The PopCulteer
June 14, 2024

We have a mixed bag this week for The PopCulteer, which is being cranked out Wednesday night so that your humble blogger can go off on a Marx Toy/FiestaWare adventure this weekend. With a totally unrelated vintage postcard header image up above, let us just launch into things, shall we?

First, we have a Kickstarter plug for a project I meant to tell you about last week.

Charleston native, Paul Rashid, who did the Red Ram comic I told you about last year, has allowed his love of the sitcom Seinfeld to manifest itself as a 48 page parody/tribute comic book.

DEFROSTED #1: A Del Boca Visit-A! is a fair-use parody of the beloved sitcom, telling a new story while poking fun of the tropes of the original. Paul, who in his secret identity is a board-certified psychiatrist, created this 48-page comic both as a tribute to his favorite sitcom, but also as a helpful stress reliever, to help folks escape the pressures of everyday life by spending some time with what are, to them, old friends.

It’s a Mad Magazine-styled parody of Seinfeld, telling a fun new story and putting an original (and transformative) spin on it for new and old audiences. There are twists One major character meets his demise but is replaced by a minature doppleganger. You’ll have to read the book to find out what the deal is with that.

Here’s a short film/trailer…

There’s two weeks to go in the Kickstarter Campaign, so you want to act fast if you want to get in on the action.

Radio Notes

Sunday evening the Tony Awards happen on CBS and Paramount+. In fact,they’re on at the usual time that we run a mini-marathon of Mel Larch’s musical theatre show, Curtain Call on The AIR. Since it’d be rather pointless to run Curtain Call while the Tonys are on, we are switching up the schedule this week.

Sunday morning at 9 AM, and running until 6 PM you can tune in to The AIR and hear nine hours of Mel’s previous Curtain Call Tony Nominations specials, and a few extra Tony-riffic shows. Then at 6 PM, if you are not interested in award shows, you can dance like nobody’s watching as we bring you six hours of Mel’s Disco Showcase, MIRRORBALL.

You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM.  You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

Mo STUFF TO DO

I’m working on PopCult in a bit of a non-linear fashion this week, and I missed a few things when I put together STUFF TO Do on Wednesday. Here’s a few events I missed…

More WonderFest Photos

Finally this week, how about I run a dozen or some more pictures from the WonderFest Model Room? These are from almost two weeks ago, but the creativity is so strong that I will resist the urge to stay up all night and write captions.  Just look at this cool stuff!

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day, even when I’m off gawking at cool toys and running around up North.

One big surprise treat for me at WonderFest a couple of weeks ago was when I turned a corner in the second dealer’s room, maybe fifteen feet from William Stout, and found a display of almost every single Major Matt Mason toy from the 1960s, laid out on a cool Moonish backdrop.  I think the only thing missing was the alien, Scorpio, the Moon exploration suit and a few of the smaller accessory packs. There was lots of stuff here that I’d never seen in person before.

Major Matt Mason was Mattel’s Man In Space, released to cash in on the Space Craze from the success of the Mercury and Apollo missions by NASA, and the cool thing was that most of the toys were based on real NASA prototypes that had been published a couple of years earlier in Life Magazine.  The figures were six inches tall, and were wire-frame bendie figures, like Gumby, and unfortunately this made them very fragile.

But the accessories more than made up for it.  The Mooncrawler and Space Station are epic and iconic space toys, and it was great to get to see such a huge collection in one place. The only problem was that it was tucked in a corner behind a giant diorama of the Starship Enterprise’s Shuttle Bay, so I couldn’t get a decent shot of the whole thing.

But here’s a batch of photos showing off close-ups of the MMM delights at WonderFest.

An assortment of figures and vehicles, some of which I’d only seen in books before.

The Space Station. Man, I really wanted this when I was a kid. I never got one. My cousin did. He got everything. I wonder if I could 3D print one of these big enough for a GI Joe Joe?

Another angle with more stuff I only saw in catalogs and books.

This one I’d seen at Where The Toys Are in Canonsburg, PA a decade or so ago.

I’ve seen this at a friend’s house. This was a carrying case that talked, and it’s damned near impossible to repair without destroying it.

These were new to my eyes. Makes me wonder if the parents wised up and were removing pages from the Sears catalog.

Close up of that Space Station. This might sell me a 3D printer, seriously. It’s got me thinking.

A group shot of cool stuff.

