The Price of Pop: Halloween Challenge Night 16

 

I am twelve, and like most people I know my age, I am crazy about Michael Jackson's new album. 'Billie jean' is an absolute banger, 'Beat It' a badger of very hot properties. The whole things sounds brilliant and is probably the first album I ever buy that I listen to, absorbing as much of the backing instruments and their interplay as I can to try and work it all out. It was a fool's errand, and I may as well have tried to pull apart Jackson's insane dance moves for all the good it (and that!) did me. But the best was yet to come. Tonight, for Halloween, I'm revisiting the next big thing to come off Jackson's unassailable album: 

Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' (John Landis, 1983)

The production is a film and cult media geek's dream: Landis was not long off the set of The Twilight Zone, bringing Rick Baker in tow for makeup - both had worked together of course on An American Werewolf in London, the only movie of Landis' that Jackson had seen, although  it was enough to get him on the line. Rounding out the interstitial music was Elmer Bernstein, also a past collaborator with Landis on Werewolf as well as Animal House, and soon to be providing the original score for Ghostbusters. And then of course Vincent Price, who doesn't seem to have been on set, but whose presence is essential in the song and for the extended reawakened dead scenes. The short film itself is an honest homage to the old form - Jackson loved the tradition of movie shorts, so wanted to bring them back, the story takes place in a Fifties'/ Sixties opening, and later zombies storm a creepy abandoned house, shuffling and moaning in a visual recreation of Night of the Living Dead. Finally there's the cinema itself, location of the movie within a movie opener, and tellingly festooned with posters of Price's - and Landis' past works. Much of this I know - but not all. And for the first time seeing it on TV, the same night as all of those other kids I know, I have no idea what's coming next. But it's brilliant.

Forty-three years on, and it's still a great diversion, even if you have to squint your brain at the history of some of its principal players. The direction is nice, the sound and lighting terrific and the colours in particular are fantastic - I'm a sucker for Eighties zombies with their parchment skin, deep-set eyes and angular features. get them dancing the way Jacko did and it's a vision. Plus, I can swear that one of them is a reference to Tor Johnson. In y opinion Jackson peaked here - he never looked as good, cast such a shadow, or electrified the screen. Thriller is a miniature treat, from gas-strapped prologue to that memorable final spin with its cat-eyed hero that would stay in my young mind for days afterward. Truly, noone could resist this Thriller.

Halloweenometer. As loath as I am to go straight down the zombie route, this has graveyards, a full moon, a spooky house and a werewolf. It's pretty much made for Halloween.

Companion Piece. The audio for Vincent 'One Take' Price's additions (complete with third, unused verse) is here. But why no add in another of Landis and Baker's great collaborations from the time - courtesy of a future Ghostbuster, naturally. I rewatched this again for a laugh and still jumped, crying out, knowing what was coming. And laughed at my silliness. By jeepers it's a good scene!

Buy Before You Die - Halloween advertising across three decades: Halloween Challenge Night 15

A lot of my idea of what Halloween is come naturally from US sources – the Child Life journals picked up from our town library, the odd TV programme, and in later years that recentday Bible of Americana, ET the Extraterrestrial. The latter I really took to, especially as it included a pretty hefty – if dubious – nod to the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon, but the Halloween aspect is key to the story. The disguise our titular alien wears, Elliot’s skeleton makeup, a cornfield bursting with golden promise, the great Star wars vuisual gag in the Trick or Treating scene (which to my astonishment seemed to take place in near full daylight – most ujnlike the dark autumn evenings I’d grown up thinking were a staple. They were like us after all!). Oh, and a trail of candy with which to trick the cosmic critter in the first place. 

Halloween in America, the young Simian concluded, must be an awesome thing indeed. Subsequent encounters with States-born classmates and friends have tempered that somewhat – and of course, Hollywood will glam these things up, but for further evidence this evening I took to everyone’s prime source of facts, YouTube, to see how Halloween was interpreted on the domestic tube in the 70s, 80s and 90s. How did it go?



As a goodie bag? A bit mixed, to be honest. I have takeaways. Some hard candy, some soft centres, some saccharine offerings of dubious origin, indeed. The 70s are a particular revelation, marking the first technicolour video decade of regional channels promoting local fare on a budget. Yep, Halloween costumes looked very… economical. Thin, plastic half masks, tamer choices of raggedy Annes or hoboes (a VERY popular and DIY-friendly choice from that time, it seems), and some sound mixing and which has not survived the ravages of time and early VHS technology. It was a bit underwhelming, and the ever-present cereal ads of Count Chocula and his frightful brethren, not to mention the long-forgotten pretenders to the McDonalds/Burger King etc throne looked a bit forlorn. 

Ten years later the dayglo decade became a little more adult-friendly with face paints and a promise of dancing and snagging your intended with the right costume… not a lot of spookiness here, really. By the 90s it was more of the same. The technology had improved, but the whole things had a rushed, improvised aspect to it, maybe because of the hodgepodge of corporate and Mom/Pop franchises vying for that sweet sweet Halloween dollar.

 Halloweenometer. The question I found myself asking was “does it get me in the mood?” Kind of. “Does it give me a good idea of what Halloween may have been like back in the day?” Well, maybe it did  - and possibly despite itself. Try it out and see what you think!

Postscript: In the interests of weird science I did compare thins to UK Horror-themed ads of the same time. Beer ads, Hamlet cigars… illicit ice lollies. It’s a contrast, but as much as  I had fun with them, they weren’t real Halloween fare. Good, though.

