Christmas & Winter Attack!

Disney Carolers, King Zor, Obits for the Last Day of Fall

* This from my old pal John Totleben, who sent this delightful image yesterday saying, “Muh Bruthuhs! In the Spirit of the Season I just had to pass this along — an absolutely incredible 1938 Hank Porter pen & ink drawing of Disney Christmas Carolers that was recently up for auction on Russ Cochran‘s web site. This is undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of Disney comic art I’ve ever seen! An amazing, wonderful piece! Enjoy!”

Thanks, John; enjoy, all.
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* We all have our favorite Christmas memories.

One of mine is from when I was seven years old, creeping down the stairs in our Duxbury, VT home in 1962 to see beneath the Christmas tree two greenish eyes glowering at me. A toothy grin gradually became visible as my eyes adjusted to the pre-dawn lack-of-light — it was — King Zor!

King Zor was the first of the dinosaur robot toys, and man, he was mighty mind-blowing for a seven-year-old dinosaur fanatic. Ideal was making the most innovative toys of that year, and in hindsight it’s pretty amazing how advanced the crude robotics were for that bumper crop of interactive dolls, creatures and toys.

King Zor was bizarre as hell: you loaded little yellow balls into a ‘cup’ in his spine, then fired suction-cupped dart at his tail’s circular tip. When you hit that target, King Zor would growl and roar, turn to face you, and fire a yellow ball back at you! He’d then advance toward you. If he hit an obstacle (say, the chair or couch you were hiding behind, King Zor gun in hand) with his tongue, he’d lean into the object, then turn away from and and find a new path to threaten all mankind.

My sister Kathie — between Christmas and her birthday — also had an Ideal 1962 and ’63: I remember her having the King Zor weird critter companion toy Odd Ogg, along with Kissy, Thumbelina and Gaylord.

This home movie posted on YouTube shows how Odd Ogg worked: you’d roll a ball under him and he’d ‘swallow’ it, roll back away from you making a “Agck, agck, agck!” noise and then SPIT the ball back at you. A cool and genuinely odd toy!

Here’s an Ideal industry reel from 1962-63 to spell out what was happening during that toy year (including a taste of the burned-into-my-brain Gaylord, Kissy, Thumbelina and Odd Ogg commercial tunes):

[These Ideal industry reels are posted on YouTube by TheSixtiesGuy Channel, which resides here — have fun exploring!]

Like Hamilton’s Invaders — the creepy carnivorous bug toy from 1964 — King Zor is a pretty remote ‘cult’ toy unique to those of us who were weird and growing up in the early ’60s.

The folks at Spookshows.com remember, though, and they have a terrific King Zor page, and even sell King Zor t-shirts. Check ’em out!

You can still find King Zor at high collector prices online — here’s a great recent ebay listing with meticulous ‘breakdown’ photos of all Zor‘s working parts, inside and out! —

— but my slightly beat, no-longer-working King Zor is sitting atop my bookcase here by my writing and computer work area, lord over all he sees. I picked him up back in the 1980s during one of the Ohio trips with Ryan Brown and the Mirage Studios crew at an affordable price; I didn’t care that it didn’t work and that one of his plastic feet was torn, it was those green eyes and those open jaws I wanted to savor now and again.

I had completely forgotten about the King Zor Dinosaur Game (1962, Ideal) that I also received from my loving parents that Christmas, but this ebay listing brought it all back in a flash.

Christmas, as we’re often reminded, isn’t about ‘things,’ and here I am going on about — well, THINGS. Things as in objects, yes, but THINGS as in — THINGS!!!

But that’s not what keeps this memory burning in my brain. I picture now my father and mother, setting up the Christmas tree spread of gifts after Kathie, Ricky and I had gone to bed, and one of them (likely my Dad) deciding that King Zor had to come out of the box and stand, facing the stairs, tucked under a bough of the tree…

Ah, the Ghosts of Christmas Past — particularly those with glowing green eyes and saurian teeth — how sweet they are.
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* Alas, there are two deaths this week I am moved to report. Lots of folks die, and death is no stranger in the Channukah and Christmas season; but I want to note the passing of two gentlemen who made quite a mark on my generation who will likely not receive even a whisper in mainstream media.

Robin Wood died at age 78 this past week;

who is Robin Wood, you wonder?

As an avid young cinephile who felt cut off from access to movies, growing up as I did in northern Vermont, Robin Wood‘s books on key filmmakers from Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock to Ingmar Bergman and Arthur Penn were eye-opening, mind-expanding texts. I’ve held on to most of my original purchase copies of Wood‘s Praeger paperbacks, which were unique among all late 1960s movie books for the depth of their analysis, and none were more insightful, confrontational or stimulating than Wood‘s.

