The Continental Op in THE DAIN CURSE

Lately I've been getting into the hardboiled detective genre which is something I've never tried before. I was on a Arsene Lupin kick for a while which in a round about way led to an interest in Nick Carter. I mean the real Nick Carter, the detective, not the so called "Killmaster". The thing is, it's really hard to find any original Nick Carter. There's like two stories on the net and the rest are expensive buys from collectors. I'm surprized those original stories haven't ever been reprinted.

Anyway that search left me wondering about other pulpy detective types. I'd never read any Chandler or Hammett and decided to pick up some short stories of each. I started with Hammett and read several Continental Op stories. This is the detective that Hammett created before Sam Spade. These are gritty and nihlistic, sometimes hitting the psychotic tone of Norvel Page's THE SPIDER yarns. I was impressed.

Then I read some of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe shorts and found it quite entertaining but maybe not as edgy as Hammett. I'll keep reading some of both authors for a while. The short stories go down easy.

I decided to put a longer Hammett piece up to listen to during the commute. THE DAIN CURSE which is comprised of 4 short stories published in BLACK MASK Magazine from 1928 - 1929. Since this blog tends to deal with the outre I felt this was a pretty good example of the detective genre crossing into the weird tale. As it may sound from the title, this deals with magic, curses, drugs and human sacrifice amongst the normal twists and turns you might find in the hardboiled detective genre.

While Philip Marlowe has had quite a movie presence, the Continental Op has only had a few excursions to Hollywood. The first was a TV miniseries in 1978 that very faithfully adapted THE DAIN CURSE. In 1995 the HBO series FALLEN ANGELS adapted "Fly Paper" and in 2002 "The House In Turk Street" (AKA THE GOOD DEED) was made into a movie with Samuel L. Jackson.

Download from Archive.org
or stream the M3U playlist.

Lupin vs. Holmes in THE BLONDE LADY

A while back I mentioned Maurice LeBlanc's series of books about the Gentleman Burglar Arsene Lupin. In a few of the Lupin stories he came up against Sherlock Holmes, though his name was originally altered to prevent legal action by Holmes' creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. The first major work featuring the two together was a book called THE HOLLOW NEEDLE which is a very good story but actually doesn't have that much of Holmes in the tale at all.

But a follow up story known variously as THE BLONDE PHANTOM, THE BLONDE LADY or THE CASE OF THE GOLDEN BLONDE, has Holmes more steadfastly entrenched in the goings ons. This version, THE BLONDE LADY is translated from French to English by ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS in 1910. This book is actually made up of a novelette and a short story, combined to make this whole narrative. The main body of the book is the main titled THE BLONDE LADY with a short story at the end called THE JEWISH LAMP.

A further report on this novel can be found in this review of the BlackCoat Press book ARSENE LUPIN VS SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE BLONDE PHANTOM, from this pdf issue of the Holmsian magazine DISTRICT MESSENGER.

"Arsène Lupin vs Sherlock Holmes: The Blonde Phantom by Maurice Leblanc, adapted into English by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier completes the account begun in Arsène Lupin vs Sherlock Holmes: The Hollow Needle. Here we have the two novellas, 'The Blonde Phantom' and 'The Jewish Lamp' (originally published together in English as The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,The Blonde Lady or The Fair-haired Lady, depending on the publisher) along with two short stories by the translators, which neatly fill gaps in the saga. The Lupin-Holmes tales appeal to me for several reasons. The protagonists are remarkably evenly matched; unlike Chief Inspector Ganimard, Holmes really gives Lupin a run for his money, though of course Lupin comes out on top. The narrator (named as Leblanc himself) admires the detective but is firmly on the burglar’s side, and the portrayal of Holmes and Watson is refreshingly different from that given in the Canon, as Anthony Boucher pointed out long ago. Moreover, the plotting is ingenious, and there’s that touch of the outrageous that British writers didn’t seem to master fully until the television age (when it flowered gorgeously in The Avengers). There’s nothing actually impossible in the exploits of Arsène Lupin, but there’s a great deal that’s improbable, and the better for it. Maurice Leblanc was not allowed to use the name of Sherlock Holmes in the original publications; he resorted to Herlock Sholmès, which a British publisher cleverly transformed into Holmlock Shears. But how nice to encounter Holmes under his real name in this extraordinary continuing duel."

