Todd’s Serial Blog

The Monster and the Ape DVD release from Cheezy Flicks has been nothing but a publicity nightmare for the company.  If you go to Amazon it had two release dates, the first one shows feed back that people that bought it only got the first disc of a two disc release.  The second release date saw the DVD go immediately into back order before anyone had even ordered it, with no idea when it will be in stock, if ever (which was my experience at Barnes and Noble).  People who have bought it directly from the company have complained online about the discs being scratched and damaged, somee to point of being unable to play and having to be sent back for replacement copies.  And if that weren’t bad enough dvdtalk.com did a review of the release this past weekend and it was a harsh critique of the DVD’s audio and video presentation, the term muddy came up a few times.  This is sad as the company was finally getting good at putting out serial DVD’s.  While King of the Rocketmen and Jesse James Rides Again had some issues, mostly in footage getting repeated and in the case of Jesse James some odd picture quality in the later chapters (there was kind of a wavy film over it), but there next two releases G-men vs. the Black Dragon and Zomibies of the Stratosphere were great, Zombies was an extremely sharp print.  Unfortunately just when the company seemed to get rolling, The Monster and the Ape fiasco has set them back an incalculable amount with serial fans. It’s great that they were trying to branch out by offering  titles not readily available, but maybe they should stick to Republic offerings from now on.

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Over on the Yahoo Cliffhanger message board they are discussing the Katzman Superman serials.  After the usual complaints about the cheap animation used to make Superman fly, someone brought up an interesting point.  Animation isn’t really that cheap to do.  He has a point.  As much as we fans like to whine about the cheapness of Jungle Sam’s serials, putting animation on a live action film isn’t that cheap or quick a process.  Now true, Katzman probably used animators that were on the Columbia payroll to ease his budget constraints, and the drawings were not that painstakingly detailed.  He probably could have imitated the Republic method for about the same cost if not less, but I’ve often wondered if the studio had a copyright on the technique and might have raised a legal issue if he had. So his use of animation was an  inventive way to handle a difficult special effect that was essential to the project, and could even be seen as an artistic choice to draw a stylistic connection with the character’s comic book origins……..nah!  This is after all the same man who thought it was a good idea to debut Roy Orbison in a comedy western where his guitar doubled as a rifle. Artistic yearnings were not in the man’s nature.  Animation was more than likely just the most economical way he could find to keep the serial on budget.

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So I’m watching the new VCI release of Red Barry and I notice something that had escaped me during my previous viewings, and had nothing to do with the quality of the picture on my previous copy.  It finally struck me that the two Russian agents working for former Princess Natalia, who wear turtle neck shirts with their suits instead of the usual button down shirt and tie, is the exact look David McCallum had as Illya Kuriakin on The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  Which brings up a question.  Was this affectation a common look for Eastern Block Europeans that most people never noticed or just an odd coincidence that McCallum picked this look for his character?

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