Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 73 of 581)

Our first pick today in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a companion to a cool toy I suggested last week. The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy, based on the classic animated feature, walks, makes noise and lights up and he’s about fifteen inches tall. You can get him at Walmart now for fifteen bucks.

A dollar an inch for a cool toy robot is a bargain, and this is the perfect gift for any kid or adult who loves the movie, and it’s also pretty cool for folks who just like toy robots. Check out the PR…

Any fan of the hit movie “The Iron Giant” will love The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy. This fun 15″ action figure is an expertly crafted replica of the character in the 1999 Warner Brothers film and features a movable arm and a chest that opens up to play cosmic sound effects with lights. The toy even walks and lights up with the four included AA batteries. A great gift for birthdays, Christmas, Hanukah, and other occasions, The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy provides hours of fun and imaginative play for anyone aged three and up. The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy.

Walmart licensed the rights to Robbie The Robot, from Forbidden Planet (who I told you about last week), and The Iron Giant from Warner Media, and hired one of their toymaking partners, Goldking, to create 15″ walking robots, with light and sound features.

The specs are: 15″ action figure; Expertly crafted replica of the character from the 1999 film, The Iron Giant; Features a movable arm and chest that opens up; Plays cosmic sound effects; Toy really walks and lights up for realistic play; Lets anyone recreate iconic scenes from the hit film;  Perfect for any fan of the film 3 years and up;  Comes with 4 AA batteries.

I would imagine that The Iron Giant is probably compatible with O Scale model railroads, just in case anybody wants to add some spice to their train layout.

This is a great gift for any fan of the movie or anyone who loves toy robots. Available exclusively at Walmart, online and in stores.

Today’s final entry in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is another cool idea for fans of America’s favorite horror-host, Svengoolie. Last week I suggested the Svengoolie Action Figure Studio Set. Today I’m telling you about The Svengoolie At Home Box.

The Svengoolie At Home Box is the newest Svengoolie collectible item with only 2,000 available. It’s an activity box packed full of fun games and activities for an old-fashioned night-in!

Inside you’ll find the “It Came From Berwyn” 100-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle, the “Crack Me Up” Fun Putty Egg, and the Svengoolie Activity Book filled with 16 pages of jokes, trivia, coloring pages, and games like sudoku, word scramble, and a crossword puzzle. The box also has the Svengoolie Puzzle Cube, Playing Cards, a Plastic Spring Toy, a Squishy Bat Stress Reliever, and the Svengoolie Magic Sketch Keychain so fans can sketch their best Svengoolie (or Kerwyn!) portrait. To top it all off, the box also includes a tasty bag of microwave popcorn to enjoy while you tune into Svengoolie on Saturday night!

It’s a box loaded with fun stuff, much of it branded with Svengoolie himself, and it’ll run you $49.95 + $12.95 shipping and handling (plus sales tax where applicable) from the ME TV Svengoolie store

Quantities are limited, and you’ll want plenty of time for it to arrive, so don’t delay. It’s not cheap, but you tons of great, fun things for the price.

This doesn’t come in a custom box or anything, but it is a cool, fun assortment of stuff to help the person on your shopping list pass the time while we’re in the inevitable second lockdown due to the pandemic.

Svengoolie can be seen every Saturday at 8 PM on ME TV. It’s a great way to pass a couple of hours watching Svengoolie riff on a classic horror or monster movie. Tonight it’s Ray Harryhausen’s Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

We all know somebody who doesn’t really get into The Chistmas Spirit, and instead wishes every day were Halloween. For that horror aficianado on your holiday shopping list, you can’t go wrong with the next entry in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide…

Frankenstein
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, introduction by Stephen King
Gallery 13
ISBN-13 : 978-1982146153
$29.99

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is, of course, a ground-breaking literary classic. Bernie Wrightson, the co-creator of Swamp Thing and one of the greatest horror comics artists of all time, took seven years of unpaid work to create the fifty pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany this edition of the novel. Horror master, Stephen King even chimes in with an introduction, making this a must-have for fans of horror.

This is the fourth edition of the book that combines the original novel with Wrightson’s gloriously grotesque art, and it’s the smallest, measuring a mere 6 inches by 9 inches. The paper stock is not the bright white that Wrightson’s art deserves, but the earlier editions of this book are out of print, and selling for enormous amounts of money on the secondary market, so this is a relatively inexpensive way to add this to your loved one’s library, with the added bonus of being able to fit it on a standard bookshelf.

