Favorite Movies: Don’t Make Waves!

  One night back in 1978 or 1979, my TV sitcoms of the day had just ended, and the nightly movie began. The show opened with a rocking little tune and this kept me from switching the TV off, but I wasn’t paying too much attention to the show on the screen until the female lead in the movie appeared. She was just GORGEOUS! I was immediately captivated, and focused my whole attention onto what turned out to be a pretty darn entertaining movie!

   The movie was an old  Tony Curtis film that came out in 1967  called DON’T MAKE WAVES, and the beautiful actress that knocked me out was none other than Miss Claudia Cardinale! The movie also featured Sharon Tate, a funny cameo by Jim Backus as himself, and that real groovy theme song was sung by none other than Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of the Byrds!! 

   The story was about a young man named Carlo (Tony Curtis) who comes to town looking for work. He crosses paths with the klutzy Laura (Claudia Cardinale) who accidentally sets fire to his car, which has all his possessions in it! She tries to make it up to him by letting him stay with her until he can get back on his feet. Thus he is thrown into her world of Muscle Beach He-men, Sexy Beach Bunnies and a multitude of Wheeling and Dealing job opportunities!

This was back in the days before convenient video rentals, so I had to wait until some TV station decided to air the movie again! Of course, whenever it DID get shown again, you can bet that it was a banner celebration for me, and every time I watched it, I loved it more and more!

  To this day, DON’T MAKE WAVES is still not available in DVD… The only thing I’ve been able to get it is released in VHS tape, so I’m not even able to watch the movie in widescreen! Oh MAN, I’m crossing my fingers for the day this terrific movie gets a decent DVD release treatment!

Super-Vixens: Medusa

One of my earliest memories of Medusa came through an unusual item of interest pointed out to me by a couple of my friends. These guys were fervent Fantastic Four fans, and it was through them that I learned of the “history” of a lot of Marvel’s greatest icons.

Anyway, Marvel had just released this paperback book reprinting several Fantastic Four strips in B&W, and on the cover they depicted Doctor Doom fighting the Fantastic Four in spectacular fashion, with Doom blasting the Human Torch as the rest of the FF looked on. Passing around the paperback, one of my friends said to the other, “Hey look, they drew Sue over Medusa!” I didn’t understand, until they explained to me that the picture was taken from Fantastic Four issue #146, and at that time a character named Medusa was temporarily filling in for the Invisible Girl. When they used the pic for the Paperback, they’d changed Medusa to Susan so the cover would reflect the “real” line-up featured in said book.

When we got home, they showed me the issue, and that’s my first recollection of the gal with the unmanageable hair. Of course later she would be very well known to me as a member of the Frightful Four, the Inhumans (and bride of Black Bolt), and I really dug her guest appearance in Amazing Spider Man #62, but she didn’t hit the “babe” mark til I managed to collect the Roy Thomas / Neal Adams stories in AMAZING ADVENTURES…

Neal’s artistic take the Inhumans was probably one of the most original, as he REALLY depicted them as “real” people, additionally, this was the first time I saw Black Bolt, Gorgon and Karnak in civilian clothes! In this storyline, the Inhumans are in the real world, and to go unnoticed, “borrow” clothes from the Muscle Beach locker rooms. When It came time to illustrating Medusa, he drew her as the sexiest swingin’ chick this side of Barbara Eden!

Medusa

First Appearance: Fantastic Four #36 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Favorite Artists:

Jack Kirby

John Buscema

Neal Adams

Super-Vixens: Black Canary

My first exposure to Black Canary was during the Alex Savuik / Mike Grell art run of Green Lantern / Green Arrow, and one of my first memories of seeing Dinah Lance out of costume was of her trying to down some of Ollie’s hot chili recipes- tears are streaming down her cheeks as she gasps something like “Best paint-remover I ever tasted!” Ahahahhha! I remember thinking, “Wow, Her hair’s BLACK! Nice!”

Another memory I have of Black Canary being particularly alluring was in some old issue of I think the BRAVE AND THE BOLD that my friend had because he liked BATMAN. In this issue, Bats and Dinah teamed up to fight the Penguin, at some point, Black Canary gets captured, the baddies strip her down to her bra and panties(!) and tie her up to a chair. I remember later telling my friend that I had to pick up that issue, and he laughed and said, “Ahhh, you only want it ‘cause Black Canary’s in her underwear!”

Well….it was true, but in the end, the issue had already sold out and I never got a copy for myself, otherwise it’s probably a good bet that a scan from that comic woulda been posted here!

