THE INVISIBLE MAN (1975) is Dynamite!

The editors of Scholastic Magazine's Dynamite sure loved cover-featuring 70's genre television, including more than a few one-season wonders like 1975's The Invisible Man, starring David McCallum, Melinda Fee (The Aliens Are Coming) and Craig Stevens.The show was NBC's "answer" to rival network ABC's hugely successful bionic adventure show, The Six Million Dollar Man, and even shared many of the same creative personnel. Unfortunately, it only lasted a mere 13 episodes before fading away....

Not at all coincidentally, today is David McCallum's 80th birthday. Here's wishing him a great one!

Six Million Dollar DYNAMITE

Seventies cyborg superspy Steve Austin strikes an iconic pose in this terrific Six Million Dollar Man illustration (artist as yet unknown to me) from issue #8 of Scholastic Publishing's Dynamite kids magazine, published in February of 1975.

Steve Austin once again graced the cover of Dynamite a year or so later, battling it out with The Bionic Woman, Jaime Sommers! The November 1976 issue, #29,sported this illustration - which looks to me like it could have been rendered by the same artist. Great likenesses of Lee Majors & Lindsay Wagner (even if - as a commenter points out below - they're wrestling with their non-bionic arms)!

Show of (bionic) hands, Star Kids: how many of you had these issues?

Cover Gallery: DYNAMITE Sci Fi

Back in the distant mists of prehistory - the 1970s - grade school kids across America were first exposed to the concept of "pop culture magazines" with the monthly publication called Dynamite. Sort of an Entertainment Weekly for pre-adolescents, the colorful magazine showcased the hottest stars, TV shows, and movies of the day.

If your school participated in the Scholastic Book Club, you'd get an order form for your parents to order an assortment of children's paperback books. Some were pretty cool: I still have a few of my old Scholastic purchases, including a really cool time travel adventure by Lester Del Rey and a Martian sci-fi adventure by Robert Silverberg. The order form also offered Dynamite, and as far as I know, it was only available through Scholastic's club. Because of the order form, you always knew in advance who or what was going to be on the cover, and there were tons of cool games, puzzles, comics, articles and Shaun Cassidy posters in every issue.

I guess the magazine - and club - lasted into the early 80s. I remember that Marvel had their own Dynamite clone, called Pizzazz, and I vaguely recall another similar magazine called Bananas, but I never read either of those. I did get Dynamite every month, though, and except for those Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers issues (I was too old for the club by then, having moved on to Junior High), I'm pretty sure I had all of the other ones shown above. I specifically - and vividly - remember the Space: 1999 and Logan's Run covers.