DVD Review: THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN (1980)

"The year, 1994. From out of space, comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sun Sword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!"

In my personal pantheon of Saturday Morning cartoons (subcategory: "adventure") few programs rate higher than 1980's sci-fi-fantasy, Thundarr The Barbarian, which ran for two seasons on ABC.

As that awesome introduction quoted above says, Thundarr chronicled the adventures of a brave barbarian warrior (actor Bob Ridgely, who, around the same time, also gave voice to legendary adventure heroes Tarzan and Flash Gordon on their respective Filmation animated series) with a lightsaber-like, flaming magic sword; a smart, sexy and sarcastic Asian princess-cum-sorceress (Nellie Bellflower); and a large, hairy, Wookiee-like anthropoid warrior (Henry Corden) as they roamed the transformed landscape of a post-Apocalyptic Earth, battling a seemingly-endless procession of power-mad, evil techno-wizards and vicious mutant creatures.

What more could anyone ask of a fantasy adventure cartoon?

Produced by Ruby-Spears Productions, and created by veteran comic book scribe Steve Gerber (Man-Thing, Howard the Duck), this action-packed animated fantasy epic featured imaginative (if somewhat formulaic) stories, appealing characters, great voice acting, and character designs by two of the greatest comic book artists to ever wield a pencil. Thundarr and his friends were visualized by the animation veteran Alex Toth (Space Ghost, The Herculoids), while virtually every other character (and vehicle, setting and/or prop) were designed by the legendary Jack Kirby (Captain America, The Fantastic Four, Devil Dinosaur).

While the animation lacks the slick sheen of modern, computer-assisted shows, and is a bit "rough around the edges," it's actually among the best seen on Saturday morning TV at the time, and far more polished than most other Ruby-Spears shows of the same vintage. It's apparent that the studio recognized that they had something good in Thundarr The Barbarian and put some extra care and attention into it.

The Warner Archives 4-disc, manufactured-on-demand DVD-R set includes all 21 episodes from the show's two seasons, presented in their original 1.33:1 "full-frame" aspect ratio, with Dolby Digital 2.0 mono audio. The film elements have not been remastered in any way, and show considerable age-and-neglect-related wear. On some episodes the otherwise bright colors appear faded, and most installments are dusted with specks and other minor damage. Overall, the picture quality is fair-to-good, and, unlike some off-air recordings, the episodes are complete. There are no bonus features included.

For my money, Thundarr The Barbarian is one of the all-time great fantasy adventure cartoons, with solid, smart scripting, fabulous visuals and a classic hero. Sure, I wish that the bean-counters at Warners had green-lit a fully-restored and remastered, mass-market DVD release, but I'm personally grateful to see it on DVD at all, in an authorized and complete form. If you're a fan, buying the set is a no-brainer; even with its faults, it's far superior to any of the old bootlegs floating around the convention circuit. If you're unfamiliar with Thundarr, but love Old School adventure animation, you might want to take a chance and order it - I doubt you'll be disappointed.

BUY: Thundarr The Barbarian (4 Disc)

STAR WARS (1977) Burger King Glasses

Let's forget about George Lucas and his infuriating OCD Star Wars Blu-ray changes for a moment, and return to a simpler time... when there was only one Star Wars, and it was not yet A New Hope... and fast-food franchises actually sold drinking glasses made of glass. When a 13-year-old Star Kid actually managed to persuade his folks to take him to Burger King four weeks in a row so he could collect all four commemorative glasses. 

The artwork on those glasses was great. I particularly liked the Darth Vader one.

Erin Gray/Wilma Deering Gallery

 Don't have time to write up a post right now, so here's a Space Babes "Extra" - a gallery of Buck Rogers publicity stills I've been saving, featuring the delectable Ms. Erin Gray as Earth Defense Directorate Colonel Wilma Deering.

Ms Gray was the Space: 1970 Space Babe for March, 2010. Enjoy!

NOTE: September's Space Babe will be posted shortly!

UFO Italian Movie Poster

back in the early days of this blog, I wrote about the 'feature film" compilations made up of episodes from Gerry Anderson's UFO television series, and posted some art from a couple of International movie posters. Well, here's another one...

New Space: 1970 Poll - 'Bots!

