. This rack toy also came with tiny, easy-to-lose plastic figures of Spider-Man, the Green Goblin, Mary Jane, and a spider (which, given its scale, could easily use its own webbing to capture and eat the other figures), along with an "Empire State Play City" on the rear side of the toy's cardboard backing.

With the Spider-Man Webmaker, you could either stretch webbing over the play city to make a flimsy Spider-Man diorama with a 2-D background, or you could stretch the webbing across fences, benches, shrubs, and whatever else you could use it on that wouldn't upset your parents. Either way, the Webmaker required at least some modicum of skill if you wanted to get your money's worth out of it--you know, to make webs that could support the included figures. This never made sense to me, because this toy was so cheap and would barely last a day. If you had that kind of skill, you were better off applying it with a tube of rubber cement to a Spider-Man model kit anyway since those kits last longer. Then again, if this rack toy was re-released today, you could use it with the tiny human-headed insect accessory that comes with this action figure to re-create the last scene from the original The Fly.

The Best Jaws 3D Fan Site Ever

Shortly after the recent release of Piranha 3D, I considered doing a retrospective analysis of Jaws 3D, something along the lines of what I previously did for Jaws: The Revenge. Yet unlike Revenge, I have a soft spot for the third entry in the Jaws franchise because it was THE film that got me interested in 3D movies.

Before Jaws 3D, I had a ViewMaster toy and a few sets of reels, and I also knew about previous horror and sci-fi movies from the 50s that were shot in 3D—movies such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, House of Wax and It Came from Outer Space—courtesy of the Crestwood House books and their ilk. But Jaws 3D solidified in my mind just what the illusion of three dimensions meant in terms of movies (as well as comic books and later video games), thus starting my lifetime affair with 3D entertainment. Furthermore, Jaws 3D was the only one of the 3D movies from the early 80s that caught my eye, since it was the only film to offer the chance of seeing one of my favorite movie monsters jump out of the silver screen and into the audience. Sealing the deal was this super-awesome anaglyph Jaws 3D poster that I picked up at a Hallmark store during the film's original release, a poster that I still have in my collection (photo courtesy of the Jaws Collector site):

With such a personal background in mind, I was ready write a detailed examination of the sequel's technical aspects (namely, the 3D photography and mechanical shark effects) and what possibly drove particular creative decisions concerning Jaws 3D's narrative. Little did I know that not only did someone else already do this kind of in-depth analysis of Jaws 3D, but that same person is still doing it in ways that haven't been done before.

Meet Romain Néophyte, French Jaws 3D fan extraordinaire. His Jaws 3D blog site is the most detailed examination of this sequel I have ever seen anywhere; it's also the most devoted and insightful fan site I've seen that's devoted to a single movie. The articles, interviews, pictures and links he has would dwarf anything that I could offer in regards to an analysis of Jaws 3D, so I've instead decided to use this post to list some of his site's highlights. Please keep in mind that Romain’s site is in French, so if you are not fluent in that language you will need a software program to convert the text for you into English. (Google provides a translator and I’m sure that there are others out there, but avoid Babel Fish—it gave me nothing but headaches.) Read on ...

* Inside "The Mouth", 08/28/10: Pictures and a behind-the-scenes description is provided of the shark mouth (that's it--just a mouth with pointy teeth and no shark) built to shoot the scene where the shark eats Philip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale).

* Tomy Jaws 3D Graphic Game (Japan 1983), 07/31/10: Pictures and a description of the handheld, battery-powered 3D video game released in Japan under the title Jaws 3D. The same game was released in the U.S. under the name “Shark Attack”.

* Jaws 3D Billboard #1, 07/23/10: Pictures and description of a very ambitious Jaws 3D billboard put up in North Hollywood, California, a billboard that featured a 3,200 pound shark head.

