Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Confessions of a Monster Boomer, Part Deux

Monster Boomer" is term that I first started seeing in the early 90s, when David J. Skal's book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, was published. It's an exceptional work, and must reading for anyone who's ever wondered why about the place monsters in American culture, and how they went from scary to cuddly, but I'm being longwinded enough without attempting to review it, so here's a link. http://www.monstershow.net/work2.htm

I'll just say that I read it with a shock of recognition. Suddenly, I knew who and what I was. Not just a baby boomer, not a post-hippy or pre-punk, but a Monster Boomer!

The Monster Boom is generally agreed to have begun in 1957, when the first "Shock Theater" package of old horror and science fiction movies was syndicated on American television. The next year saw the debut of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

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In 1961 the first Aurora model kit of Frankenstein's monster hit American toy and hobby stores. It may not have had the impact of the hula hoop or the frisbee, but was a niche market sensation.

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I joined the great American horror show around 1964, when I was six years old . For me, it was the outgrowth of my love of reptiles and dinosaurs. I'd noticed that the Aurora Model Kits included something called The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and while I later figured out that he was meant to be some kind of fish-man, I originally thought of him as reptilian.

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And there was this dinosaur called Godzilla, who was clearly meant to be some kind of fire-breathing combination of a t-rex and a stegosaurus.

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Let me stress this point. I'd never seen either the Godzilla or The Creature on TV, or on the big screen. I first knew them exclusively as model kits in the toy section of Roses Department Store at Eutaw Shopping Center in Fayetteville, NC. Of course, I had to have them. But once I'd assembled and painted them (with my father's patient help), I started to get interested in their more humanoid friends. Who was this character called Frankenstein? (I hadn't yet learned that was the name of the doctor who created him, not the monster.) Was he some kind of robot, or what? What was a wolf-man? Who was this guy in a cape whose name I kept mispronouncing as Dragula? (So did all the other kids, just as we later called the big green comic book character "The Huck" rather than The Hulk!)

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I learned about them from the information sheets in the model kits, and was fascinated. And then I traded Joey Miller a jar full of leeches I'd gathered in the creek for a tattered back issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, mainly because it had what appeared to be an even cooler giant dinosaur than Godzilla on the cover. It was the early 1960s British Godzilla imitation Gorgo, and for some reason I really liked the little webbed flaps on his head. This famous painting, by the great Basil Gogos, made Gorgo look much more fearsome and lifelike than he actually does in the film of the same name, something which was true of most of the covers that Gogos did for FM:

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And that was my downfall, or perhaps, my salvation. Famous Monsters was going to become my Bible (or maybe my Necronomicon). It was in that magazine that I learned about Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I often knew the stories of famous monster movies years before I ever saw them.

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And so I began collecting. Tons of stuff, none of which I have any more, sadly. The toy section at Roses and at Woolworths was full of monster related items. Monster dolls. Monster board games. Monster drinking glasses. Monster trading cards. I had my parents buy it all for me. My room became as dedicated to monsters as it had been to dinosaurs and reptiles.

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I used my allowance to buy the same model kits over and over again, because they'd break, or I'd burn them with gasoline, and then I'd want to build them again. I got a bit tired of the old favorites, and branched out to new found ones like The Bride of Frankenstein. I loved the tiny bits of lab equipment I had to assemble with her model, and was excited by the feminine curves of her body under its plastic bandages.

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I even owned the very rare Chamber of Horrors guillotine, with the head that really came off and fell into the basket when the blade came down.

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Although I didn't know it, I was part of a thriving "monster kid" (as it's sometimes called now) subculture, in which boys (never, as far I knew, any girls) became obsessed with the same movie icons that had terrified their parents. Before long, I wasn't just collecting the models and toys; I was watching the movies, every chance I got. I'd stay up late on Friday night to watch Shock Theater (hosted by Dr. Paul Bearer) at midnight on Channel 8, then somehow manage to get up early on Saturday for Channel 6's Sunrise Theater, which also showcased classic (and some not so classic) 1930s and 1940s film starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr.. Weekdays, I'd rush home from school in order to see Dialing for Dollars, a syndicated film package (in which the movies were interrupted by the host calling up viewers to offer them cash prizes, not that I cared about this) that featured more recent stuff; Godzilla and Gorgo and Rodan, American giant insects and alien invaders from the 1950s, and early 1960s Eurohorror, some of it surprisingly bloody.

