956. The jaunty Josie and the Pussycats comic book review!

Yeah, I can't add or count, apparently.

626. A Moab Dinosaur teaser episode!

                 Yes, this is a rather hasty episode, but it came out quite well, we think.  Let us know what you think!

Xenorama #73 is go!

"We go from the comic books to the cartoons to the fabulous movie from 2001!  We talk about the stories, have episode guides and discuss the musical aspects of the series.  We also try to figure out if the gang are actually secret agents pretending to be a musical band.  The clues are all there, so you decide!  And did we mention that this issue is all in color?  Well, it is!  Get your long tails and ears for hats ready to rock and roll!"  This just got published today, new and improved from issue #48.  While I am quite happy with the original, the color really makes issues pop now.  And the color issues are not much more expensive than the black and white issues.  Go figure!

404. 7 Song Friday 01-31-2025

              Poor Russia and Belarus- they can't hear one of the songs.  This is so odd, but I don't think I have a big audience there.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (1973)

From Wiki- Similar to both Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Josie and the Pussycats on CBS, the show depicts the adventures of the titular teen pop group.^[3] The band consists of 4 heartthrobs: Butch Cassidy (lead vocals and lead guitar); mini-skirted blonde beauty Merilee (tambourine); sensible Stephanie, nicknamed Steffy (bass guitar); and curly-haired Wally (drums). Accompanied by Wally's dog Elvis, these popular rock stars lead double lives as government-backed crime-fighters.^[4]  The teens are advised by a supercomputer named Mr. Socrates, who is (somehow) violently allergic to dogs. When the group meets with Mr. Socrates in his lair for their latest assignment, Elvis is always told to stay outside. Yet Elvis always ends up inside the lair, by his own ingenuity and/or by Wally's forgetfulness. Elvis's mere presence causes Mr. Socrates to sneeze and go haywire; Mr. Socrates then sends the group out of the lair, and off to their assignment. Butch, designated as "Sundance 1", wears a special communicator-ring which keeps him in contact with Mr. Socrates.  Back to me:

He Could Be The One- Josie Cotton

          

Xenorama #48 is on sale now!

 

 "Guitars and Marshall stacks!"

Here it is!  A celebration of Josie and the Pussycats franchise.  We cover the cartoons, the comic books and the most excellent movie.  Josie's actual 60th anniversary is next year, as she debuted in in 1963.  She got her own mag soon after, and the Pussycats were formed about six years later, in preparation for the cartoons series.  The gang has been around since then, in one form or another.

Josie's original spaceship

 

I was surprised to find this pre production drawing of the spaceship from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.  It is a more traditional rocket ship design.  It also looks a lot smaller than the designed that was eventually used.  It is never shown in the series where the gang sleeps, though we do see a galley in a few episodes.  Be that as it may, I think the ship they used in the series is better one overall.  The ball on the top gives it a different look.  This ship looks a bit like the Jupiter 2 from the HB version of Lost in Space.  This is a sleep ship, but it looks far too small to work for the series.

Pussycat concert!

What a fun poster for a faux concert!  This it even mentions the headphones.  I'm just cynical enough to think some corporation might actually do this to their fans, or actually would try the subliminal messages in media.  Not a bit of that would surprise me.  And this movie was in 2001.  This is a movie I really wish I had seen in the theater, but for some reason in April of 2001 I was not even aware of it.  Or if I was, I thought it would be terrible.  I am glad to find out how wrong I was.

Josie is on TV!

Since I did not gravitate towards "funny" comic books, I missed seeing this ad.  One thing the internet is really good for is saving all these historical documents so I can use them in Xenorama!  It is very thoughtful of those scanners.  I don't know now if I watched the original run of Josie and the Pussycats, or the second run a year later.  At this point it doesn't matter, does it?  It is too bad HB didn't do a couple more seasons of both shows.  I especially wanted to see more of the outer space adventures.  I will always wish HB ended some of their shows, instead of leaving them open ended like many of them.  We viewers wanted some closure!  How did the gang get back to Earth?  I am sure Space Ghost brought them back, what a story that would make!  Perhaps my powers can get DC to publish that story in a six issue mini-series.  I would buy that in a minute. 

The Best of Josie and the Pussycats

 

Much like Sabrina, I did not read many of these comic books growing up either.  I sure did love both the cartoon series, as has been well documented in this blog and also in the zine.  I also love the movie, and was incredibly happy to find out it's a really good film.  I wish I had seen it in the theater.  I was sure it was going to be a dud with crappy music.  Boy, was I happy to be wrong.

random theropod Monster of the Week

 

This is a random theropod that shows up in the Josie and the Pussycats episode "Plateau of the Apes Plot".  Dr. Madreau invented a ray that would return any living being to it's ancestral form.  This was a small lizard to start with.  You would think the good doctor would know lizards are actually a separate line of reptiles than dinosaurs.  Of course, Alex turned into a chicken at first, and then an ape, so perhaps the machine still needed some fine tuning.  The gang managed to stop this would be dictator in the end, so everything worked out in the end.

"Welcome to the Jungle" by The Misfits

That is definitely a misleading title. One might think the actual Misfits covered the Guns N Roses song, but that's not the case. These are the cartoon Misfits who had much better music than their adversaries.

Mystery Incorporated Theme & Credits

Since I got a month of Netflix for free I'm watching the rest of Mystery Incorporated, which is still just as fun as the first 12 episodes. I'm about 18 episodes in now, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. I'm quite surprised that I would say that about a Scooby show, aside from that very first season.

RIP Casey Kasem

Casey Kasem passed on today, at the age of 82.  He provided so many voices to characters I grew up with, and made much of the pablum of Top 40 music in the 70s entertaining with his show about the Top 40 hits of the week.  It was always fun to get to the top ten songs.  I'd rather remember the way he lived then some of the things that happened in his later years.  I'm not involved, so there will be no comment about them from me.

Mystery, Inc

Long time readers of the blog AND the zine will know that I'm no big fan of Scooby Doo, for a wide variety of reasons.  The main one is that I blame the show (wrongly, but it's funny to me) for the networks taking superheroes away from Saturday morning cartoons and then replacing them with thousands of Scooby Doo show clones (seriously, how many of them were there?).  I enjoyed the first season and some of the team ups, even the lame Batman and Robin was (thanks to Bat-mite for fixing that).  My favorite was the one with Josie and the Pussycats, of course.

'Josie and the Pussycats' Inspiration Josie DeCarlo Dies

this sad news came across the wire today.  Hanna-Barbera produced a lot of "kids and dog/cat/car/ghost/etc solve mysteries/etc" after Scooby Doo first aired in 1969, but Josie and the Pussycats (and it's sequel) were always my favorites of the bunch.  so in honor of the late Josie DeCarlo I'll be reviewing my favorite Josie episode.