A scorching, in-your-face cover by Vic Prezio for Famous Monsters of Filmland, June 1966. The solid, eyeball-burning red-orange background must have lept off the stands.
That’s Koji Furuhata as Toho’s Furakenshutain in Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), a film FMoF presented as “the picture millions have been holding their breath for!”
Two Frankenstein musicals opened on consecutive days last November, in New York.
The boisterous, monster-sized Young Frankenstein is still going, although cast salaries had to be slashed and the originally stratospheric ticket prices were revised downward. Its serious counterpart played out its initial month-long run and closed. A mooted tour never materialized.
Now, the “world premiere” recording of Frankenstein, A New Musical, featuring the original cast, is being released and will be available for digital download on Amazon and iTunes as of September 2.
You can sample the music and order the CD on the show’s excellent website, which is loaded with photographs, reviews and lots of good information.
Related Posts:
Frankenstein’s Stage Fright
Dueling Frankensteins
On this day, August 28, in 1823, on the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday, young Mary Shelley attended a performance of Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein, the first play based on her novel.
Mary had arrived in London just three days earlier, having lived in Italy for a whole year since her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, had drowned there in August 1822. That she fairly rushed to see the play, so soon after a grueling trip, speaks to curiosity no doubt amplified by the astounding popularity of the work. “Lo and behold,” she wrote, “I found myself famous!”
Presumption had opened a month earlier, July 28, to immediate success, and inevitable controversy. Morality groups passed out handbills calling the play immoral, impious, horrid and unnatural. Man creating man was a blasphemous concept — one London paper called it “an attack on Christian faith” — and improper entertainment for God fearing folks, but the crowds came (and apparently escaped with their souls intact), making the unusual melodrama a summer sensation. Soon, the company would be forced to move from the English Opera House to a larger theater.
Critics praised the actors. The London Morning Post reported that James William Wallack as Frankenstein, “displayed great feeling and animation”, and T.P.Cooke, the handsome actor who transformed himself into the leering Monster, “well pourtrays what indeed it is a proof of his extraordinary genius so well to pourtray—an unhappy being without the pale of nature—a monster—a nondescript—a horror to himself and others”.
Mary agreed. She commented in letters on the actors, especially Cooke for playing the unnamed Monster “extremely well… His seeking as it were for support, his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard, all indeed he does was well imagined and executed.”
Mary must have been impressed, as well. The creation scene, featuring elaborate stage effects, would still thrill today…
FRANK. (Within.) It lives! it lives! FRITZ. There’s a hob – hob-goblin, 20 feet high! wrapp’d in a mantle – mercy – mercy – Sudden combustion heard, and smoke issues, the door of the laboratory breaks to pieces with a loud crash – red fire within. FRITZ. Oh – Oh. (Runs out hastily) Music. The Demon discovered at door entrance in smoke, which evaporates – the red flame continues visible. The Demon advances forward, breaks through the balustrade or railing of gallery immediately facing the door of laboratory, jumps on the table beneath, and from thence leaps on the stage, stands in attitude before Frankenstein, who had started up in terror; they gaze for a moment at each other. FRANK. The demon corpse to which I have given life! Music. – The Demon looks at Frankenstein most intently, approaches him with gestures of conciliation. Frankenstein retreats, the Demon pursuing him. Its unearthly ugliness renders it too horrible for human eyes! [The Demon approaches him.] FRANK. Fiend! do not dare approach me – avaunt, or dread the fierce vengeance of my arm wrecked on your miserable head – Music. – Frankenstein takes the sword from the nail, points with it at the Demon, who snatches the sword, snaps it in two and throws it on stage. The Demon then seizes Frankenstein – loud thunder heard – throws him violently on the floor, ascends the staircase, opens the large window, and disappears through the casement. Frankenstein remains motionless on the ground. – Thunder and lightning until the drop falls.A blue flame appears at the small lattice window above, as from the laboratory.
Equally spectacular was the grand finale where Frankenstein confronts the Demon on a snowy peak, pistol fire triggering a murderous avalanche of stage boulders and fake snow.
For all the changes made to her story, the songs inserted, characters mixed up (Clerval marries Elizabeth, and Frankenstein is betrothed to Agatha DeLacey), Mary seemed genuinely happy with the play, writing, “I was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience”.