The Whicker, Man: Halloween Challenge Night 13

The UK horror experience fascinates me. For something as homegrown and ready-loaded with a ready arsenal of classic, gothic literature and a hefty output of the Hammer and Amicus Studios in the 60s and 70s, it feels as though British horror often gets overlooked in favour of its glitzier, more camera-ready US cousin, with its Universal Monsters, serial killers, Munsters and Addamses. There’s a charisma to American horror that’s sometimes lacking in the older, colder, damper, camper British version. And yet, consumers of the form overlook Britshock at their peril, because beyond the celebrated works of Stoker, Shelley, Cushing and Lee there’s an intriguing domestic oeuvre in UK horror that has a taste all of its own. A rare vintage, redolent of wet post War Victorian townhouses, urban cemeteries, canals, shadows, Scream comics, House of Hammer series, and guilty tattered paperback dreadfuls passed under school desks by day, to be consumed in secret after sunset.

I go on – and could easily continue to, but suffice it to say, British horror – even in the early decades of my long life, is a broad church, as evidenced by Alan Whicker’s exploration of the British Horror psyche here, on the cusp of a new era of visual nasties...

 Whicker’s World: A Handful of Horrors: I Don’t Like My Monsters to have Oedipus Complexes (1968)

This is once over lightly stuff, but intriguing for its scattershot skimming of what makes for British horror in the day – horror magazines, low budget schlockers, a distracted interview with scream queen Barbara Shelley, an earnest but wired Screaming Lord Sutch, Christopher Lee, Terry Nation and his Dalek creations, and our oh-so-lampoonable host drifting through Highgate Cemetery, pursued by a Yeti. It’s all good, it’s all valid, it’s all there – bumping its ugly bits together in a mash-mash stitched-together way. Reminiscent of… I don’t know what.

Horror essentially defies codification, which is part of its character and an essential element of its perennial appeal, so a single episode doco is never going to do it justice – even if geographically contained. Heck, subsequent documentary series have covered literature and film and still not scratched the surface, but that just means that there’s more to discover, to experience, to appreciate and argue over.

YouTube option:



Halloweenometer: Your mileage may vary, as it should. Trust me, it’s better that way.

Companion Piece: I nearly did Lord Sutch's 'Jack the Ripper', but opted for something a little more catchy and... comic. Here's the Damned!

Liverpool...of BLOOD! Halloween Challenge Night 12

 Giddy from the one-two punch of an all-American Disney Halloween double feature, I’ve crossed the Atlantic to see how those Brit brats did Halloween in the distant past of the 1970s (ouch)

Well, not Halloween specifically, but there are monsters, kids, horror movies, tricks, costumes and nighttime shenanigans; so let’s have a look at Play For Today’s ‘Vampires’ as recommended by that Scarred For Life Basefook page…

 Play for Today: Vampires (1979)

Hmm. Visceral. There’s a bit more going on in this than I’d thought, with latchkey youngsters, dead teachers and men taking clandestine meetings in municipal cemeteries during daylight hours, but what an interesting wee piece!

The precis: A huddle of overimaginative boys (with one seriously impressionable member) after a night in getting Hammered (The Scars of Dracula, to be exact) take the notion that a tall, cloaked man they’ve seem in the local boneyard is a vampire. One of the boys, the impressionable one, buys some joke shop fangs and turns his anorak into a Dracula-wrap, and things kind of escalate from there. But not how you might think. Perhaps befitting Play for Today, it’s a bit more domestic and social commentary than fantastic in its scope – and yet, if indeed I did set out to try to find the mindset of scar-crossed tykes in the era of Whoopee and Monster Fun comics, I think I found it, alongside a cautionary depiction of life in inner Liverpool in the dying days of the Seventies, comprehensive schooling, dour Christianity and broken homes.

Halloweenometer: As mentioned, not really Halloweeny, but then Halloween wasn’t really a thing in the UK in the Seventies, even when Hammer Films were still a TV convention and your local joke shop had a reliably creepy staffer more than ready to impress you with his theories on the supernatural. Still, mostly harmless fun, and not without its charms. Pretty good! :[

Familial Haunts No 2 : Halloween Challenge Night 8

 Tonight’s scar is actually one of Mrs Simian’s. Who knew that Little House on the Prairie had such a resource of spooky stories to draw from? Well, it did. The Waltons had a Ouija board story, sure, but Little House had allegedly haunted houses ('Haunted House')  a werewolf ('The Werewolf of Walnut Grove'), and it had this – 'The Monster of Walnut Grove', which was not a monster, but the allegedly murderous Mr Oleson the village shopkeeper and patriarch of the snobbish Oleson family and their seriously weird children (I told you snobbish shopkeepers were required in these stories!)

Little House on the Prairie 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' (1/11/1976)

The tale itself isn’t exactly what’s promised in the title. Here be spoilers: Little halfpint Laura is out soaping windows on Halloween Eve (yay!) when she thinks she spots Mr Oleson decapitating his wife in her chair with a ceremonial sword. Ho ho! And as Mrs Oleson leaves town before sunrise the next day she’s nowhere to be found and soon every child is buying into the murder story. Things escalate, there’s some great graveyard action by day, a rolling mannequin head down cellar stairs, nightmares with Grimsdike-like ghouls and the same sound library wolf howl track playing every time the script calls for EXT. NIGHT. THE LITTLE HOUSE. It’s a hoot! Actually, there are probably some hoots in there, too.

Halloweenometer: Oh, highly recommended – even if Mrs Simian didn’t feel up to revisiting her scar. Compared to The Waltons, this is the real thing, and a great surprise and delight for me. Incredibly, 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' was my first genuine highlight of the spooky season. And it’s bookended with a Headless Horseman, no less. Brilliant!

No musical companion-piece this time, but check this out for Walnut Grove’s most Spooky Moments and tell me you’re not racing off to fire up the Wayback Machine:




Bonus Pumpkinwatch: near the opening of the episode we get this marvel setting the scene:

So we have a few constants developing for an ideal Halloween viewing: kids are good, Halloween night obviously, and scares more than horror. Let’s see where that gets us from here.