* The Jaws 3D Tank, Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 (05-07/10): This four-part post provides pictures of and details about the huge water tank that was built to film the underwater scenes for Jaws 3D. This "shark tank" was 35 meters in diameter and 11 meters deep, with the capacity to hold 6,000 cubic meters of water.

* A Major Influence: Sea Dream (1978), 05/15/10: A look at Sea Dream, the 23 minute 3D film short that served as the inspiration for shooting the third Jaws movie in 3D.

* Interview of Joe Alves by Mike Smith, 05/14/10: As the title suggests, this post features a link to and a paragraph from Mike Smith's recent interview with Jaws 3D director Joe Alves. But the really interesting thing about this particular post is that it includes a quote from John Landis from a 2005 interview. As many Jaws 3D fans know, Universal was also considering doing a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon (also in 3D, just like the original) at the same time as it was considering Jaws 3D, and it opted to do the Jaws sequel instead. But what this quote reveals (and what I didn't know before reading this) is that Landis shot a 3D test reel in Steven Spielberg's pool to help promote the Creature remake idea. That's right: A 3D test reel was shot in Spielberg's own pool to promote a remake, but it was shot down in favor of a sequel to a Spielberg movie. I guess Hollywood really is a small world after all.

* The Third Dimension IS Terror, 12/23/09: A post about a 3D film festival at Cinematheque de Paris, which included a screening of Jaws 3D in its original 3D format.

These are just a few of the highlights on Romain’s site, and there are plenty more. He also has video clips, interviews, posts about deleted scenes and various VHS and DVD releases, and contributions directly from Jaws 3D alumnus John Putch (who played Sean Brody). So far, Universal and Alves have yet to show awareness of the site, but I hope they do soon—I’d love to see the exclusive behind-the-scenes information, pictures and video clips that they could contribute.

Speaking of Jaws 3D, I also found one of the early drafts of the Jaws 3D script floating around on the Internet. There are quite a few interesting differences between this draft and the finished film. In the script, the amusement park is Sea Kingdom, not Sea World. The shark’s attack of Kelly (Lea Thompson) is more elaborate and ultimately fatal while the scene with the two coral reef thieves isn’t in the script, thus lowering the body count from 5 to 4. Oddly, none of the tourists are trapped underwater; instead, Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid) goes down into the lagoon towards the end of the movie to set up a trap to capture the shark, not to repair the fractured observation tube. The ending in the script also includes an extended underwater chase scene with Mike in a mini-sub and later a boat wreckage, details that Universal apparently recycled for Jaws: The Revenge. In other words, even though Revenge tried to erase Jaws 3D from Jaws franchise continuity, it nevertheless lifted a scene from one of the early Jaws 3D scripts for its own plot.

In closing, I think that of all the films out there that qualify for a Star-Wars-original-trilogy-style special effects makeover, it's Jaws 3D—not a complete remake or a re-imagining of the sequel, just a technical update. Not only should the original 3D be converted to modern 3D standards, but Universal should also re-do several of the effects shots (particularly where miniatures were used) and perhaps re-shoot some of the attack scenes. For example, I found this short video clip on YouTube where a fan creatively edited together parts of the control room ending from Jaws 3D with shark effect shots from a similar scene in Deep Blue Sea. The end result is pretty impressive, so I think that there's plenty of potential left in this Jaws sequel--and for a fraction of the cost of a full remake, no less. (YouTube also has a preview of a feature-length fan edit of Jaws 3D which promises a higher body count, but I have no idea how to get a copy of this version if it actually exists.) Furthermore, according to information cited in the Wikipedia entry for this sequel, Jaws 3D was still earning quite a lot of money when it was pulled from theaters so there's some more money probably still waiting to be made with an enhanced edit of Jaws 3D. Are you listening, Universal?

My Deep Love of Deep Red

Silly me. With all the hubbub of 2010 marking the 35th anniversary of Jaws and the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back, I almost forgot that this year also marks the 35th anniversary of Deep Red (a.k.a. Profondo Rosso), Dario Argento's giallo masterpiece. I first saw Deep Red while I was in college and while I have seen many giallo flicks since then, none of them have been quite as memorable as this one.