Captain Lazer was Major Matt Mason’s giant alien friend. For some reason, he was twice as tall and made completely differently. It is widely assumed that Mattel just bought the rights to an existing toy from another country and crowbarred him into the MMM line. The body and light-up mechanism were later used for Battlestar Galactica figures.

Oh, there are times when I wish I had a space cannon. Not a toy. A real one.

The classic Lunar Crawler

“I’d like you to meet my leetle fren.”

We leave you with assorted paperwork and a vintage Christmas photo of the Space Station.

It’s Crazy Time STUFF TO DO this weekend as your humble blogger will be out of town just as FestivALL and YakFest and a bunch of other things are happening.  First I’ll tell you where I’ll be…

This blog will once again be running on autopilot for a few days because the Marx Toy and Train Collector’s Show is happening again this year, and the dates are this Friday and Saturday at  The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling.  Your PopCulteer is thrilled to be going back to this toy show, which is one of the most enjoyable in the country and something your humble blogger and his lovely wife look forward to every year. This is the 25th year for the big show, and it will be a blast!

This year, we’re running up for the first day of the show (and the evening before), and then we’re bypassing the second day so we can go have some kind of retail misadventures involving FiestaWare and Sir Troy’s Toy Kingdom.

I’ve been covering the Marx Toy Convention for almost fifteen years, and you can find an index to most of that coverage HERE. You can see our coverage of 2021’s show HERE and HERE. 2022’s coverage was spread across a few posts, HERE, HER E, HERE, and HERE.  Last year’s photo essays on The 2023 Marx Toy & Train Show can be seen  HERE and HERE.

You can expect a lot of photos and video next week in PopCult.

Anybody who grew up with Marx Toys, or anybody interested in West Virginia industries, or just folks who love toys, should make it a point to go to this show and check out the wonders of The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum. It’s a real gem.

Here’s the video from last year’s show…

For those of you interested in less toyetic types of fun, there’s still plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and beyond as we plunge headfirst into festival season.

FestivALL, complete with a zillion related events, begins this weekend. You can find the full schedule of FestivALL STUFF TO DO HERE.

YakFest happens in Saint Albans. I had no idea that Yak were indigenous to West Virginia, but there is an entire festival devoted to these mighty domesticated wild Oxen. Details are here…

As I have been copying and pasting of late, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. There’s like, a helluva lotta stuff happening.

Tuesday brings yet another cool new episode of RFC today on The AIR.   Radio Free Charleston, is three hours of great local, independent free-form radio this week.  To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with tons of replays throughout the week.

We have a wonderfully segmented show for you this week. Our first hour is loaded with incredible new tunes from Mediogres, Clownhole, The Dollyrots, The Aquabats, Speedsuit, Flame Dream plus a lot of other great local and/or independent music.

Hour two of the show is largely encore songs from the especially fertile last few months. Amid nine great local acts, we also have Pirate music, Zydeco, an Earth Day tune and new stuff from a Beatle.

Our third hour (plus a little more) is a live recording of The Settlement from June 1 of this year. You’ll hear the band performing at Mountain Musical Festival’s Mountain Stage in Minden, WV, recorded by Team Dirty South.  This whole show is available free at Archive.org, and may be remixed for release on Bandcamp later. In the meantime, you can buy all of the band’s live and studio recordings at their Bandcamp Page. Note that I had to excise one song from the setlist for length. We’ll bring you that one next week. Many thanks for Colton Settle for giving me the okay to run this.

Links in the artist’s names below will take you to a website (where available) where you can find our more about them and maybe buy their music. Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 180

hour one
Mediogres “How Long Do We Have To Stick Around This Hen House”
Clownhole “Old Man Jumping Over A Fence”
The Dollyrots “Wrapped In Sunshine”
The Aquabats “Whatever Forever”
After The Fire “Laser Love”
Gyasi“She Don’t Care”
Speedsuit “Elephant Gun”
Flame Dream “Silent Transition”
Well Tempered Madness “The Chase”
Dr. Curmudgeon “Nunc Pro Tunc”
David Synn “Running Backwards”

hour two
Ginger Wixx “Super Mean”
Sean Richardson “Cold North Wind Blows”
Ethan Sellers “She”
Deni Bonet “Always Come Home”
Dinosaur Burps “Driftwood”
Jim Lange “I’m A Weed”
Ann Magnuson “Ghost Cat”
Unmanned “Light The Beacons”
The Dread Crew of Oddwood “Tavern Brawl”
Le Travaillant “Au Derrière Du Bayou (acoustic)’
Sierra Ferrell “Fox Hunt”
Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates “Bucket and the Boot”
Ringo Starr “Gonna Need Someone”

hour three
The Settlement Live at Mountain Music Festival- Mountain Stage on 2024-06-01
A Team Dirty South Recording

“Only Love”
“Questions”
“Ripe And Ready”
“Midnight Train”
“Days Go By’
“Searching’
‘Snake Farm’

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week, now that I’m back using my fingers again, we have a quick ‘n’ sloppy semi-watercolor that follows in the footsteps of last week’s tree doodle.