So whether you listen to this audio or not, if you are a fan of Lupin and Holmes I'd suggest tracking down the book talked about in the above review as it adds a couple of stories to fill in LeBlanc spots.

Download from Archive.org
or stream the M3U playlist.

The Curse of Capistrano

Ah ha! I bet you thought I was dead! Well I'm not. Just very horribly busy. I mean I'm usually pretty busy, but this spring and summer I'm super mega busy.

Anyway, at the yahoo forum for Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow we've been rejoicing in the fact that the Disney TV miniseries The Scarecrow is finally coming out on DVD. The subject of Disney's Zorro came up and I thought the original serialized story of Zorro written by Johnston McCulley for the magazine All-Story Weekly would be interesting to listen to.

There's lots of information on this story and its history at ZorroLegend.









So here we go! Click on the Archive logo to get the whole series (39 chapters!).

Or Stream episodes through Media player M3U.

Lovecraft, Davros and DIY Audio Dramas

In the past couple of weeks I've been listening to several different things that have made me very happy.

First, it was "The Scarifyers" which is a horror comedy starring Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier General Lethbridge- Stewart of Doctor Who) as Holmesian/Challengerian special agent and Detective Lionheart of "MI-13", and Terry Molloy (Dalek creator Davros in the 1980s Doctor Who) as Professor Edward Dunning who writes what seems to be very purple horror pulp. Together they are the Scarifyers, who solve occult mysteries and fight Lovecraftian demons. The two tales in the series so far have played on BBC7 but are also available on CD at the Cosmic Hobo website.

Next up I discovered that long time radio play organization the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company has started a podcast which highlights some of their more recent works. A highlight for me was their live performance at DragonCon of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which included Harlan Ellison in a couple of roles. This adaptation was so straight across from the original story that it was almost more like an audiobook with each character read dramatically by different actors.

Last year I talked about the group known simply as "Doctor Who Audio Drama" or DWAD for short, and the squadron of grouplets that make up Darker Projects. These are folks who take it upon themselves to write and produce audio dramas on their own. Well there really seems to be a lot of this type of creativity going on and a lot of it is really well written and well produced. Like any artistic endeavor some are more uneven than others in quality or acting or sound effects/musical skills, but at least they are putting stuff out there and MOST of it is good and ALL of it will be entertaining to someone, depending on their personal preferences. For there is a vast range of subject matter and interests that get reflected in these homegrown audio dramas.

This brings me to AUDIO DRAMA TALK which is a new forum that looks to be a nice central nexus for these diverse groups to come together to talk about resources and production issues or advertise their own works. If anything, you should stop by just to check out the links, I've already found a ton of really interesting things on there to dive in to.

Tom Swift's Electrio-Gizmo Xmas Tree

Just in time for the holidays, I'd like to put you in contact with the greatest "Grampa" in the world (of audiobooks at the very least). Roy Trumbull is at the website The Story Spieler. I first ran across him while looking for audiobooks of L. Frank Baum's Oz series. He had a few on archive.org and felt that this guy is the perfect storm of children's storytelling. He's got the great wizened Grampa voice along with being able to read without stumbling, a strong presence and a broad yet always interesting choice of materials to pull from.

Through Roy I discovered Tom Swift. "Whatchew talkin' bout Willis?" you may ask since Tom Swift has been around for almost a hundred years now. Quite frankly it's just never been a frame of reference for me. I always thought of Tom Swift in the most abstract of terms, thinking it just some moralistic part of American folklore, like Jack Sprat or something. I had no idea there were several series of books and that they are scifi adventures like you might see in Jonny Quest or the pages of the pulps. Great big "duh" on me. Ah well, it's great to learn new things about old stuff.

Roy has put up a story called TOM SWIFT AND THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X which piqued my interest. A folksy abstract idea meeting a Planet Xian? HUH? OK so I obviously had to research Mr Swift some. I looked him up on wikipedia and stole the above image from a nice site with info on a lot of the books.

