Podcast Tuesday: "Your Kids Caught You Smoking and They Said No Way"

Tom Bosley and Marion Ross in Let's Call it Quits.

Along with the many, many laws and rules we have to follow in our daily lives, we are also given innumerable warnings about our health and safety. Don't do drugs. Get eight hours of sleep. Brush your teeth. Eat your vegetables. Look both ways before you cross the street. Since human beings are typically averse to being bossed around, I think there is a strong temptation to ignore all of this stuff. To hell with them! I'll do what I want! And I sympathize with that.

But there are some warnings I wish we would have heeded sooner as a society. It certainly would have been better, for instance, if we'd all given up on smoking as soon as the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964. But we didn't. We kept right on smoking for decades, and it led to a lot of needless suffering and death. Only now, in the 21st century, are cigarettes starting to lose their grip on us. (Of course, they're only being replaced by vape pens, but, you know... baby steps.)

Over the years, there were many attempts to get Americans to kick the habit. In 1974, the American Cancer Society produced a half-hour, sitcom-like film called Let's Call it Quits starring Tom Bosley and Marion Ross of Happy Days and filmed on the set of The Brady Bunch. This week on These Days Are Ours, we talk about that film and our feelings on smoking in general. Please do join us. And don't smoke.

The unsolvable riddle that is 'Monster a Go-Go' (1965)

Herschell Gordon Lewis tried to make something marketable out of an unfinished Bill Rebane film.

An ad for the film.

If I asked you to imagine the movies that typically wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd probably think of those crummy, low-budget science-fiction and horror films made between the 1950s and the 1970s. These were shoddily-produced exploitation flicks that were shipped out to undiscriminating drive-in audiences across America for decades. These quickies were relentlessly hawked through hyperbolic trailers, posters, and radio ads that routinely made promises the actual movies—often slow-moving, static, and talky—could never keep. They featured unconvincing monsters, aliens, spaceships, and mad scientists, and they had attention-grabbing titles, often containing words like "space," "attack," "creature," and "invasion."

As silly as these movies were, there's a kind of innocence or naivete to them. Eventually, as home video supplanted the drive-ins, exploitation movies increased the amount of sex and violence, and the old-school, MST3K-style movies started looking a little quaint in comparison. Today, these movies are mostly seen as curios of a bygone era, beloved by some, despised by a few, and ignored by most.

If you stand way back and squint, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is the very kind of movie I've been describing. It was even used on MST3K in 1993 during the show's fourth season on Comedy Central. In the broadest sense, the film is typical genre fare. The plot goes something like this: an American space capsule has crash-landed in a field in Illinois. On board is astronaut Frank Douglas, but radiation has transformed him into a hideous, eight-foot-tall, Frankenstein-like monster with blisters all over his face. Still wearing his spacesuit, he mindlessly roams the area, occasionally murdering civilians. The military tries to locate Douglas and put a stop to his rampage. Meanwhile, scientists attempt to come up with an antidote for his condition, and Frank's grieving family worries about him. Complicating matters is the fact that Douglas is highly radioactive. It all leads to a tense finale set in the Chicago sewers.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 289: The screenplay for 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951)

"You horrible room!": Angela Stevens as June Drake in Ed Wood's The Sun Was Setting.

Here's a quirk of B-movie history for you. At least three of Ed Wood's unproduced screenplays have been published in book form: The Vampire's Tomb (1954), The Ghoul Goes West (1953-55), and The Frank Leahy Legend (1974). But only two of Eddie's produced scripts have ever been published to my knowledge: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and Bride of the Monster (1955). I'd love to analyze and scrutinize Eddie's screenplays more closely—both the ones that were made and the ones that weren't—but they're just not available to me. I have no idea how people get them.