I shouldn’t have to sell you on the original novel. It’s a gothic horror classic credited as the first real science fiction novel, as well as the first true horror novel. Since it was written, over two hundred years ago, it has inspired films, operas, musicals, comic books, comedies, television shows, countless toys and even a breakfast cereal. Many people who absolutely love the story have never read the original novel.

The selling point for this edition of the book is Wrightson’s art. Wrightson was already an in-demand illustrator who made his name working in the horror genre for DC Comics and Warren Publishing, and had branched out into the world of limited-edition art prints when he began working on this project in the late 1970s. It was originally published by Marvel Comics in 1983, and then 25 years later in an upgraded large-size edition by Dark Horse. Those are long out of print, so this is the most affordable way to add this project to your collection.

Movie producer and screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Season One of The Walking Dead) famously paid over a m

While the small size and paper stock are not ideal for Wrightson’s impressive art, which was originally drawn more than four times the size that it’s reproduced here, you can still see the brilliance and beauty of his work. Stephen King completists will also want this edition for his introduction.

Frankenstein, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, should be available to be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or you can pick it up at a discount from Amazon.

Auto World

Today’s first pick in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a website recommendation if you really know the person on your holiday shopping list and  all they want  is some kind of toy car.

You can find just about every type of toy car at Auto World. They carry die-cast, slot cars, large-scale die-cast and model kits…and not just automotive model kits. You’ll find model kits of spacecraft, ships, aircraft, monsters and more, plus paints, glue and accessories. They offer full slot car sets, or customizing parts and individual cars and track pieces. You will find the Johnny Lightning brand of die-cast as well as Auto World’s own brand and lots of other cool automotive toys.

New items at Auto World include a new series of Johnny Lightning Muscle Cars, large-scale die-cast of NHRA racers and classic Muscle cars, pre-built models from Star Trek: Discovery, a snap-together model kit of the MACH 5 from Speed Racer and an HO Scale slot car set based on the 24 hours of LeMans Endurance Race.

If you’re shopping  on a budget, you can hit up their clearance section where, for under ten bucks, you can find snap-together Star Trek models, Johnny Lightning die-cast cars, classic Lindburgh Dinosaur model kits, plus a selection of nautical, anatomical and aviation models.

Auto World was the original must-have hobby catalog for child gearheads back in the 1960s, and it’s great to see the name revived for for this website that carries on the grand one-stop-shopping tradition for toy cars.

If anyone on your Christmas shopping list has an appreciation for cool toy cars, this is the place to go.

Archie McPhee

Archie McPhee is another online retailer that produces a hilarious catalog.

Originally a surplus novelty house, back in the 1980s, Archie McPhee quicky exhausted their supply of weird stuff, so they had to start making their own. You find products created for Archie McPhee under their “Accoutrements” label all over the place now, but if you want to go to the source, visit their website for a wide selection of things like rubber horse heads, super librarian action figures, squirrel underpants, chicken-flavored candy canes and stuff like that. It’s fun, and perfect for the person on your holiday shopping list with a healthy sense of the absurd.

This year the new silly stuff includes a line of pull-back racers…but they aren’t cars. You can get racing babies, grim reapers, tardigrades, possom and rubber chickens.

In fact, Rubber Chickens are a thing this year, and Archie McPhee offers a huge variety in all sizes, shapes and forms, along with ANCILLIARY RUBBER CHICKEN MERCHANDISE!

Other great new items include the Meditating Big Foot, The Squirrel Wearing Underpants Bobble Head, and a wide variety of finger puppets and jigsaw puzzles.

This is seriously one of the most fun websites, filled with tons of goofy, silly and wacky things that you can spring on your loved ones this Christmas. We have never needed a laugh more than we have in 2020, and Archie McPhee is there to give you a big one.

A laugh, that is. Although you can also find a Giant Rubber Chicken there.

Up next in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide we have a great gift for any fan of comedian, John Byner, or any fan of showbiz stories or great autobiographies.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter
by John Byner and Douglas Wellman
foreword by Nathan Lane
WriteLife Publishing
ISBN-13 : 978-1608082346
$13.99 Kindle Edition $3.99

When I was a wee lad, John Byner was one of my favorite comedians. He was a talented impressionist (much better than Rich Little), he appeared on shows like Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Get Smart, Dean Martin and others too countless to mention. What got my interest initially was his cartoon voices, beginning with The Ant and The Aardvark  and continuing for decades, up to this day. He was even the voice of Bill The Cat in the Bloom County animated TV Special, The Wish For Wings That Work.

