Out of the Vault - Adventure Comics #436

Since my mid-October hiatus forced me to skip a couple of weeks of Vaults, I thought I would extend October for one more week. If you remember, I decided to spend the month of October honoring Halloween by presenting non-horror horror stories, including a man falling in love with a ghost and a race car, Batman shooting a vampire (or maybe werewolf) through the heart with a silver bullet and Superman fighting a blob of giant cells. The final comic I had planned to revisit was Adventure Comics # 436 (or as the cover says, Weird Adventure Comics).

This was part of Michael Fleisher's infamous run on the Spectre, which led to perhaps the most ridiculous lawsuit in comics history and the most boring issue of The Comics Journal ever. But more of that later.

The story, cover-dated Dec. 1974, is titled "The Gasmen and... the Spectre." It was written by Fleisher (with script continuity credited to Russel Carley, whatever that means) and drawn by Jim Aparo. Interestingly enough, the opening splash page is almost identical to the cover, only with an extended "NGYAAAAAAAA..." sound effect. But that scene comes at the end of the story.

The story opens at a custom car show which is suddenly attacked by several men in coveralls with gas masks. They fire streams of noxious green gas which kill everyone at the show (and maybe only Aparo could render a gas attack quite so violently--he was really at the top of his game in those days).


Meanwhile, reporter Earl Crawford of Newsbeat magazine is arguing with his editor over a story he has written about the Spectre. Apparently, Earl is the only man who has ever seen the Spectre and survived, so the editor is having a hard time buying the story. Just then, word comes in about the massacre at the auto show, and Earl rushes to the scene.

There he runs into Detective Jim Corrigan (who, as all good comics fans know, was the Spectre, a cop killed in the line of duty, but allowed to live on as a vengeful spirit to visit divine justice upon evildoers). Corrigan's plan to investigate consists mostly of "wait for someone to take credit for it."

They don't have to wait long. Soon enough, a ransom demand comes in from Field Marshall Offal (really), a nutcase who dresses and acts like a Nazi commander, humored by his henchmen (I guess because he's such a criminal genius or something). Offal demands one billion dollars, or else he'll do something worse. Corrigan argues against giving in to the terrorists, but the mayor decides to pay the ransom. Corrigan volunteers to deliver it.

He ends up boarding a bad guy helicopter, followed by Earl Crawford, who smells a scoop. When they reach the bad guy headquarters in an abandoned observatory, the henchman gasses Corrigan. But instead of dying (since he's already dead), Corrigan simply becomes the Spectre. The henchman screams.

The Spectre enters Offal's command chamber, where he dispatches a couple more henchmen.


Offal flees and jumps onto a getaway boat, but the Spectre catches up to him and transforms his boat into a giant squid which...


Later, Crawford arrives and finds the first henchman absorbed into the stone cliff. He suspects the Spectre has been there, but only finds Corrigan, who swears nothing unusual has happened. Yeah, right.

This was one of the stories to which Harlan Ellison referred in his infamous Comics Journal interview, in which he compared Fleisher to Robert E. Howard, stating both men wrote unforgettable, over-the-top stories because both were absolutely crazy. Fleisher got offended at being called "bugfuck," "certifiable," and "a derange-o." Ellison later said he meant it as a compliment, but Fleisher sued for libel to the tune of two million dollars (he lost). But more about that next time.

One sad note: this issue might have been worth something if I hadn't cut out part of a page of the back-up feature, a mediocre Aquaman seven-pager. I was cutting out a coupon to order the giant-size reprint of Batman #1. And since the back-up was illustrated by Mike Grell, I didn't figure it was any great loss (I was never a fan of Grell and had no idea I would later become a collector, though I was never very serious about it). So now my infamous Fleisher Spectre issue has no collector's value, and if I remember correctly, the Batman #1 reprint was burned in a fire, so I've lost on both counts.

Oh well. La vie. There, I said it.

Big Video Thursday - Forms of Things Unknown

Sorry, my work schedule makes updating a little more hectic than it used to be, so I apologize for making you wait for this new edition of Big Video Wednesday, Now on Thursday for Extra Value!

Today we continue The Outer Limits with this, the last episode of the first season:


If I may wax pretentious for a moment, we as creators are all products of our influences. And at times, when we find something that particularly excites us, we may wear those influences on our sleeves a bit. This episode, written by (once again) Joseph Stefano and directed by Gerd Oswald, is so festooned with influences that it collapses under their weight.