Download or listen to TOM SWIFT AND THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X at archive.org


I would like to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season. Take it easy, be happy with your friends and family and think about how cool it would be to have world peace.

The Xmas tree from Planet X.

Gimme that Old Time Horror!

THE WITCH'S TALE

Time goes by so fast, especially when you are really, really busy from sun up to sun down. It's been so busy that I haven't had time to enter anything here lately much less encode any books to audio format.

But I do want to touch base and just let people know what I've been listening to in my ever lengthening commute.

A few posts back I talked about the website for Quiet, Please, and since then I've kept up with some studies on the history of horror on old time radio. What is generally considered to be the first major horror OTR program was The Witch's Tale, written and produced by Alonzo Dean Cole. This started in 1931 and ran through 1938. Old Nancy the witch-host of the show was originally 75 year old Adelaide Fitz-Allen. When she passed away 5 years later she was replaced by a then 13 year old Miriam Wolfe.

This is one of my favorite radio series since it keeps pretty straight forward into the occult horror genre and rarely strays into standard detective-type pot boilers. Here we find werewolves, ghosts, giant insects and revenge from beyond the grave!

You can find 60+ episodes at archive.org click here to go straight to the streaming and download page.

LIGHTS OUT, Everybody...

Probably one of the most enduring radio shows, up there with Inner Sanctum and The Shadow, is LIGHTS OUT. Started by Wyllis Cooper of QUIET, PLEASE fame, it was taken over by an extraordinary entrepreneur by the name of Arch Oboler. This was a horror and weird fiction anthology that would not die. Starting in 1934 it took a break because of WWII for a couple of years but resumed from 1942 until 1947. There is a distinct patriotic edge to the 1942 - 47 run but it isn't obnoxious. Oboler would run a series called "Arch Oboler's Plays" which were aimed directly at the war effort. Those stories ranged in quality but really did show the breadth of what Oboler was capable of writing.

In the early 1970's Oboler would revisit the LIGHTS OUT oeuvre with THE DEVIL AND MR. O. Oboler tended to stay more on the weird tales, horror and detective noir with a twist ending type tales and a lot of become true classics. The primary one everyone sites is CHICKEN HEART which Bill Cosby did a skit on in the 70's, about a living chicken heart that grows exponentially until it threatens the existence of the entire Earth. Another personal favorite is also a mad science out of control yarn called OXYCHLORIDE X. You can find episodes in many entries on archive.org, but here is one of the biggest deposits of episodes.

I've been reading a few books on this stuff lately and here are two:
Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Behind the Creaking Door. Kearney, NE. Morris Publishing. 2002 by Martin Grams
Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931- 1952. Jefferson, NC. McFarland & Company, Inc. 2006. by Richard J. Hand.

Another I haven't gotten to yet is The Witch's Tale -- Stories of Gothic Horror from the Golden Age of Radio. Yorktown Heights, NY. Dunwhich Press. 1998. by David Siegel.

Also I'd like to point out the website Radio Horror Hosts, which is a great nexus of horror related OTR. Here you can find info on almost all of the horror shows that appeared on U.S. radio since the 1930s, along with articles ranging from violence and censorship on the radio to its influence on TV and comics.

Calling Captain Future!

I've covered horror, fantasy and crime so far, but haven't really hit on scifi yet. So thought it would be appropriate to bring in Edmond Hamilton's CAPTAIN FUTURE, who had his own magazine for around 17 issues and then later was run in STARTLING STORIES for another several issues. Hamilton was in the pulp business from early on and started with a space opera before Captain Future called THE INTERSTELLAR PATROL which ran in WEIRD TALES. This series has been collected into two books (CRASHING SUNS and OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE) that are both easily available at most online used book stores.

There are of course many scifi pulps out there, and most considered more adult and "respectable" than the CAPTAIN FUTURE series, but I like my pulp to be... pulpy and not so high-falootin'. So this stuff is a lot of fun as it reminds me of a cross between Doc Savage and Flash Gordon. It's more Space Fantasy than Science Fiction I suppose, but whatever it is, it's pretty fun to read.

