Captain Company not only offered wonderful toys for little ghouls and boys, but it also provided exciting reading for lovers of the fantastic. My introduction to Mandrake the Magician and Buck Rogers came from reading these wonderfully oversized books. Here's where the power of print trumps digital every time. You can still find these books on Amazon.
Decisions, decisions: skull mugs or the Horrible Melting Man mask? It's hard to decide. But that Werewolf Siren Ring is more practical, especially on full-moon lit nights. The Super Frankenstein Mask covers the entire head, though. Neato!
Famous Monsters of Filmland wasn't always about monsters. As monsterkids entered the space age in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, science fiction (or science fantasy, take your pick) took off for the galaxy from the pages of FM. Purists hated it, but the magazine needed to stay in step with the new interests of hybrid monster-space-age-kids, or it, and Captain Company's sales, would plummet back to earth.
Buck Rogers was a lively, well-concieved show primed for action figures and vehicles, until it went all bizarro with season two. The toys were wonderful to play with, especially Twiki (bidi-bidi-bidi, okay Doc!).
Boris Karloff: Le Monstre Sacre, Behind the Mask...Collection Horror Pictures from Gerard Noel faneditions, copyrighted 1989. I found this digest-sized book in Professor Kinema's Boris Karloff file. Picture comments are in French, by Jean-Claude Michel. (click to enlarge)
Continue reading "Faces of Boris Karloff
Le Monstre Sacre...Behind the Mask..." »
It doesn't get much cooler than these Captain Company items. The colors, the poses, the Universal monsters; grownup monsterkids still salivate at the sight of them.
While I've seen the vinyl wallets now and then (especially after the re-issues), I don't recall seeing any of the wall plaques.
Note to Phil Kim and the new Famous Monsters of Filmland: maybe it's time to resurrect the wall plaques. I'd even update them if I were you. Add Freddy, Jason, and Chucky (but for godsakes, not the remake versions!) And add a backlight so they glow in the dark. Just a thought.
Thanks to Professor Kinema for supplying this back cover ad from Famous Monsters of Filmland #29.
Creepy and Eerie magazines are the epitome of monsterkidism, back in the day. Without Warren Publishing pushing the horror craze in print, we'd be the lesser for it. It's ironic when you think of it, but with all this horror came a more stalwart social awareness through the telling of it, which kids were privy to and adults abhorred.
The first known interracial kiss in mainstream comics (as opposed to underground comix occurred in Warren's Creepy #43 (Jan. 1972), in "The Men Who Called Him Monster" by writer Don McGregor and artist Luis Garcia. McGregor said in 2001 that the kiss was actually due to the artist misunderstanding the line "This is the clincher" in the script. McGregor would later script color comic books' first known interracial kiss, in the "Killraven: Warrior of the Worlds" feature in Amazing Adventures #31 (July 1975).
(from Wikipedia)
I didn't order the 5 foot balloon, though as I think of it, it would have been fun playing The Prisoner and having it chase me down the block, with me screaming "I am not a number, I am a free man!" as I ran. Just look at that kid in the picture; you can imagine he's practically screaming those words before the big weather balloon engulfs him.
But I did get the spankin' monsterkid-cool Horrorscope. The packaging it came in was even more exciting than the viewer. The monster illustrations on it were colorful and brash, daring you to watch. The design was fairly nifty, too, though I recall it being a bit hard to crank.
Of course, I lost it along the journey from dream-filled childhood to reality-numbing adulthood, but when you can say you had a great monsterkid toy--scarce and expensive to find now-- as opposed to not ever having it, well, that's a plus, right?
"What is most unique about the success of the Captain Company was the fact that it survived for so long. While it is understandable how reruns of the films would remain popular it is nothing sort of shocking how such massive volumes of tie in merchandise were still selling well into the late 1970’s. Much of the reason for this was the Captain Company’s unique ads that promoted monster “stuff” as the coolest thing in the world and this kept kids sending off their money orders for these great items. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever and the horror fad faded and interest in tie in merchandise waned to nothingness. But, for a time it was incredibly popular and even more incredibly cool!" (Captain Company and the Lost Era of Magazine Marketing)
Zombos Says: Excellent
It's difficult as an adult to come up with words to describe what those magazines meant at the time to an adolescent youth in the pre-Internet years, to capture the warming glee of finding a new issue on the shelves, the urgent expectation and sense of discovery that came with turning the pages of each new issue, and the feeling that they inspired of belonging to some secret fellowship.