The episode opens without the usual narration. Instead, we see a car careening down a winding road. At the wheel, a laughing dude who decides, for some inexplicable reason, to make out with Vera Miles. The speeding car, the lovers, the man laughing at danger, the jumpy editing: I'm reminded of Godard's "Breathless," which had come out just a couple of years before, The car goes into a skid and there's a freeze frame. Did the car wreck? Did everyone die? Will the rest of the episode be simply one of those extended dream sequences where the stars are actually dead, a la "Carnival of Souls?"

I wish it made that much sense.

So when we next see Laughing Dude, he's in his swimsuit by a lake. He saunters down into the water and calls for Kasha (Vera Miles) and Leonora. Who? Oh, there's another woman with them, played by Barbara Rush (known to science fiction fans for her roles in "When Worlds Collide" and "It Came From Outer Space"). Leonora grabs a leaf off of a bush, and Kasha drops it into a drink she's mixing. She hands the leaf back to Leanora, who drops it on the ground and grinds it under her foot like she's putting out a cigarette. Kasha warns her not to chew her nails; she might poison herself.

Laughing Dude, whose name is Andre, calls for the girls to bring him his drink in the lake.


"Kasha will pour," he says, in a sadly typical passage of dialogue, "And Leonora will serve. And then we'll go to London and pay a dark call on Leonora's rich and respected father. And when we've extorted him, we'll leave London, not very respected, but very rich."

Then he drinks his drink, and is poisoned + drowned. Kasha's very cold about it all, but Leonora's freaked, and it's starting to feel more like "Diabolique" now. For some insane reason, Kasha decides to put Andre's body in the trunk of their car and take him with them (she explains it later, but it still doesn't make sense). As they drive, they stop to allow an odd funeral party to pass, and suddenly, we've slipped from "Diabolique" to "The Seventh Seal."


As they drive through a rainstorm, Leonora sees the trunk lid open and screams that Andre is still alive. Kasha stops to check, and Leonora freaks out and runs through the stormy forest, mincing along slowly in her high heels. When Kasha tries to convince her that Andre is actually dead, Leonora says that Andre has changed position in the trunk. "My soul photographed it," she explains. Then she sees a shadowy figure and runs back to the car, where she sees that Andre's body is gone. Waah!

The car won't start, so they walk to a nearby mansion to ask for help. Sir Cedric Hardwicke answers the door, playing a pretentious blind manservant who looks like Uncle Fester.


Then in walks Ilya Kuryakin, and Leonora faints. Turns out, the man she saw in the forest is an inventor named Tone who has stolen Andre's body from their trunk and plans to return him to life using his special "time tilting" device, which consists of a bunch of clocks connected by wires. Seriously.


During the conversation in which this comes up, Leonora talks about how they poisoned Andre with a leaf from a "Thanatos tree" which killed him like "a crushed clown" and I seriously have no idea where that came from or what it means.

Tone takes Leonora up to see his device, and we see the scene which played as the teaser before the credits, with Leonora giving the fakest scream of all time...


And then mincing down the hallway in her high heels.


Meanwhile Andre has come back to life and is vastly amused by his former death. He makes out with Kasha some more and wants to go to London straightaway to extort Leonora's father. We get another Bergmanesque scene...


as Tone repents to the butler (who isn't the butler, actually) of having used his power over time to "resurrect an evil clown. Man, this just keeps getting stupider.

Tone decides to kill Andre, so while Andre watches, Tone pulls a cute little pistol out of a desk drawer and loads one bullet into it, all the while flaunting his crazy eyes.


But then he gets hypnotized by a toy on a table (?), so Andre takes it from him and shoots a chair (??). Then Andre takes off with Kasha while Tone announces his intention to use the Time-Tilter to kill Andre off again.

Then Andre dies in a car crash(????), and Tone decides to use the Time-Tilter to kill himself, which he does.

The End.

Really. There's not even one line of dialogue to wrap up the story after Tone disappears. Wikipedia states that this was shot as a pilot for a series titled The Unknown, and that the original pilot had narration at the beginning and end, although the text of the narration doesn't make the plot make any more sense.

What's pretty obvious here is that Stefano and Oswald were trying to make a European art-house movie for American television but failed. Because as senseless as it is, the episode is simply too coherent to be a European art-house film.

ETA: Silly me. I forgot to embed the link to the show. Here you go:

Movie Monday - Batman, 1943 Chapters 7-10

Welcome to part three of our visit to 1943's "Batman," the Caped Crusader's first depiction on film.