In the case of Eddie's made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951), I thought I'd take matters into my own hands and recreate the script myself by carefully transcribing the finished film. This is not the first time I've done something like this. Years ago, I painstakingly transcribed Glen or Glenda (1953). But that transcript is still a mess in terms of formatting. Perhaps someday, I will finish it. The Sun Was Setting is more manageable, due to its shorter runtime. In any event, it is my hope that this quasi-script will give us an opportunity to see how Ed Wood constructed a screen story.

NOTE BEFORE WE CONTINUE: This is not in any way, shape, or form the actual screenplay that Ed Wood used when making the movie. It is purely a fan-made work. It is not formatted as a standard Hollywood script would be. Instead, this material is presented in a form that I feel would be more easily readable. If you feel you can do better, you likely can and should. In fact, I invite you to do so. J.B. 

So I watched 'Coyote vs. Acme' and...

Wile E. Coyote and Will Forte team up in Coyote vs. Acme.

An uphill climb to the big screen.

It's not often I review recent movies on this blog. Then again, it's rare that I actually watch any film made in this century. Or this millennium, come to think of it. It's not that I'm against current movies; I just have so much old stuff to review that I don't get around to the new stuff that much.

I made an exception for Dave Green's Coyote vs. Acme (2026), the long-delayed feature film that Warner Bros. shelved for tax purposes several years ago, now finally released through the intercession of a company called Ketchup Entertainment. If you're reading this blog, you probably don't need me to explain what this movie is. You already know the characters and the basic plot. Like me, you grew up with Looney Tunes and its cadre of wacky animated characters: Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. You're probably also familiar with the fictional Acme Corporation and its wide variety of faulty products.

So what did I think of Coyote vs. Acme? Short answer: I liked it. It's inventive, amusing, and well-made, and an elaborate tribute to the cartoons I loved in my youth. I recommend it unreservedly to Looney Tunes fanatics, especially those who also happen to be fans of actor and comedian Will Forte. In the past, Will has demonstrated his range on such shows as Saturday Night Live, The Great North, and The Last Man on Earth, plus such feature films as MacGruber (2010) and Nebraska (2014). If you've witnessed Mr. Forte at work, you likely do not need to be sold on his talents.

Do I have anything of particular value to say about Coyote vs. Acme? Any special insight to bring to this material? Well...

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 288: 'Invisible Ghost' (1941) and 'Deanimated' (2002)

Artist Martin Arnold did some interesting things to The Invisible Ghost (1941).

It was a long way down for Bela Lugosi. We know that his Hollywood career peaked with his indelible, much-imitated portrayal of the title role in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) for Universal. Over time, however, the Hungarian actor's fortunes were plagued by numerous factors: typecasting, shifting audience tastes, plus Lugosi's thick accent and ruinous drug addiction. By the 1950s, when he started working with Edward D. Wood, Jr., his once-sparkling career was utterly in the doldrums. Any work was welcome. Hence Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and the posthumously released Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

But Bela's career was vast and varied. By the time he made Dracula, he'd already accumulated numerous movie credits, foreign and domestic. From 1917 to 1921, he appeared in silent films made in Hungary and Germany. From 1923 onward, he appeared in American-made films, first silent then sound. And all this was in addition to maintaining an extremely active stage career. 

In the turbulent decades between Dracula and Glen or Glenda, Lugosi made dozens of films of wildly varying quality, ranging from major studio productions to low-budget B-movies and serials. In 1941, Lugosi began a productive if not exactly glamorous association with a Poverty Row studio called Monogram Pictures. Nine films in total eventuated from this. For a detailed and thoughtful analysis of this era, I'd highly recommend Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Guffey's Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine (2019). 

Podcast Tuesday: "We Have Nothing To Fear But OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING OVER THERE?"

Erin Moran in Galaxy of Terror (1981).

The actors on long-running sitcoms can get antsy sometimes. Playing the same character every week, year after year. Same jokes, same stories. It gets old after a while. Worse yet, the public gets the idea that playing this one character is all you can do. There is no surer career-killer than being typecast in a sitcom role. And so, TV actors tend to glom onto whatever movie offers come their way. Anything to prove they have a little range.

