Something new-ish: a more recent post-apocalyptic story where giant insects and other critters help the protagonist learn something about himself.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
Something old: an early eighties Sci-Fi story where imaginary androids and one of the weirdest-looking monsters ever created (by one of the best stop motion animators in the world!) help the protagonist learn something about himself.
This week, I covered a teens versus aliens cult film with style, substance, and a few before-they-were-famous actors.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
And on the vintage side, I also wrote about a bit of Mexican Gothic with a musical twist.
This month’s Creature Classic brings us back to the classic British Sci-Fi trilogy for a classic story of 1950s paranoia.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
I also wrote about something that was not a sequel, but an alternative take on something I wrote about before: an anime rendition of an Osamu Tezuka-created giant robot vs. monsters series.
I want to remind everyone that in a pre-Star Wars time, the closest thing there was to a kid-friendly multimedia Sci-Fi franchise was the Planet of the Apes series—it’s the one that got the toys, the lunchboxes, and yes, the Saturday morning cartoon—which is certainly incredible to think about considering the oftentimes heavy content of those movies. I guess the ape make-up wasn’t just good enough to hide the actors, but also the increasingly bleak sentiment about human civilization! Regardless, kids did in fact go ape for the Apes, and after the movies were exhausted by the mid-seventies, and a live action TV series fizzled, the final attempt to keep this monkey business going was in animated form. In this, the month of Ape-ril, and with a new movie in this deathless series weeks away, it feels like as appropriate a time as ever to see what those maniacs blew up in cartoon form.
Airing thirteen episodes in the fall of 1975 on NBC, and produced by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, the studio co-founded by major Warner Bros. animation director Friz Freleng and that made its bones on Pink Panther cartoons, the most surprising thing about Return to the Planet of the Apes is its storytelling ambitions, especially when you consider when it was made. With just how formulaic most television cartoons were in the seventies, the fact that this series is making a genuine attempt at a long form serialized plot makes it stand out immediately—that’s something that was barely happening a decade or two later, and it honestly feels well ahead of its time. It’s rather unfortunate, then, that its ambitions still had to contend with all the usual limitations of seventies animation.
This week, we travel back to 2009 for a mixture of Frankenstein mad science and familial trauma.
Welcome back to MonsterLand! The first new post of the year tackles the recent cinematic reboot of one of the pillars of kaijudom, which you may be familiar with if you’ve been reading this site for a while.
Tis the season for jolly primates, and first out the gate is a movie that may or not actually feature a gorilla, but does have a bride.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
Last week also saw the latest in the Doctor Who post series, just in time to miss the actual sixtieth anniversary day, covering a story about WWII and mutant vampires and vikings and other things.
For several years now, I’ve been fascinated with the TV series Prisoners of Gravity, a Speculative Fiction-focused, newsmagazine-style program that ran from 1989 to 1994 on TVO, the public, education-focused broadcaster in the province of Ontario. I didn’t live in Ontario, so I didn’t see it in its original context—I know I saw it on TV at least once, potentially on the (Canadian) Discovery Channel in the mid-to-late nineties, which was enough to lock into my memory so that when I started discovering episodes of it uploaded to Youtube within the last decade or so, I had some familiarity with what it was. Aside from covering a subject I am already close to, the series plays into several personal obsession points of mine: it sits at a very particular juncture point in the history of SF, and acts as a time capsule of what the genre and the community looked like at the time; it also brings a specifically literary-focused brand of history and analysis to a slightly larger audience than normal, in maybe one of the only instances of this kind of critical discussion about the genre(s) being aired on television. It is truly a unicorn, an effective and entertaining showcase of what SF was and is, and represents a section of the fandom that rarely gets a voice as loud as even a local public television station.
To close out on the month of October and Halloween season, I wrote about one of the Big Ones, and pondered its place within the canon of Universal Monsters.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
There’s also this month’s Doctor Who post, which goes to the eighties to learn about demonic aliens and the history of England.
The latest movie post covers a cult Sci-Fi/Horror film which turned out to be very influential on both genres.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
Meanwhile, Monster Multimedia tracks the thirteen year run of mystery monster recreations on the Robert Stack-hosted non-fiction series.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 