Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 186: Tom Jung and the iconic 'Plan 9' poster

It turns out that this familiar poster was created by a prolific and successful artist.

In Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), the title character (Johnny Depp) is so eager to direct an upcoming biopic of Christine Jorgensen that he visits the headquarters of a hole-in-the-wall studio called Screen Classics and talks to the film's producer, George Weiss (Mike Starr). Weiss tells Eddie that the film will have to be fictionalized, since he doesn't have the rights to Christine Jorgensen's life, but he's going forward with the project anyway.

"Is there a script?" Eddie asks.

"Fuck no," Weiss replies. "But there's a poster."

With that, he holds up a one-sheet featuring a half-man, half-woman and the provocative title I Changed My Sex, cheerfully adding that the film "opens in nine weeks in Tulsa."

Is this Ed Wood's most famous poster?

The scene illustrates the importance that posters have had in selling films, both big and small, for decades. Who can forget the iconic posters for Jaws (1975), Halloween (1978), Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Jurassic Park (1993)? Movie posters are a lot like movie trailers: pretty much every theatrically-released film gets them, regardless of genre, and they promise thrills and excitement that the movies themselves can't always deliver. Because they're so collectable, movie posters have been remarkably long-lived for something that's supposed to be ephemeral. Occasionally in my research, I've found film posters that have survived even when the films themselves haven't!

So far, I've not written a lot about the posters that advertised Ed Wood's movies, even though these were a constant in his career from the 1950s to the 1970s and beyond. Let's change that today, shall we? If I were to pick out the single best-known poster used to advertise one of Eddie's movies, I'd probably choose the one-sheet for Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). If you're a Wood fan, you've seen this one countless times—the grim-faced astronaut with his head encased in a fishbowl, the shadowy gravediggers, the cloaked figure menacing a man in a tunic, the spaceships soaring overhead, and even Vampira herself in a strapless, sleeveless red cocktail dress better suited to Jessica Rabbit. It's a poster that raises many questions, namely: "What the hell kind of movie is this, anyway?"

Ed Wood's most famous film premiered under its original title, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, on March 15, 1957 at the long-since-demolished Carlton Theatre in Los Angeles, but it didn't achieve any kind of meaningful release until 1959, when it was picked up by the Hal Roach-owned Distributors Corporation of America (DCA), retitled Plan 9 from Outer Space, and shipped out to unsuspecting theaters across America. That's also when the film acquired its iconic poster.

Legendary poster artist Tom Jung.

You must admit, Plan 9 is a tough assignment for any poster artist. After all, the film is an unlikely combination of space age sci-fi and Gothic horror, pieced together from random scraps of footage into a barely coherent story. It's the cinematic equivalent of a crazy quilt. How do you go about summarizing it on a poster? Which elements of the movie do you emphasize? 

To create advertising art for Plan 9—not just posters but pressbooks and print ads as well—DCA contracted with a New York firm called Ben Adler Advertising Services, which also helped market such independent films as The 400 Blows (1959), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Go, Johnny, Go! (1959), and a 1956 rerelease of the dialogue-free thriller Dementia (1955) called Daughter of Horror. The task of designing a poster for Plan 9 from Outer Space fell to a young artist from Boston named Thomas "Tom" Jung, whose specialty was advertising foreign films in a way that would appeal to American audiences. Tom's birth year is usually given as 1942, but that seems unlikely, since he would have only been 17 years old at the time of Plan 9's nationwide release. Before working for Ben Adler, Tom had already studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and served in the U.S. Army. Did he do all that as an adolescent? My assumption is that he was actually born a few years earlier but gave his birth year as 1942 for personal or professional reasons.

Whenever he was born, Tom Jung had an astonishing career. In the 1960s, he worked for MGM and helped design posters for such prestigious films as Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Grand Prix (1966). Perhaps his most iconic work from this era, however, came in 1967 when MGM reissued Gone with the Wind (1939) in a stereophonic 70mm edition. Tom sketched the concept art for the new poster, which was ultimately illustrated by another artist, Howard Terpning. The 1967 artwork, with Clark Gable cradling Vivien Leigh in his arms against a backdrop of flames, is so closely associated with GWTW that I had no idea it wasn't part of the film's original advertising campaign.