He was always funny, talented and very likeable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter, is a funny, pleasant likeable story of Byner’s life in show business. He spends some time on his early life, not dwelling on the negatives (his father passing away when he was young) but concentrating on his generally positive outlook and how he cultivated his talents into a long career. Byner, and his co-writer, Douglas Wellman, have crafted a very enjoyable showbiz book.

In briskly-written chapters, Byner gives first-hand accounts of working as a stand-up in The Hungry I, a legendary comedy club, and tells his readers what it was like appearing on shows with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. He talks about his many film roles, dropping some big names along the way, and gives accounts of what it was like appearing on TV shows like Soap and Bizarre, which Byner hosted for five years, and which was the show that made Super Dave Osbourne a star years after he first appeared on another variety show hosted by Byner.

We don’t get a lot of personal details, and to be honest, that’s a bit of a relief. I wanted to read the story of Byner’s career, and didn’t need to hear the warts-and-all details of his three divorces. We do get a chapter on dealing with hecklers and difficult people (like Woody Allen and Alan King), but the book is overwhelmingly positive and enjoyable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter is a fascinating time-capsule into show business in the 1960s and beyond that doesn’t weigh down the reader with dark stories of personal demons. It’s a quick and enjoyable read, but it’s got lots of meaty showbiz stories.

Aside from a couple of small, trivial quibbles I do recommend this book for anybody who wants to hear some great showbiz tales without any heavy overtones. Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter can be ordered from Amazon in print in or Kindle form.

Our first pick today in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a pair of books that collects the adventures of one of the wildest superhero teams of the 1960s. This is the perfect gift for the lover of vintage comics, and anyone who enjoys bizarre superhero adventures (or wants to see the beginnings of The Doom Patrol due to their DC Universe/HBO Max series).

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 1
by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani
DC Comics
ISBN-13 : 978-1401281113
$29.99

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2
Written by Arnold Drake, Art by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown
DC Comics
ISBN-13: 978-1779500984
$39.99

Doom Patrol, the original Doom Patrol comic from the 1960s, was decades ahead of its time. This team of misfit superheroes brought the concept of a dysfunctional psuedo family of heroes in a world where people react to them naturally to comics long before the great wave of surrealist British comics writers transformed superhero comics forever.

These are the adventures of Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl, all working under the direction of the wheelchair-bound Chief, Niles Caulder, and alongside their allies, Mento, the world’s fifth-wealthiest man (equipped with a helmet that gives him psychic powers) and Beast Boy, a teen with green skin, who can turn into different animals.

Before Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, there was Arnold Drake. Drake was a mainstay of DC comics, but he proved with Doom Patrol that, given free reign, he could out-Marvel Marvel. Drake, working with a full script, created wild and bizarre adventures that rival (and possibly inspired some of) the work of Stan Lee at Marvel.

Unlike Lee, who took credit for plot work done by the artists under the “Marvel Method,” Drake crafted his tales on his own, pacing the stories and writing all the dialogue before sending the script off to his main Doom Patrol collaborator, Bruno Premiani.

Premiani brought those scripts to life with a fine, illustrative style that, while lacking the dynamic quality of Jack Kirby, perfectly suited Drake’s stories of a team that fought among themselves as much as they fought their enemies.

The Team was made of up three people who, due to different twists of fate, were turned into freaks with amazing powers. Brought together by The Chief, who was intrinsically tied to their mishaps, they did battle with a rogues gallery unlike any other. With an evil immortal, an alien warlord, a disembodied brain, a super-evolved speaking (with a French accent) ape, and a man with the powers of all the elements, all of them hell-bent on world domination, and all them willing to work together to kill the Doom Patrol, the stories in this volume take you on a wild ride, indeed.

These two paperback collections of Silver Age Doom Patrol stories bring us the first two-thirds of the team’s original comic book run, and if DC holds true to formula, in about two years we should see the final volume in this series. They are also collecting the later versions of the team, all of which are used in the streaming TV series.

These stories, originally published from 1963 to 66, put the lie to the myth that DC was just publishing staid, traditional superhero comics during the heyday of Marvel. Doom Patrol, which had an obvious influence on Marvel’s X-Men, holds up a lot better than many of Marvel’s lesser titles, and at times rivals the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in terms of pure imagination.