For this experiment I've picked CALLING CAPTAIN FUTURE which is the second book in the series. Though I've read several stories so far, this one really hits all of the great genre hotspots: a Sargasso sea of space with a conglomerate of standed ancient space ships, some of which are inhabited by tentacled, blood-thirsty aliens, a romp on Pluto's frozen surface and moons, chased around by hairy dinosaurs, wacky aliens, mad scientists, and a "Legion of Doom"!

SOLOMON KANE: THE MOON OF SKULLS

For some reason I was just never a big fan of Two-Gun Bob's peplumy fantasy worlds. They are well written, there's no doubting REH is a master wordsmith of action packed and or horrifying adventure tales, but Conan, Kull, Red Sonja and friends are just not really my thing.

I do find Solomon Kane to be very interesting though as it mixes a little Sword & Sorcery with a little Talbot Mundy or Arthur Friel "exotic adventuring". In fact I believe REH has said that he was a big fan of Friel, so it comes as no surprize that the types of bloody adventure found in Friel and Howard are a pretty close match.

Along with today's experiment I want to point out a couple of things going on in the world of Kane. For one, there is an indie movie now being produced. There's not a ton of info on it but the writer/director is putting out a video blog about the project.

Also there was a fan-made short recently, adapting one of the Kane poems, "The Return of Sir Richard Grenville". It's pretty cool especially for a short, fan-made film. You can check it out by hitting the arrow below.




ALSO it looks like the DARK HORSE Comics' REH line will be putting out a series based on Kane in 2008.

If you are interested in buying the book there is a definitive edition collecting all the stories, poems and fragments, with excellent illustrations by Gary Gianni. From the same publisher are three poems you can download from here.

So on with the experiment. Today we have one of the longer stories in the Kane series, THE MOON OF SKULLS. Click to run in your browser or right-click and "save as" to download.

Lupin the Third's Grandpappy

I always knew that the very long running manga series by Monkey Punch and still running Japanese animation Lupin III was based on a series of French, turn of the century novels by Maurice Leblanc. But had no idea until recently that there are a lot of media incarnations outside of the Japanese anime TV series and movies.

What piqued my curiosity about this fact was that I ran across a trailer for a French made movie called simply ARSENE LUPIN that came out in 2004. It's based on the original 1924 novel THE COUNTESS OF CAGLIOSTRO. Though taking place in the proper time period, it looks to have a bit of that BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF look to it, being filmed in a very "modern" style and using a lot of martial arts that seem to me to be anachronistic of the time. Ah well, it still looks pretty moody and fun. I have it but haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

So this got me wondering about other versions, and upon searching around it looks like there's quite a few. Of live action, there seems to be about 20-something movies from several different countries, starting from 1907 to a new one that is an adaptation of the anime slated to come out in 2008. There was an earlier adaptation from the anime from 1974 called "Lupin III: Strange Psychokinetic Strategy" which is currently available on R1.



Also in the 1930s was an American made movie that starred John Barrymore as Lupin and his brother Lionel as the Inspector. Two more American made Lupin movies came after the Barrymore one but I guess didn't do so well.

There's two (maybe more) live action series from France circa 1960-70. And a Canadian made cartoon called "Night Hood". The first episode of which, Lupin is confronted and bested by Sherlock Holmes.

"Whaaat?" you might wonder. Well, as it happens in the original line of books by Leblanc, Lupin did indeed come up against Sherlock Holmes on several occasions. Though for copywrite reasons he is called "Herlock Sholmes" or "Hemlock Shears".

In this experiment we are going to take a listen to "The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar" which is a collection of Maurice Leblanc's first Lupin stories which were first serialized in the French magazine "Je Sais Tout" in 1905. The stories are witty and a lot of fun and it's easy to see where the charm of all the different media incarnations get their genesis.

Click here to take a listen.

QUIET, PLEASE

Being a fan of audiobooks and Old Time Radio or just audiodrama in general, it always makes me happy to see informational websites that really put a lot of detail into their subject matter.

QUIET, PLEASE is exactly one of those types of sites. The main page gives an overview of the shows history and it's creators Wyllis Cooper and Ernest Chappell, who "starred" or narrated the episodes. Chappell BTW sounds remarkably a lot like KGO AM radio personality and cranky blowhard Dr Bill Wattenburg.