While we're waiting for the action to begin, let's pause a moment to listen to the theme music. A more random collection of notes and tics you may never hear in your life--the same 5-note progression played in about eight different keys over quivering strings meant to denote tension, I guess, and every now and then, a harp swoops in because, I don't know. It was the early 40's. Really, the best thing that can be said about the opening theme is that it's all uphill from there.

So okay, in chapter 6, there was a fight in some sort of chemical factory or something which ended in a huge explosion. As chapter 7, "The Phoney Doctor," opens, Robin and Alfred come stumbling out from the other room they got locked in during the fight to find Batman alive under a couple of ceiling beams that had fallen against one another to leave a space underneath. Robin, master of understatement that he is, tells Batman, "Boy, are you lucky!"

Meanwhile, Colton is upset that the male nurse assigned to watch him doesn't play cards. He gets dressed and decides he needs to start packing heat. He shoves a huge revolver down his pants and hides a derringer up his sleeve attached to an elastic cord. Then he tells the nurse to beat it.

Bruce has apparently reported to Captain Arnold that he witnessed the men assaulting Colton. He looks at mug shots and recognizes one of the men. Captain Arnold identifies the man as Fletcher, a disgraced civil engineer. Captain Arnold says he'll get a warrant issued for Fletcher's arrest.

Colton, meanwhile, knows where Fletcher is, because Fletcher is in Colton's room, posing as a doctor. He knocks Colton out with chloroform and takes him to Daka's secret base in a fake ambulance. When Bruce arrives a little later, the only clue is the handkerchief Fletcher used to drug Colton. Bruce examines the handkerchief in his lab and discovers it has a Japanese laundry mark, and by coincidence, there just happens to be one Japanese laundry in the city (and just to interject here, but whoever did the laundry markings wrote the best pseudo-Chinese characters I have ever seen--I thought they were genuine until I tried to look them up in my kanji dictionary).

At the secret base, Daka threatens Colton with death unless he divulges the location of his radium mine. Colton pretends to be cowed, then pulls his derringer and forces Daka to open the exit door. But as Colton is exiting the door, he is knocked out by the caveman standing outside, pretending to be a wax figure on exhibit in the Cave of Horrors. And considering they've been showing that guy in close-up every time somebody visits the base, in almost every chapter, it's about time they paid that off.

That night, Batman and Robin visit the Japanese laundry to look for clues, and by AMAZING COINCIDENCE, the thugs just happen to be visiting, too. Apparently, Daka keeps his mining equipment stashed at the laundry on the third floor. The Dynamic Duo drop in on the thugs from the skylight and launch into yet another fistfight that they end up on the losing end of. Robin is knocked silly, and Batman is dropped down an elevator shaft, three stories straight down to land face-first on concrete. Splat!

Then the thugs send the elevator down to crush him. Overkill!

In chapter 8, "Lured By Radium," the thugs leave before the elevator has finished its work. Robin comes to and stops the elevator just in time. Then he runs down to see if Bruce is all right. Well, not only did Batman survive a three-story fall onto concrete, he didn't even sustain a single bruise. In fact, come to think of it, these guys get into one or two brutal fistfights every chapter, and never suffer so much as a black eye, bloody nose, or split lip. They're nigh invulnerable, and yet glass-jawed.

They hear sirens and decide to beat it, because as Robin says, "We don't want the police to find us in these outfits."

Daka tortures Colton in the zombie chair. Colton, who acts like a huge tough guy, screams for mercy after about a second in the chair. Seriously, he's the only one in the entire serial who wusses out before the zombie procedure is complete. He tells Daka that he'll take the men to his mine the next day.

Linda visits Bruce, worried about Colton, and says she wants to visit the mine to see if he's there. Bruce agrees to take her there.

The next day, Colton rides to the mine in a clown car full of six thugs and him. Meanwhile, Bruce and Linda stop to talk to an old Indian at a trading post who offers to sell them pottery made from pitchblende. Seriously, it's radioactive pottery, y'all!


The thugs go straight to the mine, while Bruce, Linda, Dick and Alfred go to Colton's cabin. Bruce and Dick head up to visit the mine while Linda has lunch with Alfred. Bruce and Dick spot the crooks' car outside the mine and change into costume.