Familial Haunts No. 1 : Halloween Challenge Night 7

I have scars. We all do. Yeah, I have physical scars - gnarly, story-carrying ones about literally crawling over needles and broken glass (I was an unattended little Simian in my formative years), coming a cropper off bikes, even chipping a tooth on a loser's fist in high school... but no, I'm talking REAL scars, psychological ones. 

A departure tonight, then, as my early scar – well, perhaps more of an intrigue, comes courtesy of that eerie, haunting tale of the weird and uncanny, The Waltons. Yes, the most sepia-toned TV series of the 1970s, set in the 1930s, but anchored in the Flared Decade’s fascination with all things country and colonial. We’ll come back to that, but tonight’s episode from Season 7 is one of only two Halloween themed stories, 'The Changeling', and it features a poltergeist. Yes!

The Waltons, s7 ep5 'The Changeling' (26/10/78)

Poltergeists were all the rage in the Seventies for a time, it seemed. 'The Changeling' aired only months after the Enfield Poltergeist (though before Tobe Hooper’s movie, of course), and carries with it the essential contemporaneous theory that this activity was usually centred around a… highly-strung (adolescent) individual – often female. With Enfield you can see the connection (one theory even calls this the “mischievous adolescent” phenomenon), and of course it fits neatly into the story of Elizabeth Walton - twelve years old, just days away from the big one-three. No longer a little girl, not yet one of the grown-ups of the household, she struggles with her place in the homestead. Her brother Jason has a subplot which offers a variation on the innocence/experience struggle, but there’s no paranormal element to his, and it’s as dull as ditchwater.

Elizabeth’s is slightly better fare as the Youngest Walton is beset by flying crockery, a sentient piano and a creepy doll™ which is a raggedy Ann variety – which, trivia fans may know, was the actual doll that the Annabelle doll from the Conjuring movies was based very very loosely on. But back to 'The Changeling'. It’s a curious story, balancing the radio efforts of gauche Jason as a would be on-air agony cousin, and local storekeepers Ike and Cora Godsey (there’s always a snobbish storekeeper in 1970s colonial programmes – we’ll come back to them) and of course the supernatural troubles of our heroine. Hair gets blown back, faces get stuck on ‘bewildered’ for most of the episode, and it’s really only the intervention of Olivia, the Waltling matriarch that provides an explanation (probably a ghost) and a resolution (after things peaked things… stop?) and we’re on our way back to a very Appalachian normaldom.

Halloweenometer? The last ten minutes are probably the best, but the doll is reliably unnerving. On the whole, though, not quite as spooky as intended. It tries, but like our Elizabeth, is maybe stuck between worlds a bit.

Companion piece. It’s hard to find one that’s not exploitative Maybe an Arthur C Clarke bit on Poltergeists, or just sample this snippet from the story. Yeah, that'll do.


Goodnight, John Boy. Sweet Dreaammmssss

Real Awful: Halloween Challenge Night 3

Tonight we watched some reality TV. I mean a documentary kind of thing. About Amityville, surely THE 1970s haunted house story, and an event that inspired a book, a movie, some more movies (including remakes) and probably launched a whole swag of paranormal documentaries, including this one.

Shock Docs: Amityville Horror House (2020)

Halloweenometer? We didn't finish it. This is the second in a row ! What's going on?

Mrs Simian only had a passing knowledge of the Amityville story (fair enough), and no knowledge of the preceding DeFeo family murders, which this documentary took sometime in setting up as a backdrop to the story. So, it's a true crime story from the outset, with mugshots, confessional tapes, forensic photos - so far, not really Halloweeny. It was lurid, it was at pains to reproduce a grimy, nicotine-coloured version of the Seventies (good!) But we didn't finish it. The real-life murders cast a pall over any promised spooky ookiness, and so we turned to something else instead. Bah.

Now, I'm not opposed to documentaries, and spooky documentaries, and even 70s flavoured documentaries. Gimme some of those Ghost Hunters - brilliant! And to be fair, the modern streamers do produce a shedload of paranormal-adjacent 'reality' content. Most of it is ridiculously hysterical bobbins, but some I find good. I may be alone in really liking the atmospheric and more leisurely Files of the Unexplained (especially the episode on Myrtle Plantation). But this wasn't it.

No score on the Halloweenometer. We really disliked the voyeuristic over the top aspect of this. It's not our Halloween, But I have a good feeling about some stuff coming up, so stick around!

Companion Piece

Not that it deserves company, let's have a haunted house song, this time inspired by The Shining and provided by Ms Bush just one album before The Hounds of Love (ooh - with a sample from Night of the Demon!) Here's the rather bonkers Get Out of My House:

Eey-oorr!!

A Very Special Star Warps Holiday

 Star Warps! Just the name alone rings bells of memories, when its creator George Lukers promised his faithful Warpers that one day... ONE DAY he'd expand the world of the original Star Warps movie and give us a glimpse of the enormous far-time galaxies it fitted into. The great plan.

And then he did! And, even better for those of us who didn't have a movie theatre of our own, for TV! It arrived less than a year after the first Star Warps, starred all of our favourite characters (except Oble Kenoble who is dead (spoilers)) with special guest stars like Aunt Carney, Beau Arther and a special performance from Jefferson Airbiscuit. 

It was called A Very Special Star Warps Holiday, and it was AMAZING.

You have to see it for yourself - and one day we will, through the magic of repeats. But until then, here are some of the treats that await us:

Chewy's family on the Wonky homeworld of Kolchak:

Marla, Chewy's beautiful wife

Scratchy, his irascible father

Humpy, Chewy's young son.