For those of you who are new to this, giallo movies are basically Italian slasher films with a greater emphasis on mystery than their American counterparts. What makes Deep Red such a great film is that it does best what giallo movies are known for: mysteries that are solved not through physical evidence, but instead through deeply symbolic explorations of the killer's fragmented, deranged mind. (In some ways, giallo films have more in common with the silent German expressionist horror classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than they do with standard murder mystery narratives.) As the story unfolds, Argento fills Deep Red with suggestive, distinct images and sounds (a single eye suddenly opening in the darkness, a children's lullaby, a maniacally laughing mechanical doll, a painting that holds the secret to the killer's identity, etc.) that stick with you long after it's over. It also has one of the creepiest introductions of a killer that I've ever seen in a movie--it's not done through an elaborate opening murder scene, but in an auditorium where a psychic goes into hysterics when she senses the killer's sinister presence among the audience. That scene and the involvement of a legendary haunted house as a clue add an extra aura of supernatural dread to this classic thriller.

Happy 35th anniversary, Deep Red! I'm sure you'll keep knocking 'em dead for 35 years to come.

Hell House: The Awakening: The Review

A few days ago, I posted a brief preview of the upcoming Viper Comics graphic novel, Hell House: The Awakening by Chad Feehan and Ryan Dixon. In the intervening time, Mr. Dixon and the folks at Viper Comics were kind enough to send me an advance copy of Hell House for review. In a nutshell, if you like your horror subversive and somewhat controversial, then you’ll want to add Hell House to your collection when it arrives in comic shops and book stores at the end of this month. Continue reading past the break for the complete review.

Hell House features a diverse cast—which includes a group of fundamentalist Christians, an atheist, and a few Christians who are more moderate in their religious outlook—as they prepare for a Hell House event sponsored by a conservative Christian high school. Yet as the Hell House is taking place, the Rapture actually happens, and those who remain standing are forced to contend with the horrifying aftermath. While this may sound like some kind of Left Behind knock-off, it most definitely is not. Imagine if an Evil Dead movie and a Jack Chick comic tract went on an all-night drinking binge together and then hooked up, their offspring would be Hell House: The Awakening.

To give any more details away about Hell House would ruin the story. What I can say is that Feehan and Dixon have clearly done their homework on Hell House events and Christian eschatology and have woven together an interesting story that takes the religious concept of the Rapture and turns it sideways, all while taking full advantage of the narrative conventions provided by the horror subgenre of post-apocalyptic survival. This eclectic mixture of horror and holiness yields a graphic novel with plenty of surprises, right on up to the last page. Furthermore, Hell House leaves plenty of room a sequels; if Feehan and Dixon keep this level of quality up, their future Hell House graphic novels have the potential to do for Rapture-centric horror narratives what Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series has done for zombies.

That said, if Viper Comics is going to publish more Hell House graphic novels (and they should), they need to give Feehan and Dixon a few more pages to use. While Hell House tells a complete story within its page limit, Tsubana Yozora’s excellent artwork feels like it needs a little more breathing space so that it can properly blossom into its full grotesque glory.

In case you’re wondering if you’ll be offended by this book, a lot will depend on how you feel about Hell House events. If you think that Hell Houses are sincere, legitimate ways to evangelize to people, then you will HATE this graphic novel. If you think that Hell Houses are nothing more than lurid, exploitative publicity stunts to advance the interests of arch-conservative religious groups (believe me, you don’t have to be a non-religious person to feel that way), then Hell House: The Awakening is the graphic novel for you. Keep in mind, though, that while Hell House takes quite a few satirical jabs at religious fundamentalism, it is a horror story at its core with all of the requisite gore, vicious kill scenes, and high body count.