What really makes the Quiet, Please website shine is the fact that many episodes, over 100 I believe, are offered online along with one to several paragraphs of info or synopsis about each radioplay.

Another really great resource for tracking radio dramas, especially in the sci-fi, horror, fantasy realm is the OTR Radio Plotspot. This is almost like a graphical wiki of 25-30 different series, with plot synopsis and reviews, some of which are submitted by readers. I find this to be a great resource when wading through the massive pile of OTR mp3s and wanting to find a certain or particular type of show. The plotspot also has a great index of known authors whose work has been adapted to radio drama.

Hugh B. Cave's The Prophecy

A Little about Hugh Cave.

I don't remember when I first heard of Hugh B. Cave but it was probably in the mid 1990s with the publication of Fedogan & Bremer's hardbacks THE DOOR BELOW and DEATH STALKS THE NIGHT. I bought both of them and started reading one of the stories in THE DOOR BELOW. I don't remember a lot of the details or even which story it is now (I'll have to go back through and check at some time), but I do remember it being so lurid and intense that I had to put it down. It was just too intense for me at the time. I, who live and breathe horror, had to stop reading because it was just too overwhelming to deal with.

It was a while before I tried Cave again with some different stories and have come to appreciate his overheated, feverish and even psychotic tales of everyday life gone really horribly wrong. There's something about how he can craft a story that might start out as a mundane, relaxing evening with friends having a nice dinner and conversation and turns into a bloodbath full of screaming and wretching horror by the end that is just fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

And that is what our experiment for today is about. The mundane gone wrong in horrible and terrifying ways. The Prophecy was originally printed in Black Book Detective Magazine, October 1934.

If you find this piquing your interest in Cave's writing I would suggest the two books mentioned above and also a larger book of collected horrors called MURGUNSTRUMM AND OTHERS which was originally a very rare hardback by Carcosa Press but is now out in a broadly available soft cover (and also HB version) from Wildside Press.

Further reading on Hugh B. Cave:
bio on wikipedia
listing of his short stories, which numbers over 1000
CAVE interview by Tim Dill
CAVE interview by Tracey Hessler

Ok, and now on with today's experiment
CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE PROPHECY
(RIGHT CLICK AND "SAVE AS" TO DOWNLOAD)

The Festival by H. P. Lovecraft

So Halloween is almost upon us and I've spent most of October not posting anything because I've been trying to assure that this blog is showing up in google. It's not very enticing to think that I put this together for you folks but ya wind up not even knowing it exist because it's not on any search engines. It is now so we'll continue on with the experiment.

What we have for today is one of the first Lovecraft stories that I ever read. What first drew me to HPL was the stark and scary covers by Michael Whelan. I picked up The Tomb and Other Tales just randomly based on the Whelan cover and the weird-sounding name "Lovecraft". It had "Love" in it but together with "craft" made it somehow itself a creepy and might I say Eldritch sounding name.

After reading more classical horror staples such as Poe and Shelley, running into Lovecraft was quite a revelation. This was like truly classic gothic horror, but with gloppy, disgusting monsters of some type of alien origin in it. I had no idea what was hidden behind the cloaks of the revelers in The Festival. I was blown away and immediately started drawing those horrors that I read about. That stuff was really stimulating, and sometimes even now, a quarter of a century later it can still fire my imagination.

So on that demented, mad-piping note, I present The Festival. This entry in the experiment includes some ambient music just to weirdly spice things up.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN OR RIGHT CLICK AND "SAVE AS" DOWNLOAD

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 17 - 19

Time to wrap this one up! In the last three chapters we'll see voodoo rituals, daring escapes, dead heroes, bad jokes from Battle the butler and much much more!

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter SEVENTEEN
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Chapter NINETEEN
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 15 - 16

Other auditory entertainments online.

ON and off for the past 25 years or so I have been a Doctor Who fan. In the 80s and 90s there was a growing base of fans creating their own Doctor Who dramas. The cheapest way to do that was to produce radio play-like audiodramas. I have listened to some of the audiodramas created by the now professional troupe called BIG FINISH. They've banged out almost 90 different dramas in the Whovian realm, with many of them using the voices of the original TV show stars. They are pretty fun, though somewhat expensive on CD. Also there are groups like MAGIC BULLET which is now producing the Dr Who spinoff series of FACTION PARADOX.