The Doom Patrol (Spoiler Alert here) were killed off in the final issue of their comic a couple of years after the stories collected here. It was nearly a decade before DC resurrected the team, with only Robotman surviving from the original team. The revived team, originally written by Paul Kupperberg, went through a few changes and reboots until the early 1990s when Grant Morrison took over writing the adventures of the team, and managed to out-weird the original run.

The TV series, which debuted on DC Universe and then moved to HBO MAX, is based on parts of all three eras of the Doom Patrol, but the core of the personality clashes between Robotman, Negative man and Elasti-Girl, are found in the original series.

A lot of the roots of modern superhero comics can be traced back to the Doom Patrol. These collections are a great sampler.  I hope that DC comes through with a third volume ahead of schedule. My only complaint is that the final issue collected in volume two is the first half of a two-part story, and ends with a big cliffhanger. I don’t want to wait two years to see how it all turns out (and I don’t want to have to buy the original comics).

These comics were among the first I remember ever reading as a young child, and they’ve stuck with me for more than five decades. I can’t recommend them enough. You can order Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 1 and Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2 from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or get them from Amazon by clicking on their titles above.

The PopCulteer
November 13, 2020

We are a little more than halfway through The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide. It’s gratifying that PopCult has hit new records in daily readership this week, particularly because we were apparently forgotten in the new redesign of the Gazette-Mail website, and at the moment there are no links to our blog anywhere at the newspaper.

So that means that all our traffic is coming from social media and regular visiters who have us bookmarked, so that’s a bit of a nice feeling.

Nice feelings are much appreciated, since your PopCulteer spent about fifteen hours yesterday dealing with urgent technical issues on multiple fronts. It was sort of like I had Friday The 13th a day early, just to get it out of the way.

That means that today’s entries in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide may be delayed a bit, but they will all go live by this afternoon. So don’t panic.

A reminder about the gift guide this year: I am doing my best to offer online ordering options for every gift suggestion. Normally I would urge everybody to go out and support your local brick-and-mortar store, but as an immuno-compromised person, I do not feel comfortable shopping in person, and I am loathe to suggest that my readers do something that I won’t do myself.

So, you won’t find any restaurant recommendations this year, and I won’t be telling you all to “shop local” as I have in previous years. Shopping and eating with locally-owned businesses is still a lofty and desirable goal, but not during a pandemic when the number of new cases nationwide is reaching new heights every day.

I am recommending some websites where you can find all sorts of cool things to order. Rather than single out one item, I decided to share some of my go-to places for great gift ideas with you folks. I’m also limiting my individual picks to things that cost under a hundred bucks. Things are tight for many of us in 2020, so I’m trying to be less extravagant with my choices for the gift guide.

That should explain why I’m not recommending the new 26 CD reissue of King Crimson’s first album.

Please remember that we have a sister internet station, The AIR. We’re bringing you independently produced music and talk programming (mostly music) and if you can produce a complete show on your own, and get it to us, we would like to expand our offerings in the new year, so leave a comment on this post and I will get in touch with you, or look me up on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

You can check out our embedded player at the bottom of this post.

Check PopCult for three or four entries in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide every day until Thanksgiving. We will post our master list on what would have been Black Friday, which should give you plenty of time to order presents for holiday gift giving.

I hope you’ll come back later today for some comics, book and website suggestions. You’ll see a tiny preview of today’s choices in this post.

Today’s final entry in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a local business that made the transition to being an online store after the pandemic forced them to give up their brick-and-mortar location back in the spring.

Oddbird Gift Emporium still offers a collection of quirky, fun gifts for the home, office, beauty, baby, garden and everywhere in between. Only now, they’ll ship them directly to you.

Oddbird Gift Emporium has a good number of items made right here in the Mountain State. Oddbird also carries some fun clothing lines and has some cool gift cards and holiday ornaments.

Aside from the clothing and ornamets, Oddbird Gift Emporium is loaded with cool housewares, knicknacks, cooking items, custom-made soaps and candles and more. You’ll also find art prints, pottery, dinnerware, mugs and tons of other neat things. They even sell some specialty teas now.

Oddbird Gift Emporium is hoping to return to the world of brick-and-mortar once the pandemic is over, but for now you can visit them online for snarky, hilarious and slightly offensive goods. For the time being, you can shop at their webstore, or keep up with them on Facebook and Instagram. Reach out on social media to see if they have stuff that isn’t on the website yet.