Finally, if you plan on picking up a copy of Hell House: The Awakening and you live in the Los Angeles area, you’re in luck. Feehan and Dixon will be at Golden Apple Comics on September 29th from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. for an in-store signing of their premiere graphic novel. Click here for more details.

A Look Back at Portable Video Games

If you're out on the northwest coast this weekend and have a thing for retro video gaming, you might want to head on over to Portland, OR. On September 18 and 19, Portland will be hosting the 5th annual Portland Retro Gaming Expo. It looks like it's going to be a big batch of fun, with events including Nintendo 64 and Atari 2600 gaming tournaments and a cosplay/costume contest.

I grew up during the rise of video game arcades, and the rise and fall and rise again of the home video game consoles. Yet one area of video game history that usually gets overlooked by even hard-core video game aficionados are the portable video games, particularly the pre-Nintendo GameBoy units from the 70s and 80s.

To be sure, the majority of these games weren't very compelling. While arcade games were still exploring their expanding graphical and game play capabilities and the home consoles were racing to keep up with the arcades, the portable video games had even less at their disposal to create a marketable game. Not only was their game play either very simple, annoyingly repetitive or sometimes incomprehensible, but their "graphics" consisted of either Light-Emitting Diodes (LED), Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD), or Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFD). LED games were just glowing dots (that's it--dots, dots, and nothing but dots), while LCD and VFD games used series of inanimate shapes or pictures that would light up in certain sequences to suggest motion.

Nevertheless, whenever my thumbs furiously race across my teeny, tiny Blackberry keyboard to answer work-related e-mail after e-mail, I can't help but to reminisce over those early funky, clunky attempts to put the joy of electronic gaming in the palm of your hand. Continue after the break to join me on my trip down insufficient memory lane and learn more about these early computerized toys.

The portable video games that I saw during the 70s and 80s fell into two basic, broad categories: the handhelds and the tabletops. The handhelds are self-explanatory, while the tabletops were games that were smaller than the home game consoles and didn't require a TV or computer screen to play them, yet you still needed something to put them on while playing them (such as a table) because they were too large to be played in your hand.

Of the tabletops, I had the Star Wars Electronic Battle Command, an LED game that was released in 1978. (Click here to see a video of the game in action.) The game was fun, even though you had to imagine that flashing red dots on a 4x4 grid were spaceships, planets and lasers, and that the screechy, scratchy noises emitted by the game unit were the sounds of space combat. Furthermore, the game required 6 AA batteries to run if you didn't have the outlet plug (which I didn't), so it wasn't cheap to play.

Of the handhelds, I had Escape from the Devil's Doom, one of the LCD solar powered games that Bandai released in 1982. Bandai released a bunch of solar powered handheld games that year, but Devil's Doom was marketed closely with Invaders of the Mummy's Tomb, as if the suggest that both were part of a single set. (You have to give Bandai quite a few geek chutzpah points for this: Not only did the titles sound like the names of long-forgotten B movies, but they also rhymed when you said them closely together.) Devil's Doom was a fun, simple time waster and it didn't require any batteries, but it was a far cry from even the most simple video games offered on the Atari 2600.

If anything, the early handhelds and tabletops represented the initial attempts to cram computing (albeit very, very simple computing) into increasingly smaller devices and yet maintain a commercial appeal. There were even some digital watches that included simple LCD games, long before anyone thought of putting games on cell phones. Believe it or not, Tomy released some "3D" handheld games, games that were packaged in ViewMaster-like units that you would hold up to your eyes while you played the game.

The series of tabletops that I remember the most fondly (but I didn't own a single one due to their high prices) are the VFD arcade emulators that were released by Coleco between 1981 and 1983. By that time, many other companies produced and sold their fair share of both handheld and tabletop arcade emulators, but what set Coleco's apart was that their emulator units were specifically designed to resemble tiny stand-up arcade cabinets. The packaging of the emulators and the commercials that advertised them heavily promoted this detail; to me, they looked like what would happen to arcade cabinets if you could shrink them in the laundry. Thanks to Coleco's emulators, all you needed was some background electronic and crowd noises (and perhaps the smell of beer and stale cigarettes) and you too could live out the arcade experience in the privacy of your own home.