This time, using spent watercolor pens and Winsor Newton inks on paper for pens (with a lot of tissue blotting and smudging for effect), I added color to the mix and painted some trees, from my imagination. It’s a bit of a cheat, using the lack of detail to give the illusion of movement.  I like the way it looks, but it’s basically still a limbering-up exercise. I am trying to capture atmospheric perspective better as I go along, but this isn’t exactly a gallery piece.

As usual, I did a little color-correction and cropping after scanning it, but there were no digital touch-ups.

It is nice to be making physical art again.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM. All times listed are Eastern, so if you’re in another timezone, adjust accordingly.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of classic George Carlin on a vintage episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Mel Larch’s Curtain Call. The Tony Awards are Sunday, so we’re bringing you a marathon of Tony shows from the past, kicking off with this year’s nominations show.  On Sunday, instead of running our weekly marathon of Mel’s musical theatre show opposite the Tonys, we will move it to 9 AM, and wrap it up by 6 PM, in time for fans to watch all the pre-show Tony Awards coverage on streaming services. Then from 6 PM to Midnight, we’ll bring you a bonus marathon of Mel’s Disco show, MIRRORBALL.

Above, In around seven minutes, PopCult looks at some of the custom models on display at WonderFest USA, the first weekend of June. This is a PopCult Video shot by Mel Larch and Rudy Panucci, with music, narration and editing by your humble PopCulteer. Most of the music is stuff I’ve done in the past, but I forgot to credit my brother, Frank, for our collaboration on the second tune you hear in the background.

Below you’re going to see about thirty photos of some of the models we didn’t manage to get into the video. The model room was packed with very-impressed onlookers, and trying to get decent shots made us feel sort of like salmon swimming upstream in wet cement. So to fill in the gaps, here are some still images of the models we didn’t get on video. You can expect another photo essay or two in the next week, but for now, watch the video and enjoy the photos below.

WonderFest USA happens in Louisville every year, the weekend after Memorial Day, and it’s a fun gathering of model kit builders, monster kids, horror and sci-fan fans, aficianados of special effects and make up and folks who just love cool stuff. We always have a blast there and of course, I like to share some of that with you.

Your eyes are drawn to the cool monsters, but Forbush Man is the real gem here.

Just as the tables were packed with models, the aisles between them were packed with admirers.

One of dozens of classic movie scene dioramas.

Continue reading

From November, 2009, this episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Adamfest VI Shirt” features music from The Limbs, The Buttonflies and WATT 4, plus animation from Frank Panucci, and a short video showing off the photography of Clayton Spangler.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 7, 2024

As promised, here’s the first big photo essay of our trip to WonderFest USA in Louisville last weekend.

Because of the limitations of this blog, I can only cram in about thirty photos in this one post, so today I’m going to show you some of the guests, some of the cool stuff from both dealer’s rooms, and several models that were on display in said dealer rooms. We made the trip down because Mrs. PopCulteer is still a huge fan of The Walking Dead, and that show’s makeup guru/producer, Greg Nicotero, was on hand and available for autographs. That’s him at the upper right of this post with Frank Dietz, who moderated his buddy Nicotero’s talk.

I also got to meet Danny Roebuck, whom I’ve traded online comments with a few times over the last twenty years or so. Danny is a noted character actor who has been in every Rob Zombie film (he was Grandpa Munster in the recent Munsters reboot) and has acted with such notable stars as Andy Griffith, Julia Louis Dreyfuss, Bruce Campbell and Grumpy Cat. Seriously, he’s been on so many TV shows that I can’t list them all here. Danny also, buried under extensive makeup, played one of the great monsters of the screen…Jay Leno.

Danny also made me go look at something in the dealer’s room that absolutely blew my mind. You’ll see it below.

I also got to see William Stout again. I’ve been a fan of his artwork since way back in his underground comic days, and among the SEVEN books he has in the works, is a compilation of all his underground comix, so that was really cool.

