Fifty Years Ago...the Final Frontier!

The Fall 1966 TV season was a landmark for TV sci-fi/fantasy!

There were at least two series every night in Prime Time (sometimes opposite each other, which in those pre-DVR days drove us NUTS)!

(NO Internet! NO YouTube! NO Streaming Video! NO DVD/Blu Rays! Not even VHS Tapes!)

But, every night, after dinner (and presuming you finished your homework)...

Spies!

Super-Heroes!

Comedies with monsters/witches/genies/time-traveling astronauts, etc!

Straight sci-fi with The Invaders, and three Irwin Allen series (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and Time Tunnel!

And, of course, the greatest of all...

Original 1966 NBC promo poster. Art by James (Doc Savage) Bama!

It was an amazing time to be eight years old!
Even though my family had two huge 13" TVs, both of them were b/w, so I didn't see all this stuff in color until the '70 when my dad finally got a color set!
(Some, like Captain Nice, I didn't see in color until VHS and DVD copies were available!)
But even in monochrome, those shows enthralled me.
So, tonite, I'm settling down in front of the tube (a 50-inch flat-screen) with my own mini-marathon of 50-year old sci-fi!
Batman "Shoot a Crooked Arrow" (which, technically, aired on Sept. 7) & "Walk the Straight and Narrow"
Star Trek "The Man Trap"
(Bewitched and Jericho [A spy series set in World War II Europe] also ran on Thursdays, but didn't begin their season until Sept 15th!)

Support Atomic Kommie Comics

Visit Amazon and Buy...

Fantastic Television

Celebrate Friday the 13th with 13 Ghosts and Illusion-O!

The 1960 William Castle movie 13 Ghosts used red/blue 3-D style glasses, but not for 3-D!

While most of the movie was black and white, certain sequences had red and blue tinting.
To see the ghosts, you looked thru the red "lens".
To not see the specters, you looked thru the blue "lens".
For years, you could only see the totally-b/w version on tv (including on TCM today), and the VHS release was also b/w.

When they finally issued a DVD edition, the initial one included the version with the color Illusion-O segments plus red/blue viewers based on the ones given out in theatres.

Unfortunately, the "first edition" of the DVD was the only one to have both the Illusion-O version of the movie or the viewers!
The much-more available later pressings/editions are only b/w!
I finally found a copy of the original DVD release (with viewer) for only $4.99 in a used-DVD bin in a local music shop (we used to call them "record shops"), and spent the afternoon getting a real kick out of watching it!
It's an entertaining film, but it's better with Illusion-O!  ;-)

Visit our

3-D Movies & Comics 

Collectibles Store
 (where you don't need 3-D glasses!)

Happy 100th, Vincent Price

Born this day in 1911, Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was a man of many talents, chef, art connoisseur, writer, and of course, actor.
I'll leave it to other sci-fi, fantasy and horror bloggers to cover his accomplishments in those genres, and mention a category he's rarely associated with, but had an incredible knack for...
Comedy.

His very first film appearance was in a little-remembered 1938 screwball comedy called Service de Luxe, playing the male ingenue opposite Constance Bennett.


After this, he went on to a singularly successful career in films and radio, playing heroes and villains with great aplomb, but not appearing again in a comedy until 1950 (a voice-only cameo as The Invisible Man in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein isn't really an 'appearance')
As insane ad exec Burnbridge Waters, Vincent steals the movie from Ronald Coleman in a performance that can only be classified as "mad", man...

Here's an audio interview from 1990 with both Vincent and Art Linkletter, who played the game show host/toady in the film. They discuss the scene shown in the lobby card above.

And here's the entire film at one shot! (but with commercials)


While most of his roles had humorous aspects to them, these were the only two outright comedies he did until the mid-1960s, when people finally started utilizing his funny side, unfortunately in only mildly-funny films like the Dr Goldfoot flicks.
(Here's the tv special Wild, Weird World of Dr Goldfoot, which was funnier than either of the films!)



Thanks for the memories, Vincent.
When you didn't have us screaming, you had us laughing!