Time for another Space: 1970 Reader's Poll, which you'll find over at the top of the right-hand sidebar. This one fits right in with the graphic I've been using for the feature, because it's all about 70s sci-fi retrobotics - in particular: "Which 70s sci-fi robot and/or droid was YOUR favorite?"  I'm limiting this to live action feature films and  U.S. TV shows, but if you want to write-in Doctor Who's K-9 or some other android or robot I missed, feel free to do so here in the comments.

By the way, if you read this blog through its RSS feed, you should know that the Poll is only available here on the actual site. Have fun!

D'OH! I can't believe I forgot The Delos Gunslinger from Westworld! (And the Fembots, too.) Dammit....

STAR WARS Atari Arcade Game (1983) Flyer

Click for Readable View

"Gold Leader, this is Red 5. I'm going in!" In the Summer of 1983, I fed probably $300 in change into this Atari arcade game (the upright model) at a Waterville, Maine pizza parlor. That was the Summer after my last year of High School, and I was working at a paper mill to make money for Art School. In the evenings, I would meet up with a few of my friends for pizza and Star Wars. If I recall correctly, this same restaurant also had the Astron Belt laserdisc game (with the Message from Space movie footage) for a while, but that one was infuriatingly difficult to play.  

Star Wars, on the other hand, was so damned much fun, with its colorful vector graphics, John Williams themes and soundbites from the movie. If I recall correctly, we all got pretty good at it (the owner must have had it set on "easy" mode!), and spent hours at that joint eating mediocre pie and pumping quarters into the game. Considering how few other customers I can recall ever seeing in there, I suspect we were keeping the place in business all by ourselves....

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (1976-77) Charlton Comics Cover Gallery

Joe Staton

Neal Adams

Hector Castellon

Jack Sparling

Jack Sparling

Jack Sparling

Fred Himes/Pat Boyette

Fred Himes/Pat Boyette

Fred Himes/Pat Boyette

I'm told that Colonel Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, has returned to comic books with a new series from Dynamite Comics, so I figured this was a good time to head over once again to Charlton Comics, and take a look at their color comic book version of Universal's The Six Million Dollar Man television series. They also simultaneously published a magazine-sized black & white series (as they did with Space: 1999), but this time out we're focusing solely on the color book.

Charlton Comics got spotty distribution in my area, so I'm pretty sure the only one of these issues I ever bought off the newsstand was Issue #4, which caught my eye because I also had the Six Million Dollar Man model kit of Austin wrestling with an alligator (I also had the one were he's kicking in a door with both feet - I should try and find pix of those; they were great little diorama kits!).

My pal (and collaborator) Joe Staton drew the first issue, and as he told Comic Book Artist magazine, in those days pre-Internet & home video, visual reference for licensed comics was sometimes hard to come by:

"We had moved upstate by the time I was working on Six Million Dollar Man...  back in the days when dinosaurs drew comic books, we had one TV station, didn't get the show, we didn't have any photos, so we came into town to the Ramada Inn in Kingston, got a room, because somebody told us the Ramada Inn got the station it was on. We didn't have a tripod, so we piled up some books under [my wife] Hilarie's camera in front of the TV in the hotel room, trying to shoot photos off the television! That was most of the reference I had for the book.

There was always a lot of trouble to get the reference. For Six Million Dollar Man, we called up an Air Force airbase, the same airbase the Six Million Dollar Man crashes on in the pilot episode, and they sent me this whole official pile of photos on airbases. If I were a Russian spy... If anybody needs good photos of secret defense installations, call up and say you're doing a comic book and the Air Force is very accommodating!"

Behind-The-Scenes Pix #6: ALIEN

That's movie-making for you: hurry up and wait. Actor Bolaji Badejo, as the titular extraterrestrial terror, takes a break between takes on the set of Ridley Scott's Alien at Shepperton Studios in England, probably in late '78. I love this pic because it shows how friggin' scary-cool H.R. Giger's design was; especially that skull face which was obscured in the film by the smooth, black "carapace" that is missing in this photo.

Have a great weekend, Star Kids!

STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) Alternate Poster Art

This is another art treasure that I stumbled across recently. Apparently, this is an alternate poster image created for Paramount's Star Trek - The Motion Picture campaign, painted by the incredible Bob Peak. It's a very striking composition, although probably too low key and sedate for what the studio was trying to sell to audiences as an epic science fiction adventure - and I do like the art they went with for the one-sheet better.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I never saw this painting before coming upon it online a short while ago. Does anyone know if this was used on any 1979-vintage Trek merchandise or in promoting the film in non-U.S. markets?

ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (1975) & RETURN TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (1978) Double Feature TV Spot

In 1978, Walt Disney Productions re-released their G-rated space kids-on-the-run thriller, Escape To Witch Mountain on a double bill with its sequel, Return From Witch Mountain. Here's a 30-second TV commercial for that telekinetic double feature. Obviously, these movies were childhood favorites, in large part because I saw them at the drive-in with my family. Even then, though, I wished that we'd seen a lot more of their flying saucer and learned more about their people.

For the record, I actually enjoyed the 2009 update - I thought the kids were quite good, Dwayne Johnson was likable enough, and I have a serious crush on Carla Gugino - but I don't believe I ever saw any of the various other remakes and spin-offs done for television in the 80s & 90s. There was a short-lived TV series, too, right? Or am I misremembering? (I must be - I can't find one on the IMDb....)

DVD Review: MAN FROM ATLANTIS: THE COMPLETE TV MOVIE COLLECTION (1977)

In the spring of 1977, NBC aired a made-for-television science fiction movie about a mysterious man who was discovered washed up on a California beach after a storm. He nearly dies, but a beautiful marine biologist is able to save his life when she realizes that he breathes underwater. No one - not even the aquatic stranger himself - knows where he comes from; the best guess the government super computers can make is that he might be the last survivor of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

 

That telefilm, Man From Atlantis, buoyed by the charismatic Patrick Duffy (pre-DALLAS) as the amnesiac sub-mariner, was a ratings hit, and the network commissioned three additional 2-hour movies, which aired throughout that Summer, followed by a weekly, hour-long series in the Fall. Now, Warner Archive has remastered and packaged those first four installments as "The Complete TV Movies Collection," and fans of the series should be very pleased with the result.

In the first, Man From Atlantis, the sea-born stranger adopts the monicker "Mark Harris," and helps the U.S. Navy foil the diabolical plans of super villain Mister Schubert (the always entertaining Victor Buono), who intends to conquer the world. In the second film, Man From Atlantis II: Death Scouts, Mark - now working for the independent Foundation For Oceanic Research with his lovely savior, Dr. Elizabeth Merrill (Belinda J. Montgomery), must deal with a pair of hostile extraterrestrial body-snatchers - the vanguard for an alien invasion force. In Man From Atlantis III: Killer Spores, a returning space probe brings a lethal microscopic life-form back to Earth, and in Man From Atlantis IV: The Disappearances, the world's top scientists - including Elizabeth - are kidnapped by a mysterious organization.

All four TV movies are fairly entertaining, if a bit slow by today's standards, with decent scripts grounded in science and pseudo-science. Much mileage is gotten out of Mark's naivete/innocence and his "stranger in a strange land" situation. Duffy's charisma carries the flicks pretty well, and there's plenty of rather amazing (for the time) underwater action sequences, and plenty of classic, Old School special effects. Most notably, the unique submersible vehicle called The Cetacean, which is introduced in the pilot film as property of the villain, but is soon co-opted by the heroes, becoming Mark's mobile base of operations.

The two-disc, manufactured-on-demand DVD-R set from Warner Archive sports newly-remastered, "full-frame" 1.33:1 transfers. Picture quality is pretty remarkable for TV films of this vintage; there are a few minor nicks, specks and scratches, but nothing particularly distracting. Colors are surprisingly bright, and details are quite sharp. The 2.0 Dolby mono audio is clear and crisp, with no notable hiss or pops. Overall, it's a high-quality TV-on-DVD presentation.

Obviously, like most everything else I cover on this blog, I loved these movies when I was 13, and I am very aware that my childhood nostalgia for the Man From Atlantis colors my opinion of these TV movies today. If you grew up with the show back in the late 1970s - or just have a fondness for genre television from that era - you may want to pick these discs up. The presentation is extremely good, considering that the source material is 34 years-old. I happen to think they're a lot of fun, and you might, too.

Note: The complete 13-episode weekly series is available from Warner Archive, too, and my review of that DVD set will be posted here and at my DVD Late Show site shortly.

BUY: Man From Atlantis:  Complete TV Movies Collection  (Remastered, 2 Disc)

SPACEHUNTER (1983) Publicity Stills

Today, I present a handful of B&W press stills I've collected online from the 1983 interstellar Western,  Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. As I've written before, I'm a big fan of Spacehunter, and would have loved to see a few more adventures of Wolff (Peter Strauss) and Niki (Molly Ringwald). Alas, it was not meant to be....