In 1967, Gone with the Wind was reissued with this iconic artwork.

Tom Jung kept designing memorable film posters throughout the 1960s and '70s. One of his specialties was creating one-sheets for Steve McQueen movies like Papillon (1973) and Le Mans (1971). ("Steve represented, at that time, a gut of defiance that any person could identify with," the artist mused.) He also worked on a James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Even with all these accomplishments, however, his biggest career milestone was still to come!

In 1977, while working as a freelance artist, Tom Jung was selected by 20th Century Fox to create a poster for Star Wars (1977). This ubiquitous one-sheet—with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) hoisting his lightsaber aloft and forming a giant white cross in the sky, while Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) shows plenty of thigh and the ghostly image of Darth Vader (David Prowse) looms large in the background—is simply one of the most recognizable pieces of advertising artwork ever created for a motion picture. I've seen it on countless pieces of merchandise and even airbrushed on the sides of vans. 

While Jung designed and executed the artwork himself, he originally had fellow artist Frank Frazetta in mind with his concept art, and it's not difficult to see the influence of Frazetta here. Compare Tom's Star Wars poster with Frank's strikingly similar poster for National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

 A detail from Tom Jung's famous Star Wars artwork.

Side by side: Plan 9 and Star Wars.

As an Ed Wood fan, however, what I see are the numerous parallels between the Plan 9 poster and the Star Wars poster. Here are the science-fiction films widely touted as the nadir and zenith of the genre, yet their posters employ many of the same devices. Look, for instance, at the jet-like spaceships in the upper right corner of the Plan 9 poster. They're echoed by a whole fleet of such ships on the left side of the Star Wars poster. 

Jung also knew to employ an element of sex appeal into his work, even though neither Plan 9 nor Star Wars is particularly erotic. On these posters, Princess Leia fulfills essentially the same function in 1977 that Vampira had in 1959. Even the positioning of their arms is similar. And, obviously, special emphasis is given to the women's legs and breasts. Supposedly, Tom Jung's own wife served as the model for Leia. Did she also model for Vampira? The two women have remarkably similar bodies in these posters. The Plan 9 poster does not depict Vampira's ridiculously tiny waist.

The single largest element of the Star Wars poster is the helmeted head of Darth Vader. Notice that Vader is not staring directly at us, the audience, nor is he looking at any of the other figures on the poster. Instead, he is gazing off to the side, like someone posing thoughtfully for a yearbook photo. The single largest element of the Plan 9 poster is the helmeted head of our unnamed astronaut. He, too, is gazing off at some point in the distance. I don't know if this figure is supposed to represent heroic human Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) or misguided alien Eros (Dudley Manlove). Neither wears a space helmet in the film.

The Star Wars poster is Tom Jung's most famous creation, but it was hardly the end of his career. He went on to create posters for such films as The Lord of the Rings (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Raging Bull (1980), The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Right Stuff (1984), and Weird Science (1985). Basically, if you attended any movies in the 1980s, you saw Tom's work. In the '90s and 2000s, he switched gears and became a storyboard artist. His credits there are likewise vast: the Eddie Murphy comedies Doctor Doolittle (1998) and Nutty Professor II (2000), the first two Stuart Little movies (1999-2002), Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), Scooby Doo 2 (2004), Disturbia (2007), Blades of Glory (2007), and many more.

Tom Jung seems to be enjoying a well-deserved retirement in 2024, his most recent credit being a 2020 Ren & Stimpy short. Honestly, I had never even heard of the man until I started looking into the history of the Plan 9 from Outer Space poster and stumbled upon his name. That's a shame. Tom's work is influential and far-reaching, and he deserves to be better known. I doubt I'll ever be able to afford a genuine 1959 Plan 9 poster for my own apartment. But reproductions are plentiful online, with prices ranging from $4.99 to $29.99. I'm guessing Tom sees not a penny of that.