All of them are on Kolchak trying to prepare for Go-Live Day, a festival of singing and gathering which is holy to all the Wonkies.  But of course they keep getting interrupted by the guest stars and all hell breaks loose! In the end Chewy and his human owner Hank Solo arrive and sort things out. Phew! And not before time, as Princess Layer and Luke Sandhater are invited too, and pretty soon there's going to be singing.

Hey, careful, Luke - that's Hank's Sister! (spoilers)

"It's a Wonderful Go-Live Day, Chewy!"


Star Warps - it's not just for Go-Live Day!

Drokktober 2019. Day 26

"Dredd vs any TV/movie character of your choice" is today's theme.

So I did Wellington Paranormal's Officers O'Leary and Minogue. I was reasonably happy with this, and then my Tweeted pic got a like from the real O'Leary and Minogue. Crimminey! 

1966 And All That

The true strength of a pop cultural icon lies in their resilience. Heroes and villains come and go, but the greatest of them endure through generations and interpretations. Yes, there may be periods when they are considered out of vogue, but being strong figures they are bound to return - perhaps as a farce, or a revisionist retelling, or as a mirror to contemporary society's travails.

I speak of the big ones: Robin Hood. King Arthur. Sherlock Holmes. Batman. The Sixties version.

No, come back, I'm not mad. I wasn't even mad in 1989 when I sniffed at this rare product of high camp and sixties psychedelia and walked away. Tim Burton's reinvention of the character was just around the corner and the big bad Nineties introduced a less colourful, more serious take on the character. The Dark Knight was the order of the day, and the Caped Crusader had quickly become For Selected Audiences Only. I eschewed the series' self-knowing silliness and cheap later episodes, and those misspent afternoons screwing my youthful freckled schoolboy nose at the hyper kinetic hi-jinks our neighbours' colour TV provided every same Bat-time same Bat-channel.

So what changed for me to rediscover the West and Ward Batman? Well it wasn't the TV show, though I do want to 'reconnect' with it in some form - the Blu Rays look mighty tempting. Of course the car I rediscovered to my surprise in the Dark Knight Rises extras. It was also the Bat-history, dutifully documented, directed and delivered by that doyen of the Detective Comics dynamo, Mr Jim Moon that got my attention. And it was the comic strip.

Yes, again, the Wellington City Library has done itself proud and has a pretty decent collection of the recent Batman '66 anthology series, being a set of new Batman tales told with the energy, the enthusiasm and the tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1966 series. When they're good they're very very good- not since Lego's Batman '66 set have I been so relieved to see Caesar Romero's painted moustache so faithfully rendered beneath his Joker makeup. And Burgess Meredith's Penguin, Frank Gorshin's Riddler (who owes his reputation purely to the TV series and Gorshin's talents), the triumvirate of Catwomen in Kitt, Merriwether and Newmar plus other TV-only villains, like Egghead, Bookworm, Louie the Lilac, Ma Parker, Shame, King Tut and Marsha Queen of Diamonds. The captions recall the exclamations of the show's cliffhanger closers, the title fonts are perfect, and over all there's a spirit of fun in the series, even in recent years with its canon-bending introduction of anachronistic characters like Harley Quin and Bane.

For the most part the series sticks close to its roots, even with occasional crossovers to contemporary TV series (Green Hornet, Man From Uncle, The Avengers) and shout outs to the future (including a seemingly irresistable nod to a certain Seal song during a Poison Ivy outing). In case you're wondering, Batgirl gets as good as she gave, and there are some intriguing stylistic ventures also - notably a meta trip to Japan for the Bat trio where an encounter with Sixties comic villain Lord Death man. Trippy.

And trippy is as it should be. The '66 series is something to be celebrated, particularly amidst the sturm und drang of the Snyder films and Arkham video games. There was a time when Batman was fun, and was in on the joke, and those days did more for the survival of the Bat brand than anything in its comics. At The Warehouse in Whanganui recently I picked up a copy of the West and Ward Batman movie - until recently all you could get of the original series. Jet Jr and I watched it when it came home with me and we had a blast.

All of this presumably comes from a relaxing by Fox on its grip on the old TV series, leading to a minor snowstorm of retro products. The final release of the full series is the obvious jewel in the crown (those extras!), and the comic follows  of course. Batman 66 Lego is utterly adorable:

But no Batgirl minifigure? For shame!

And after the success of West, Ward and Newmar's animated reunion in Return of the Caped Crusaders there's now a follow-up in the works, featuring Two-Face voiced by - who else? William Shatner. Holy Dream Casting!

RIP VHS

This week marks a bittersweet moment in the Simian household. Well, two, really. First and foremost is another year marked off by Jet Jr as he burns through his single-digit birthdays like a cheetah on Ritalin, but such things are unavoidable, and calls are for celebration. No, the second is the cruellest marker of time's passage, for this holiday weekend the labours of our local video rental shop cease, its dorrs to close forever.

For the past month Civic Video have been selling off their wares from top to bottom - DVDs, Blu Rays, TV series, movies, games, refreshments, shelves... like a distressing Dick Smith closure but cheaper and with longer queues. I defy any self-respecting staffmember to resist a sad and understandably rueful acknowledgement that this same throng could have saved the business on any other day, but over this short period it's been a quiet and certain bleeding out of a store that was a real life saver at times - particularly wet weekends and school holidays.