Playwright Richard Brinsley Peake had reduced the novel to its simplest argument and his work became the template for subsequent adaptations, including the films made a century later. It is Peake’s version, not Mary Shelley’s original that, even today, most people are familiar with. Gone is the Arctic framing sequence. The Monster is made mute. The story focuses on a spectacular creation sequence, The Monster escapes at large, a child is menaced, a wedding day is ruined, and Frankenstein pursues his creation to final confrontation. Peake even introduced the character of Frankenstein’s assistant Fritz, as comic relief.
In a direct connection with the James Whale film of 1931, T.P.Cooke’s name was replaced by an empty space on the playbill, much like Boris Karloff’s name was replaced by a question mark in the film’s opening titles. Mary loved it: “The playbill amused me extremely… This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good.”
The success of Presumption was such that rival versions quickly proliferated. A parody called Humpgumption premiered on September first, followed by a drama called Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland. By October, even Peake got in on it with a broad farce of his own, Another Piece of Presumption, featuring a climactic avalanche of cabbages and cauliflowers. By year’s end, five different Frankenstein plays had appeared. Yet another version played New York in 1825, and T.P.Cooke caused a sensation with his blue-skinned Monster in Paris, in 1826.
Copyright laws were very rudimentary at the time and books were turned into plays without permission asked or royalties due. Authors could profit indirectly by issuing new editions of their books. Even so, Mary’s new Frankenstein reprint had to compete with Peake’s published play (see illustration at top), its cover showing the now famous creation scene. Peake’s book, in turn, was plagiarized in 1825 by a cheaply done, anonymously written novel called The Monster Made by Man; or The Punishment of Presumption.
Richard Brinsley Peake’s theatrical adaptation ignited a Frankenstein frenzy. Five years after her Frankenstein was first published, five long and terrible years darkened by unimaginable personal tragedies, Mary Shelley was in attendance that Friday night, in the Strand, as a triumphant witness to the nascent popularity of her creation.
Resource: The excellent Presumption pages edited by Stephen C. Behrendt on Romantic Circles, featuring the complete text of the play. Click around to read wonderful biographies of all the actors, and early newspaper reviews.
Cover of R.B.Peake's book from Frankenstein, A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock.
Related Posts:
The First Monster: T.P.Cooke
Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley
Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein premiered at the venerable Plaza cinema in Piccadilly Circus on this date, August 27, fifty years ago.
No sooner had The Curse of Frankenstein wrapped, in January 1957, that a script for a sequel was commissioned of writer Jimmy Sangster. Promotional materials appeared in trade papers featuring Christopher Lee’s disembodied head — The Monster from the original film — floating above the working title, The Blood of Frankenstein. Shooting eventually kicked off in January 1958, reuniting Cushing with director Terence Fisher, but sans Lee, whose Dracula (aka The Horror of Dracula) was released in May ’58.
Francis Matthews, sitting in attendance at the Revenge premiere with Peter Cushing, remembers the audience laughing as his character prepared to transplant Dr. Frankenstein’s brains. “My dear boy,” Cushing whispered, “What have we done?”
British critics would lavish odium on the film, as they had for The Curse of Frankenstein. The Observer’s critic called the film “vulgar, stupid, nasty”, adding, “I want to gargle it off with a strong disinfectant, to scrub my memory with carbolic soap.”
Mr. Cushing need not have worried. With an intelligent, provocative script, a superlative cast and outstanding production values that belied the film’s actual budget, The Revenge of Frankenstein was a rare gem of a horror film, an instant classic, and a solid box-office hit.
Nervous laughter and contemptuous critics aside, audiences world-wide would embrace Hammer Film’s brand of gothic gore and Cushing would get to pursue and refine his sardonic Frankenstein in four more films over the next 16 years.
Related Posts:
The Revenge of Frankenstein Wraps
Frankenstein 1958
The August 2008 issue (#238) of the British Fortean Times magazine carries a fascinating and significant article about the Golem of Prague, meticulously researched by Ivan Mackerle.
The legend tells of Rabbi Loew of Prague, in the late 1500s, who fashioned a powerful Golem to protect the Jewish community from its enemies. One day, the creature ran amuck, bringing death and destruction to the ghetto. Deactivated, the Golem was hidden away in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, the stairs to the storeroom removed and access thereafter forbidden.
Tracing the origins of the legend and a possible basis in historical fact proves problematic.
According to ancient lore, Golems were never built as warriors. They were meant as a test of sorts, an experiment to measure the abilities of their Kabbalist creators. The Talmud names five Rabbis who made Golems, but Rabbi Loew is not among them. Golems were animated with magical words carved into their foreheads or worn around their necks, but Rabbi Loew animates his Golem in a very unusual manner, inserting a slip of magical parchment into its mouth.