Links for further study:

• Tom Jung's IMDb entry

• Tom Jung's Wookieepedia entry 

• A gallery of Tom Jung posters

• Another gallery of Tom Jung posters

• An article about Tom Jung's career

• Another article about Tom Jung's career

Podcast Tuesday: "Second Best Western"

Fonzie (right) meets his doppelganger on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.

Recording a very unnecessary Happy Days podcast involves a surprising amount of solitary, tedious labor, namely researching and editing. But it's all worth it for the fun my cohost and I have when recording. I live alone and don't really have anything to say at work, so doing a podcast might be the only conversation I have with anyone all week. The problem is, I have so many words stored up that I turn into a real motormouth when I'm on mic. And because I converse so rarely, I tend to ramble and interrupt and go off on tangents.

As you might guess, then, each episode of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast has to be heavily edited before it can be posted. A lot of my digressions wind up on the proverbial cutting room floor. This week, one of the casualties was my lengthy explanation of the character of Cupcake (voiced by Didi Conn), the ditsy "future chick" who accompanies Fonzie (Henry Winkler), Richie (Ron Howard), and Ralph Malph (Don Most) on their misadventures through time and space. I felt that including this material in the podcast would have slowed down the conversation too much, so out it went.

But this blog is just for my own amusement, so I'll give the explanation here. Basically, my guess is that Cupcake is the spoiled yet nice daughter of a wealthy man from the 25th century. ("Cupcake" is just a nickname her daddy gave her.) She's never really had any responsibilities, and she was too focused on having fun to focus on her studies. That's why she's often so useless in crises and has such poor control over her magic powers. Daddy gave her a time machine for her 18th birthday, and she took it for a spin before learning how to operate it. She soon crashed in 1957 Milwaukee and recruited Fonzie and his pals to help her. (In the opening credits, you can see her sitting dejectedly on the hood of a car when Fonzie approaches her.)

That's my "head canon" for Cupcake on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. You won't hear it in our review of the cowboy adventure "Westward Whoa!" but you'll hear plenty of other things we had to say about the episode. And there's an easy way to do it: just press play.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 185: 'Beach Blanket Bloodbath' (1985) and the 'Sleazemania' series

The Sleazemania videos offered viewers a crash course in sex and sin.

Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards brought Ed Wood unlikely posthumous fame in 1980, naming him the worst director of all time and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) the worst film, but that doesn't mean Ed's movies were instantly accessible to fans who wanted to watch them. In the early 1980s, you generally had to rely on revival houses and late night television to see Eddie's work. And even then, you weren't in control of which movies were being shown or when you could see them.

Fortunately, the home video revolution helped change that. VCRs brought a dizzying variety of entertainment into people's living rooms—not just recent blockbusters and Hollywood classics but all kinds of specialty titles, too. Pornography and horror famously flourished on VHS, but so did exercise videos, concert movies, vintage TV shows, and low-budget cult flicks that hadn't been widely seen in decades. This proved to be great news for Ed Wood fans. (Too bad Eddie himself wasn't around to enjoy it; his death in 1978 came at a terribly inconvenient time.) It really cannot be overstated how important VCRs were in bringing Eddie's movies to the masses in the pre-internet era.

One of Rhino's Sleazemania videos.

Leading the charge was Rhino Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based company that started in the 1970s as a quirky record label specializing in novelty songs and reissues. By the 1980s, they had branched out into the burgeoning home video market. By focusing on kitschy oddities from the past, Rhino proved a natural home for the work of Edward D. Wood, Jr. It was a marriage made in cult movie heaven—or trash movie hell, depending on your point of view.

