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AWESOME-tober-fest 2014: Fangoria Scream Great #1 – The Incredible Melting Man (1983)

Posted in Fangoria, Genres, horror, magazine, monsters, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, zombies with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2014, Fangoria, Halloween, holiday, magazine, magazines, monsters, movies, zombies on September 30, 2014 by Paxton

Fangoria was known for it’s pull-out posters. These posters featured screen grabs from popular horror movies. Fangoria labeled the posters Scream Greats. However, these pull-out posters weren’t added to the magazine until around the third year of the magazine’s existence.

Since I showed you the first ever Fangoria cover yesterday, let’s continue that “firsts” theme with the first ever Scream Great pull-out poster. Below is Scream Great #1 from Fangoria #26 way back in 1983. This first poster featured an image from 1977’s The Incredible Melting Man.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2014: Fangoria #1 – 25 years of Godzilla (1979)

Posted in Fangoria, Genres, Halloween, holiday, horror, magazine, monsters, movies, nostalgia, pop culture with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2014, Fangoria, Godzilla, Halloween, holiday, horror, magazine, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, vintage on September 29, 2014 by Paxton

AWESOME-tober-fest 2014 begins!

Let’s begin this year’s AWESOME-tober-fest Fangoria celebration with a quick look at the cover to the very first issue of Fangoria from 1979.

As you can see, there was a feature about the history of Godzilla movies up to that point (25 YEARS!). I scanned in that article, so if you want to read it, here is page 1 on my Flickr stream. Just click to the right to continue through the article’s 8 pages.

There were two pretty awesome Godzilla pin-ups that came with the article. The first is an awesome painting featuring Godzilla battling Megalon on the top of the Twin Towers which I thought has to be an homage to the 1976 King Kong remake with Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin which featured a poster with Kong astride the same Twin Towers. However, if you read the article, the below poster was designed for the 1973 Godzilla vs Megalon movie. And it features a scene that never appeared in said movie. I love this poster.

This second pin-up is a better look at the Godzilla painting that was used on the cover.

See you guys tomorrow for more, gory goodness from my favorite issues of Fangoria magazine.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2014 is coming!

Posted in Halloween, magazine, nostalgia, pop culture with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2014, Fangoria, Halloween, holiday, magazine, magazines, nostalgia on September 4, 2014 by Paxton

It’s the first week in September! Which means we are now officially 1 month from October 1st, which is the beginning of my annual AWESOME-tober-fest Halloween celebration. Needless to say I am hip deep in preparations for this year’s festivities.

Technically, this is my EIGHTH year doing a Halloween celebration as I started in 2007 with a few posts during the month of October. However, the daily AWESOME-tober-fest as you’ve come to know it wasn’t really born until 2009 when I did Frankenstein. Which means this is my sixth year of doing the full blown AWESOME-tober-fest celebration.

Since Frankenstein in 2009 I’ve covered; wolf men, vampires, movie maniacs and then zombies. My original plan was to do ghosts as my theme this year, but you know what, I thought it was high time I paid special attention to one thing that really had an effect on me in my high school days. And it crosses all these boundaries. This year I want to focus on Fangoria magazine.

I’ve used scans from old Fangoria magazines throughout each year of AWESOME-tober-fest, but this year I’m going to be doing an entire month of only Fangoria goodness featuring covers, articles, ads, pictures, Scream Greats movie posters, the Video Eye of Dr Cyclops and the Nightmare Library.

Video Eye of Dr Cyclops
Nightmare Library

I’ve got a stack of magazines and I’m going to comb through them all and bring you some of my favorite content from all of my favorite issues of horror’s greatest magazine.

And, as a bonus, every Friday in October is going to be Fangoria Movie Friday. So it’s not just all scanned magazine content I’m going to review old B-horror movies that were featured in 5 of my favorite issues of Fangoria. These won’t be the A-listers like a Nightmare on Elm Street or a Friday the 13th. I’m talking something more along the lines of The Reanimator (which I reviewed last year). I’m looking forward to those reviews because I’ve picked 5 movies (one for each Friday in October) that I’ve never seen before but have always wanted to watch. And the movie will definitely have been featured in some way in an issue of Fangoria. It should be a lot of fun.

So gird your loins, ladies and gents, and head back here on Oct 1 and, you know what, that’s a Wednesday, I’m making an executive decision, AWESOME-tober-fest 2014 will start two days earlier on Monday Sep 29. Holy crap, I’m starting AWESOME-tober-fest in September! I hope I don’t get cited by the Halloween police. The staff here at the blog just looked at me with murder in their eyes. Oh well, hopefully I’ll see you back here at the end of the month!