The Coleco emulators included arcade hits such as Donkey Kong, Frogger, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Zaxxon. Coleco also released Donkey Kong Jr., but that was a LCD tabletop unit. The Smithsonian American History Museum has a copy of the Pac-Man emulator, but I didn't see it on display the last time I was there.

It should be noted that the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) software has spawned a subculture of classic arcade game enthusiasts who build arcade cabinets that are meant to provide the experience of an entire video arcade in a single full-sized unit. Given the advancements in micro-computing and compact, high-definition video screens, a really devoted MAME fan could probably gut one of the Coleco emulators and convert it into a tabletop unit--in other words, convert a plastic shell that was originally designed to house a VFD emulation of Donkey Kong into something that could house an actual, playable arcade version of Donkey Kong. Now that’s what I call progress!

The cartridge-less handhelds and tabletops didn't completely disappear after the Nintendo GameBoy arrived in 1989, but it was clear by then that their days on shelves of toy stores everywhere were numbered. To learn more about these revolutionary toys that paved the way for future generations of portable thumb-cramping computing devices, check out these sites:

• The Electronic Handheld Game Museum
• The Electronic Plastic Collection
• Mini-Arcade.Com.

Star Wars Fan Film in 3D & Teenage Son of Predator!

It's a news headline so nice that I just have to say it twice: IT'S STAR WARS IN FREAKIN' 3D!!! Mind you, it's not official Lucasfilm-produced Star Wars; it's a fan-made CGI animated short called The Solo Adventures by Daniel L. Smith and Jeff Scheetz, a short that won Best Animated Feature at this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida. It's a great short by itself (the actor who does the voice of Han Solo sounds almost exactly like Harrison Ford) but the anaglyph 3D really makes this short something truly special to behold. For the first time, you get to see iconic Star Wars vehicles such as the Millennium Falcon, a Star Destroyer and TIE Fighters flying around in 3D. (Of course, you can also watch this same short in 2D, but where's the fun in that?)

I've known for quite some time now that George Lucas has considered converting all six of the Star Wars live action movies into 3D. However, I'm surprised that he hasn't released anything in 3D for his Star Wars: Clone Wars CGI animated TV series, since that would be much easier to convert. I've argued before that CGI animation is the ideal format for 3D presentation, and the Solo Adventures short provides a tantalizing glimpse of how awesome a 3D CGI Star Wars series would be.

The Official Star Wars Blog recently posted an interview with Jeff Scheetz. Also, if you're going to watch this wonderful short in 3D, do it right and pick up a pair of high-quality plastic anaglyph 3D glasses--not the dinky cardboard anaglyph 3D glasses.

Speaking of animation, check out the animated short "Predator's Teenage Son" at the College Humor site. It's a funny parody of the Predator universe (complete with subtitles), and the sudden cameo appearance at the end is a hoot!

Hell Yes to Hell House: The Awakening & Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD (Updated)

For all of you comic book hellions out there, you're in luck. This month marks the premiere publication of the Hell House: The Awakening graphic novel, written by Chad Feehan and Ryan Dixon and illustrated by Tsubasa Yozora, from indie publisher Viper Comics. Hell House: The Awakening details what happens when one of these seasonal, religiously-themed events is overrun by something genuinely supernatural. From what I heard in the previews, the end result ain't pretty.

(If by some odd chance that you don't know what a "Hell House" in this context is, you might want to check out the Hell House documentary from 2001. It should also be noted that this kind of Hell House should neither be confused with Richard Matheson's 1971 novel Hell House, nor its 1973 movie adaptation The Legend of Hell House.)