Although far from the only home video distributor of Eddie's work in the 1980s and '90s, Rhino was arguably the most prominent. The company released its own editions of Plan 9, Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959), Glen or Glenda (1953), Jail Bait (1954), Orgy of the Dead (1965), and The Violent Years (1956). Rhino even produced and distributed Ted Newsom's colorful documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994). As late as 2000, when DVD had replaced VHS as the home video format of choice, Rhino reissued Love Feast (1969) under the title Pretty Models All in a Row. A whole generation of fans, including me, got their first exposure to Ed Wood's movies through Rhino.

While we're talking about the subject of Rhino and Ed Wood, though, we should really discuss the original Sleazemania videos that the company released in 1985 and 1986. These strange, highly enjoyable tapes were compiled by the one and only Johnny Legend (1948- ), aka Martin Marguiles, a rockabilly musician, pop culture historian, wrestling manager, and film producer who has played a significant role in popularizing the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and other low-budget directors, including Stephen C. Apostolof. 

With his Rasputin-like beard and flashy wardrobe, Legend is most famous for writing and producing "Pencil Neck Geek," a 1977 novelty song by wrestler "Classy" Freddie Blassie. Blassie and Legend also teamed up for the infamous pseudo-documentary My Breakfast with Blassie (1983), starring comedian Andy Kaufman and distributed by (you guessed it) Rhino Video.

The Sleazemania videos, each about an hour in length, consist of movie trailers for exploitation and sexploitation films from the 1930s to the '80s, supplemented with a few burlesque shorts and drive-in advertisements. If this sounds to you like the typical fare released by Seattle's Something Weird Video, you're right; much of this same exact footage turned up on SWV tapes and discs in the years to come, But back in 1985, SWV didn't even exist, nor did video-sharing sites like YouTube, so these trailers and other clips were not commonly available to the public. 

I'd balk at calling the Sleazemania videos "documentaries." Legend deliberately opted not to have any explanatory narration in these compilations, and the clips are not presented in any particular order, either chronological or thematic. The second entry in the series, Sleazemania Strikes Back (1985), uses the movies of Ed Wood as somewhat of a connecting thread, but even it feels like a jumble of random footage designed for pure sensory overload. In his liner notes for a 2009 DVD rerelease of the original trilogy, Legend explains his stylistic choices:

At the time (1985), there were only a handful of trailer compilations, usually specific to one genre like horror and hosted by the likes of John Carradine and Elvira. I decided on no talking heads, hosts or whatever, and went straight for the jugular, pure sleaze and exploitation. In the ensuing years, most of the classic titles appeared on labels like Rhino and Something Weird (Pin Down Girls, Curfew Breakers, Jailbait, etc.), and I premiered many of these myself on the various labels.

In other words, the Sleazemania videos are extremely bare bones, right down to their quaint, homemade-looking credit sequences. Johnny Legend lets the clips speak for themselves, which is a wise decision. The trailers tend to be fast-paced and action-packed, so no embellishment is needed. Sleazemania III: The Good, The Bad, and The Sleazy (1986) includes a tongue-in-cheek title sequence inspired by Rocky III (1983), but that's about as fancy as this series gets.

What can Ed Wood fanatics get from these Sleazemania videos? Probably not a great deal that they haven't seen elsewhere, but these compilations do provide some interesting context for this material. As you make your way through these compilations, you'll see trailers and clips from Ed's movies interspersed with trailers and clips from lots of other directors' movies. These filmmakers were Ed Wood's contemporaries, collaborators, and competitors, and they were going after the same dollars that he was. As idiosyncratic as Eddie's films may seem to us now, it's important to remember he spent his career following entertainment industry trends and trying to produce commercially viable work. In other words, he was trying to fit into the American film marketplace. Through Sleazemania, you'll get an idea of what that marketplace was.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 184: Did Ed write "It Takes Two for Terror" (1970)?

Only one can survive! Or maybe both. Or maybe neither. One of those.