And, as always, I’ll be a part of the giant Countdown to Halloween celebration as well.

Check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more information on how you, too, can join in on the fun.

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Vintage ads for official movie magazines from the 80s

Posted in advertising, Fangoria, magazine, movies, nostalgia, pop culture with tags Fangoria, magazine, magazines, movies, nostalgia, pop culture on August 16, 2013 by Paxton

I’ve talked about movie magazines before. As a matter of fact, back in 2010 I took a look at the Back to the Future souvenir magazine. I love official movie magazines and I have a bunch of them. These magazines were the original movie supplemental material. We didn’t have DVDs and VHS tapes didn’t normally add anything extra (some did, but it was rare). I remember seeing ads for these magazines all over my favorite magazines. I’d fill out the form and select the ones I wanted as a wish list. Just hoping that someday I’d be allowed to order a Rambo or Star Trek movie magazine through the mail.

So, I was perusing through my old Fangoria magazines recently and found a couple of these movie magazine ads. They show a ton of the magazines and it’s great to see some of the covers. So on this lazy Friday, I thought I’d show you this 80s vintage goodness.

This first ad is from 1986.

I love how the magazines are spread out like you took the pile and threw them on the table. Amazing layout. There’s that amazing Rambo magazine. They also have Rocky II, Rocky III and Rocky IV magazines. As a matter of fact there are THREE Rocky IV magazines. AND, Stallone gets a “Best Of” magazine. Damn, he was at the height of his popularity here. As for all the Rocky IV magazines, when a movie was popular enough, it would not only get an official movie magazine, it would also get an official poster magazine and an official “movie book”. I put that last one in quotes because even though it’s called a book it was still a magazine, just with more content and glossier, color pages.

You can see some of the covers on this ad are for the poster magazines (Star Trek III, Rocky II for example). Some of the other ones pictured that I think look cool include the A View to a Kill as well as The Explorers. Take a look at the list in the yellow box at the bottom and there are listed several magazines that aren’t pictured. Annie, Superman III, High Road to China, SF Superheroes, TV Superheroes, Joanie Loves Chachi and Conan the Destroyer. I would buy every single one of these magazines today.

If I were to have ordered every magazine in this ad back in the day it would have set me back $75.35. Plus $24.90 for shipping. That’s $100.25 (incl shipping) for 26 different magazines. Which is about $3.85 each. NOT BAD. It would cost well over that now to track this mess down on eBay and trader sites.

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Superman Week 2013: The Superman the Movie magazine (1979)

Posted in comic books, movies, Superman with tags Christopher Reeve, comic books, DC Comics, magazine, movies, pop culture, Superman, Superman Week on June 17, 2013 by Paxton

So the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, made it’s theatrical debut on Friday. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to do another Superman Week. I convinced CT over at Nerd Lunch and Robert over at To The Escape Hatch to join along. So leap in a single bound over to those wonderful blogs and see what Superman content they are offering up this week.

As for me, today I’m going to start off this year’s Superman Week with a look at the special souvenir magazine DC released for Superman the Movie.

This particular magazine was released by DC in tabloid size, so the thing is gi-normous. It’s too big for my scanner, in fact. So I had to take some pics with my camera and I’ll just have to show you those. Click any of the images to see them BIGGER on Flickr.

These are the front and inside covers of the magazine. Nice, glossy pages. I especially like the photo montage on the inside cover with the movie-stylized “S” in the middle. It helps that there’s an awesome pic of the bikini-clad Valerie Perrine in the montage.

Here’s a nice pic of Marlon Brando as Jor-El. What this magazine does well is to provide information from the movie and then provide information from the comic to compare it to. It even includes artwork from the comics. This particular section is talking about Krypton and comparing the different versions from the movie and the comic books.

In the Krypton section we get some more info on the three Kryptonian Judges who sentence Zod to the Phantom Zone. We also see a pic of a deleted scene involving the three judges dispatching a Kryptonian “executioner” to stop Jor-El from launching the rocket with his son (bottom of page). Here’s a closer look at that oddly dressed “executioner”.

Just before filming began on the movie, DC Comics had a contest called The Great Superman Movie Contest. DC asked kids to spell out words by cutting out letters from their comics (yes, they were encouraging kids to DESTROY THEIR COMICS…it was the 70s). Two winners got a cameo in the movie. The ad for the contest appeared in DC comics in 1977. This is what one of the ads looked like.

Below is a page in the movie magazine that shows pictures of Christopher Reeve and the then-president of DC Comics sorting through contest entries trying to pick the winners. The eventual winners are shown in the bottom picture looking at an issue of Superman. The two boys would cameo in the Smallville football scene with the teenage Clark Kent.