I’ll be including extensive captions with each photo, but I have to warn you…we’re not going to the model room today. On Sunday, I’m going to bring you a short video of the model room, along with about twenty photos. We might have more of those next week, along with a very special mini-photo essay devoted to a classic toy that was on display in one of the dealer rooms.

So  let us dive into the photos…

Mr Greg Nicotero. Insert your own “describing someone’s weiner” joke here.

Frank Dietz, writer, actor, animator and the moderator for his sometime collaborator, Nicotero.

I finally got to meet Danny Roebuck in the real world, and we hung out and talked for maybe half an hour, and as I was leaving the room, I realized that I hadn’t taken any pictures of him, so he obliged me with a thumbs-up before we left. He also sent me to look at the coolest thing in the world, which you will see below.

William Stout, the guy who drew the movie poster for “Rock N Roll High School,” did all the production designs for “Return of the Living Dead,” has published several books of dinosaur art, and is also one heck of a nice guy.

Continue reading

As we pause to observe D Day and enjoy the last couple of weeks of Spring there is still plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and beyond, which we will get to right after a quick Kickstarter plug

We have a cool new Kickstarter Project from Robert Jiminez to tell you about today. For a few years now I’ve been telling you about his Fearsome Weirdos trading card sets, and now he’s taking his monstrous talents into the world of gaming, with Fearsome Weirdos: Gaming Ghouls.

Gaming Ghouls, the 6th Fearsome Weirdos set, is a parody trading card set featuring 8-Bit Beasts and Video Game Ghouls. The base set is made up of a Wrapper/Checklist card, 20 Characters, and 3 Decayed Arcade cards. The set also includes a lenticular card, a holographic sticker and 2 promo cards, all packaged in a nifty tuck box.

Also available as rewards and add-ons are sketch cards, original art and more (although the original is going fast). If you’re new to Fearsome Weirdos, all previous sets are available as add-ons as well.

The set is written and illustrated by Robert, with some writing assists by Paul Harris and Peter Zeis. Check out the cool trailer…

Fearsome Weirdos Theme Song by The Intoxicators! 8-Bit intro and end music by Fesliyan Studios. This set was fully-funded in about an hour, so you can be sure you’re going to get it, and it’s cool as hell, so you know you want it. Go Kick in now!

And now we return to our live events and stuff…

As I have been copying and pasting of late, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. I ain’t omnipotent, y’know.

This week’s Live on the Levee features local legends The Spurgie Hankins Band opening for Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears. The music begins at 6:30 PM.

Your PopCulteer is back from last weekend’s WonderFest USA in Louisville, and we had a great time. The plan is to bring you a huge photo essay this Friday, and a short video on Sunday, but for today, we’re going to go with ten or so randomly-chosen photos of the model kits on display.

At right you see a life-size model of the Robot Maria from the classic Fritz Lang film, Metropolis. She was tucked away in a corner of the model room. Nobody puts Robot Maria in a corner!

Friday you’ll get to see more photos of the models, but I also have a few shots of the dealer’s rooms, and I remembered to take a handful of photos of some of the guests.

I also plan to bring you a couple of shorter photo essays next week of some of the non-competition displays.

But for now, here’s a teensy-tiny teaser that doesn’t even scratch a cube chipped off of the tip of the iceberg…

This was a gigantic model kit of some kind of space monkey sumbitch.

A very cool, yet simple and effective diorama of The Walking Dead.

Okay, this is half of an amazingly intricate, detailed diorama based on the show, Fraser. Everything is reproduced to exact scale and every detail is perfect. It was really impressive, even to me, someone who really hates that show.

Three Zombie Nazis photobombed by Vampirella’s ass.

There’s a lot of cool stuff here, but that Metaluna Mutant really stands out.

A really nice tribute to Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation. His daughter was one of the guests at WonderFest this year.

A table full of impressive model kits, with a generous helping of cheesecake in the middle. I’m a little suprised that the overly-sexualized Velma trope has managed to survive that awful cartoon on MAX.

A table full of primo Kaiju, at least one of which is really neat.

An impressive (and huge) sauropod. I’m not going to get more specific than that.

Finally we have an incredible paint job on a Torosaurus. I know I got this one right because, I didn’t realize it until I got home and looked at the photo, but I bought this same kit (unpainted). When I paint mine, I’m taking a different approach, but this looks freaking fantastic.