Penguin Classics has been killing it lately with 20th Century American horror fiction — Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, even Clark Ashton Smith. The Best of Richard Matheson is a solid collection — there’s a couple of missing greats and as many duds, but it’s hard to argue with…
Just finished Reed Tucker’s Slugfest, about the long-running rivalry between Marvel and DC. It’s not the best book of its kind I’ve read — Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow are much more thorough comics histories — but it’s a lot of fun, and a quick, breezy read. There are…
Commercials from before the huge video game boom (and bust) of the early ‘80s. I find these fascinating because it’s clear Atari was trying to figure out how to sell the concept of cartridge-based “programmable” game consoles (versus “dedicated” platforms like the various Pong units) to the public. At this time, what…
There is, or used to be, a Wax Museum of Progressive Rock in Tokyo.
Just FYI, the paperback rights for Carrie went for $400,000, not $4 million, as the article seems to say (though that’s probably a typo). Still, that was a lot of money back in 1973. And $2,500 was nothing to sneeze at, either.
Puppet pundits Fafa and Mario advocate making Bill Murray’s birthday — that’s today! — a national holiday. It’s better than drinking Cristal with Gandhi!
TV movie, aired March 2, 1980, on NBC. The final Quinn Martin production, likely intended as a pilot for a weekly series. The plot is strongly reminiscent of QM’s earlier The Invaders, with hostile alien invaders trying to infiltrate and subvert Earth society, but since this is three years after Close Encounters…
Suggested soundtrack:
The future is fun! The future is fair! You may already have won! You may already be there!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before. I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.
Philip Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre accurately predict the next forty years of television on their comedy LP TV Or Not TV, released in 1973. Side two here.
In a series of ads in 1977, various tough guy types were asked politely by an unseen announcer to surrender their Schlitz. They then murdered him (presumably). This short-lived campaign later became known by the unofficial title “Drink Schlitz Or I’ll Kill You.”
I’ve been going through my unread stuff from late 2015-2016. I finished Robert Crais’ The Promise (Elvis Cole series) this morning and went to work on Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams, his most recent short story collection. It’s okay so far.
Extreme Measures. I have never seen this, but the trailer ran before virtually every movie I saw in the theater in the late summer and fall of 1996. It got to the point where Hackman’s “Wouldn’t ya have to?!” became an inside joke between me and my roommates. Unfortunately, this preview leaves out Grant’s line about…
Source unknown. Found on Sean Howe’s essential tumblr, mostly devoted to Marvel Comics but packed with all sorts of pop culture ephemera from the ‘70s.