Ed Wood wrote a truly staggering amount of material, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had to; it was his only real means of survival during the last, desperate decade of his life. Booze doesn't pay for itself, you know. It was either sell a story or go without. So Eddie wrote at a furious pace under a variety of names, including his own, for scores of publishers, He did it all—novels, short stories, nonfiction articles, editorials, etc., etc. While Ed did keep track of his writing credits, some of his magazine work has gone undocumented.

Because of this, fans have taken it upon themselves to scour through old pulp magazines from this era looking for Ed Wood's work. Sometimes, they find it. Other times, however, all they come up with is fool's gold. In their enthusiasm, they've seen Wood where there is no Wood. I've done this myself in the past and will undoubtedly do so in the future. This week, I present for your consideration a colorful story from the early '70s that shares some themes with Ed's recognized fiction. But does that make it the genuine article? Let's examine the facts.

The story: "It Takes Two for Terror," originally published in Adventures in Horror (Stanley Publications), vol. 1, no. 2, December 1970. Anthologized in The Horrors of Wood (Ramble House, 2001) as part of the Woodpile Press series. Credited to "Obadiah Kemph." The entire issue has been archived here.

A map of the story's action.

Synopsis: A pretty, virginal young woman named Beth begins working as an assistant at the Brooklyn Museum, which has recently received a 3,000-year-old mummy from an anonymous donor. One especially hot day, Beth's boss, Mr. Long, asks her to stay late after the museum closes to help unpack the sarcophagus. She happily accepts, not only because she needs the money but because she'll have the opportunity to work alongside Dr. Helmut Shiller, a famed Egyptologist.

That night, Beth, Long, and Shiller venture down into the basement of the museum and start carefully opening the crate that contains both the mummy and the sarcophagus in which he was buried. By translating the hieroglyphics on the mummy's tunic, Shiller concludes that this was the corpse of a head chamberlain named Ka. Beth trips over piece of the packing crate and briefly lands on the mummy, briefly panicking Shiller. The scientist says that Ka was cursed for having fallen in love with the pharaoh's daughter and will come back to life with a maiden's kiss. Beth and Long scoff at this.

Meanwhile, in nearby Prospect Park, a man suddenly transforms into a snarling werewolf. He goes searching for human beings, especially women, and enters the museum through a basement window. Once inside the building, he hears Shiller and Long arguing about the age of an amulet that they found in the sarcophagus with the mummy. Beth says she can settle the dispute with a book about ancient Egyptian jewelry. When she goes to look for the book, the werewolf chases after her and tears off her dress.

Incredibly, just as Shiller foretold, Ka comes back to life. The nearly-naked Beth runs away from the werewolf only to encounter the mummy looming over her. She faints, and Ka puts her into his coffin. The werewolf and mummy begin to fight ferociously before each realizes the other is invincible. Shiller and Long finally arrive, and Shiller decides to light some cotton on fire and throw it at the monsters. Ka burns up into ashes, while the wolfman escapes into the night. Shiller reasons that the amulet is the cause of all of this, and he smashes it to pieces.

The story as it originally appeared in Adventures in Horror magazine.

Excerpt: "Part of the mummy’s upper torso was exposed. Dry, ancient leather. The man-wolf attached his teeth to it but couldn’t separate the strands of shriveled flesh from the bones. Down, up, both children of the Devil tumbled, wrestled, fought for the female each wanted to possess. A stalemate—both products of darkness were too evenly matched. The wolf could no more kill the mummy than the Egyptian corpse could put an end to the man-animal. But they were pitted by destiny to fight forever—teeth tearing, choking, death-bound each, but neither would slay the other."