It just so happens that I know--or at least know of--half of this Hell House writing team. Years before he started writing comics, Ryan Dixon produced and directed a few of his own low, low budget movies in western Pennsylvania and he cast of friend of mine in a major role in one of his productions, Scary Movie! or Small Town Serial Killers and Flesh Eaters. You can still watch this movie for free on Dixon's video production company site, Firefly Productions. As for Chad Feehan, he was one of the producers for the ambitious 2006 horror film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. (The way I see it, any horror film that can add a dark, twisted subtext to Bobby Vinton's version of the otherwise innocuous song "Sealed With A Kiss" is worthy of mention.) Feehan also wrote, produced and directed Wake, another horror movie that has been making its rounds in the film festival circuit.

Hell House: The Awakening looks like it's going to be a big bloody blast of blasphemous fun, so be sure to pick up a copy. This title will be released by the end of this month (September 29, the last I heard), and you can pre-order it now. You can also read an interview with Dixon and Feehan on the Comic Monsters site, and you can read Brett Schenker's positive advance review of Hell House at the Graphic Policy site.

Speaking of graphic novels, the Small Press Expo (or SPX) will be held in Bethesda, Maryland this weekend, September 11 and 12. Admission is $10 for one day and $15 for both days. In addition to having a wide variety of guests, events and exhibitors devoted to comic books and graphic novels, this year's expo will include the First Annual Small Press Expo Animation Showcase. So if you're in the Washington DC area this weekend and have some free time, you should go check this out (that is, if you're not already planning to head north to the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama in the Pittsburgh area).

"I Did NOT Jump The Shark!" Says TV Writer Who Pioneered Shark Jumping

Just thought that y'all might find this commentary piece from the Los Angeles Times to be of interest--I know I did: "In defense of 'Happy Days' ' 'Jump the Shark' episode". It's a commentary piece by Fred Fox Jr., the writer who penned the episode of Happy Days where Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli (played by Henry Winkler) ski jumped over a shark.

Since the term "Jump the Shark" has been around since 1985, it's kind of odd to read this piece so long after the term first appeared. Fox uses his commentary to defend his creative decisions when writing the episode, and how the term "Jumping the Shark" does not apply to his episode in the context of Happy Days and its popularity. Yet for all of the assertions and recollections that he makes, Fox fails to cite the most obvious reason why this particular stunt was put in Happy Days in the first place: to capitalize on the popularity of Jaws and the anticipation of its then-upcoming sequel Jaws 2. For shame Mr. Fox, FOR SHAME, for not acknowledging that you wrote an episode to capitalize on the popularity of a hit movie, Jaws, for a sitcom that was produced to capitalize on the popularity of yet another hit movie, American Graffiti.

 

All you have to do is look at the poster for Jaws 2 to figure out why Happy Days would have a water skier and a shark, even though it's a sitcom that takes place during the 1950s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Furthermore, Jaws 2 was in production while this Happy Days episode was written and produced (it finally aired in September 1977, less than a year before the sequel opened in theaters) so it's not unreasonable to conclude that the show's producers got word of the movie's ski attack scene and thought that Fonzie + shark = prime time ratings bonanza due to the popularity of Jaws and interest in Jaws 2. Heck, I saw this episode when it first aired and although I wasn't even in kindergarten yet, even I could figure out that this episode was jumping on (over?) the Jaws bandwagon. (For what it's worth, the shark jumping episode was a big ratings hit for ABC after all.)

Yours truly, in my prepubescent

water-skier-eating monster shark attire

In light of this, I propose that all sitcoms should have more sharks in them--preferably, a giant monster shark that suddenly appears and eats a major character, at least once per season, and perhaps a closing "feeding frenzy" scene with multiple sharks for the last episode of a sitcom that has been cancelled. I especially recommend this for sitcoms which air on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. That's the kind of shark jumping I can support.