Key characters and locations in the story cannot be found in historical documents, and there is no record of the pogrom that would have motivated the creation of a protector Golem. Most tellingly, it seems that Rabbi Loew himself cannot be placed in Prague on the crucial dates in the legend.
Closer examination of the tale reveals a creature that behaved rather un-Golemlike, a “strangely down-to-earth” creature, as Mackerle puts it. Golems quickly grow in size until they become unmanageable, but this one lived quietly for twelve years, performing simple household tasks. He even had a human name, Yossele.
Here Mackerle formulates an interesting hypothesis that, given the lack of historical evidence to support the legend, could explain Rabbi Loew’s unusual Golem. Mackerle’s purpose is to demonstrate that something, somehow, could have inspired the legend. Imagine, then, a man who suffered from a form of mental illness, taken in and cared for by the kindly Rabbi. He suffers from occasional fits, perhaps an epileptic condition. The legend’s parchment inserted in the mouth could suggest medicine taken orally, or the practice of placing of a rag in the mouth during a seizure. Ultimately, the man suffers a violent and very public attack of some sort, a burst of uncontrolled anger, and dies. In the end, the event is hushed up, “to avoid unpleasant consequences for the rabbi and the ghetto”, and the body of the strange man is relegated to the attic.
Whatever inspired the tale of the Prague Golem, the story of its purported resting place in the Old-New Synagogue’s attic has yielded numerous stories of death, or madness and otherwise horrified reactions for its rare visitors. Well warned, and armed with ultrasound equipment and the permits that took two years to obtain, author Mackerle concludes his investigation by climbing the iron rungs to the building’s roof and its forbidden storage space.
Unless the Golem has been long removed — and there are many claims to that effect — or it has crumbled into dust, of which there is plenty packed into drifts among the rafters, the Old-New Synagogue’s attic proves barren of monsters or new clues.
Ivan Mackerle’s article is like a supernatural detective story, intelligently written and packed with details. It’s a wonderful read, a valuable document of Golem lore, and well worth seeking out.
A sidebar article by David Sutton chronicles the Golem in culture, touching on the claim that Mary Shelley was inspired by the old legend. There is no evidence of this, but there is no doubt that the Golem movies of Paul Wegener had some degree of influence on James Whale and the writers and designers of the Universal studio’s Frankenstein of 1931.
The beautiful cover painting is by Owen Richardson.
Also pictured: A statue of Rabbi Loew in Prague, and Paul Wegener as The Golem (1920). Note the Frankensteinian "asphalt spreader's" boots.
Le Tampographe Sardon of Paris creates limited edition rubber stamp art. You can decorate your letters, envelopes and official documents with outsider art, disturbing designs, infamous faces and typographed insults (in French, the better to confuse your correspondents).
Offered here is a screened stamp likeness of Karloff’s Monster, available for 10 euros.
Look around Le Tampographe's blog, they also have a snarling Christopher Lee Dracula.
I launched Frankensteinia one year ago, today.
I didn’t pick August 20 for any special reason. I was just raring to go, ready or not. I applied Ray Bradbury’s advice, something about jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down. I think I’ve done OK.
The blog today looks and feels a lot like I had hoped it would. That’s probably the best thing you can say about your own work.
My greatest accomplishment, I think, was sticking to my self-imposed mandate: Be accurate with information and honest with opinions, don’t let the blog encroach upon personal and professional pursuits, and have fun. The “fun” part is really what has kept me going.
Most of the fun comes from meeting people through the blog. Thanks to everyone who posted comments, to those who wrote, shared information and contributed, and those who reviewed and supported the blog. I’ve made some real friends here, and I am very grateful for that.
I thought I should do something special to mark this first anniversary, a celebratory gift, if you will, from me to you, my friends and readers. Here it is…
I may be a year older but, apparently, none the wiser... I’m launching a new blog!
Frankensteinia’s new sister blog is called MONSTER CRAZY — I think that title should be all caps, all the time — and it’s a tumblelog devoted to the imagery of monster pop culture. Consider the blog’s subtitle: “Art, Esthetics, Design, and Monsters”.
I made my first post there today. Click the graphic and you'll be whisked over, but please keep in mind that it’ll take a week or so to get enough stuff up before the style, the feel and the orientation of MONSTER CRAZY kick into gear.