Meanwhile, Colton makes a break for it, heads down a secret shaft and emerges through a trapdoor into his cabin, ruining Linda's sandwich. He grabs some dynamite to blow up the mine. Batman and Robin fight the crooks in the mine, while others assault the cabin from outside. Linda flees down the trapdoor and into the middle of a raging fistfight. Someone falls on the plunger and the dynamite goes off. KABOOM!

In chapter 9, "The Sign of the Sphinx," Batman is once again saved by a lucky space left underneath a couple of support beams, and Linda with him. Colton dies in the explosion, along with one of the thugs. The other thugs think their buddy Marshall died as well, but he ended up on Batman's side of the rockfall and becomes Batman's prisoner. After a very lame scene where Bruce and Dick show up to pretend they were completely unaware of the fight, the group heads back to Gotham.

Daka meets with the boy band and says, "I guess we need some more FBI guys," or words to that effect. He tells one of the men to start recruiting.

Meanwhile, Batman has Marshall tied to a chair in the Batcave, only Marshall doesn't scare as easily as the first guy. So Batman leaves him alone in the cave. Marshall quickly slips his bonds and runs to the phone so he can call and warn Fletcher and his men. However, it's a trick. Batman purposely let Marshall escape his bonds so that he could see the number which Marshall dials using a huge phone dial gimmick on his wall.

Batman poses as the guy on the other end so Marshall doesn't get wise to the trick. And by the way, no modern technological advance is too extreme for the Batcave. For instance, check out that phone Marshall's using.

Batman figures out that the number Marshall dialed was the Sphinx Club down by the waterfront. After they drop Marshall off at the police station, Bruce decides to go undercover and disguises himself as Chuck White, ex-boxer and low-life thug. He goes to the Sphinx Club and throws Marshall's name around. Bernie, the bartender, takes him in to see Fletcher. But Fletcher decides to shake him down, so White pulls a gun.

Yes, Batman's packing heat!

Anyway, Robin, watching through a window, distracts the thugs by shining a Bat-Signal flashlight into the room (and this is as close as you'll get to the Bat-Signal in this serial).

The goons chase Robin while Chuck White disappears and changes into his Batsuit. Two of the thugs chase Robin onto a ship at the pier while Batman fights the others on the dock. By the way, I don't know if this was just the way the stunman moved naturally, or if he had suffered some kind of groin pull or something during the course of the production, but in this scene especially, stumpy-legged Robin waddles like an ape when he runs.

Robin dives off the ship, while Batman is knocked out by a punch, after which one of the thugs drops a gangplank on him.

Or not. As chapter 10, "Flying Spies," opens, Batman rolls out from under the gangplank just in time.

The thugs report to Daka yet again that they've killed the Batman. When Daka mentions the numerous times before that they've made the same claim, they say that this time it's for sure. Daka begins to wonder if there's more than one Batman. Daka gets a call from an associate, stating that they've stolen some radium for him and will drop it from an airplane at a designated location that night.

Meanwhile, Bruce gets another coded message from the government, telling him to be on the lookout for the radium, which was stolen from "Michigan Hospital in Chicago." Bruce decides to try his Chuck White guise again. He goes back to the Sphinx Club and meets Daka's recruiter (not Fletcher) who is supposed to bring recruits to another secret location so Daka can look at them.

Chuck is ushered into a room, where Daka spies on him through the eyes of a painting. Hackneyed, but awesome.

"He looks like cheap gangster," Daka says, but tells the boys to give him a tryout anyway. They take Chuck to the site of the radium drop. And while I wondered at the time what Daka meant by White looking like a cheap gangster, I figured it out once I saw him with all of Daka's gang. Turns out, Chuck's the only one without a tie.

A random extra drops the radium out the bathroom window of a passenger airliner, and Chuck White runs away, returning moments later as the Batman! Robin is quickly knocked out, but Batman grabs one of the thugs' cars and takes off toward the radium. The thugs shoot out one of his tires, and Batman dies in a fiery car crash!

See you next week for the exciting conclusion of "Batman!"

(You can read the summary of the first two chapters here)

(Read a summary of chapters 3-6 here)

Castle Follow-Up

Well, I need to eat a little pickled crow, I guess. I have previously posted in some detail just how less than enchanted I was with Castle.

Well, after hearing friends rave about it some more, I decided to give it another try. The first season is no longer on Hulu, so I've been watching the second season, and I have to say...

It's okay. From discussions with a friend at a Halloween party last night, I apparently managed to watch the two weakest episodes in the first season, but the second season has been better. Still not anything like appointment viewing for me, but better.