During his seven-season run on Happy Days, for instance, Ron Howard appeared in Eat My Dust (1976), The Shootist (1976), and More American Graffiti (1979) as well as the made-for-TV movies Huckleberry Finn (1975) and I'm a Fool (1977). He also directed the made-for-TV movie Cotton Candy (1978) and the feature film Grand Theft Auto (1977). Meanwhile, Ron's costar Henry Winkler stayed for all 11 seasons of Happy Days but still managed to find some extracurricular acting work, like the movies Heroes (1977) and The One and Only (1978), plus the made-for-TV movie An American Christmas Carol (1979).

But what of young Erin Moran, who played Joanie Cunningham on Happy Days? People may think that this sitcom and its spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi were the only major projects Erin ever worked on. But her resume is more diverse than that. For instance, between the eighth and ninth seasons of the show in 1981, Erin acted in a sci-fi thriller called Galaxy of Terror produced by Roger Corman, who had previously produced both Grand Theft Auto and Eat My Dust.

As you may have already guessed by now, we are reviewing Galaxy of Terror on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Hit the play button down there to learn more.

The enduring, plain jane beauty of "Johnny Angel"

Shelley Fabares croons "Johnny Angel" on The Donna Reed Show.

Actress Shelley Fabares, who died on August 22 at the age of 82, never considered herself much of a singer, despite the fact that she scored a #1 hit single in America. In interviews, she talked about how the producers of The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) strongarmed both her and costar Paul Petersen into recording pop singles. The makers of the sitcom were apparently eager to replicate the multimedia success of Ricky Nelson from The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and made it clear that, if Shelley didn't comply, she'd be written out of the show. And so, in late 1961, she became a reluctant pop star. Shelley recalled being extremely nervous to step into an actual recording studio, surrounded by talented professional musicians, but she somehow got through it.

Shelley's big musical moment.

The song she recorded, a winsome ballad called "Johnny Angel," debuted on February 1, 1962 during a fourth season episode of The Donna Reed Show called "Donna's Prima Donna." The public's response was simply overwhelming. By April 1962, "Johnny Angel" was the most popular song in America. Shelley was still no singer, and her music career was not sustainable for long. While she had a few more charting singles, including a direct sequel to "Johnny Angel," Shelley largely stuck to acting for the rest of her life. Later in her career, she was a regular on the popular ABC sitcom Coach, which ran from 1989 to 1997. Shelley Fabares' musical legacy is largely limited to this one song: two minutes and 19 seconds of audio cotton candy. 

As for The Donna Reed Show, it lasted four more seasons and eventually became a staple of syndicated reruns. I'm sure many people of my generation, born well after the original run of the show, became familiar with Donna Reed because of its frequent airings on Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. What distinguishes this series is that it has nothing to distinguish it. Unlike The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, it is not built around a wild comedian with an over-the-top personality. It doesn't tap into "kid logic" the way Leave it to Beaver and Dennis the Menace do. It doesn't even have an unusual family structure, like My Three Sons or The Brady Bunch. Nope, it's just an unadorned, straight-down-the-line sitcom about a nuclear family in mid-20th-century America. This is exactly the kind of blandly wholesome show that inspired Gary Ross' film Pleasantville (1998).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 287: 'Songs from the Ed Wood Zone' (2007)

The gang's all here! (artwork by Libby Reid)

There's something about Ed Wood, specifically the low-budget sci-fi/horror films he made in the 1950s, that inspires creativity in others. But why is that? I think it's because artists look at Ed and see a man who created highly distinctive, idiosyncratic work despite every conceivable obstacle. People watch his cheap but endearing movies and think, "He somehow got this insane movie made and released. What's my excuse?"