As a past librarian I've frequently had to make hard decisions about collection management. They're hard decisions because beyond the cold equations of linear metres, storage overheads, rental and futureproofing, there's an emotional attachment to a well-stocked collection. Like a lot of people my generation and older, I like to discover by browsing and through serendipity, and you can't do that much with what resources we have at home for domestic film viewing. We don't torrent movies (though I do admit I've been the grateful recipient of one or two in a bind), and we don't have Netflicks - though we suspect this will have to change at some stage. Sure, the hit rate for Civic was sometimes not our friend, and there would be a distressingly-large number of scratched discs that would have to be returned, swapped, and maybe returned again to be swapped for a different title for a crestfallen Jet Jr, but the store was a mainstay of our little suburb, and the staff were unceasingly friendly, courteous, and helpful. I'll miss them - I do already. I have been, I admit freely, in an extended period of mouring for the old place, even if I confess I haven't been using it as much as I should have, or would have done were I a younger ape with more time on my hands.

But as I say, it's been a real friend. When I broke my back nearly ten years ago I spent a lot of recuperating hours finally watching Outrageous Fortune. I binge-watched when it wasn't fashionable to! Thanks to the less-recent closure of a neighbouring Video-Ezy, Civic's collection was also pretty decent for arthouse fare, and their World and SF collections weren't bad, either.

Alas, no more. And two visits to the shop post-closure announcement have meant some sad purchases were made - I have Batman v Superman now, for my sins, plus My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (oh boy), The Spiderwick Chronicles, Snowpiercer, E.T, Galaxy Quest, a Count Duckula collection (which may be scratched beyond play but at $2.25 was worth the gamble) and The Bean Movie. The father and son before me in the queue second time around walked - or at least staggered off - with just over ninety titles ranging from Dog Day Afternoon to The Delinquents for a cool hundred bucks. On my first visit a small boy eyed my quartet of movies and quietly asked 'Do you have Hunt for the Wilderpeople?'. I didn't. No chance. How am I going to see it now?!  Whole collections of Tolkien, Rowling and Meyers I passed by, and I regret not picking up Frankenweenie when I saw it, but on the whole I felt somehow culpable in part to a good shop's demise.

So, off to Netflicks or Neon we Simians march and call it progress. I've known some great video shops in my time. Well, no I haven't. I've known maybe one or two - but Civic Video in Johnsonville along with Amalgamated Video in Kilbirnie were the best two Wellington shops I frequented. Aro Video deserves its dogged survival, and long may it continue, but to me it's never been as friendly, as homely, or as handily local.

Video Affects: 'Wuthering Heights' - Kate Bush

It's a point of historical fact that for probably the first years of my life my family don't own a modern TV. Ours is big, blocky, and black and white. When we finally have the luxury of two TV sets, the old one is housed for a while in the bedroom of my older sister, and on it of a Saturday evening she, my brother and I will watch the early evening fare before bedtime. Probably The Dukes of Hazzard, The Incredible Hulk or Little House on the Prairie. But crucially also, among my sister's M*A*S*H and Scott Baio posters, some tidbits of pop music via classic chart show Ready to Roll. I am eight years old, and about to have one of the great frights of my life.

Picture a night-black studio, its floor smothered in dry ice fog. Out of it and strobing with the same video feedback trick that made The Jackson Five's Blame It On The Boogie so memorable, is something more starting. A ghost. A wailing, wide-eyed spectral woman in white with a high pitched mournful song that could only itself be about a ghost. At eight I think I've heard of a banshee - and this seems the most accurate depiction of one I could imagine. Somehow, I think the song's creator would approve.

Kate Bush's oeuvre has always had elements of the supernatural and horror about it, from Hammer Horror to Experiment IV, the opening snippet of Night of the Demon leading into Hounds of Love to the wonderfully (and literally) batty cosplay on the back of fourth album Never For Ever. But no song is as redolent as Wuthering Heights, its Gothic imprimatur well intact. Unsurprisingly for what follows, Bush is a revelation - and Wuthering Heights sets out her agenda with aplomb. Eerie, arty, outsider music of a kind which ought not to be able to escape its Seventies trappings were it not for Bush's own ability to follow the trend and her ability to reinvent herself.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For the moment this is the first time I'll ever see Kate Bush, and I'm ready to run to the hills in terror. There are two videos for Wuthering Heights; this is the lesser-seen one, but it's the one that will haunt my nights for a good few weeks to come.

Gnome Country - the novels of 'B.B.'

For a number of years I carried the memory of a show I watched as a young Simian after school. One was about three boys who went bush in the English countryside and had a distinctive piping theme tune. The other was a words and pictures tale of some little folk who went looking for one of their number called Cloudberry. Both eluded me for ages until I recently did the sensible thing and turned to Google. As it turned out, both series - respectively Brendan Chase and Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry were connected through their author/illustrator Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the nom de plume 'B.B' (after the air rifle pellet and not an abbreviation of Bilbo Baggins.) No wonder I'd had difficult searching them out.


B.B. seems to have belonged to a specific generation of British writers who, affected by the changing landscape of post Industrial Revolution England turned their concern for the disappearing landscape into children's writing. If it's possible to draw a line from Tolkien to Richard Adams then that same line must pass through BB, whose stories are imbued with woodlands nostalgia.

In The Little Grey Men (1942) and its sequel Down the Bright Stream (1948) B.B. uses his gnome protagonists as vessels of concern as in both stories they traverse the waterways and woodlands of a changing countryside in search of their brother and, later, a new home  (the second tale has some kinship with Adams' Watership Down) these gnomes - Dodder, Baldmoney, Sneezewort and Cloudberry are the last of their kind, dwellers in a world of talking animals and where man is at best a blundering fool, at worst a monster. It's written well in a naive style akin to Tolkien's Hobbit, but with some of the attendant sexism and xenophobia of the age. Nevertheless, for the most part the gnomes are well characterised, with Dodder in particular developing between the books in an arc worthy of a Baggins.