Special Super Halloween Bonus!

Yes, that's right. Once again, I have taken up The World's Cheapest Microphone to bring you another episode of They Stole Frazier's Brain! Since I'm no longer on box.net, there's no embedded player, but you can download the MP3 here.

And yes, there are clues to the theme of this episode in today's Out of the Vault.

Theme music is by Partners in Rhyme.

Additional music: "Destination Venus" by Man or Astroman?

Out of the Vault- Batman/Superman Halloween Special

Okay, since I missed the Vault a couple of times this month, this here will be a special Halloween double-feature with the two biggest heroes in comics history--Batman and Superman--squaring off against scary monsters.

First up, a spooky two-parter from 1939, originally published in Detective Comics #31, reprinted in the Batman Super Spectacular in February 1973. The story has no actual title beyond Batman, interestingly enough. Gardner Fox is credited with the story. If you're familiar with Batman, you know that no one except Bob Kane received credit on any Batman story for the first twenty years of his existence. But the credit was added to the story in the reprint.

The story opens with this bit of narrative description:

The Batman--weird menace to all crime--at last meets an opponent worthy of his mettle. A strange creature, cowled like a monk, but possessing the powers of a Satan! A man whose powers are uncanny, whose brain is the product of years of intense study and seclusion!

No idea if that last sentence refers to the Batman or to the Monk. And that level of clarity will hold true throughout the story, sadly.

Batman rescues a man from a strange woman claiming to have been sent by the Master Monk. Batman pulls the guy up onto a telephone pole to keep him safe and says, "Remain until I give you leave to go."

Then he goes down to discover that the woman is his own fiancee, Julie Madison (Julie was his recurring love interest in those early pre-Robin days)! She awakes as if from a dream, and Batman takes her home (the guy up on the phone pole is forgotten and never heard from again--he may still be up there).

The next day, Bruce Wayne takes Julie to her doctor, who gets a strange intense look in his eye as he recommends Julie take an ocean voyage for her health "to Paris..and perhaps later, to Hungary-the land of history and werewolves." Ominous. Bruce buys Julie a ticket on a Lunar Lines steamship, but doesn't offer to go along.

Instead the Batman goes to his secret hangar (the Batcave not having been invented yet, but you'll have to read Movie Monday for that story) where he unveils two new weapons for use in his fight against crime--the Batgyro (precursor to the Batplane) and the Batarang!


Bruce jumps in the Batgyro and chases after Julie's ship, causing widespread panic among the people of Gotham as he flies overhead.


He looks like he's enjoying the panic below, doesn't he? Robin may have had the name, but Batman was the real dick.

Batman pays Julie a visit on the deck of the ocean liner, but the Monk suddenly appears and tries to hypnotize him. So Batman throws his Batarang at the Monk's head, breaking his concentration, and Batman leaps for the ladder to the Batgyro and gets away.

In Paris, Batman terrorizes the populace, searching for Julie, until he stumbles upon her bedroom one night. As he enters, though, he is attacked by a gorilla! Leaping out of the ape's way, Batman falls through a secret door into a net hanging over a huge dungeon! The Monk gloats and pulls a lever, lowering Batman into a pit of poison snakes!

Batarang to the rescue! Batman throws the Batarang, which not only turns off the lever, but also breaks the glass light fixture before returning to the Batman's hand. The Batman also catches a piece of falling glass. The Monk flips the switch again and Batman continues his descent, but is able to use the glass to cut through the ropes and escape the snakes.

Batman chases the Monk, but a cage drops over him and the gorilla is lowered into it by a rope. Batman, who 33 years later would kill a great white shark with his bare hands, bravely runs away.


He races to the waiting Batgyro and follows a car speeding "towards Hungary." He manages to stop the car and save Julie, the car's only occupant. "Poor kid!" says Batman.

In part 2, published in Detective #32, Batman is in Hungary and a stops a horse-drawn carriage which contains a female passenger named Dala. He takes her to his hotel and leaves her in Julie's room for the night. Later in the night, Dala exits the room, seemingly in a trance, with blood on her lips. Then she knocks Batman senseless and runs away.

Batman discovers Julie with bite marks on her neck, then chases through the woods after Dala. Batman catches her and accuses her of being an accomplice of the Monk, as well as a vampire. Dala offers to help Batman catch the Monk, but only if he promises to kill the mad hypnotist. "I'll be the judge of that," Batman says.

