Review: 'Retro Fan' Issue #2

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.

Review: 'Toybox Time Machine: A Catalog of the Coolest Toys Never Made'

Advertising is an eyesore and brainsore of bland compositions, slick computer graphics, and lazy irony. It wasn’t always this way. The mad men of the mid-twentieth century often created marvelous art pieces with striking graphics and gonzo promises (see: sea monkeys). These ads were at their most marvelously striking when hawking junk for kids. Marty Baumann, a multi-faceted artist who helped create the looks of Disney’s Toy Story 3 and Cars and played guitar with Bobby “Blue” Band and Jr. Walker & the All Stars, was steeped in that enchanting style, which bursts forth in his own retro creations collected in a new book called Toybox Time Machine: A Catalog of the Coolest Toys Never Made.

Each of the book’s pieces is presented as a faux mid-century ad for toys but and other kid-centric products like candy, Halloween costumes, and sugary breakfast cereals. Each piece is conceived in its own particular style, sometimes recalling the work of such period icons as Jack Davis, Ed Roth, Hanna-Barbera, and James Bama, while the faux products are often based on existing ones:  View Master, Aurora Model Kits, Ben Cooper costumes, Silly Putty, Barbi dolls,  Beatles guitars, etc. The bogus TV shows with which many of the products tie-in are sly twists on properties like The Groovie Goolies, Yogi Bear (reborn as a beatnik!), Batman, Dark Shadows, Honey West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., George of the Jungle, and others that will get the nostalgia glands salivating. Spotting the references is part of the fun of soaking in all these dreamy mid-century- style graphics and fetishes (expect plenty of tikis, monsters, robots, rockets, and spies). And some groovy co. really needs to make Baumann’s battery-operated Creepy Clutching Hand crawler a toy-box reality.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 23

Series: The Groovie Goolies

Episode: “Population Party”, in which The Groovie Goolies do the same things they do in every episode of The Groovie Goolies: crack corny jokes, spout catchphrases (“I needed that!”; “A-wa-roo-roo-roo!”), violate innumerable copyrights held by Laugh-In, look rad, and sing catchy bubblegum pop songs. This episode basically stands out because the songs “1-2-3” and “Population Party” are two of the series' catchiest.

I Was a Late-Generation Monster Kid

My room would be fuzzed with that vague purple that comes right before the sunrise. I’d be exhausted, because it was 6 AM and little kids need their rest, and because I’d been toiling away in school all week long, probably learning to print or gluing elbow macaroni to paper plates or whatever else it is you do in school when you’re five or six. I don’t remember how old I was exactly, because I can’t find any information about when “Groovie Goolies” aired at 6:30 AM (or was it 6:00 AM?) on Saturday Mornings in the late-seventies/early eighties, but man, do I remember that sickly feeling of trying to fight myself awake every Saturday morning so I could creep downstairs to the still-dark den to take in those cornball Burbank-by-way-of-Transylvania jokes and groove along to those bubble gum pop songs as sugary as the Frankenberry cereal I’d scarf after the closing credits.