I found the books affecting - not quite as epic in scope or dour as Watership Down, but very charming and highly readable. Watkins-Pitchford effectively captures a world in macrocosm, with a population and sense of community, but devoid of politics or human concerns. Don't be fooled though - there's a darkness in these books including treachery, cruelty and murder. Cast members die in natural and unnatural ways, and though the face of God isn't present in B.B.'s woodland, the great god Pan is, in a striking and surreal chapter which precipitates some remarkable character turns among the gnomes. Similarly in Bright Stream the growing sinister truth about one of their number leads to a genuinely tense chapter of skullduggery and truly natural justice. All the while Watkins-Pitchford's  distinctive writing elegises the loss of the gnomes world, a quiet voice in the wilderness. And his illustrations are gorgeous.

The takeaway for me, as mentioned in my earlier post, is in the nature of the gnomes themselves. Here B.B imbues them as spokemen of a vanishing natural world, dodging beasts and men, habitat destruction, and even after the fires and noises of the Blitz are heard but not entirely fathomed by them on their last great journey, ultimately abandoning England for a home of older myth and safer refuge. There's much in keeping with the Seventies version of Huygen's text - and in fact, given that B.B's works concern themselves chiefly with the last gnomes of England,  they needn't be mutually exclusive. I believe there's a place for this version of the Gnome in a modern RPG - and in fact, there already is, in the independent RPG Tales from the Wood, and it's in my next post that I'll turn to this.

In the mean-time, I made some notes based on the gnomes and their world for anyone interested below:

Four Squares 2: Golden Years

I'm back watching The Flash, and still really enjoying it. This year the particle accelerator which made our hero's metahuman enemies is gone, replaced by a wormhole singularity which is now feeding him bad guys from a parallel Earth - Earth 2. And, of course, it has also brought in this guy:

 Yeah! Jay Garrick, baby!

The version of the Flash from Earth 2 or, as we might otherwise know him, 'old 1940s Flash' or thereabouts. It's one of the many cool things about the show that it has actually been this series which has ushered in the established comics model of multiple worlds. It was a concept that originated in the Flash comics, and it's given the show a boost that it didn't yet need, but which in an expanded DC TV universe, needs no futher explanation.

I also love the look of Jay Garrick, with his slight Dieselpunk look and the Mercury kettle helmet. Hell, I like mostly all of the old school hero costumes with only a few exceptions, and their heroes' grouping, the Justice Society of America is a territory that I also think is rich for mining.

One of the other things I did leading up to season 2 was re-connect with the Golden Age of [DC] super heroes. The sole comic I own representing that era is a revisionist story The Untold Origin of the Justice Society collected into a tidy A5-ish pocket comic book, which I picked up from a local dairy years ago on the way to an intermediate school camp. Though I never reconnected with the story or the characters, I do still really like them. In their best stories there's a simple honesty to them that genuinely evokes a Wartime, pre-Marvel era, where many of the Justice Society's members nod more to their detective comics origins - millionaires and scientists sworn to thwart crime with gadgets, physical superiority and very limited superpowers.

I also picked up a few JSA collections from the local library, the best example being The Justice Society Returns!, which owes more than a debt to the aforementioned origin story, but builds other characters into the mix and heightens the profile of some more enduring, second-tier heroes; so out go Superman and Batman, but the likes of Hourman and Johnny Thunder get a much-deserved promotion. It's a pretty good, serialised story all told, with all the major players essentially getting a chapter of their own, and if there's a deluxe reprint - well, I'd be tempted to get it.

But as I say above, I think this is an era still ripe for use in today's comic book entertainment world. There are examples already of period-era heroes - Marvel's Captain America and its spin-off Agent Carter are obvious examples, and of course DC's Earth 2, the home of its Golden Age heroes, is now a Flash/Arrow-verse reality - and of course before he was making Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, director Zack Snyder cut his superhero teetch with the Minute Men of the Watchmen cinematic adaptation. 2017 will see a Wonder Woman movie which will tell a story spread over several decades, including the Second World War - perhaps it's not unreasonable to expect a few cameos there?

For me, though, the appeal of the Golden Age superhero is one of relatability. I will never have super powers or wield fantastic gas guns, magic rings or rods of power, but the vulnerability and human frailty of many of these early year super heroes is something I find more and more interesting as time goes by.

Four Squares 1: The New Pod

Well, that hardly escalated at all.

It's been a busy month, and the month is almost over. My big October of RPG-blogging never happened - although I have been listening to a lot of SaveOrDie. Nevertheless, besides family stuff and work stuff I have fitted a few more things in. Like this:

Beyond the Sofa is another podcast I'm part of, after dipping my toe in the waters of Zeus Pod last year and watching and listening to it become the modest success that co-founder Jono Park made it. Zeus Pod is curently on hiatus while Jono works on his new life project, being a dad.


Coincidentally, BTS was born as a project between me and my good friend and fellow Dad and fan, David Ronayne.

Unlike Zeus Pod, BTS is a little less-focused on the new Doctor Who series, and in fact tok an element of my last Zeus Pod appearance as its kicking-off point. Two episodes in, and it's going well, and there's plenty more gas in the tank.

Also,we have a Facebook group. And a Twitter! And a gmail and a Soundcloud account!

Tune in!

Thunderchild 1: Totally Tubular

Thunderbirds is big in the Monkeyhouse these days; both versions, and mostly with Jet Jr, who has a small version of his favourite International Rescue vehicle, plus a not-to-scale Scott Tracy to loom over it threateningly. Recently a Glad Wrap tube was co-opted into playing the part of a slightly larger Thunderbird 1,so in a foolhardy fit of paternal involvement I suggested we work together on a pimp-up project.

Plans were drawn, coloured in, internets consulted and dismissed, and measuring was done and everything. I'd like to say it took a few hours, but I can't. I can't even say it took a couple of weekends! Nevertheless, a month or so on of stolen moments between Real Life Distractions, we got the job done.