He takes off with Dala in the Batgyro toward the Lost Mountains of Cathala, but suddenly, a silver net drags the Batgyro down! The Monk appears, and Batman is hypnotized. Help! The Monk decides to take Batman back to his castle and toss him into the werewolf den (and what is it with the Monk's lack of imagination? Snake pit, ape cage, werewolf den: is there an animal he won't use for a death trap?) Dala insists that Julie witness the execution as well, so the Monk hynotically summons her, and we get a flash of nightgown cheesecake.

The Monk transforms into a wolf and summons a pack of seemingly normal wolves, then throws Batman into a pit with them. But as he's falling, the trance is broken and Batman can act freely once again. He gasses the wolves with a pellet from his utility belt, then tries to escape by lassoing something above the pit. He fails until he ties the rope to the batarang, which allows him to climb out easily. The Monk, having inexplicably decided not to watch the execution, is sleeping off the daylight in his coffin. So Batman melts down a silver statue into bullets and...


Well, that was a little anti-climactic. And you know, we never did find out what was up with that guy at the very beginning, or why some vampire in Hungary would be so obsessed with some random American chick anyway. Wow, Golden Age comics made absolutely no sense at all. Let's see if Superman's monster battle goes any better.

"Meet the Metropolis Monster" was published in Action Comics #415 in August 1972, written by Cary Bates and drawn by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. The story opens with a strange green-skinned man climbing up the side of the WGBS building, where Clark Kent is preparing for his nightly newscast.

The monster enters through the window and attacks Clark, ripping open his shirt to reveal his Superman costume and slamming him down onto his desk. So Superman responds in an appropriately heroic way: he kicks the monster out the window.


Fortunately, neither monster nor bystanders are hurt, and the monster takes off. Superman lets him go, so as not to cause greater destruction in a super-battle. Soon the monster is the subject of headlines, as well as visual comparisons to a certain famous movie monster with green skin and a flat head. The monster is spotted later with a blonde hostage. When Superman hunts for the monster, he finds instead a man in a futuristic jumpsuit who claims to be the scientist who created the monster. He's dying of a mysterious disease, and implores Superman to revive him after he is dead, so that he may stop his creation. Then he dies.

So Superman takes him to the Fortress of Solitude, where he builds a Kryptonian Revitalizer and, with much zapping, reanimates the corpse! When the hell did Superman learn to do that? Suddenly the monster bursts in and calls Superman a gullible idiot (that's not actually what he says, but he should). It can talk!

The monster is actually from another dimension, "the last survivor of a dying race of giants..." He discovers the chemical secret of life and decides to try it out by making a couple of people, a man and a woman. But because they apparently have neither the Twilight Zone nor ABC Afterschool Specials in his dimension...


Didn't anyone ever pull him aside and tell him such self-loathing is unbecoming of such an advanced race?

Anyway, it turns out the "scientist" Superman revived is actually one of the synthetic beings the alien created. And he's infected with the Protoplasmic Plague, a side-effect of the cell-creating chemical the alien used to make him. He sloughs off millions of giant cells a second, which all respond to his mental commands. Superman tries to stop him...


In the end, Superman wins easily by burying the humanoid under snow that he then freezes solid with his freeze breath. The alien scientist then takes off through the dimensional window with his blonde babe to make a new boyfriend for her before he dies.

So in the end, there was a real monster, even scarier than the seven-foot-tall, green-skinned red herring that created him. But I must say, that was anticlimactic as well. I mean, a monster story that turns into a science-fiction story about aliens! How Halloweeny is that?

Well, stay tuned, and I hope I have an answer for you later.

GIMPing Again

Sorry for the missed Big Video Wednesday. The new job has me exhausted and without the free time I had to pursue the old shows like I had. In the meantime, while I was off-line, I played with GIMP some more and came up with this holiday greeting.


The original model was from Met-Art (Nina B, NSFW!) which does some incredible nude photography. I'm using a (slightly) more explicit version for my desktop wallpaper (1024x768) and will send it it upon request.

Movie Monday - Batman, 1943 Chapters 3-6

Well, I'm finally back.

So here's the spoileriffic continuation of "Batman," the 1943 Columbia serial that marks Batman's first screen appearance. This may seem overboard, but you don't see a lot of information about this serial. When it is mentioned, it is usually dismissed as racist nonsense and no time is spent actually discussing it on its own terms. Yes, it is propagandistic, but not nearly as bad as the comics of the time, and no worse than your average Michael Moore film, except that Batman doesn't pretend to be a documentary. We're going to cover several chapters at a time here, so buckle up, because we'll be at this a while. But I hope it'll be entertaining.