The neat thing is that the FANS themselves are also still out there making these. And now with digital sound creation and mixing technologies, and with the creators getting older and wiser, the fan audios are virtually on par, if not in some instances doing better productions than the pros.

The word "fan" might lead you to believe that these would be clumsy pastiche attempts at remaking ideas from the original shows but with poor recording, bad writing and amature acting. But that is certainly not the case for at least a couple of these groups.

The group that primarily comes to mind is DOCTOR WHO AUDIO DRAMA or DWAD for short. They have been creating Who based serials since the early 1980s, which is before some of my co-workers were born. They have gone through 4 Doctors, now on their 5th, and many companions, and along the way have built a healthy fan base for their work. Their scripts are clean and smart, the voice acting tends to be very professional and the technical side, the music and sounds effects are perfectly generated and put together to create dynamic, original and entertaining serials.

Another group is DARKER PROJECTS who create audios based on multiple subjects ranging from Star Trek, to Lord Byron to the good Doctor as well. The neat thing about groups like this, DWAD and others is that when possible, they release their materials online for free. And FREE is a really good deal when it comes to getting a quality product, which these are.

Go visit them. Download some shows and visit their forums. They are really open and nice folks.

G-8, L-11 and K-3!

It looks like G-8 might've overstretched himself dogfighting with the Zombie Nazis as he and his Battle Aces have found themselves out of fuel and ammo on the wrong side of the enemy lines. It seems they might really be done for this time, but G-8 might have some very special friends just around the corner. Let's find out about L-11 and K-3!

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter FIFTEEN
Chapter SIXTEEN
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 11 - 12

I don't have anything new to report, SO I'll just say "let's keep going with the story!"

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter THIRTEEN
Chapter FOURTEEN
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 11 - 12

At the end of chapter 10 we found G-8, Nippy and Bull in a jam:

G-8 suddenly noticed something he hadn’t seen before. The Germans were tearing in from the south, cutting them off from their home lines. They couldn’t run for home now if they wanted to.

He swung his flight in a climbing turn. He must get up to the level of the Germans before the fight started. And while he kicked over in that maneuver, his thumb came down on the trigger button to warm his guns.

Tac! tac!

He jerked upright in alarm. Instantly the full horror of the situation flooded over him. They had been short of ammunition, he remembered the sergeant saying so. He had taken the faulty ammunition out their belts and had put in what there was of the good. They had used many rounds in trying to sever the wires that held the corpse to the Zeppelin.

Now their belts were empty. His gasoline tank was nearly so. Nippy and Bull were most probably in the same fix.

G-8 groaned.

So you want to find out what happens next, don't you?

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter ELEVEN
Chapter TWELVE
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 9 - 10

The G-8 Website

If you are interested in further information on G-8 and his buddies, I suggest you checking out Chris Kalb's website. Chris also has created websites based on Doc Savage and The Spider.

All of his websites are well executed and beautifully rendered, and a bonus on his G-8 site is a flash-generated computer game.

Very cool stuff!

And now on with the story. Looks like the guys are in the middle of a Voodoo pickle here. You better keep up so you know what's going on!

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter NINE
Chapter TEN
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 7 - 8

WWI era aviation movies that I would recommend:

I'm just spewing this out since FLYBOYS is looming closer and closer and since we're listening to WWI master spy and SPAD fighter G-8 and his Battle Aces. I'm not doing any research here, just naming off the top of my head several movies I've seen and appreciated in this genre.

First is Howard Hughes' THE HELLS ANGELS, which had hours of flying footage shot for it. Most of the edited out footage wound up as stock footage for other aviation movies. Great story of two brothers who are in France when the Germans start invading and enlist in the air corps. This movie did the kamikaze plane into the Zeppelin long before FLYBOYS.

Next is DAWN PATROL with Errol Flynn. This is a great movie about the pressure of being the commander of a fighter squadron that has high casulties (as they all did back then). Wonderful Erol Flynn type heroics are transfered successfully into the skies.

