Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 188: Ed Wood's recurring characters (including Kelton and Lobo)

For some reason, Ed Wood kept bringing Officer Kelton back.

Three of Ed Wood's 1950s films—Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959)—are collectively known as "The Kelton Trilogy" because they all feature actor Paul Marco as bumbling, cowardly Officer Kelton, a uniformed cop who repeatedly comes into contact with the otherworldly and supernatural. In Ghouls, narrator Criswell gives us a succinct description of the character:

Patrolman Paul Kelton, 29 years of age, four years with the department, eager for the glory of the uniform but wide-eyed with fear at the thought of actually being on special duty. Unfortunately, though eager, not what the department usually looks for in their officers.

Ouch. The other characters in these movies tend to treat Kelton with utter contempt. In Night of the Ghouls, the character even describes himself as "the whipping boy of the whole police force." He's basically the Jar Jar Binks of the Ed Wood universe. So why did Ed keep bringing back Officer Kelton, reusing him the way Shakespeare reused Falstaff? A few reasons, I think. First, Paul Marco was one of his closest buddies and wasn't exactly drowning in work outside of Eddie's films. I'm certain the zany Kelton character was written especially with Paul Marco in mind. ("Hey, Paul, I've got a great part for you in my next picture!")

Beyond that, Ed Wood was heavily inspired by the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and '40s, and those films tend to include broad comic relief provided by wacky supporting characters—chambermaids, English bobbies, villagers, etc. It seems like a Universal movie isn't complete until some Cockney-accented stooge gets spooked by the monster du jour and trips over his own feet trying to run away. Paul Marco's scaredy-cat Officer Kelton is very much in that tradition. As unnecessary as the character may seem to modern viewers, he has his roots in classic horror.

Podcast Tuesday: "Ancient Chinese Secret, Huh?"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler) seems pretty chummy with the villainous Ming Fu.

This week marks what I'd call a milestone in the history of our humble podcast. We are finally releasing our 255th episode, meaning that we have tied Happy Days (1974-84) in terms of sheer quantity. But, wait, since we reviewed every episode of Happy Days already, shouldn't we have reached the 255 milestone months ago? Not quite. 

See, the original ABC sitcom did a lot of multi-episode stories. In syndication, two-parters count as two separate episodes, three-parters count as three, etc. But we would sometimes review those stories all at once, meaning that we "only" amassed 247 episodes by the time we got to the finale. Thanks to the animated series, however, we've managed to reach our 255th episode and will soon surpass it. I don't know about my cohost, but I plan to keep this show going indefinitely. Who knows? It may reach 300 or 400 episodes someday.

But what do we have for this milestone installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast? Well, we're reviewing the December 1980 episode "Ming Fu to You, Too." It's an adventure set vaguely in "ancient China" in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and his pals meet the villainous Ming Fu, an obvious ripoff of Fu Manchu. How embarrassingly racist does it get? You'll just have to click to find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 187: A look back at the 'Plan 9' comic book adaptation

A comic book I think Eddie would have loved.

In 1990, Malibu Graphics went all-in on Ed Wood. The fledgling California comics company, best remembered today for such titles as Men in Black and Ultraforce, released two strange but intriguing little books based on Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) that year: an "uncensored and uncut" screenplay and a graphic novel. These slim volumes could have easily been combined into one omnibus edition, but instead they were released separately. Did the company succumb to the Ed Wood curse? You tell me. By the time the Tim Burton-directed biopic Ed Wood (1994) was released to theaters, Malibu had already been absorbed (read: chewed up and spat out) by rival Marvel Comics.

The early '90s, in retrospect, was rather a fallow time for Wood fandom. A decade had elapsed since The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), but Rudolph Grey's groundbreaking book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) had not yet been published. Eddie wasn't in the public eye very much during those years. Malibu's two modest Plan 9 books can thus only be seen as labors of love; they certainly weren't the result of market research or trend-hopping.

The 1990 Plan 9 comic book.

I've already discussed the screenplay book in a fair amount of detail, so this week I turn my attention to the graphic novel, which carries the subtitle The Official Authorized Movie Adaptation. (I believe film distributor Wade Williams gave his blessing to the project at the time.) Like the script book, the comic was edited by Malibu Graphics co-founder Tom Mason. Yes, he shares a name with the gaunt chiropractor who once served as Bela Lugosi's double in the original Plan 9. No, they're not the same guy. The chiropractor died in 1980. It's just a wacky coincidence, maybe one that Ed Wood himself would have found amusing.

Malibu assembled quite a team to create the Plan 9 comic. The script was adapted to graphic novel form by author John Wooley (1949- ). In his decades-long career, the multitalented Wooley has written for Fangoria, penned volumes about beach movies and biker flicks, and hosted an NPR show about Western swing, among many other endeavors. Like Johnny Legend, Wooley has done so much in so many fields that it's difficult to define him or categorize him. But he's more than qualified for the job of writing this comic. The artwork was penciled by Stan Timmons (1956- ) and inked by Bruce McCorkindale (1960- ), both prolific veterans of the comics industry with voluminous credits at DC, Marvel, and other publishers.

In an introductory essay called "Shabby Dignity," Wooley decries The Golden Turkey Awards as smug and condescending and laments the negative attention the book brought to Ed Wood and Plan 9. However, he acknowledges that the graphic novel he's writing would probably not exist without Harry and Michael Medved. He also describes the approach that he and his creative team took in adapting Wood's film to the comics medium. Basically, they had two choices. They could literally translate the film to the page, complete with wonky special effects and mismatched footage. "Or we could do it straight," Wooley writes, "using Wood's story and dialogue but—in effect—giving him a budget, since it costs no more to draw a million-dollar spaceship than it does to draw a pieplate." 

Ultimately, Wooley and company chose the latter option, and I'm glad they did because this graphic novel gives us a Plan 9 that we haven't seen, rather than rehashing the one we've sat through a hundred times. To be sure, this comic is a faithful, instantly recognizable adaptation of Ed Wood's film. The comic book versions of Tor Johnson, Vampira, Bela Lugosi, and Criswell all look like their famous onscreen counterparts. Meanwhile, John Wooley's script carries over the plot and dialogue we all know with just a few tasteful adjustments, including some added explanatory narration. But Stan Timmons and Bruce McCorkindale have been given a fair amount of leeway in redesigning sets, props, costumes, and supporting characters. Edie the stewardess, for instance, has been given a very 1980s-looking permed hairdo and does not much resemble Norma McCarty's version of the character. Eros and Tanna's ship is more credible, too, and the tombstones in the cemetery don't appear as though they're about to fall over.

A redesigned Edie in a more realistic cockpit in the Plan 9 comic book.

Also, because the makers of this comic are not shackled by the constraints of low-budget filmmaking, such as filming real actors on a cramped soundstage, they can show us the action from vantage points that would have been impossible for Ed Wood to replicate. We get closeups, wide shots, Dutch angles, overhead shots, and other niceties that Eddie simply didn't have the time and money for. The comic book even manages to work some visual interest into Plan 9's talkiest and most static scenes, such as when Col. Edwards (Tom Keene) meets with Gen. Roberts (Lyle Talbot) at the Pentagon.

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.