Samson and Goliath

the first two cartoon heroes I remember (that weren't from comics) were the Mighty Mightor and Samson and Goliath.

sure, it says "young" Samson, but the other tit;e is the one I always have used, and it's the one most people say.

made by Hanna-Barbera in for NBC's Saturday mornings in 1967, it featured 18 episodes in a half hour format.  I must have watched it, but my main memory of it comes from a coloring book that I had.

Samson had magical gold wrist bands that when slammed together turned him into a "peplum" hero of immense strength and power.  he would slam the bracelets together a second time and his dog would turn into an immense lion, complete with eye beams and razor sharp claws.

the transformation was very similar to Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel, once he had merged with perpetual sidekick Rick Jones (in looking at that Wiki entry his middle name is "Milhouse"?  the fudge is that?  I mean really, how stupid.  but I digress.) and the whole thing, combined with Mightor, is pretty much the overrated He-man's motif.

in the course of 18 episodes, Samson and Goliath took on giant monsters, statues come to life, aliens and spies.  I wonder who at Hanna-Barbera thought of the concept, since the whole peplum movie fad had run it's course a few years earlier.   his hair isn't even that long to look like the biblical Samson!  still, it's an action packed show and what kid wouldn't want a giant lion to ride?

hey hey hey it's the Fabulous Ones

just got a set of three DVDs from Highspots, and one of them was this set of classic Fabulous Ones matches.

while some of these matches have been available in other sets, here we get many of the promos that help set up the angles for the matches.

in a rather lengthy introduction, Jackie Fargo introduces the Fabulous Ones, that he picked out as a response to manager Jimmy Hart's "New York Dolls" who he thought were copying his brothers gimmick.  there's more banter between Hart and Fargo, and then we get the matches themselves.

some of the matches are from the tv show, but many are from the weekly show in the Mid-South Colosseum.  the quality is not HD or even SD, but it's not bad, and since you aren't going to find it any better VQ at this point I'm happy with it, overall.

we also get to see Jackie Fargo introduce the NEW Fabulous Ones of Tommy "Wildfire" Rich and Eddie "Hotstuff" Gilbert  Fargo sounds very sanctimonious in this segment (and the following one he's in as well).  no wonder the new Fabs never got over!  that and it was a really bad idea.

so I highly recommend the disc, and Highspots themselves, as the service is fast.  good stuff.  Memphis is something else.  I'll have a few more reviews of their DVDs.

Monster of the Week- Viras

Gamera movies were scarce in Colorado.  it didn't help that most of them didn't have the name "Gamera" in the title.  I had seen half of War of the Monsters, about 3/4 of Attack of the Monsters and this, Destroy All Planets was the first one I saw all the way through.

it aired at 8:00 on a school night, so I got to stay up to ten to watch it.  I believe I still have the tv guide from that week, close to 30 years ago.

I had no idea it was a Gamera movie, but since our hero makes his first appearance about 2 minutes into the movie I learned quickly.

as this was my third or so Gamera movie, I didn't mind all the stock footage of him fighting Barugon and Gyaos, since most of that was new to me as it was.  now that I'm a bit older, I think it could have been trimmed down to a scene or two instead of 20 minutes of padding.  it works OK though.

here's the face of our villain.  ever seen a space squid?  me either!  since I have a fascination for tentacled monsters such as giant octopi and squid, I loved seen this as the for for Gamera to fight.

this was also one of the smarter alien monsters Gamera fought.  and more vicious, though all of the titanic turtles foes made him bleed at some point.  Viras invaded bodies of Earthlings (I think) and then when he needed them, lopped off their heads!

that was a surprising scene!  he was also able to use his own body as a spear.  Viras came to Earth because their race needed nitrogen to survive, and since our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen it seemed like it would do.

most of these images come from a PD DVD, but this last one is from the R2 Japanese DVD, which looks amazing.  a few years ago I corresponded with Carl Craig, who was the Caucasian boy in the movie.  really nice man.  he recorded a commentary track for this movie at one point, but I've never heard of it being released.  which is too bad, as it's probably unique and cool to listen to.  you can still purchase really cool pictures and such from him here.

the most powerful one there is

As many of you may know, or at least surmised, I like my superheroes pretty superheroic.  never much cared for satiric heroes, though I enjoyed a parody or two (Batboy and Ruben, to name one).

