Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Planet of the Apes: The Original Topps Trading Card Series'

Although Topps had produced entertainment tie-in cards for such properties as The Beverly Hillbillies, Lost in Space, and Batman, the company’s decision to try a series based on Planet of the Apes in 1969 was a different kettle of monkeys. This was the first time Topps produced a series of cards based on a big hit movie starring a big movie star: namely Charlton Heston. This had certain legal ramifications since Heston was not thrilled with the idea of having his square-jawed visage packaged with stale bubblegum. In the end, he only gave the OK for Topps to include him on a mere nine cards, an offer Topps kind of wasted by using a few of these cards to only show the back of Heston’s head, his feet, or in one glorious instance, his butt. To give the impression that Heston was better represented than he actually was, Topps reduced its usual run of 66 cards to a mere 40. Although she was a complete unknown at the time, co-star Linda Harrison didn’t have any face time in the series at all. Fortunately, there were no such issues for the actors and actresses hidden in ape make up, and let’s face it, the kids who bought these cards were more interested in ogling awesome ape faces than Heston and Harrison’s pretty pusses.

Abrams’ new collection of Planet of the Apes cards would be a pamphlet if it only assembled that original 40-card run, so it widens its net to include the card series based on the short-lived 1974 Planet of the Apes TV show and Tim Burton’s bad 2001 remake. The upside to the relatively few cards collected in Planet of the Apes: The Original Topps Trading Card Series is that each card is allowed to occupy its own page at extra-large dimensions. Also, Gary Gerani, who provided captions for the Planet of the Apes TV series cards, and whose text in Abrams’ recent Topps Star Wars cards books was so entertaining, does the same for this new volume.

Review: 'Shag: The Collected Works'

Perhaps the mid-twentieth century wasn’t a non-stop rainbow orgy of Beatnik lounges, hipster soirees, Beatles concerts, Tiki bars, surfing expeditions, and rumbles between Adam West’s Batman and Frank Gorshin’s Riddler. Perhaps. I really don’t want to think about the dreary alternative, though. I surmise Shag doesn’t either.

For over twenty years, the pop artist has fetishized the sixties and seventies in enchanting fashion, creating a wild retro realm that you just want to disappear into like Alice sinking into the looking glass. It’s a world in which every cat is super cool, every chick is ultra groovy, every color is eye-poppingly brilliant, and every environment is de-luxe. You may have seen his work in commercial settings, as it has appeared in numerous adverts and on the covers of quite a few CD collections. Nevertheless, there’s always seriousness artistry behind the method. More surprisingly, nightmarish blasts sometimes shatter the retro dreaminess of Shag’s world. He has depicted scenes of murder, torture, and Hieronymus Bosch-inspired depravity in his signature, crowd-pleasing style. He has even come clean about how his own dark times inspired some of these deviations in his work.

Shag’s light and dark, artistic and commercial work is all on glorious display in a gorgeous new collection titled Shag: The Collected Works. This book levels Shag’s wide playing field, encompassing his acrylic paintings as well as the things featuring his artwork you aren’t likely to see hanging in any museum: the CD covers, the ottomans, the coasters, the pillows, the Hawaiian shirts, the watches, the drinking glasses. It’s all marvy. So is his taste in pop culture as he gives The Beatles, The Ramones, The Velvets, the Universal Monsters, The Twilight Zone, The Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Batman, and Disneyland the Shag treatment.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 56

The Date: November 25

The Movie: Planet of the Apes (1968)

What Is It?: Chuck Heston crashes his rocket ship on a planet populated by simian slavers, falls in love, has a few laughs, etc.

Why Today?: On this day in 3978, Chuck Heston crashes his rocket ship on a planet populated by simian slavers.

The Mother of Sci-Fi Movie Franchises Was Also the Darkest

Warning: The Spoilers will damn you all to hell.

Star Wars gets all the credit for being the first major science-fiction movie franchise, segueing off into a plastic avalanche of every product imaginable from the ubiquitous toys to clothing, house wares, books, hygiene products, food, and so on and so on. First appearing a decade before George Lucas’s juggernaut, Planet of the Apes wasn’t quite as over-commercialized as its successor (what is?), but kids could still get their paws on a plethora of Apey action figures, mugs and bowls, t-shirts, comics, puzzles, piggy banks, Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, and so on. They could also get a healthy dose of harsh reality by actually watching the movies. Forget Darth Vader’s traumatizing revelation in The Empire Strikes Back and even all the skin-charring nastiness and off-screen “youngling” killing of Revenge of the Sith. The Planet of the Apes series is by far the darkest, downright cruelest film franchise ever pitched at kids.

