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.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 28

Series: The Munsters

Episode: “Munster Masquerade”, in which the ultimate Halloween clan attends a masquerade party and all of the party-goers believe The Munsters’ ghoulish visages are part of their costumes. The series’ very first outing is quintessential Munsters, with a bunch of boring straights getting freaked out by the family’s delightful uniqueness and more comedic misunderstandings than a month of Three’s Companies. Am I a weirdo for wishing I could live in that Munster mansion? It’s luxuriously huge, full of ravens and dragons, and it’s always autumn outside, with gusts sweeping dead leaves into the place every time someone opens the front door. Sigh. Too dreamy.

Review: 'Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972'

Writers such as David Skal have dealt with the zany monster revival of the fifties and sixties before, but as far as I know, Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 is the first book devoted to that topic alone. Mark Voger makes up for lost time by cramming as many monsters, Munsters, Addamses, Dark Shadows, issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Creepy, Borises Karloff and Pickett, horrific toys, models, and hot rods into a slim 190 pages as he can stuff. Unlike scholarly Skal, Voger captures the gee-whiz enthusiasm of a true Monster Kid with goofy prose and a scattered structure that screams, “Oh wait…here’s another boss thing that happened during the monster craze!”

The focus of Monster Mash is its copious interviews and photos. During his career as a journalist and pro-horror geek, Voger has interviewed such genre major players as writer/editor Forrest J. Ackerman, publisher James Warren, singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett, artists Basil Gogos and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and actors John Astin, Lisa Loring, Al Lewis, Butch Patrick, Pat Priest, and Kathryn Leigh Scott. Those fun (it’s heartwarming to discover how much the “Addams Family” cast adored each other), sometimes frothy interviews constitute a good portion of this book’s text. However, they cannot compete with all the ghoulishly, gleefully, garish full-color photos of monster memorabilia. Don Post masks and Famous Monsters covers and comics panels and Aurora models and “Munsters” lunchboxes and Wolf Man dolls and Gill Man Soakies. Looking at Monster Mash is like having a giant nostalgia bug lay lovely eggs in your eye sockets. 

Ten Genuinely Great Classic TV Themes

A TV theme has a job to do and that is to set the tone for the show that follows. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century TV shows were pretty goofy and got the catchy/crappy themes they deserved. Hey, I can remember all the words to the “Brady Bunch” theme song as well as the next asshole, but it isn’t exactly my idea of good music.

On occasion shows ended up with legitimately good themes, either because they were extraordinary pieces of television that deserved complimentary music or…err… by accident, I guess. I’m not talking about programs that cheated by using pre-composed music or classic pop songs as themes, otherwise the following list would be loaded with classics such as “Paint It Black” (“Tour of Duty”), “Reflections (“China Beach”), “Bad Reputation” (“Freaks and Geeks”), “Rock Around the Clock” (“Happy Days”), “Five O’ Clock World” (“The Drew Carey Show”), “Having an Average Weekend” (“The Kids in the Hall”), “And Your Bird Can Sing” (“The Beatles” Cartoon), “Falling” (“Twin Peaks”), and “For Pete’s Sake” (a way better song than the cutesy “Monkees Theme”). Instead I selected ten songs specifically created for specific programs that I wouldn’t feel ashamed to blast with the TV turned off.

1. “Twilight Zone Theme” by Bernard Herrmann

The discordant tune that instantly conjures memories of gremlins, murder dolls, and pig doctors is Marius Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”, a piece of music recorded for CBS’s library of stock cues but not necessarily “The Twilight Zone”. Eugene Feldman edited it with Constant’s “Milieu No. 2” to serve as the series’ theme in the second season, probably because the music that opened the show’s first one simply isn’t very catchy. It is, however, an eerie scene setter composed by perhaps the greatest composer of cinematic thriller scores, Bernard Herrmann. If Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”/“Milieu No. 2” delivers the skin-crawling shocks of “Eye of the Beholder” then Herrmann’s theme is more in line with the haunting subtlety of “Mirror Image”…

2. “Route 66 Theme” by Nelson Riddle

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.

Review: 'TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen '

About four years ago I wrote a piece about the mostly unacknowledged history of horror as a television genre and how it has never really managed to get “a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to proliferate.” Horror has rarely been acknowledged as a thriving or even a legitimate television genre, yet monsters and murders have made their mark in TV, not just in overt genre programs such as “The Munsters” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but in ones that straddle the lines such as “CSI” and “The Mighty Boosh.”  As cable stations concerned with quality and open to experimentation continue to expand the possibilities of what is permissible on television, horror has found a more comfortable home on pay channels such as HBO and AMC. If nothing else, after sixty years of The Quatermass Experiment, “The Twilight Zone,” “Dark Shadows,” “The X-Files,” and “The Walking Dead,” TV horror has made a deep enough impact that it warrants a study much deeper than the 2,700-or-so words I gave it back in 2009. Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have done precisely that with their new book TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen.

The multitudinous programs the writers cover in just 225 pages really draws attention to how overdue this study is. Because of that past failure to acknowledge horror TV, Jowett and Abbott had many, many stones to fling over. They trek to all corners of the topic to discuss how horror has infiltrated non-genre programs, how the televised version differs from its cinematic cousin, how the “mainstreaming” of horror has changed what we are able to see on our TVs, how children have always been more open to the genre than programmers often realize, how horror programs function as metaphors for the entire genre, and how the television set, itself, has functioned as a thing of horror. The discussion is academic but always readable and accessible, though I am now convinced that academic writers get paid based on how many times they use the word “liminal.” A word non-academic writers love to use to make themselves sound academic is “seminal,” and I’ve always promised myself I’d never use it here on Psychobabble. I’m going to break that vow—just this once—because “seminal” is exactly what TV Horror is. It is the first thorough discussion of that creature in the closet, that thing the academics refused to acknowledge until now. Let there be many more intelligent studies of horror TV such as this one and many, many more horrifying programs to study in the decades to come.

September 18, 2009: Psychobabble Presents: A Horrible History of Horror TV!

Today is the 45th anniversary of the debut episode of The Addams Family and this September 24th finds The Munsters celebrating that same milestone. These two ooky, kooky birthdays have got me thinking about one of TV’s fringiest genres: the horror program. Horror has never gotten a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to proliferate. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to sustain terror week after week on an episodic series. The anthology seems to be the horror program’s favored format, but it’s difficult to get viewers to tune in every week without familiar characters to follow. While a respectable number of horror shows have aired since TV’s cultural breakthrough in the 1950s, many of them were short-lived. Even indelible shows like The Addams Family and The Munsters only lasted two seasons. But the appeal of even some of the most fleeting horror TV shows has endured long beyond their original airings.