In the 1970s, serials were rediscovered by the comic and science fiction fans for good reason: you can criticize the budgets, but the stories were pretty nifty and the imagination ran wild. I always liked Buck Rogers more than Flash Gordon, though I found both a lot of fun and exciting. There's just something really cool about a person who wakes up 500 years later than the year he went to sleep in.
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Those crazy teenagers, always getting into trouble on campus, at least in 1940s and 1950s movies. Mostly, the appeal of this pressbook was Noel Neill, Lois Lane in George Reeves Superman television series. I liked Noel Neill but she always seemed too fragile and less headstrong than a Lois Lane should be. Phyllis Coates, who played Lois in the first season of Superman, was replaced by Neill. Coates was pushy and tough in appearance and action, which made the first season of Superman more for the entire family instead of just the kids, which the later seasons played to. She also hated the idea that Lois couldn’t figure out that Clark Kent and Superman were one and the same; something the comic picked up on and tried to explain in a very bad way (see Superman issue 330). Let’s be honest: those glasses and mild mannered demeanor are the worst attempt at disguise ever done in comics. Just go with it.
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Frankie Darro starred (more or less with the dog, Rinty) in The Wolf Dog (1933) serial and other actioners from Mascot. He had a big role in The Phantom Empire serial in 1935. His small stature and youthful looks kept him into young roles for a while until his age caught up with him. He also starred, along with Mantan Moreland, in movies like this one for Monogram. He also did a lot of television work. Notably, Mantan Moreland receives barely a mention in the pressbook as an “ace colored comic.” Moreland was, for a moment, considered as a replacement for Shemp in the Three Stooges, but that did not happen. He would have been awesome.
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Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. There are skeleton men and man-eating dinosaurs to contend with in Jungle Manhunt. That looks like one mad chimp too, so Jungle Jim has his hands full in this one.
One of my guilty pleasures, Target Earth lacks an army of robots (they made only one), lacks a good budget to sell the invasion angle, but does provide drama between the players who must survive the (did I mention only one) robot’s deadly intentions as well as those of the psychopath in their midst. Later movies, from zombies to aliens, would play up on the dealing-with-the-threat-from-without-and-within theme. While the robot isn’t designed all that well by today’s standards, it does create menace and has that 1940s/50s esthetic that I do find endearing. The pressbook is a tidy little number with enough articles, promotion, and poster art to help sell the movie. And, repeat after me, “beaverboard.” The pressbook mentions taking the 6-sheet poster, mounting it on beaverboard, and placing a flashing red light where the robot’s eye-panel is. Whew. That would have been killer in the theater lobby.
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The Red Ace pressbook, which is the oldest one in my collection so far (from 1917), is one of the most beautifully conceived pressbooks I’ve seen, with wonderful use of color, graphics, and text fonts. Size-wise, it’s rather small at 12.5 x 7 inches, but it packs quite a visual wallop; and, certainly, that old world, flourishy, charm in its design is nostalgic.
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Here's the colorful theater herald for the 15-chapter serial, The Red Ace (1917), from Universal.
If it wasn’t Mars blasting the earth’s atmosphere with deadly rays it was an undersea or other hidden kingdom threatening doom with a disintegrator ray. Ah, the good old days when global warming wasn’t a problem; just evil minions and their maniacal leaders who apparently had little else to do but make trouble for everyone on earth. Mystery Science Theater 3000 can mock this movie all they want, but it’s still a wild ride with its mishmash of whatever costuming was available from the wardrobe department, and creative model work, and the volkites (tin can robots), all done on a shoestring budget. As for scientific gadgets, the Reflector plate is very interesting mostly because the concept was used again in Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror episode with its Tantalus Field: a device that could see and hear anyone at any time, with a handy press-here-to-disintegrate button. There’s also the Invisible Wall of Atom Rays that acts a lot like the Enterprise’s shields. So make fun all you want: a fair amount of later science fiction staples came from this and other serials. This pressbook is huge at 13 x 20 inches and contains a lot of promotional material to get the kids into the theater.
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This 13.75 x 28.25 inches poster-sized Mexican Lobby card for The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (El Llanero Solitario y La Ciudad Perdida de Oro, 1958), is exciting, colorful, and certainly makes me want to see the movie. While the Lone Ranger is considered too corny now for a decent revival in cinema, growing up watching him on television, with George Reeves' Superman, was fun. The travesty of Johnny Depp playing Tonto (originally done by Jay Silverheels) as a weird joke is unforgivable. What's weird and corny about two people seeking and working together for justice? One of Jay Silverheels' homes was in Brooklyn, off of Bay Parkway, just a little ways from where I was growing up in Bensonhurst. I often passed his house with the beautiful window displaying his Native American pride. I don't recall him doing conventions–at least not the ones that I attended in the 1970s.
Exciting illustration and inset scene makes this Mexican lobby card for Tarzan en El Silencio De La Muerte, an eye-grabber. Interestingly, there's archive footage of Jock Mahoney, who also played Tarzan, to help lessen the budget, even though this movie was already edited from two episodes of Ron Ely's 1960s Tarzan television series. Is it me, or does that lion look a bit like the ID Beast from Forbidden Planet?
With an amazingly low budget of anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 dollars, of course they would come up with some gimmick to help cut corners. Enter cinemagic, a way to tint scenes of Mars a strong saturated red, thereby hiding the cheap budget by lessening details you would not see anyway. The rat-bat creature stalking the astronauts (well, more or less, given the budget), was a pretty good and effective design; enough so that Cloverfield‘s (2008) New York invading alien would have similar attributes. Carnivorous plants, a one-eyed amoeba (I always smile, because it makes me think of Zacherle the Cool Ghoul) , the rat-bat creature, and an unfriendly three-eyed Martian (just pops up now and then), provide the action as cinemagic does its best to provide the red colorization (though the process was more involved because it used solarization).
Here is the pressbook. It focuses on poster art to sell the movie as well as TV and radio ads. And, of course, it touts the CineMagic gimmick.
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Here's a rather large, 15.5 x 22.5 inches, Mexican lobby card for Tarzan's Desert Mystery movie (Tarzan el Temerario). What differentiates this from being a small poster instead of a lobby card is the inset movie scene. Interestingly, the inset scene is about the only thing from the movie on this lobby. The other scenes appear to be illustrations taken from various sources, but not ones based on the movie. These types of lobbies were printed on slick, thinner paper, and are for later runs of the movie in theaters.