Ever since I was a little boy, I've been an avid collector of things. I collected Batman TV show cards from the 1960's, superhero comics and monster models.
I've always had a curiosity about the world of fantasy and I was always deeply immersed in watching TV shows and movies about the undead as well as the upbeat side of the world of the superhero.
But for some strange reason I never understood, even though I had over 1,500 comic books, I never built up a single superhero model, even though they existed, and I only built up models of monsters, like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman. This cycle was only broken a short time ago, when I bought a model of Captain America, a famous Marvel Comics© superhero.
One of my favorite monster magazines was Famous Monsters of Filmland. Famous Monsters featured reviews and commentary on many monster movies and I drooled over the magazine every time I could find an issue of the magazine, as distribution where I grew up in Long Island, NY was very sporadic. It was a very slick publication and had really great photographs and lucid reviews.
Famous Monsters introduced me to the world behind the production of the movies too. How creative teams worked on the movies, and who did the special effects makeup - like Jack Pierce (Frankenstein) and the Westmore family (The Creature from the Black Lagoon by Bud and Star Trek, The Munsters and Star Trek by Mike) and similar topics were explored in the pieces in the magazine.
The magazines I read and the movies I watched motivated me to stage a Frankenstein play when I was very young boy, between 6 to 8 years old, while I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn, NY and that was over 40 years ago. I wanted to play the monster but they made me the good doctor and I was murdered. It sort of is the story of my life.
At this point in time I bought Collosus Rex who was one of the Colorforms© aliens. He was muscular outer space man from the planet Jupiter and this presaged my becoming a weightlifter later on. In addition to this, I also bought the Scorpio action figure from the Major Matt Mason © astronaut series.
Since then I have delved into horror and science fiction books, magazines and movies with a passion for understanding what makes a quality media piece in that genre. Generally speaking, I think that the older movies and shows were better than the recent offerings.
I know a number of independent movie producers like Warren Disbrow and Brian Coposky. I actually hired them to do molds and make masks for me as well as hiring Mark Alfrey as mentioned later on in this piece.
To be sure, Famous Monsters was not the only horror magazine I ever read. I also read The Monster Times and saw issues of Monster World, and I remember picking a magazine off a street one day when I was a little boy that featured Hammer Films© versions of Dracula and The Daughter of Dracula. I was horrified by the overt portrayal of blood sucking demons, killing weak human beings in their quest for a perverted form of eternal life.
I had a love/hate relationship with these magazines. I was both repulsed by and attracted to these movies and shows. I couldn't understand my feelings towards this genre of literature and media. I had friends who were also involved with these movies and we all shared a common interest in understanding what made our attraction to these magazines tick, so to speak in the common vernacular.
Psychologists and psychiatrists claim that people who engage in watching these movies are usually children who are trying to work out the issue of their mortality. Watching shows in this genre help children to cope with the idea that one day they will pass on and there's a heavy concentration on the idea that death is not final. In that regard, these shows have a sort of cult, religious type of orientation.
For example, psychologists claim that the radioactive, fire-breathing dragon, a mutant tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus hybrid, Godzilla, is actually a psychological attempt by the Japanese to deal with the after effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The carnage those bombs produced became incarnate flesh and blood in a nigh invincible entity, an engine of devastation that was eventually killed by a weapon called the oxygen destroyer. Needless to say, the A-bombs did their damage to Japan and were not stopped by that country.
Godzilla never really died because based on the second series, there was a second Godzilla (aka, Gigantis the Fire Monster) who had a run in over 20 movies after the first Godzilla was killed. And I make rubber masks for a hobby and Godzilla is one of my favorite topics to sculpt. I made him for my nephew years ago.