At the end of Chapter 2, Batman was tightrope-walking a cable with Linda Page over his shoulder while an electrical current chased him like a slow-burning fuse. He fell from the cable. At the beginning of Chapter 3, "Mark of the Zombies," Batman catches his bat-rope and descends safely. The crooks speculate that Prince-Doctor Daka will be angry, but head thug Forster declares, "I'm not afraid of any squint-eye."

When the thugs report their failure to Daka, he is furious. "Batman is a rank amateur," he declares, not like the members of his League of the New Order (which sounds like a superhero boy band). He then decides to give Warren the zombie treatment. In one of his best lines of the entire serial, Daka says, "Resistance is useless, Warren. I suggest that you adopt an attitude of fatalistic resignation."

Then he lowers a scary-looking diving helmet thing over Warren's head and activates his equipment. There is much smoking and zapping and Warren is zombified.


Forster enters the hideout past the caveman guard and shows Daka a newspaper ad that basically says, "Found: one ray gun." Daka realizes its a trap set by Batman, but tells his men to show up an hour early to catch Batman by surprise. Daka orders them to use the newly-retrieved ray gun to then destroy a railroad bridge before a supply train crosses. He also gives them a bomb to use as backup.

At 9:00, the thugs arrive. They send one man to scout the area. Robin follows him and gets conked on the head. It should be noted here that Robin has some muscular legs. They're also kind of stumpy.


Robin chases the guy who hit him up to the roof while the other thugs go to claim the ray gun. There, Forster confronts Alfred in disguise, while Batman lurks unobtrusively outside the window.


Robin and his guy crash in through a skylight, and the fight is on. The Dynamic Duo are getting the worst of it, but Alfred picks up a dropped pistol, closes his eyes and fires blindly all around the room. The crooks flee, but not before Batman strips Forster's coat off with the map showing where they're to blow the train bridge.

After the crooks have fled, we get a pretty amusing dialogue exchange:

Alfred: How many did I kill?

Batman: Seven.

Alfred: But there were only four.

Robin: You killed three of them twice.

Batman and Robin examine the map and race to the train bridge, where they fight the thugs again. Batman suffers much cape trouble (a recurring feature of the fight scenes in this serial). Forster doesn't finish setting the charge before Batman interrupts him, and has to flee as the train is bearing down on them. One of the thugs throws a wrench that hits Batman in the head, and he falls on the tracks as the train approaches. Oh no!

Chapter 4, "Slaves of the Rising Sun," opens with Robin saving Batman and jumping into the water just before the train passes. The thugs believe that the duo have drowned. They're wrong, of course.

Daka happily feeds his pet alligators, Ojonojo (I swear the first time I watched this, I thought he said, "Mojo Jojo") and Sakosako, who live in a secret pit beneath his meeting room. He is about to throw Warren in as well when he is interrupted by the arrival of the boy band. Forster arrives and proudly announces the death of Batman. Daka is not pleased however. The train got through unscathed, and he still has no ray gun. He castigates Forster, who replies that he's sick of working for a Jap anyway. He knows who's going to win the war, and it's not going to be the New Order. Daka calls in a couple of really paunchy zombies...


But Forster shoots one, so Daka calls Warren off. Forster holds his gun on Daka and says he's leaving. Daka says that of course he can leave. "That's the kind of answer that fits the color of your skin!" Forster says and heads for the door. Then he falls into the alligator pit. Bye bye, Forster.

Linda Page calls Bruce Wayne and tells him that there's a new radium shipment coming in to the Gotham Foundation, and asks Bruce if he wants to come along with her to pick it up. Only she has to stop off along the way to see a mystic swami at 1120 Front Street who claims to have information about Warren. Bruce is suspicious and heads to see the swami first.

And what do you know? The Front Street swami is actually a front for Daka's gang. Ironic! Bruce knocks out the swami and takes his place. When Linda arrives, he tells her to leave quickly. Unfortunately, there's a thug waiting in the lobby who grabs her and knocks her out. Bruce, Dick and Alfred find Linda moments later, giving Alfred a chance to feel up Bruce's girlfriend.


The thugs take off in an armored car and Batman and Robin give chase. Batman jumps onto the roof of the armored car and uses the radium gun to blow a hole in the roof. Then he attacks the driver, who comes from the "saw the steering wheel back and forth like you're playing the tympani" school of driving. The armored car goes off a cliff. Yow!