I lived, breathed, ate, slept and dreamed monsters. I spent a good portion of each and every day drawing them. My school notebooks and textbooks soon became covered with doodles like this:

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My dad eventually got tired of me always asking him if there was a new issue of Famous Monsters at the local newsstand. One birthday, he gave me a subscription to Boy's Life, Mad Magazine and Famous Monsters of Filmland. I read them all avidly, but it was Famous Monsters that had a special place in my heart. Until a few years later, when I discovered Castle of Frankenstein.

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This magazine was from a competing publisher. Future director Joe Dante (THE HOWLING, GREMLINS) was one of the regular writers. It had tinier print than Famous Monsters, and a LOT more of it – it was just jam-packed with articles and features and columns. It dared to be critical and esoteric and to suggest that some of the movies it covered actually sucked. It featured nudity, both in comic book style drawings of sorceresses and femme fatales, and in still photographs from spicy European films. And in a move that alienated some of its readership, it moved from monsters into political commentary, protesting the Vietnam War and attacking Johnson and Nixon. It was my first exposure to politics. I felt subversive reading it, growing up in flag-waving army town where hippies generally didn't dare set foot (you usually had to go to Chapel Hill and Greensboro to see them).

Few things made me as happy as the day the new issue of CoF arrived in the mail. There's almost nothing I can compare it to now, almost nothing that's redolent of the same kind of joy and excitement. There's something pure in that kind of expectation and happiness, something that you can never recapture. I suppose if I'd been 10 years old, rather than 22, when I stood in line for the first showing of The Empire Strikes Back in Chapel Hill, I might have felt something similar. For a few years in the mid-90s, when I first discovered the films of Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, and would make road trips with equally obsessed friends to see them as the now sadly defunct Asian-American film festival in Durham, NC, I felt something similar. But mostly, no, it's gone, like one of those highs one can never have in quite the same way again, like the first time one falls in love, or is allowed to put one's hand under a bra, or does heroin.

Confessions of a Monster Boomer, Part One

About a decade ago, I realized I had my own socio-cultural-generational niche. I'd long accepted my status as nerd and a geek, even before I knew those actual words. But my geekiness hadn't seemed pegged to a particular generation. Despite having some vivid memories of both the 60s and the 70s, I'd never associated myself with any of either decade's major cultural trends. Indeed, for much of my early life I was perpetually out of the loop, and even when genuinely cool (as opposed to merely trendy) stuff was part of the zeitgeist, I tended not to catch up with until years later.

I was aware of the Beatles as early as 1965, and can remember being seven years old and arguing with a neighbor kid because I thought their haircuts meant they were girls. But I don't think I voluntarily listened to them until 1974, when I caught Yellow Submarine on the ABC Movie of the Week and was bowled over by "Eleanor Rigby." In 1966, when I was eight years old, I thought that Bruce Lee's Kato on The Green Hornet was the biggest badass on T.V., but five years later, I didn't go to see Fists of Fury in the theater, nor see any Bruce Lee movie until 1980, almost a decade after he'd died. When my fellow high school seniors were grooving to KISS, I was discovering Bob Dylan (I'd sing "It's All Right, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" while walking to school). I got my second ever hard-on over a black woman (the first having been Lt. Uhura) upon finding a Pam Grier pictorial in some second-string skin magazine (probably Gallery) in 1974, but I didn't see Ms. Grier's specRACKular talents on display in Coffy and Foxy Brown until I was working at a video store in the 80s. I wasn't aware of Gordon Lau, the Master Killer himself (and later Pai Mei in Kill Bill) until the mid-90s, although a bunch of his 70s Kung Fu films had played in downtown Fayetteville theaters (where I'd have been scared shitless to have sat amongst the G.I.s and the pimps, an audience I'd enjoy rubbing elbows with now). I knew that Shaft was the slick private dick who was a sex machine to all the chicks, but had only seen him in his short-lived, watered-down TV show until I started watching Blaxpoitation movies in the early days of homevideo. And so on.