Reflections: I would never have heard of "It Takes Two for Terror" had it not appeared in an anthology entitled The Horrors of Wood alongside other pieces known to be authored by Edward D. Wood, Jr. This tale of terror first appeared in a 1970 issue of Adventures in Horror, a short-lived magazine from a New York company called Stanley Publications, Inc. This particular publisher is never mentioned once in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), but a description of Adventures in Horror at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is extremely promising:

A magazine of generally low-quality horror fiction with a distinctly erotic flavor, with such lurid titles as "The Naked Slaves of the Master of Hell" (October 1970) and "Trapped in the Vampire's Web of Icy Death!" (December 1970). The magazine became Horror Stories from issue #3 (February 1971) onward. It is of some interest as a popular title among collectors of media magazines devoted to monster movies, partly because the infamous film director Edward D. Wood, Jr. reportedly wrote much of the contents under various pseudonyms. This is plausible enough: Wood wrote a number of pornographic novels after his career in films ended.

They even mention Eddie by name. Could there be a hidden treasure trove of Wood work at Stanley Publications? That's worth exploring.

While it is within the realm of possibility that Ed Wood penned some pieces for Adventures in Horror (aka Horror Stories), I have grave doubts that "It Takes Two for Terror" is his work. Sure, the juxtaposition of a mummy and a werewolf will remind fans of Orgy of the Dead (1965), and the plot of "It Takes Two" could be broadly interpreted as a mashup of two known Wood stories, "The Day The Mummy Returned" (1971) and "Howl of the Wolf" (1973). Eddie even liked to use the word "terror" in his titles. We've already discussed Portraits of Terror (1957), Trial by Terror (1958), "The Whorehouse Horror: A Touch of Terror" (1973) and "Bums Rush Terror" (1972). 

But "It Takes Two" doesn't have the cadence of Ed's writing at all. His favorite vocabulary words are conspicuously absent, for instance. I started to smell a rat when our heroine, Beth, was described as "beautiful" instead of "lovely." And the author doesn't bother describing Beth's outfits either! We know that the werewolf rips her dress off, but we don't know the style or color of that dress or which undergarments she had on that day. Eddie would've lingered on that topic a while. The story also lacks the philosophical, often morbid digressions that are so integral to Ed's writing.

Where the story really lost me, though, was when it briefly referenced a "careless custodian" who's been making mistakes around the museum lately. Mr. Long mentions him to Beth just a few paragraphs into the story, and I wondered if that detail would pay off later. And, sure enough, it did: the werewolf enters the museum through a window that our custodian friend accidentally left open. That kind of fussy foreshadowing isn't Eddie's style. That's just not how he wrote, at least not in my experience of reading his work.

So I did a little digging to see if any author had laid claim to "It Takes Two for Terror." And, yeah, one definitely had: none other than R.L. Stine (1943- ), creator of the fabulously successful Goosebumps books. The Stephen King of the lunchbox-and-crayons set? That was a twist I didn't see coming.

Stine's memoir from 2015.

In his 2015 memoir, It Came From Ohio!: My Life as a Writer, Stine humorously describes some of his early experiences, struggling to make it as a writer in New York City. After getting fired from one magazine for not knowing anything about the production side of the industry, he applied for another publisher that operated out of a 95th Street apartment rather than an office. He was hired by a middle-aged woman named Nancy and immediately began writing phony "interviews" with pop stars for teenage fan magazines. Happily, the company also decided to launch a magazine called Adventures in Horror, which gave Stine his first experience writing horror fiction! Here's how he describes it:

It was while I did my part to help celebrities get a make-believe life that I wrote my first horror fiction. Nancy’s boss agreed to try a horror magazine, Adventures in Horror. “Bony Fingers from the Grave” was written under the name of Robert Lawrence—my first and middle names. “Trapped in the Vampire’s Web of Icy Death” and “It Takes Two for Terror” were mine, too. I worked at this job for about a month. I must have written a hundred phony interviews! Then the company went out of business. I was out of work again. The fan magazines paid me one hundred dollars a week. My checks were big enough for an occasional restaurant meal. With dessert. And I could afford to treat myself to those great pretzels they sell at food carts on the streets of New York. But if I didn’t find work pretty quick, that’s where I’d find myself—homeless on the streets of New York.

