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Friday, December 21, 2012
Famous Monsters Memories: Mr. B.I.G., Pat "Wolfman" Paulsen & Chaney Jr.
This installment of Famous Monsters Memories contains images and ads from issues 101, 102 and 103.
THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) is one of Mr. B.I.G.'s best L.O.W. budget movies of the 1950s. Glenn Langan is really quite good in the lead role of the tragic US Army officer who goes Giant after being exposed to a Plutonium blast. While he gets bigger than his breeches, his mind can't keep up and he goes both insane, and on a spree of mass destruction. A sequel, THE WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, premiered the following year.
Bert I. Gordon went color for his 1962 fantasy adventure, THE MAGIC SWORD (1962). It was one of those movies that came on TV once in a blue moon, and was entertaining enough that it made you wonder why that was.
Special Effects Makeup Artist, Verne Langdon, paints up the late comedian Pat Paulsen as a werewolf for what I presume is his short-lived television series from the 1970s.
Famous Monsters paid tribute to Lon Chaney Jr. in their December '73 issue a few months after his passing in July of that year. These two images below are from that spread covering his entire career.
And you couldn't have Famous Monsters without those amazing ads that took up the last dozen or so pages of the magazines.
I remember those Super 8 ads were among my favorites even though I never had one of them. I figured if I bugged my mother or father enough, they'd relent and order me one of them.
The Fisher Price Movie Viewer Theater was the closest I ever got. There were no monster cartridges that I recall, but it was just like having your own bonafide projector, and easily the next best thing to owning the real thing.