I bought this sometime in 1980, and it has been making me laugh ever since.  Hembeck takes our favorite heroes to some vague limbo where they are able to relax and hangout with each other.

of course, this doesn't work out at all for anyone, not even his lovely bride Lynn.  it's chock full of heroes doing and saying and wondering things we as fans often thought.  Hembeck just drew it all out for us to laugh at.  And he even thought of things that I would never have wondered- I'll just leave it at Phoenix thinking Mr. Fantastic is wasting his considerable super power...

the Hulk meeting Captain "Shazam" Marvel is a riot, as well as the discussion of the endowment of most heroines that happens between Supergirl and Ms. Marvel.

Yuke! Megaloman!

the fiery superman, Megaloman is possibly my favorite giant Japanese superhero series.  produced by Toho for tv in 1979, it ran 31 episodes.

I first saw the series mentioned in issue #11 of the Japanese Fantasy Film Journal (pronounced  Jay Eff Eff Jay) back in about 1980.  just a blurb by one Mr. August Ragone, saying this was the first Japanese hero to use kung fu.

X marks the Monster

I remember the first time I saw Guilala.  there was a picture of it in Famous Monsters of Filmland (from hereon referred to as "FM"), on the inside cover, or back, or inside back, I forget now, of it holding a boat aloft.  looked incredibly cool, that's for sure.  this is a great scene of it chasing a truck.

but as happened often back then, there was nothing ABOUT the movie in the accompanying blurb.  which really was frustrating at the time, I'll tell you what.

I think the next time I saw a picture or two was in Starlog's "Spaceships" book/magazine (one I still have.  boy, it took forever to find that link, and I didn't know Starlog had ceased print publication) which featured a picture of the cool "Atomic Astro Boat Gamma".  this is one of my favorite spaceships of the movies.

this Japanese movie by Shochiku Studios was populated by several gaijin, or non-Japanese "actors", many of whom appeared in a lot of other Japanese movies when they needed a token foreigner.

the star of this movie was the lovely Peggy Neal.  these images came from the trailer of the movie, so perhaps that's not the most flattering picture I could have picked.  doubtless some would want the shower scene, complete with synthetic water.

no, I don't know how they made that!

Peggy starred in two Japanese genre movies, this and the fun "Terror Beneath the Sea".  these days she seems to have vanished.  I would love to see or hear an interview with her.  it's hard to gauge her acting ability, since she's dubbed into English.  the R2 DVD has this very odd English dub, and the version we saw as kids was dubbed by Titra.

I finally saw the movie, I think in about 1980 or so, when Channel 4 was having movie themed weeks toward the middle of the year.  I loved it, thought it was well worth the wait.

VS titles

no, not that awful Kitamura movie.  this is just a flick from the 50s.

this is just about one of the coolest titles to a movie.  and it completely misrepresents the movie in so many ways.  it's a cool little flick though.  however, nothing beats it's 8mm cover-

Hibiki Rider

while I don't consider Kamen Rider Hibiki to be an actual Kamen Rider, at least it's nice that he rides a bike at some point.  I mean, just cashing in the name recognition of "Kamen Rider" is pretty lame, don't you think?

but here in episode#25 we get a nice little ride sequence with some decent rock music.  not sure what it was for other than to show off the bike, but it worked for me.

tyger tyger

I have recently taken a much larger interest in panthera tigris, AKA the tiger.  it's the world's most popular animal.

I think this comic book, "Tiger-Man" had a lot to do with it.  it was a short lived book, only 3 issues, but it was really kind of cool.  the second two issues featured some great art by Steve Ditko, which was the first time I saw the name and realized how good he was. 

now, of course, I seen his spectacular art from the early Spider-man and Doctor Strange stories for Marvel, and he's become one of my favorite artists of all time.  too bad he's not quite as lionized as Jack Kirby, but there are reasons for that.

this is a great cover, though can someone find me a tiger with any blue on it?

now, there are some people out there who might say my interest in tigers stems from a different comic book, but I do believe Tiger-man actually predated that one.  Tiger-man made his debut in April of 1975, a full year before the other tiger based hero made her appearance... Tigra.

this is from Marvel Chillers #3, drawn by Will Meugniot (pronounced "Mini-yo" as told to me by Tony Isabella).

of course, some comic book historians might say she debuted in July of 1974, in "Giant Size Creatures #1" and that's true.  however, I had not read that comic despite it starring one of my other favorites, the Werewolf By Night (when else would he be a werewolf?).

so go figure.  why it took so long for me to actually like real tigers is beyond me, though I have always had a love of smilodon, the so-called saber toothed tiger.   however I do know which one has had a larger influence on my life.  though I would really love to own the rights to Tiger-man and write more stories.

he slimed me...

here's a movie we used to see on tv all the time, but hasn't gotten a decent DVD release.

the Green Slime is just too cool.

as preposterous as they are, they are really kinda scary in a weird way.