(David Horne, Gathering Horror)
My first impulse after reading and paging through the over 600 pages of listings and appendices was to wish I lived next to David Horne so I could ingratiate myself over, in order to roll around naked in his Warren magazine collection. Sure, I'd let him keep them bagged and boarded while I did that; I'm a collector, too, you know.
Gathering Horror: A Completist Collector's Catalogue and Index for Warren Publishing is one of those labor of love's you often hear about but seldom ever really see. The over 700 Warren-instigated magazines, and related materials, indexed with concise information, is a reference book fantasy come true for horror magazine collectors. Where McFarland's disappointing The Great Monster Magazines (by Robert Michael Cotter) whetted the appetite, Horne's reference work satiates it. It's the most inclusive and meticulously written catalog of its kind available.
Drawing on his publishing background, Horne has created a book that's as much fun paging through as it is to use simply as a reference for building a complete collection of magazine runs. Thumbnail cover shots identify issues, and content title information, along with important notes, accompany each entry. Selling and buying Warren magazines on eBay, scarcity and abundance of certain issues, and a common defects section provide a suitable and engaging introduction to this body of work, and important information to the collector.
I found the section on common defects invaluable since my knowledge of Warren publications is spotty at best. Horne's discussion of the Warren Order Form being on a magazine's last page, and the significance of this in relation to how Warren paginated their issues, points out an important potential gotcha: removal of the page from a magazine could be missed under casual scrutiny.
Horne also catalogs the Warren-related fanzines (they were blogs without the Internet, when you think of it), convention program booklets, adds a profiles and fan art index, non-comic and comic title indexes, editor index, writer index, artist index, Warren One of a Kinds listing, and foreign issues. There's even a Warren merchandise section.
The name "Captain Company" first appeared in Wildest Westerns 5, May 1961, and then in Famous Monsters 12, June 1961.
If you collect Famous Monsters of Filmland, Vampirella, Creepy, Eerie, Blazing Combat, and anything else Warrenesque, or aim to, Horne's Gathering Horror is essential as blood is to a vampire. He's printed only 300 copies at a ridiculously reasonable price of $34.95.
I wouldn't wait if I were you. You can find it under "Warren Catalog" on eBay.
Have you always wanted a live monkey? Tough call. For me, I think I rather have those two new monster model kits. Having Godzilla and King Kong staring each other down as they sat on my shelf would probably be more fun than even a barrel of live monkeys.
Fascinating fun for the entire family? Not so sure about that one. Hey Mom, look, I just got a live monkey! Oh, gee, no he's not potty trained. Didn't think about that one. I like the "live delivery guaranteed." Quite a bummer if the little thing didn't make it through shipping. I'm glad they included free instructions on care and feeding. That's important.
I don't know of anyone who bought a live monkey. Do you? It's definitely one of the oddest items offered by Captain Company.
There's something special about this model kit. Hard to pin down, but maybe it's the skull locked in a never-ending scream, or maybe how the tattered clothes reveal the rat-picked bones underneath. It's shades of The Cask of Amontillado and hints of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Although he was lucky enough to escape...
I may be wrong, but I don't think this really was "perfect for everywhere wear." You'd have to be pretty spaced out to wear this to school or the disco. Just make it easy on yourself and paste a kick my ass sticker to your butt and save the expense.
Then again, I'd go all Battlestar Galactica for a chance to wear this at a sci fi convention. Geeky chicks dig geeky older guys in space adventure battle jackets, right? Get your whole family to dress up, too. How cool would that be? Beats going all Klingon mug-ugly and anti-social*.
(*Not that there's anything wrong with that so please don't beat me up again, okay? I promise not to joke about your Bat'leth, even though you seriously look silly swinging it like for real. Know what I mean? I never have these problems at horror conventions.)
Call it what you like, dirt is dirt. But boy, didn't every Dracula fan want one of these? I wonder who went around the castle digging up the dirt for this "unusual offer."