Even in his prime, Eddie had little money or access to resources, so his films feature laughable props, wobbly sets, and frequent continuity errors. His actors are often misfits and eccentrics, people who look and speak so strangely that they barely seem to belong to the human race. And Eddie's scripts, both in their plots and their dialogue, represent the deeply weird and personal sensibility of the author. Ed Wood just had a kooky, cockeyed way of looking at the world, and he managed to incorporate his own off-kilter ideas into stories of aliens, zombies, monsters, and flying saucers. Add to this the fact that Ed Wood was a cross-dressing alcoholic, and it's a minor miracle that his movies exist at all. But they do.

Over the years, I have reviewed numerous Ed Wood-inspired works, ranging from comic books to short films. Today, however, I am turning my attention to an obscure EP from 2007 called Songs from the Ed Wood Zone, which contains ditties about Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and more. What, you've never heard of it? Well, I only encountered it because it kept turning up in my search results when I was looking for other Ed Wood-related material online. At first, I'd find it a little annoying ("Oh, not this again!"), but then I realized I should actually listen to the damned thing.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 286: Searching for details in 'Glen or Glenda' (1953)

The paintings of Frank Moss Bennett play an important role in Glen or Glenda.

Something strange happens to me when I watch the same movie too many times. Eventually, the plot, dialogue, and characters become second-nature, and I start noticing all the other stuff in the movie—the props, sets, costumes, etc. A similar thing happened when I screened all 255 episodes of Happy Days (1974-1984) for my podcast. Over the course of watching 11 seasons, I started caring less and less about the characters and their problems and began to focus my attention on what was happening in the margins of the show. (Wasn't that figurine on the other side of the living room last week? What happened to the recliner? Which magazine is that on the coffee table?)

And so, this week, I've decided to go rooting through Ed Wood's debut feature, Glen or Glenda (1953), in search of minutiae. I've certainly watched this movie enough times to start noticing all these little incidental details. But my interest in these things is not merely trivia for the sake of trivia. I've said that each movie—no matter how fantastic the plot or outrageous the characters—is a documentary of its own time and its own making. When I identify a prop or background detail in one of Ed Wood's movies, I get a clearer vision of the (now mostly vanished) world Eddie and his actors and crew members inhabited.

So let's get started, eh?

Los Cos: The original 'Fat Albert' special from 1969 has resurfaced!

Fat Albert bursts onto the screen in 1969.

A Cosby album.

Long before his name became associated with the drugging and raping of women, comedian Bill Cosby (born 1937) was known as a purveyor of warm, relatable humor about the day-to-day foibles of mid-20th-century American life. Leaning heavily on anecdotes from his own experiences, he talked about such subjects as sports, driving, childhood, marriage, parenthood, etc. in that friendly, conversational cadence of his. During a time of tremendous racial strife in this country, Cosby's act transcended color lines and appealed to a broad spectrum of the public.

In the 1960s, Cosby emerged as one of the top stand-up comics in America, headlining at nightclubs and appearing frequently on talk shows and variety shows. He also released a series of well-received comedy albums, starting with Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow... Right! (1963). Meanwhile, his acting career took off with his groundbreaking dramatic role on I Spy (1965-1968). In short, Bill Cosby was big but nowhere near as big as he'd one day become. Ironically, his next major step forward came from looking backward.

In his act, Cosby frequently talked about his youth, growing up poor in North Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s. He would regale his audiences with stories about his rambunctious childhood buddies, including Dumb Donald, Old Weird Harold, and the jubilant but massively overweight Fat Albert, the latter of whom was known for his catchphrase: "Hey, hey, hey!" Soon, thanks to these standup routines, several of which wound up immortalized on LPs, all of America was familiar with Bill Cosby's childhood.

Podcast Tuesday: "Father and Child Reunion"

In 1994, Henry Winkler was once again ready for his closeup.

There's such a thing as playing a character too well. When Jim Parsons—now and forever associated with his nerdy Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory—hosted Saturday Night Live in 2014, he sang a song called "I'm Not That Guy," an ode to actors like himself who have been hopelessly typecast in sitcom roles. The lyrics reference Jaleel White from Family Matters, Jason Alexander from Seinfeld, and Henry Winkler from Happy Days. As Parson puts it: "Henry Winkler as the Fonz/The epitome of cool/But in real life, he was a nice Jewish boy who went to Yale Drama School."