Apart from some replacement paints, nothing was purchased in the making of this model, and aside from some printed lettering (done by Jet Jr's Mum to hurry things along - not unlike other more pressing projects) everything was done by hand. Cardboard tubes, tape, PVA glue, acrylic paint and some Mod Podge and muttered swears to seal the deal. Most of the model is double-thickness card - including the nose cone which spent an hour or so wedged on a broomstick tip to hold its shape. And it has some heft!

And yes, a request has been put in for a follow-up!

He[a]r[i]n the Hunter/s

Evening all.

Now, of late things have been quiet on Jetsam, and somewhat reactive rather than proactive. I'm hoping to address this soon by posting some creative endeavours, but in the mean-time, some more reaction in the cheapest way - a combination post! Yes, my apologies. It's nearly bed time.

So what am I reacting against? Whaddaya got? Well, how about the long-rumoured and finally confirmed return of Hawk the Slayer?

That's pretty cool. Lord knows, the original movie had enough sequel hooks in it, and if I might take a moment to be a leeetle unkind, this is a movie project that may benefit from having some of its old cast unavailable for bookings. Okay, that is unkind - I loved Bernard Bresslaw and Morgan Sheppard, and it looks like Ray Charleston is back as a very Old Crow, but Voltan must be recast with Jack Palance out of the frame and, well, I wish them all the best. As readers will know, I rather took a shine to this little piece of cinematic miscalculation, and after some very disappointing fantasy movie spectacles, perhaps small-scale fantasy might be the way forward for a while?

And while we're riding through the glen, today's news is of another long-rumoured, long-attempted follow up to an even more beloved Eighties slice of fantasyfolklore. Robin of Sherwood is getting an audio sequel! Based on a script by RoS' late, great creator Richard Carpenter, Knights of the Apocalypse has a title that promises something as big and tumultuous as the original series' The Swords of Wayland. Even better, it's in good hands, courtesy of Bafflegab (who produce the wonderful Scarifiers series), script editor John Dorney (who has produced some top-notch stories for Big Finish's Doctor Who line) and a lot of the original cast. Okay, no Michael Praed, but Jason Connery, Nickolas Grace AND Ray Winstone, plus Judi Trott and Paul Rose! I'm in. Sign me up.

What a year to be alive. Cue Hawk-inspired rock song!

Capes and Capability

In recent weeks the roster of TV superheroes availabe to see here in NZ has shifted. We still have Marvel's Agents of SHIELD on Thursday nights, and Daredevil is accessible to those with a Netflix account. but it's fair to say that terrestrially at least, things have quietened down for the most part. Arrow closed off a reputedly acklustre third season with more pillaging of the Caped Crusader's book of enemies and plotlines (still, if you're going to steal...), while Gotham brought its first year to a bloody close and maybe a reduction in the castlist. The biggest finale for me, though, was Flash's.

Saviour of the universe! In my house at least.

This series started with not a lot and just grew and grew. The Flash comes across to me as a second-tier DC superhero - as any of the roster are behind the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Yet with a carefully-put together season of mainly one-off metahuman-of-the-week stories, slowly building towards recreating the comic strip's Rogue's Gallery, teasing the identity of the mysterious benefactor Harrison Wells, seeding the season with peripheral allies (Firestorm mainly, but let's not miss out those fun Arrow and Atom crossovers) before ending with a genuinely moving and breathtaking finale. You sit there in wonder that what you're viewing is a television budget show, with the requisite rules and limitations of storyline, narrative and location, and then an item of headware pops through a time-space vortex. This is a series that got my derisive wife invested on the strength of a seemingly peripheral man-child support cast member (Cisco Ramon take a bow!) brought in Mark Hamill mid-season, and then a pretty convincing CG gorilla before the curtain went down. I genuinely can't wait for the next run. It looks like anything could be possible right now with this show.

I never got into Arrow, and increasingly Gotham became a grim watch. The future Batman references were a minor addition in the end - I actually took to this series as a procedural with two great characters in Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock easily, and the lingering complaint that it's not speeding up towards the obvious finish line seem silly to me. With two promotions among the support cast to core cast for next season it looks like not much will change. I hope for the best.

Also hoping for the best: Legends of Tomorrow, which looks rather crazy and as camp as Christmas on the strength of the trailer, Wentworth Miller's ham-tastic Captain Cold and Arthur Darvill sporting a Tenth Doctor wardrobe and not entirely convincing anyone that he's taking his new casting as a time traveller entirely seriously either. I'll stay for Atom shrinking, Dr Martin Stein, Firestorm flying, Hawkgirl in costume and the occasional Flash appearances. I guess I'm in, then.

Proving not all Kryptonians are grim-faced these days

Also from the DC stable and Flash Producer Greg Berlanti is Supergirl, the pilot of which I saw accidntally thinking I was watching the epic-length trailer (sort of). So far it looks fine to me, though nothing astonishing. Comparisons to early Flash are perhaps apposite, so maybe the best is yet to come, and I do think CBS got the lead casting bang on. It hoves very close to established Superman mythology and tropes once more, and I can't decide whether this is a sensible move for a pilot or not; and of course I can't know whether nods to Kara Danvers' famous cousin in Metropolis will be a staple of every episode to come. Unfortunately, Supergirl has a large hill to climb whichever way you look at it - a legacy series based on a succesful movie franchise, a female-centric superhero vehicle, or a newcomer to a busy genre. I wish it well, because I'd love to see something like this do well, especially without the questionable 'support' of a male-centric and over-entitled fanbase.

But here I go, off on one again about comics fans. 

DC-TV

Hey, this post is synched with Jamas' post over on his blog! 

Hi readers, today I'm going to write briefly about some DC comic heroes currently on the small screen. By rights I should be matching this post with a similar post about Marvel superheroes on TV, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, as I'm not currently a viewer of any of those, so if you're still here then settle in...