Oh, I wasn't out of EVERY cultural loop. I saw most of the episodes of Star Trek in their original run, as it became a ritual for my father and me, but it wasn't really something I shared with my gradeschool friends. Maybe if I'd been, say 12, rather than 8, when it first aired, I might have later become a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, but while I loved the show, I didn't worship it, it wasn't part of my interior life. Same thing with The Avengers and The Prisoner, both of which I saw during their initial American network TV runs and loved, but which didn't effect me quite the way they would have if I'd been slightly older.

And yes, speaking of the word "older, I am indeed quite the remarkably well preserved fossil.. Cue the du rigeur exclamations of "I can't believe how young you look!"

I make jokes about that now, but it was a subject I avoided when I first got on MySpace (and before that, on Friendster). At that time, I still tried to think of myself as being in my EARLY 40s and hid my real age by claiming to be 100 years old. I wasn't trying very hard to fool anyone, but for some I was less comfortable about admitting that I was 44 than I saying that I'm 48. Maybe the fact that some women in their early 30s (and even a few in their late 20s) seem to be more amused and intrigued than dismayed by my age is part of my coming to terms with it. Or maybe it's that I've actually met some forty-something women whom (unlike the ones I used to meet on dating sites) I'm genuinely attracted to (indeed, the last two Greensboro women I made overt passes at were, respectively, 41 and 43 years old, although one of them immediately shot me down in favor of some dreary ageing hippie, while the other preferred to play the tease rather than actually go out with me).

So, yes, just like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, I grow old, I grow old, But while I may not wear my trousers rolled, I remember a lot of things that many of you don't. I can remember when Southern cities actually had downtowns, and one saw first-run movies in downtown theaters, rather than at malls or multiplexes. Many of those theaters had balconies, and in their concession stands, they sold little plastic bottles of orange soda that were shaped like oranges, with built-in straws (what the Hell were those things called, anyway?) I can remember when one could see freaks and fake monsters and "educational" sex-oriented slideshows and big-titted strippers at the sleazy old-school NC State Fair (I wrote one of my best old blogs about this). I can remember eating at Woolworth lunch counters, and ordering chocolate Sundays and sodas at Eckerds, and buying comic books for 12 cents from spinning metal racks at Rexall and 7-11.

I've written elsewhere and in this blog about Doctor in the Butt, the weird game we played at Glendale Acres Elementary School at recess. One thing that strikes me about it now that seems almost as alien as the fact that we were merrily putting pebbles and pill-bugs up each other's asses is that we were COMPLETELY UNSUPERVISED. Our school was beside a patch of woods, and nobody watched us at recess to make sure we didn't wander into those woods. I lived in a neighborhood about six blocks away from the school, and other than the one crossing guard, we didn't see any adults from the time we left our houses until we stepped in the classroom. And part of that five-days-a-week journey took use behind a church and down a dirt path through a patch of woods. Nobody thought that was strange.

Until 7th grade, meeting black kids were something that happened at other schools. We weren't entirely whitebread, in that some of the most popular boys and girls at Glendale Acres were of Lebanese ancestry (there's actually a long tradition of Lebanese families – just Christian ones, of course – living in the American South, my kung fu teacher Dennis Makool being a prime example of a fifty-something Lebanese-American Baptist good ole boy), and there were some Asian kids, and the first girl whose newly developed boobs I can remember staring at was Josephine Hoffman, whom nobody picked on for being Jewish. But we didn't have any "coloreds," as we called them, although I met (and got beat up by) plenty of them once I was old enough to be bussed off to the Seventh Grade. I could go on, but I suppose that's really a subject for another essay.

So, why I am I calling this blog "Confessions of a Monster Boomer" instead of "Confessions of a Deceptively Youthful Rake Who's Really an Old Fuck?" Like the fate of Han Solo, frozen in his cozy Carbonite, the answer is . . .

To Be Continued.