I gave myself a mandate for MONSTER CRAZY: Post often, don’t let it take any time away from my dedication to Frankensteinia, don’t let it encroach upon personal and professional pursuits, and... HAVE FUN!
I hope you’ll share in the fun of MONSTER CRAZY. There’s no way to comment on Tumblr, but you can post your thoughts here, or email me. I’d like to know what you think.
Cheers!
I wish I was in, around or heading out to Kingsport, Tennessee, come October, to attend the Classic Movie Monster Con.
The theme is "Boris Karloff: The Man Remembered”, and it will bring Sara Karloff and Donnie Dunagan together for the first time. Sara was born in 1939 while dad Boris was shooting his last Monster appearance in The Son of Frankenstein, co-starring then 4-year old Donnie.
Also on hand will be Elena Verdugo, the star-crossed Gypsy Girl who fell for Lon Chaney Jr’s lycanthropic Larry Talbot at the expense of J. Carrol Naish’s lovelorn hunchback in The House of Frankenstein (1945), a place otherwise occupied by Boris, John Carradine and Glenn Strange as, respectively, a Mad Scientist, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s Monster.
The stellar guest list includes, among many others, Bob and Kathy Burns, and illustrious illustrator Basil Gogos. It’s shaping up to be quite a weekend.
The program, along with membership applications, is online. It’s worth clicking through just to admire the gorgeous poster by George Chastain.
Related post:
Another Frankenstein-themed convention in June 2009.
Blogging, I have found, leaves me precious little time and a conundramatically decreased motivation to read other blogs. In my experience, you either write or you read, and doing one comes at the expense of the other. Nevertheless, I am faithful to a handful of sites, personal favorites, mostly those listed on my blogroll down there on the column at right.
One rare blog I’m literally addicted to is the perceptive, perverse and often acutely funny horror-themed Arbogast on Film, whose Mystery Man host must be congratulated for surviving — er, I mean celebrating — a whole year online.
Give Arbo a shot, see if you become a daily visitor, as I am.
Related post: My contribution to Arbogast’s blogathon on movie victims you might have saved.
The Frankenstein Monster in its Karloff configuration rates as an American Icon in a dazzling picture book edited by fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger and Madison Avenue legend George Lois. Not only that, but the image gets a significant cover spot, chosen from among over 350 images in the book, proof of how recognizable and ubiquitous The Monster is.
The image used features Boris Karloff as he appeared on a Bride of Frankenstein poster in 1935. The inevitable green complexion is iconic in itself: The Monster sports green skin in most of its pop culture manifestations.
The book, Iconic America, was published in November 2007. There's a short video about the book under "news" on the Tommy Hilfiger site.
With thanks to Rob Kelly, of All in Black & White for 75 Cents, for the heads up.
Related posts:
Rob Kelly wrote a very entertaining and funny review of a Dell Comics Frankenstein adaptation from 1963.
Pop Culture tagged posts.
500 Clown is a Chicago-based ensemble that use circus arts, extreme acrobatics and on the spot improv to tell their stories, celebrating, according to their avowed mission, “the unpredictable power of the moment”.
The troupe’s renegade re-imagining of Frankenstein has its performers struggling with ungainly period costumes as they recklessly build the laboratory set, literally riding a large, heavy, limb-threatening wooden table that slides open, snaps shut and gets thrown and tumbled about. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the craziness “will have you laughing and holding your breath at the same time”.
In a sudden twist that conjugates comedy with tragedy, according to the program notes, “Comic mayhem takes a sharp turn to a devastating climax when one clown is forced to play the role of the creature and suffer abuse and abandonment. The result is the creation of unexpected horror.”
500 Clown Frankenstein was conceived and performed by Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig and Paul Kalina, with the collaboration of director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. The troupe also performs a variation on Macbeth, and a demented Christmas show.
See a high-energy preview of 500 Clown Frankenstein here, and a promotional clip on YouTube.
The 500 Clown website has lots of info, photos and reviews.
Related:
One-Man Frankenstein
Mortal Toys
The Maltese Frankenstein
Frankenstein On Stage
Here’s a Frankenstein Game from the classic French TV series Jeux sans frontières (Games Without Borders) in which teams from all over Europe competed in a sort of loopy Olympics.
In this clip from 1977, shot in Évry, just outside Paris, members from one team play “the little flower girl” who must race around the castle grounds — hobbled by a string around her ankles — planting edelweiss to score points while being chased by an opposite team member wearing a huge, 8-foot tall foam Frankenstein suit.