Black Canary

First Appearance Flash Comics #86 by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino.

Favorite Artists: Neal Adams, Mike Grell, Alex Savuik

The (Old) New Mickey Mouse Club

The "New" Mickey Mouse Club, 1977

Although it is hard to imagine in this day of DVDs and Video rentals, back when I was growing up, the only way you could re-watch any of your favorite Walt Disney cartoons was to wait for the studio to re-release them in the theaters! And all you could do in the meantime was listen to the soundtrack album and read along with Tinkerbell (when she rings her little bell…like this!)

  Then one day my brother discovered a Disney TV show that would occasionally run segments of classic Walt Disney cartoons like The Aristocats and 101 Dalmations on its program -the show he had discovered was The New Mickey Mouse Club, and from that point on, we watched it every day in hopes of catching a clip of some favorite cartoon. I remember really wanting them to run the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment from Fantasia and ANY clip from “The Jungle Book”, which was my favorite Disney movie back then (and probably still is…).

  After a few months of watching the show, Waiting for clips of the Disney movies didn't seem quite so important to us, as we inevitably started liking the show itself and its cast. The songs were great, and the skits the “new” Mouseketeers acted out were hilarious! I remember we would cassette tape several of the skits, then me and my brothers and sister would memorize them and re-enact the show for my mother and visiting aunts, as well as sing out the songs!

  Then there were the Mouseketeers themselves. Unlike the original kids back in the fifties, this was a mix featuring a whole bunch of different ethnicities and ages. It really made it easy for anyone to have a different favorite member! For me, it was all about a pretty girl named Lisa Whelchel (who of course would go on later to star as Blair Warner in The Facts Of Life)...

  Lisa was, to me, the “cool” chick. She was really pretty, but decidedly tom-boyish. She was a practicing ventriloquist, and the show developed a segment called “Sleuth” around her and her ventriloquist doll SLEUTH, a detective dog. This quickly became my fave segment to watch, because it was all about the Whelchel!

  Each episode chose a different “theme” for it, whether it be “Discovery Day”, “Surprise Day”, “Who What Why Where When and How Day” and “Showtime”. These episodes were introduced by poppy theme songs, and before you knew it, we loved those songs, too! In fact, I don’t remember an awful lot about  “Surprise Day”, but I DO remember me and my brother taping the theme song because it was so good! ( I also have a vague memory of someone falling off a giant Ice Cream sundae, but that's just me.)

   After a few months had gone by, we discovered that there had been a RECORD ALBUM released for the NEW MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, complete with almost all the songs we had grown to know and love! I remember going down to Harry’s Music Store one day with my allowance money and purchasing the album for a whopping $3.00!

  Here’s a funny thing. Funny as in Ironic, that is. I had gone down and bought the album on a Friday afternoon, right after the Mickey Mouse Club show ended (about 4:00). We immediately opened it up and began listening to the record. A nice bonus was that the album came with the lyrics to the songs on the sleeve (and a REALLY NICE poster / souvenir book), and for the first time, we could figure out exactly what all the words were! We listened to that album all weekend, re-learned the songs in earnest, and couldn’t wait to watch the show again on Monday. But then, the ironic part: LAST  FRIDAY’S EPISODE WAS THE LAST EPISODE- THE NEW MICKEY MOUSE CLUB HAD BEEN CANCELED!!! We couldn’t believe it! Here we’d finally gotten around to buying the album to accompany watching the show, and now it was all that we had left of it!

  For a long time, we kept waiting for the show to come back on, as kids aren’t quite understanding about cancellation. But it never did, and before you knew it, Lisa and Julie had both gone on to Facts Of Life, and much much later, a brand new “New” Mouseketeers show came out featuring all the you-know-whos of this young generation.

  One sad thing I’ve noticed is that the original 50’s Mickey Mouse Club is (rightly) revered as the iconical pop culture show it was ( Oh, Annette!) and the recent Mickey Mouse club is famous for producing the Britneys, Timberlakes and Aguileras, but the 1978 show is just plain ignored. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Disney had been releasing Box Set episodes of both the Fifties show and the Nineties show, but not a single DVD has been released for the “middle” gang (yet), and one can only pray they’ll get around to releasing the album again on CD.

Someone on some other page states that the reason they haven’t released any of the episodes is because “they just aren’t good, as far as I can see”. Well, maybe they weren't stellar earth shattering shows, but if you grew up with them, they might have held a special place in your heart!