In 2014 there's not a lot of TV I watch. A combination of late evening starts, box sets, altered priorities and spousal/scheduling TV issues means that my fare has been a little wanting. Game of Thrones was a regular watch, and the local, silly but fun Covers Band, but other genre TV has just not been a go-er. Walking Dead? Forget about it. Breaking Bad? Maybe one day.

But I have been watching two series - Gotham and The Flash - both based in the DC universe of superheroes, but both quite different in takes. Gotham has been labelled a Batman prequel, but it's really more of a procedural in the middle of a gang war which happens to be happening at the same time as young detective and future Commissioner Jim Gordon arrives in Gotham. There, the recently orphaned Bruce Wayne- I'll stop, actually. If you don't know what Gotham is, there are plenty of places to find what you're after. Suffice it to say, I really like it. It's not Batman, but in the absence of, say, Boardwalk Empire or The Sopranos, and in the absence of a Batman TV series for grown-ups, it's quite engaging, and has now the best iteration of the Penguin I've encountered. But it's dark, and not a happy piece. So...

...in contrast I watch The Flash, featuring of course DC's Scarlet Speedster, Barry Allen/The Flash - and a host of other superheroes and villains still emerging from the particle accelerator-infused brickwork of Central City. It, too, is something of an early days hero story - but it's lighter, simpler, and more heroic in a classic comic sense. If Gotham reflects the Batman comic of today with its nuanced characters and intricate plotting and broad back story, then this new series of The Flash is pure silver age, good-natured fun. A great remedy, and a pretty refreshing Thursday night appointment.

Over on his blog Jamas has marked the recent Flash/Arrow crossover, which this post was also supposed to do. I watched it, but like Jamas found it less of a cross-over and more of a blending of two episodes that each centred around their series' respective hero. [Green] Arrow arrives in Central City and becomes a more ruthless and predatory figure alongside Barry's sometimes haphazard heroics, while an hour later the Flash speeds into Oliver's Star City and is very much the ingenue against the Arrow team, his fitting in with their methods and values proving a challenge, even though he obviously wants to prove himself to his would-be mentor. I haven't followed Arrow, simply because it didn't immediately engage me, but I can see the appeal, and maybe one day I will. In the mean-time I'm glad these three shows are around, and have done will in a tough environment and somewhat superhero-saturated media marketplace.

Further thoughts on Flash versus Arrow after the jump...

RI (P), Rik...

It's a sad day in the Simian household, with the untimely death of the great Rik Mayall announced this morning.

I'm trying to recall the first time I was exposed to Mayall's comedy - probably it was Bad News Tour, made in 1983 (contemporaneously with This is Spinal Tap, apparently) but screened here some time in 1984. The mockumentary, shot 'fly on the wall'-style was a wickedly accurate pillorying of the banal and grubby world of the titular and highly amateur NWOBHM band. Being a young heavy metal fan I lapped it up and eagerly awaited the repeat screening a few years later, in time for the sequel. In the mean-time there was of course the ubiquitous The Young Ones (mid-1985, on a deservedly and therefore very cool late Friday night slot), which informed much of my infatuation with British pop culture of the time and then the underrated Filthy Rich and Catflap, The New Staesman, and ultimately Bottom in the Nineties.

 Through the late Eighties and early Nineties Mayall was almost everywhere - more often than not with Ade Edmondson, but not always. Young Ones was very big at my school (I had a mate who looked disturbingly like Rik and once submitted to requests from some girlfriends to have his hair done in the signature style of The People's Poet. Sadly, no photographic evidence exists) and latterly Bottom also blew our pants off, the first episode's cries of "Gas Man! Gas Man!" turning into a weird shorthand among friend for anyone we met who was decidedly a little off-skew. Drop Dead Fred was what ou might call a guilty pleasure - well, I liked it.

I don't exaggerate when I say that Mayall was seemingly everywhere - my first year at university had a Young Ones themed Orientation and I seized a poster for my wall. He was eminently spottable, whether cameoing in An American Werewolf in London and semi-regularly in Blackadder, co-starring in various Comic Strip productions (personal favourite appearances outside the Bad News stories: Consuela, Dirty Movie, Mister Jolly Lives Next Door and A Fistful of Traveller's Cheques) or on his tod, notably in a one-off screening of Weekend in Wallop, which introduced me to Mayall's early creation, the fantasist Colin Turvey:

Turvey seems to be a variation on many of Mayall's own creations - the tragically unhip outsider with delusions of popularity, talent or wit. Rik the Poet, Catflap's Richey Rich, Bad News' would-be dilletante Colin Grigson, and even Richard Richard, the frustrated middle-aged bludger of Bottom. Little wonder that he sought other roles to expand his repertoire, even when the old stand-bys never really left him. I did, however, really enjoy Rik Mayall Presents, with his episodes opposite Helena Bonham Carter (Dancing Queen) and Alan Cumming (Micky Love) being clear highlights. And off-screen a 'straight' production of Waiting for Godot, reuniting Mayall with Edmondson. I'd only read about this in The New Satesman, and for years wondered what the production would have been like - it sounded fantastic, but possibly misjudged. Did they pull it off? There only seems to be this news footage surviving as any indication:

Which isn't to discount his other collaborations with Edmondson - Twentieth Century Coyote's Dangerous Brothers which seemed incredibly anarchic when my flat watched it on off-air video. And of course, Bottom again, quite possibly the pinnacle of the pair's career where their writing and chemistry was absolutely top notch, even when corpsing live on stage in Southhampton:

 

My God but did we used to rewind that bit until the tape went speckly. And now it's set me off again. Rest in Peace, Mr Mayall, and thanks for all the laughter.