I wish they’d have this as an official Olympic discipline in Beijing.
It’s a quick, two and half minutes of pure, silly fun. Listen as the British announcer cracks up.
See the clip on DailyMotion (large frame, better image quality), or YouTube.
A Frankenstein Monster appears on one of five Monster Rings that went for 75 cents, postage and handling included, from Famous Monsters of Filmland’s in-house mail order outfit, Captain Company, in the Sixties.
The “secret flicker design” sounds like a simple lenticular effect using a clear, ribbed plastic cover that allowed you to see one of two different images at a time. Move your finger, the image changes. These were also called “flasher rings”. You could see a baseball player swinging a bat, or Moe of The Three Stooges making a funny face.
I wish I’d sent away from these plastic novelty items. I was utterly fascinated by these simple, stark graphics, but the set was too expensive. You could buy two issues of FM for 75 cents, and even have enough left over for some candy.
Related Post: Super Frankenstein Mask
Illustrator Chris Sickels, aka Red Nose Studio, works in 3-D. His Sculpey clay, wire and cloth characters, roughly 6 to 8 inches high, inhabit tabletop universes of cardstock houses and damask lawns under painted skies. Props are fabricated from paper, discarded plastic and all sorts of repurposed bits and bobs.
Sickels’ meticulously composed scenes are infinitely fascinating. His subjects can be charming and funny, like his goggled pilot flying a running shoe or an artist painting black stripes on a yellow cat, or they can be disturbing, like the images in Sickles’ The Look Book with its headless gauze chicken and an inexplicably impaled squirrel.
Sickles’ portraits are gorgeous and witty: Dickens is carried aloft on the wing of a feathered pen, Edgar Allen Poe has an inevitable raven perched on his head, and a witch makes herself spookier with a flashlight under her chin.
Sickles’ patchwork Frankenstein Monster is discombobulated by a fading rose. A distant windmill evokes his movie adventures. The illustration was created for the Halloween 2007 issue of READ magazine. The cover featured Boris Karloff in his burned Bride of Frankenstein makeup.
There are terrific, must-see portfolios of Chris Sickles’ work on his Red Nose Studio webpage, and his Magnet Reps page.
There’s lots more art to see, as well as interviews with the artist, on the How magazine and Illustration Fridays sites.
Here’s an audio interview with Chris Sickles on Illustration Mundo: Part 1, and Part 2.
The data cloud shows that I use the word “Frankenstein” a lot. And “Bride”, too.
The Bride has been good to me. My last post, about Aleksey Galushkov’s beautiful Bride photos, was picked up by io9, the science fiction news blog. As a result, I got fifteen days’ worth of visitors — a stratospheric number of hits — in just 24 hours. Meanwhile, back at io9, the Bride shoutout was their most popular post of the day! Such is the power of The Bride. Especially when “unwrapped”.
Welcome io9ers, and I hope you’ll all visit again sometime!
The crazy traffic hasn’t let up yet as the news propagates. I am now getting swamped via Nerdcore and AMCTV SciFi Scanner.
I’m grateful for all the attention, and I’m especially happy The Naughty Bride caused a sensation, considering it was my 199th post. Which makes this one some sort of milestone.
Hm... 200 posts, over 550 images. Not bad. I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Stand by, lots more Frankenstein goodness coming up.
It’s too late to stop now.
Word cloud generated by Wordle.
Given an on-screen career barely twelve minutes long, in a film made some 75 years ago, The Bride of Frankenstein’s impact elevated her spectacular profile to the pantheon of unforgettable characters in popular culture.
She thundered to life even as the film careened to its cataclysmic finale. Elsa Lanchester’s brief cinematic ballet, silent save for one searing hiss, effectively signaled the feverish, inexorable end to James Whale’s magical and macabre fairy tale.
I submit that The Bride’s ephemeral quality is the key to our enduring fascination. She was never raised again out of the underground pools, the sulfur pits or the glaciers where her erstwhile beau nestled between films. She was never made ordinary through repeated reanimation and overexposure in progressively cheaper sequels. The Bride never danced with The Wolfman, or Abbott and Costello.
She has been merchandized, of course. The Bride was embossed on lunch boxes, printed up on puzzles and posters, made into crepe hair Halloween costumes and plastic assembly kits. She has been reproduced in oils and sculpture, pasted on skateboards and engraved as tattoos, but for all the pop imagery, the original survives, dignity intact.