THE BLUE MAX with an interesting view from the German side. A more modern movie (relatively speaking, in 1966) with much more complicated characters who you are not sure you can or should root for. Not because of which side of the war they are on, but because the characters are so kniving, backstabbing and vainglorious.

And then there are some serials such as ACE DRUMMOND and TAILSPIN TOMMY which even though not taking place during the Great War is around that time and uses nifty bi-planes. TAILSPIN TOMMY is more kid's adventures oriented (makes sense, since it's based on a newpaper comic strip) and ACE DRUMMOND is a more exotic affair, taking place in China.

G-8 would have made a GREAT serial.

Well let's see what he's up to. It seems the Scooby Doo effect that is usually the case in G-8 maybe actually turn out to be real Voodoo! We'll have to listen and find out!

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter SEVEN
Chapter EIGHT
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 5 - 6

In the NEWS:

From now until Sept 21st, you can watch live video feed of a robot that is exploring the sunken dirigible USS Macon. The Macon carried five F9C Sparrowhawk biplanes which were launched and landed through a hang-down trapeze system. This floating aircraft carrier went down in a storm off of the California coast and was the last dirigible of the US Navy. Now what do you suppose would happen if that robot was poking around, and in that underwater debris they happened on zombies? Or in the case of a G-8 scenerio, underwater, Nazi zombies? Well I don't think it THAT far fetched. We've seen it happen before!

That was one heck of a segue wasn't it? And on that note, let's see what sort of undead trouble G-8 has to put up with today...

"We, the dead pilots Munz, von Bach, von Klingen, Wolffson, beg to announce that we have been brought back from the dead by Croloi, the master of white and black magic.

And by our resurrection, four of your best flyers are about to die, to take our places in the grave."

Click to listen or right click and "save target as" to download.
Squadron of Corpses
Chapter FIVE
Chapter SIX
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc

G-8 : Squadron of Corpses Chpt 3 - 4

FLYBOYEEEZ! Ok, so there's this movie coming out called "Flyboys". It looks kinda "Hollywood" and glitzy for my taste. It's supposed to be based on the true story of the Lafayette Escadrille, of which there is an earlier movie notably starring David Jassen and Clint Eastwood. To me a lot of the visual and dramatic queues seem to be straight out of Howard Hughes' THE HELL'S ANGELS (not the motocycle club) and THE BLUE MAX. I don't know if it will be any good or not, but since we're listening to a WWI story right now, I thought it would be appropriate to mention it here because FLYBOYS opens in theatres this week. Also since the Lafayette Escadrille was a French-based squadron it looks like they flew Nieuports and SPADS, just like G-8 and his buddies. In the FLYBOYS trailers I've only noticed the Nieuports.

On to other business... A NOTE OF WARNING: I just want to take a second to inform the uninitiated that pulps in general and especially war-related pulps such as G-8 can and usually do contain a lot of very un-PC racial slurs. If you are offended by hearing racial slurs then you may not want to listen to, or read, the G-8 stories since they are filled with German epithets.

Ever wonder what the Lafayette Escadrille would do if they encountered German Aces coming back as reanimated corpses? Well, me neither, but it is definately the realm of G-8 and his Aces, Nippy and Bull.

No one seemed to know what to do in the little circle that was ever increasing as artillerymen came running up, only to stop and gasp.

With an effort G-8 stepped forward, his gun held ready. He confronted the weird spectacle of unhumanity. When he spoke his voice came dry and rasping.

“You are Oberteutnant von Griel ?” he asked.

Then cold sweat burst out on his body, lor the eyes didn’t even look at him, although he felt that the man could see him.

The lips didn’t move. Nothing about that stiff, standing figure except its head. And that nodded once, in a jerky motion. Down, forward and back.

The forward movement was a snapping drop almost to the chest, as though the strength in the neck had suddenly given out. Then a backward motion, as though the owner were lifting his head by a slow, weary effort.

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Squadron of Corpses
Chapter THREE
Chapter FOUR
G-8 is (C) 2006 Argosy Communications, Inc