Michael Eury’s new magazine Retro Fan has a very singular purpose: to hit the nostalgia sweet
spot. With the arguable exception of Christmas, no holiday hits that spot like
Halloween, so you can bet that Retro Fan’s
autumnal issue will give you that deep bath in ghouls you crave at this time
every year. Articles cover such gruesome yet wistful topics as horror hosts
(including a brief interview with this issue’s cover-girl, Elvira), 1960s
monster TV (specifically Bewitched, The Munsters, and The Addams Family), The
Groovie Goolies, and those delightfully garish Ben Cooper costumes.
While these topics have all been discussed many times
before, the Retro Fan writing staff
always hits just the right note. The writers’ references to their own, very
relatable, childhood experiences maximize the nostalgia value without upstaging
the topics. The tone is friendly, but the articles are almost absurdly in
depth. Did I previously know that Bob Clampett was preparing an animated
feature with basically the same premise as The
Munsters way back in the 1940s? Nope. Do I now ache for the existence of
such a film? You bet your abbie-normal brain I do. Did I know that there were
also plans for a sort of Muppet Babies-esque
spin off of The Groovie Goolies in
the 1980s? Hell, most ex-employees of Filmation didn’t even know that!
For those who do not have a predilection for monsters and
the macabre, there are also articles about such non-Halloweeny topics as Sindy:
the British Barbie (good to see a female writer being invited to the show this
issue…hopefully there will be more in issue #3), a now defunct dinosaur theme
park in San Diego, a fab collection of lunch boxes, and super hero View-Master
reels. If I have any beef with this issue, it’s that I wish the lunch box
photos were bigger and it would have been nice if the View-Master article were
more seasonal, focusing on those wonderful adaptations of creepy classics such
as Dracula and Frankenstein featuring creepy dolls. I loved those.
But the biggest disappointment is not Retro Fan’s fault at all. As soon as I glanced at an article about
a pop culture museum in Baltimore, I was poised to buy a bus ticket to Charm
City—then I read the sidebar explaining that the museum closed for business
between the article’s writing and the magazine’s publication! It’s just another
reminder of how quickly things change, how constantly the past replaces the
present. At least we have Retro Fan to
memorialize such lost things with humanity and love.