So there you have it. The true author of "It Takes Two for Terror" was not Ed Wood but R.L Stine. While I'm sad to lose it from the Wood canon, since it is a pretty fun little bit of genre fiction, I think the story's actual attribution is a delightful surprise. By sheer coincidence, the Goosebumps movie from 2015 was cowritten by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also scripted Ed Wood (1994). What a world, what a world...

Podcast Tuesday: "It's Like Treasure Planet... But on an Island!"

Fonzie (right) duels with Blackbeard as Cupcake looks on.

When I was growing up, our entertainment options were relatively limited. There was no internet or streaming in the late '70s and early '80s. Home video and cable existed way back then (sort of), but nobody had them yet. At least not in our neighborhood. We really were dependent on the three big TV networks to see movies that were no longer in theaters. It was a big deal when Walt Disney would show its older films as part of The Wonderful World of Disney. I still have fond memories of making my way through the entire Herbie series starring Dean Jones and Buddy Hackett. My whole family watched those.

But even better than Herbie was Disney's Treasure Island (1950), based on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel of adventure on the high seas. So taken was I by this tale of pirates, parrots, and buried treasure that I had my parents read me the original novel as a bedtime story. I was particularly obsessed with the character of Ben Gunn, the bearded old hermit who has been marooned on an island for three years. For a while there, I would go around the house pretending to be Ben Gunn, imitating the voice of actor Geoffrey Wilkinson from the Disney film.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, I get to revisit my Treasure Island days. We're reviewing "Bye Bye Blackbeard," a pirate adventure in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and his pals travel back to the 1700s, assist a treasure-seeking maiden named Lucy Primrose, and match wits with the dastardly Blackbeard. There's even a Ben Gunn-type character named Uncle Horatio.

You can find out what we thought of "Bye Bye Blackbeard" by listening to the latest episode of our podcast. And guess what? You won't need a treasure map to find it because it's right here.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 183: "Domain of the Undead" (1972)

A scientist disrupts the natural order and pays the price for it in Ed Wood's "Domain of the Undead."

There are few pleasures greater for me as an Ed Wood fan than finding one of Eddie's short stories that I've never reviewed or studied. Maybe I ignored it, forgot about it, or never knew it existed in the first place. Who knows? Somehow or another, it flew under my radar. But when I finally discover it, that story gets my full and undivided attention. I found such a story recently, and I am excited to share my thoughts about it.

The story: "Domain of the Undead," originally published in Horror Sex Tales, vol. 1, no.1, Gallery Press, 1972. Anthologized in The Horrors of Wood (Ramble House, 2001) as part of the Woodpile Press series. Credited to "Kip Gebakken," which is Dutch for "fried chicken."

The contents of Horror Sex Tales.

Synopsis: Professor Thorndyke, who has been doing some experimental research in extending human life, travels to the home of a wealthy and beautiful woman named Carlotta. She has agreed not only to fund his controversial work and provide him a fully-staffed laboratory but also to take him to new heights of sexual ecstasy. This last item especially interests the professor, who has not had sex in the seven years following his wife's death.

Thorndyke arrives by chauffeured limo at Carlotta's hilltop mansion, bringing his incredible machines with him. He is taken by servants to a strange underground throne room containing an altar-like platform where he is to do his work. This suits him just fine, and he is especially pleased when Carlotta seemingly makes good on her promise and offers her incredible body to him. However, while performing cunnilingus on his benefactress, Thorndyke realizes he has been drugged and falls into unconsciousness.

When Thorndyke regains consciousness, he makes some terrible discoveries. Carlotta is the leader of a demonic sex cult and wants to live forever. Worse yet, his head has been severed and connected to one of his own machines, replacing the chimp's head that had been there previously! If Thorndyke wants to survive, he will have to continue with his research and experiments. In the meantime, forever tethered to the terrible device, he will be forced to watch Carlotta's orgies in the throne room.