Monsterology: Mutants

In this new feature on Psychobabble, we’ll be taking a look at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

You’re an animal. So’s your mom and your dad and your sister and all your friends. We humans like to think of ourselves as far removed from the animals we eat, shoo, experiment on, and patronize as pets. But though we may have opposable thumbs and cell phones, we are basically shaved apes with unwieldy brains. As Charles Darwin pointed out 150-odd years ago, we’re also mutants. We are the result of sudden biological jolts in unexpected directions, which is why most of us no longer live in trees or employ butt sniffing when choosing a mate (did prehistoric people actually do this? I like to think so). Despite war, genocide, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, homophobia, extreme narcissism, reality television, and Rick Santorum, we turned out pretty well. But a little tweak in the wrong direction and we could have been murderous men-fish with big webbed claws or underground-dwelling mole ladies. Terrifying to consider, eh? Perhaps that’s why mutants have been such reliable monsters since the dawn of Horror fiction.

H.G. Wells was one of the first artists to address such mutations, which he did in The Time Machine (1895). The writer sent his protagonist back to 802,701 A.D. where he meets two alternate early versions of his own species. Wells chiefly used the lazy Eloi and the brutish Morlocks as metaphors for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, respectively, but he may not have conceived of these particular creatures had Darwin not made us aware of the strange side roads we walked on our journey toward humanity. The following year, Wells gave us a more explicit glimpse at our bestial past, but he did so without the trappings of revisionist history. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, the title doc is the maddest of modern scientists, conducting enforced evolution in a lab his hairy charges fear as the House of Pain. Wells intended his novel as a denunciation of one of “evolved” man’s great crimes, vivisection, yet it also functions as a raging criticism of the arrogance, cruelty, and whimsy of an evolution-crazed God. Moreau sees himself as The Creator, a noble entity who would erase the savagery of nature and replace it with the refinement of civilized humans. In actuality, he is an egomaniacal puppeteer and torturer, and like the God of Biblical fiction, his creations are ultimately destructive. Was Wells telling us we would have been better left grazing in the fields? Perhaps, and perhaps he wasn’t too far off the mark.

H.G. Wells later described The Island of Dr. Moreau as “rather painful” and “an exercise in youthful blasphemy,” yet it solidified a Horror archetype that had yet to take a shape of its own but may have always existed. What are werewolves and vampires if not mutants of sorts? Could they be supernatural suggestions of what might have been had humans evolved from wolves or bats instead of apes?

Such “what ifs?” gave us some of our most memorable monsters when Horror mutated from the printed page to the screen in the twentieth century. What if there was a direct missing link between us and that fish that crawled from the sea some 360 million years ago? Perhaps there might still be one of these creatures doing the backstroke in a black lagoon in the Amazon, mooning over a woman with whom he may have had a shot had he been fortunate enough to follow the same evolutionary path as the rest of us. As scientifically unlikely as it is, that fish/man missing link became one of Horror’s iconic monsters and a belated last hoorah for the golden age of Universal horror.

A true testament to natural selection, the Gill Man has withstood time better than the big-eyed mutants of the charmingly campy The Mole People, Universal’s less successful attempt to justify weird creatures with dicey science. Quite unlike evolutionary science, the “Hollow Earth Theory” had been roundly dismissed a century and a half before Virgil Vogel’s movie premiered in 1956. That didn’t stop phony-boloney scientist Frank C. Baxter from lecturing about mutant mole men running amok in the Earth’s core during the uproarious prologue:


Silly? Yes. But apparently not unworthy fodder for serious horror, as we learned almost fifty years later when Neil Marshall explored both the evolutionary undercurrent of vampires and the speculative hooey of mutant monsters dwelling under the Earth in the genuinely terrifying The Descent. Of course, the film’s claustrophobia-inducing scenes of spelunking are so scary that the mutant bat people are somewhat less overwhelming when they finally show up halfway through the picture.

In the interim, Horror and science fiction pondered strange mutations time and time again. In 1984, cult favorite C.H.U.D. took another dive below ground to visit with mole people of a different sort: urban homeless people mutated into monstrous cannibals by toxic waste. The classic 1963 novel and 1968 film The Planet of the Apes wondered what might result if apes continued evolving while retaining their signature ape flourishes while humans were relegated to lower-beast status. The three film adaptations of The Island of Dr. Moreau work as a devolutionary timeline, descending from the great (1933) to the good (1977) to the abysmal (1996) over time. Dagon, Stuart Gordon’s underrated 2001 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, melds weird mutations and weirder religion with its Gill Man-esque creatures who worship a freaky fish god. Evolution and religion merge at last. The mutant continues to stalk our nightmares.

So before you go to bed tonight, thank your god—if you’re inclined to believe in such things—that you managed to make it to 2012 without gills or fangs or the need to take residence deep in the Earth. Better yet, toss The Creature from the Black Lagoon into the DVD player and thank Jack Arnold, H.G. Wells, Neil Marshall, and the rest for finding the riveting Horror in the strange-but-true science of evolution.

Essential Mutant Viewing:
Island of Lost Souls (1933)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
The Mole People (1956)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Planet of the Apes (1968)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
C.H.U.D. (1984)
Dagon (2001)
The Descent (2005)