Now, Ukrainian photographer Aleksey Galushkov pays homage to the Queen of Monsters in a stunning series of photographs. Galushkov’s RetroAtelier portraits mimic bygone styles, his time-traveling models — Belle Époque Belles and Forties Femme Fatales — are captured in faux hand-tinted daguerreotypes, stark Man Ray black and whites, and silvery glamour studio photography. Costumes and coiffures are impeccably dead-on, and setups evoke Caligaresque Weimar Berlin, Ziegfield Follies pinups and Hollywood's Golden Age.
Galushkov’s Bride — in the artist’s own words, a “fantasy” photoshoot — calls us across time, the prints scratched and fading. Beautiful, delicate, and perhaps a tad unchaste, this Bride is armed and dangerous. The model is identified simply as Ksenia.
See Galushkov’s remarkable Bride photoshoot on his blog, and visit the RetroAtelier site, overflowing with terrific photos.
Related:
The Bride's Bare Essentials.
Thanks for the tip to Fred of Sweet Skulls.
Boris Karloff was 75 years old when he consented to appear as the Frankenstein Monster one last time. The year was 1966 and the occasion was an atypically lighthearted Halloween episode of the now legendary Route 66 TV series, providing an unexpected respite from the show’s usually somber, downbeat, social realist mood.
The series’ central characters, Tod (Martin Milner) and Buz (George Maharis), were young men Looking for America. Their Beat Generation vibe was alleviated for network TV consumption: Tod and Buz were hip but clean-cut, rootless but centered, rebels without a real cause for concern. They were On The Road, but riding a scene-stealing Corvette that ran on Nelson Riddle jazz.
The drive-thru anthology format provided a clean slate every week, its drama fueled by new characters and new locations. Route 66 was, as a rule, literate, sometimes gritty, often engrossing, but the celebrated Halloween episode, Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing, was content to simply amuse, with no small thanks to the good-humored, all star monster guest cast of Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Peter Lorre, playing themselves. The only angst found in this episode was the horror stars’ fear that their brand of old school spookery had lost its power to chill a Cool Generation.
Chaney Jr. bore the brunt of the makeup chores, masquerading as his father’s Quasimodo and his own Mummy and Wolfman characters. Lorre got away with just a top hat and wisecracks. Boris Karloff piled on The Monster’s makeup, complete with dark suit and big boots. Backstage photos show a makeup man working on Karloff and referencing a still of The Monster from The Son of Frankenstein.
In the end, with the complicity of Tod and Buz, and a hotel full of conventioning secretaries, the horror heroes find out that they still ‘have it’. The only hitch with the episode, by today’s standards, is how the young women portrayed are given to extreme ditzyness and dead faints at the sight of movie monsters.
Karloff’s makeup was a little rough, and The Monster’s appearance all too brief, but it was a memorable, gladdening event for legions of Boomers weaned on Shock Theater and Famous Monsters.
Route 66 was shot in black and white but, now, new color photographs of Karloff and Chaney in makeup have surfaced and they are being published for the first time ever in the August 2008 issue of Tim and Donna Lucas’ Video Watchdog magazine.
The candid shots were captured by Bob Burns, Monster Maker and collector extraordinaire, who had access to the Chicago set. All the details are given in Tim Lucas’ article, which he has generously posted online, but you’ll have to pick up the new issue of Video WatchDog to see the newly released pictures. The issue also carries a review of the 1973 Frankenstein with Robert Foxworth and Bo Swenson as The Monster.
Video WatchDog #142 preview. Click through to see the article by Tim Lucas.
An excellent article on Route 66 by Mark Alvey on the Museum of Broadcasting Communications website.
Painter Skot Olsen illustrates Rod Lott’s adaptation of Frankenstein in a unique style that combines nervous, cartoony lines and atmospheric sepia.
The sepia art is on view in a graphic novel anthology title, Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Volume 15, and on exhibit until August 30 at the Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery, in South Florida. The show launches Saturday night, August 2, so drop in if you’re in the area.
Besides Lott & Olsen’s Frankenstein, the book also features adaptations of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, H.P.Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and stories by L.Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, and Clark Ashton Smith
Skot Olsen’s Website is here, and here's interesting interview with the artist.
The Publisher's website.
You can view all the artwork on exhibit and even purchase Frankenstein art by Skot Olsen at the Bear and Bird Gallery’s Online Shop.
