Gene Phillips's Blog, page 11

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL:

Of the other "name pirates" standing alongside Kidd and Bonney, only Blackbeard (Mike Ross) has anything much to do. The names of Calico Jack, Stede Bonnet and James Avery are tossed out haphazardly and with no real characters attached, while another famous pirate, Bartholomew Roberts, gets both of his names farmed out to two separate characters, a Captain Bartholomew and a Captain Roberts. I guess the writers got a short list of famous pirate-n...

MONSTER MASHUPS #105

 EC artist Jack Davis did a lot of lobby cards and album covers on "monster mash" themes, but this might be the best of them, even if one doesn't necessarily consider most of the Addams Family "monsters."

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of the 1978 sex comedy FAIRY TALES:

Fairyland in this case is more like one of the many "all-fairy-tales-sold-here" worlds, though Prince doesn't seem to recognize any of the figures he meets on his quest-- Little Bo Peep (Angela "LOST EMPIRE" Aames), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Tommy Tucker, Scheherezade (Nai Bonet), Old King Cole, Peeping Tom, and the Frog Prince. The original version is also supposed to have some erotic schtick with Jack and Jill, but this didn't appear in...

THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME #62

Since I'm making up for not having done many villain-crossovers, I'm obliged to state that "Almost Got 'Im," the 1992 episode of BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, is easily the best villain-cross in that series, if not in all Batman cartoons of all time.


"Almost" only has one close rival: "Mayhem is the Music Meister" from BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which I mentioned in GREATEST #43. In any case, that one's less notable for its villain-crossovers than playing Batman off such familiar heroes as Bla...

RAR #77: EVENING STAR

 Following up on RAR #68, here's an extremely minor example of a female chief from a 1957 TOMAHAWK, for a story winsomely entitled, "Revenge of the Girl Chief." But it's such a mediocre story-- involving a young squaw, Evening Star, who takes over leading her tribe when her father is murdered-- that making the daughter into a son would have made no structural difference. I'd like to think that somewhere in the thirty years of the TOMAHAWK feature-- at least in its Revolutionary War setting-- tha...

CROSSOVER MADNESS

THE DALTONS' WOMEN is a low budget oater within the "Lash LaRue" series, wherein the whip-wielding hero and his comedy relief contend with the Dalton Gang. However, this very fictionalized version of the Daltons just barely sustains any crossover-vibe. Of the three real-life Daltons, the script uses just the name of Brother Emmett (Tom Tyler), and makes up two other names, Clint and Jess, out of whole cloth.
I think that the "women" are two saloon girls who have a big catfight over their intended...

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of the 1978 softcore spoof FAIRY TALES, which takes place in a "Mother Goose Land."

__________

...Prince happens to have a photograph of Sleeping Beauty (Linnea Quigley in one of her first roles), and he's confident that he can make babies with such a stone fox. So he girds his loins-- in this case, by belting on a sword-- and leaves his kingdom for the nearby terrain of Fairyland, where he has some reason to think he'll find Sleeping Beauty.

Fairyland in this case is more like one ...

RAR #76: THE ZAZZTEC INDIANS

 

In FOUR COLOR #51, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig go treasure-hunting on "Happy Pappy Island" and almost get sacrificed by the natives, the Zazztec Indians. Curiously, the first time Bugs sees a native, he calls him a "White Indian," but nothing more is said about this odd classification. This 1944 opus is a pretty good Barks-style adventure, though artist Carl Beuttner probably wasn't directly influenced by Barks, who's only got started in Disney comics in 1942. The script includes a bit in which Bu...

NULL-CROSSOVERS #18

 No, Willie's inability to decide between Tessie and Millie was not a comment upon his sexuality.

THE WEIRDIE FILES

 DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The H...