Wood‘s semi-autobiographical orientation to ‘reading’ movies changed how I saw not only movies, but all the creative arts, with every creation a privileged glimpse of a stage of a creative existence. Though, once I’d seen the films themselves, I often disagreed with Wood‘s assessments, no writer on film ever provoked me as Wood did; he forced me to dig deeper, experience more fully every second of cinema that kissed my eyes.

My personal favorite of all Wood’s texts was The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Wood and Richard Lippe, a slim 100-page paperback published for/by the Festival of Festivals, Toronto, in 1979.

Wood and Lippe and their co-contributors Andrew Britton and Tony Williams offered the first book-format evaluation of what exactly had been erupting from movie screens throughout the 1970s, reaching its most volatile form in the horror movies of that decade. It was and remains an absolutely landmark moment in genre writing, including Wood‘s “World of Gods and Monsters: The Films of Larry Cohen” and Lippe‘s “The Horror of Martin,” and for such a rare tome is remains among the most-cited by horror genre scholars — and with good reason.

Many of Robin Wood‘s books are still in print and highly recommended,

including Hitchcock’s Film Revisited

and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, both excellent, even essential texts for cinephiles.

His voice is one I shall sorely miss.

I also need to bring to your attention

the passing this past week of the great Dan O’Bannon at age 63.

Like George Romero, Dan O’Bannon left an indelible mark on horror and sf movies; ironically, for an industry so dead-set against bankrolling the work of either man (Romero or O’Bannon), it was Romero and O’Bannon who forever changed the zombie mythos with two of their most low-budget efforts.

Romero, of course, changed everything about horror movies with Night of the Living Dead (1968) — and forever changed ‘zombies’ and the walking dead to infectious flesh-eaters in the popular imagination — and it was O’Bannon, seizing one of the precious few opportunities he’d ever had to both script and direct a feature, who spun the rights to Romero partners John Russo and Russell Steiner‘s source novel Return of the Living Dead into the delightful 1985 feature film.

O’Bannon is the man who added “Brains!” to the zombie lexicon, forever mutating the Romero carnivores into brain-eaters for the generation that followed.

There’s no point in listing the many projects O’Bannon tried to get off the ground; what he did was too often ignored as having come from O’Bannon. It was O’Bannon who first nurtured the seed of having comics creators like Ron Cobb work on realizing his movie concepts; once Alien was in Ridley Scott‘s hands, Scott built on that foundation and the rest is history. Before Scott‘s Blade Runner, O’Bannon‘s collaboration with Jean Giraud/Moebius on a single comic story — “The Long Tomorrow” — had already done a better job at realizing the same conceit (fusing film noir and sf); but it’s Scott who gets the historical credentials. Such is life and cinema history.

After making the student sf satire feature Dark Star (1974) with John Carpenter, and his bullseye of Return of the Living Dead, O’Bannon only had one other shot at directing — O’Bannon‘s sorely underrated H.P. Lovecraft adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the rarely-screened The Resurrected (1992), which I highly recommend! — and fought Hollywood all his waking life to get his scripts made into films. Those few that did make it to the screen include Alien (1979) — well, shit, need I say more?

O’Bannon always got a bum rap, as ample interviews from those who spun O’Bannon‘s hard-fought battles into ridicule, belittling O’Bannon‘s passion for his projects (as they seized his work as their own) and personally maligning the man who was so instrumental to changing the genre landscape in the 1970s and ’80s for the better. I don’t know what it was that made O’Bannon such an easy target; maybe he was too much like his Dark Star character Pinback in real life? Who knows.

I only know O’Bannon‘s work — including his amazing Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal collaboration with Jean Giraud/Moebius, “The Long Tomorrow,” a landmark and sadly forgotten highlight in the fusion of noir elements and cyperpunk — was almost always attuned to the cultural zeitgeist, and then instantly absorbed by the pop culture once it materialized. How this led to O’Bannon forever clinging to the fringes, frustrated by the powers-that-be so consistently derailing his efforts instead of greasing the wheels to success, will remain a mystery and part of O’Bannon‘s legacy (as it does Romero‘s).

I’m sharing with you here images most eulogies won’t include: O’Bannon‘s fruitful creative collaborations with two of the greatest cartoonists of their era, Jean Giraud and William Stout. In both cases, O’Bannon got some of their finest work — and together, those collaborations changed everything.

Every time I see a CGI sf movie plundering the cramped urban environments from “The Long Tomorrow,” I think of their debt to O’Bannon and Giraud. Everytime I hear or see another zombie movie/story/novel/comic/song/animated cartoon refer to zombies eating brains, I know it’s O’Bannon they’re lifting from.

As corporate movie brokers and lesser talents make billions and spin entire franchises off the shreds of O’Bannon‘s ideas that actually made it through the meatgrinders to the screen, belittling, ignoring and/or oblivious to their debt to Dan O’Bannon, one need only ponder what Dan did accomplish in his lifetime to arrive at wondering — what might have been, had he been afforded more chances to work?

We can only wonder.

And be thankful for what Dan did manage to bring to life.