In Chapter 5, "The Living Corpse," we see that Batman jumped out of the armored car just before it rolled off the cliff.


Meanwhile, Daka gets a call from a Japanese submarine, and we learn that his first name is Tito. Man, that boy band thing just won't go away, will it? The sub has a package for him that it will deliver at Smuggler's Rocks.

Back at stately Wayne Manor, Bruce gets a special coded letter. In his lab, he demonstrates for Alfred, Dick and Dick's crazy hair how to make the invisible message show up. It's a special assignment from Washington to guard an experimental plane (yes, another reminder that Batman is actually a government agent, not some crazed vigilante).


At Daka's place, the special package turns out to be a coffin. Inside is the body of a Japanese soldier. In his lab (which is much cooler than Batman's, cause even in the 40's, the Japanese apparently made cooler tech), Daka explains that the soldier is not dead. "This brave Son of Heaven is under hypnotic influence, or what is commonly known as a state of Animated Suspension." I can't tell if that line is ridiculously inept technobabble or insanely marvelous satire. It makes me happy either way.

Daka reanimates the soldier, who tells him to steal the experimental plane and fly it to Pelican Island. He pulls a button off his uniform and says that details are in there. Then he dies.

That's it? They had to ship a coffin via submarine from Japan for that? They couldn't send a letter?

So anyway, Bruce and Dick go undercover as airplane factory workers, communicating by radios hidden in their pockets (worst wartime plant security ever), while Daka zombifies two mechanics from the plant and tells them to steal the plane. The mechanics beat up the pilots and Robin (who seems to grow six inches taller during his fight scenes, BTW--apparently there were no stuntment the size of Douglas Croft) and take the plane, with Batman riding along. He tells Robin via radio that he's just going to ride along to see where they take the plane, then he promptly gets into a fight with the zombies as the Army shoots the plane down. Crash!

In Chapter 6, "Poison Peril," Batman survives the plane crash without a scratch. Lucky! He grabs the zombie headpiece off one of the mechanics (this is never followed up, BTW) and runs away before the soldiers arrive. Daka reports the failure to the submarine, and says they'll try to steal the plans to the plane instead, but then the Navy destroys the sub, so oh well. Daka orders one of his men to plant a secret microphone at Linda Page's place. Linda seems to have some connection to Batman, so maybe they'll learn his secret identity. When one of the henchmen speculates that maybe Linda's boyfriend, Bruce Wayne, is Batman, Daka says, "Don't be absurd."

Meanwhile, Linda calls Bruce to say that an old friend of theirs, Ken Colton, is in town looking for Martin Warren. Bruce visits Colton at Linda's place, and Colton pulls a chunk of pitchblende out of his pocket. You see, Colton has discovered a radium mine (is it safe to just walk around with radium ore in your pocket?). Colton, by the way, is played by Charles Middleton, better known as Ming the Merciless.



Daka needs to know the location to the radium mine, so he sends thugs to Colton's hotel room, but Batman and Robin appear and fight them off. The thugs flee, and Batman and Robin give chase down the fire escape, where Batman's cigarettes accidentally fall out of a secret pocket in his cape.



But the thugs escape. Bruce calls Colton the next day to see how he is, and Colton mentions he has gotten a call from Martin Warren, asking to meet him. Bruce, knowing Warren has disappeared, tells Colton he will investigate to make sure it's not a trap. Poor Alfred gets pressed into service again, disguised as Colton this time. The thugs threaten to drop him in a vat of acid if he doesn't tell them where the mine is, and when that doesn't work, they try the age-old torture method of yanking his beard, which comes off. He's a phony! Batman and Robin attack (again) and get their asses pounded (again), though at one point, one of the thugs attempts the curious move of putting a chair in Batman's way, as if that will block his punches or something.

Stray bullets pierce the acid tank, and wires are ripped off the wall, and when the electricity gets into the acid, there's one huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of an explosion!

Whew! Let's take a break, shall we? See you next week with Chapter 7, "The Phoney Doctor."

(You can read the summary of the first two chapters here)

(Read the summary of chapters 7-10 here)

Hiatus

I'm going to be off-line for a few days at least, so no Vault this week, and probably no Movie Monday either.

Disconcerting Image of the Day

via Lileks here:

The kiss is okay, but the eyes in the background creep me out.