For most of us Monster Boomers of the Sixties and Seventies (or, Monster Kids, if you prefer), much of the fun of Monster Culture back then wasn't even about watching monster movies. It was making monster models, collecting monster bubble gum cards, and, most importantly, reading monster magazines like Famous Monsters Of Filmland. But there were some amongst us monster lovers who were addicted to the, um, lower strata of monster magazines. Let's hear from one such former Monster Kid as he recounts his...
By COUNT GHOULENSTEIN Ah, the Sixties and early Seventies! The times when a kid could have his fill of classic monsters on TV, in the movies, in model kits...and in magazines! I was such a Baby Boomer turned Monster Boomer. Ah, yes. I remember it well. Golden days of chewing rotten hard old bubble gum to get the funny monster joke cards and getting Testors glue on your hair building that favorite Aurora monster, and filling one's tummy with stale popcorn that theater management was too cheap to throw out the night before watching old horror flicks like The Vampire's Coffin at Saturday movie matinees, and...getting eyestrain and ink stains on one's hand reading those pulpy old monster mags! Now, some of the kids preferred to read Famous Monsters Of Filmland or Castle Of Frankenstein. They were big stuckups. Just because those two mags had facts and interviews and good writing and actual stills...big deal! They were too stuffy for me! There were other monster mags, ones that cost less than FM and CoF, ones with covers that wilted in the summer heat, with inside pages that rubbed ink off on everything, ones that had much neater articles about monster movies and lots cooler inside info on what was happening in the horror business in Hollywood. My stuffy friends sniffed disdainfully at my cheap monster mags, saying that half the movies in them were just made up and all the pictures were either doctored or stolen, that only the crummiest writers would accept half a penny a word to write those articles that were baloney anyway, and the mags were so low-down that even Charlton didn't print them and everyone knows what lowly rung Charlton occupied in the comic book world. (I never understood that; I thought Timmy the Timid Ghost was much better than Casper and the Blue Beetle was neato.) I didn't care. I loved those mags and I knew they were telling the straight dope every time. And the best of these was...Monster Mishmash!
Okay, so it was almost never available for sale and the newsstand only had a few copies when it did show up and the printing was kinda washed out and the pages had little bits of sawdust in them...it was still the coolest monster mag ever! I mean, just look at the cover! Now, there's a monster match-up for you. My friends said they never made a movie where the Tyrannosaurus Rex from King Kong and the monster from 20 Million Miles To Earth met, but they were just full of it. Just because that movie never made it to my crummy town. Hey, lots of movies never made it to Pittsburgh, right? You never saw stuff like that on the cover of Famous Monsters, right? Right! Yeah, so it reprinted a lot of stuff. Well, I could never get two issues in a row, so it meant the stuff was new to me, at least, so what was the big deal? The photos were real cool, even though it looked like the same folks were sitting around the same set, waving at the same camera. But, heck, a lot of the same people made most of the monster movie we loved, didn't they? Well, Monster Mishmash said they did, so there! Naturally, no kid could resist the great ads the mag carried, with all the neat stuff you could buy, stuff they never carried at Ben Franklin or Woolworth's!
Look at the cool stuff for sale! I really wanted just about everything they carried because I knew it was super exclusive stuff just for us Monster Kids. So I mowed lawns and saved my allowance and even used a paper clip on my kid brother's crummy old piggy bank and sent away for the weird and wacky "monstrous merchandise" that Monster Mishmash carried in its pages. (They seemed to carry the same stuff on lots of their pages but, hey, when you got a winner, you can't advertise it too much, right?) Now, it's true that lots of times I never got the stuff but that was because the post office people stole it! Yes, they stole it. I read an editorial in Monster Mishmash that said so. It seems that the mag's staff was working night and day (especially night, heh-heh) to get us our stuff and the crooks who carried the mail just pocketed it because they were just like our parents and teachers and didn't want us to have cool stuff like Meat Monkeys and Transylvania Grave Dirt! To this day, I'm a FedEx man! There's no doubt that the heart and soul of the monster mags were the pictures of the great monster flicks either in release or in production and that's where old MM really shone.
I could sit for hours and hours (and I did) looking over those awesome pictures and just imagining how cool and creepy they were and wondering when and if they would come to pokey old Pittsburgh. You can't imagine how many really neat-sounding monster films never made it to my little burgh! I used to write Monster Mishmash and ask about where those movies were playing but I guess the MM staff felt sorry for me and didn't want me to feel bad by telling me how many places the films were being shown because they never wrote back. So when my friends heckled me for talking about cool monster moves that they said weren't real, I couldn't give them details about them but I knew in my heart of hearts that these films were made and playing in some lucky kids' neighborhood theater. If only I didn't live in a one-horse town like Pittsburgh! One special way that I knew all the great stuff in MM was absolutely gospel truth were the articles that gave details on those movies. I mean, no one would make a kid's magazine and lie to them, would they? After all, the grownup who made MM weren't like our parents and teachers. They didn't want us to watch films like Bloody Ape Horror and the editors at Monster Mishmash did.
It was real clear from the articles how much people in Hollywood loved making monster movies and how much actors and actresses loved being in them. From the pages of MM, time after time, real live Hollywood directors and actors spoke, telling how great their monster movie was and how it was a real cinematic achievement and all that. These people had pride in putting out films like Vixens From The Prison Planet and the great mutant bug movie Scorpamantula (another super monster movie that never made it to dumb old Pittsburgh) and they showed it. Why, some actors even said in MM that they wouldn't be caught dead in some grownup Hollywood movie with lots of money wasted on glitzy sets and with big-time directors telling them what to do all the time and having to work from scripts with all that boring stuff in them that our parents liked to watch. It made me feels so good that so many of these people from Hollywood thought about movies exactly they way I did! And I learned all that from good old Monster Mishmash. Now, some of the directors did talk a lot about saving money and how they couldn't remember details about some movies and the actors and actresses usually didn't have real long statements to make, but that was because they were busy making new cool monster movies. I used to laugh them my friends talked about this long interview with some big-deal guy like that Ray Harryhausen in Famous Monsters. That just proved he was out of work while the guy who make the marching Martian metal monsters (with stuff he was able to find in a junkyard, he said) in Horror Fiends Of The Red Planet was making movies right and left! So, who would you rather read about, huh?
Well, my wife says I have to take out the--I mean, I have some home maintenance projects to take care of and I don't want her to threaten to burn my MM collection again (the little woman loves to tease me), so I'll have to cut this short--hey, just like all those actors and directors did in Monster Mishmash! Cool! Anyway, I just want all those kids who made fun of us because we read and loved MM to know they can still go jump in the lake! MM was the best! After all, when MM stopped production back in 1970 (they owed me $1.17 on my subscription but I figured they could have it), it left an awesome legacy that no other monster mag even tried to emulate. It was too good to copy! And MM sure as heck didn't get involved in some lawsuit and have people testifying and courts making judgements like it was Watergate or something. MM had class! By the way...have they ever put Scorpamantula out on home video? I've been waiting for decades for that. But it'll happen someday, I just know it. Thanks for the memories, Count Ghoulenstein. I guess we know now why you want to use that moniker instead of your real name. You know, I have to say that most of us Monster Kids stopped arguing about which monster magazine was best at about the time we discovered girls, and...oh, skip it. If any of those "lost" monster flicks ever show up on video or DVD, we'll let you know. Article copyright © by Count Ghoulenstein. Artwork by Peter Von Sholly. |