Wood trademarks: Secluded mansion where strange sex rituals take place (c.f. Necromania, The Only House, "The Whorehouse Horror," "Breasts of the Chicken," etc.); words "lovely," "pink," and "soft" (three of Ed's favorites); ellipses (Ed's signature punctuation); looking at oneself in a full-length mirror (a persistent motif in Ed's writing, e.g. Drag Trade); wealthy woman obsessed with youth (c.f. Elizabeth Bathory in Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History); scientist interfering in natural order (c.f. Bride of the Monster, Venus Flytrap); sheer nightgown (c.f. Glen or Glenda, many of Wood's stories and novels); drugging someone during sex (c.f. The Erotic Spy) .

Excerpt: "As the last of the blur left his eyes, Thorndyke watched the tall black chauffeur, now naked but for a tight loincloth, stride quickly from the room. Seconds later, he returned with the butler, similarly attired. They were carrying the naked body of a fantastically beautiful young girl. The sight made the Professor’s eyes open wide, but he felt no physical surge of excitement in his body. Instead, he felt only a vague, empty feeling of acute longing. It was the way he had sometimes felt upon seeing a particularly lovely girl in one of his classes at the university. It was an agonizing feeling of frustration, of longing, of desire."

The perfect job for Ed Wood.

Reflections: It's a damned shame that Ed Wood didn't live long enough to work on Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996). That cultishly beloved HBO anthology series took its inspiration directly from the ghoulish horror comics of the 1950s, specifically the ones published by EC, but added the sex, profanity, and gore that modern audiences have come to expect. The show's producers—a mighty roster including Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, Richard Donner, and more—were successful filmmakers who had grown up on comic books and exploitation movies and wanted to pay tribute to their roots. I'm certain they would have known of Ed Wood and even given him an opportunity to write or direct an episode of the show if he'd still been around in the '90s.

One of the unspoken rules of Tales from the Crypt is that its characters can gleefully violate the laws of God and man, just as long as they're punished sufficiently in the end. Typically, the punishments (or "just desserts") will fit the crime perfectly. Often, the transgressor will fall prey to the same kind of cruelty or perversity he inflicted upon his victims. Had The Human Centipede (2009) been a Tales from the Crypt episode, for instance, it would have undoubtedly ended with Dr. Heiter (Deiter Laser) finding himself as the middle link in one of his own ghastly creations. Failing this, the characters on Tales from the Crypt will usually meet a dreadful fate that in some way comments on their own faults and failings. They reap what they sow.

This kind of thinking abounds in Ed Wood's works, both cinematic and literary. Wood movie characters who get what's coming to them include Dr. Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) in Bride of the Monster (1955), Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) in Jail Bait (1954), and Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) in Night of the Ghouls (1959). These men violate the natural order and suffer in ways that are commensurate with their respective crimes. Acula, for instance, falsely claims to be able to communicate with the dead, so the dead rise up and attack him. Brady seeks to change his identity and "succeeds" in the worst way possible. And Vornoff becomes the final subject of his own ghastly experiments.

But this theme is even more prevalent in Eddie's writing, especially his short stories. While reading "Domain of the Undead," I was reminded of "Breasts of the Chicken," the truly gruesome and twisted tale Eddie wrote for Gold Diggers in 1972. That was about a businessman, Rance Wilkerson, who goes to a strange cannibal restaurant... only to find himself on the menu. Dr. Thorndyke's ominous voyage to Carlotta's mansion is very similar to Rance's trip to the sinister restaurant. And I suppose they're both inspired by Jonathan Harker's (or Renfield's) perilous journey to Dracula's castle. Also like Rance Wilkerson, Professor Thorndyke is indifferent to the suffering and death of young women. Both men are too driven by their own sexual lust to consider the moral implications of their actions. And look what it gets them!

If there's ever another anthology of Ed Wood's short fiction, "Domain of the Undead" is a prime candidate for inclusion. How it evaded me this long, I can't say. But it's Wood at his Woodiest, complete with some of his classic tropes and themes. Perhaps in some parallel world, there's a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology series based on Eddie's stories, and "Domain of the Undead" is one of its best-known episodes.