It's true that, when Happy Days was cancelled in 1984, the news hit Henry Winkler very hard. He was so well-known as Fonzie that he didn't think the public would ever accept him as another character. And so, after the eleventh and final season of Happy Days wrapped, Henry walked away from acting for about a decade. He reinvented himself as a director and producer, jobs that kept him in showbiz but off-camera. All that Yale acting training down the drain.

But in 1994, Henry decided the time was right to come back to acting in a big way, taking the lead role in a Fox sitcom called Monty. Sensing it would have been disastrous to play a character even remotely similar to Fonzie, Winkler portrayed someone who was almost the complete opposite: an uptight conservative talk show host named Monty Richardson. The sitcom depicts Monty's professional life (where his coworkers barely tolerate him) and his home life (where his wife and children barely tolerate him). At the heart of the show is Monty's conflict with his liberal, college-age son Greg (pre-Friends David Schwimmer), newly engaged to even-more-liberal Geena (China Kantner). 

Obviously, Monty was a major change in direction for Henry Winkler. But was it a good one? That's what we're trying to determine on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. You can find out what we thought by clicking the play button below.

1970s Hardee's commercials were beautifully chaotic

Gilbert Giddyup (left) and Speedy McGreedy shill for Hardee's.

Hardee's was not part of my childhood, at least not to any great extent. The restaurant chain had only a marginal presence in mid-Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, lagging behind McDonald's and Burger King, plus KFC, Wendy's, Arby's, Taco Bell, and numerous others. I can only remember going to Hardee's with my family on a handful of occasions in my youth. A trip there was decidedly out of the ordinary. A big deal, you might say.

I cannot even recall seeing a single TV commercial for Hardee's when I was growing up. While I was very familiar with the antics of Ronald McDonald, Grimace, and the Hamburglar, I was denied the animated adventures of such Hardee's mascots as Gilbert Giddyup, Speedy McGreedy, and Supermouth. Were these Hardee's characters part of your childhood? Did you dream about them the way I used to dream of the residents of McDonaldland? 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 285: The weird, wild music of 'Necromania' (1971)

The music in Ed Wood's Necromania (1971) is drawn from a number of sources.

Back in 2019, I assembled a soundtrack album for Ed Wood's 1971 pornographic film Necromania and posted it to SoundCloud for other fans to enjoy. Following the template of the 1995 Orgy of the Dead soundtrack from Strangelove Records, I took the audio directly from the movie itself and included both music cues and dialogue excerpts. Response to the project was, let's say, muted. While I personally find this subject quite fascinating, it's not necessarily of much interest to the average person. Even many Wood fans steer clear of Eddie's adult movies, so the prospect of a Necromania soundtrack is not all that appealing to them.

Nevertheless, in 2026, I am bravely revisiting the topic. Music identification has come a long way in seven years, and it is now possible to find the actual titles and artists of the songs heard in the movie. At least some of the time, that is. I should clarify, for those who haven't seen it, that Necromania relies entirely on stock music. That's no surprise. While Bride of the Monster (1955) has an original score by Frank Worth, most of Eddie's classic films such as Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) use so-called library music. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 284: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 3]

A lifetime's worth of memories in just 32 crudely-Xeroxed pages.

A magazine from 1993.

Information is like tap water these days. Any time of the day or night, whenever we want it, it's there for our use. Just turn on the faucet and enjoy. True, there are places in this world where information is decidedly not accessible to all. By the same token, there are places where tap water isn't available either. There are probably places where neither is available. Be glad you don't live in any of those places.

Here, in the land of the free, we have become accustomed to information on demand as well as media on demand. If an album, movie, or TV show isn't available instantly, we declare it "lost." That's how impatient we've become. If you have to go to a library to get it, it doesn't exist. But we should remember that it wasn't always so. There was a time not so long ago when we were much more reliant on printed material and physical media for the information we now take for granted.

Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, a 1981 chapbook by superfans Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin, is a product of that time before the information revolution. In those days, if you wanted details about an offbeat director like Eddie, you had to comb through the archives and maybe contact people who knew him personally. And so they did. Only a handful of Ed Wood's movies were accessible at that time, and much of Ed's career was entirely undocumented. But Randy and Harold cobbled together whatever they could and assembled a 32-page booklet from their findings, which they then distributed via mail order from an office in Hollywood. They called this operation The Edward D. Wood, Jr. Film Appreciation Society or EDWJFAS.

Podcast Tuesday: "JD, Use the Forks!"

The Making of the Vice President: Owen Asztalos in Hillbilly Elegy.

Each nation, including our own, must cultivate a version of its history that it can live with. That means emphasizing certain facts, eliminating others, and just generally stretching and augmenting reality whenever necessary. The reconstituted origin story becomes a shared and beloved legend, a comforting fable we tell ourselves over and over again until it becomes truer than the truth.

Not only do we do this myth-making for our country, we do this for certain individuals who are important in our history: prominent politicians, inventors, businessmen, war heroes, etc. These folks are just as messy and flawed and contradictory as anyone else, but we somehow need them to be better than the rest of us, to be more, to rise above the foibles and follies that keep most of us down. So we essentially turn them into superheroes. And we all know every good superhero has a compelling origin story.

But what if you can't wait for others to turn your story into an inspiring myth? Well, then, you do it yourself. That's how we get books like 2016's Hillbilly Elegy, in which Ohio-born venture capitalist and Magic: The Gathering aficionado JD Vance tells us about how he overcame adversity to become the great man he is today. The bestselling book became Vance's springboard to a fast-rising political career, one that has taken him in short order from the Senate to the Vice Presidency and may one day make him Executive in Chief and Leader of the Free World.

Along the way, there was also a less-celebrated Hillbilly Elegy movie in 2020. Since that movie was directed by Happy Days alumnus Ron Howard, that makes it fair game for our podcast. This week, my co-host and I spend some quality time discussing Hillbilly Elegy and the politician who inspired it. If you'd like, you may join us by clicking the play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 283: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (center, cowering) in the nightmare sequence from Glen or Glenda.

This time last week, we were talking about Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, a surprisingly thorough 1981 chapbook about Eddie's strange life and career created by two very dedicated California fans, Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin. These young men conducted their research at a time when there were no books about Ed Wood on the market and Eddie's movies weren't even readily available on home video. The acknowledgements page suggests that Randy and Harold may have contacted some of Eddie's family, friends, and professional associates in assembling their booklet.

We'd only gotten as far as the book's capsule biography of Ed Wood, namely because I'd gotten bogged down in discussing how much of it was true and how much of it wasn't. But now, we get into the heart of A Man and His Films: a discussion of Eddie's filmography. The authors have divided this material into several sections: The Major Films (four movies), The Lesser Known Films (five movies), and The Lost Films (two movies, one unreleased and one unproduced). This gives you an idea of how well-documented Eddie's career was in 1981 and how much was still unknown to the public.

So what are Eddie's "major films"? The authors list just four: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), Glen or Glenda (1953), and Jail Bait (1954). (And, yeah, they're in that order for some reason.) Remember, at this time, Night of the Ghouls (1959) aka Revenge of the Dead had not been rediscovered and released on home video. So if you wanted some classic 1950s Ed, you really only had those first four features to go by.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 282: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 1]

A remarkable fan creation from the early 1980s.

We may think we want to travel back in time, but we probably wouldn't like the past very much once we got there. For one thing, we're so reliant on modern-day technology that it would be incredibly frustrating to be without it for any extended length of time. I can remember how cumbersome research used to be when I was in school. To write just one term paper on the Old English poet Cynewulf, for example, I had to check out a whole stack of books from the college library. Today, all that precious Cynewulf knowledge would be at my fingertips whenever I wanted it.

This entire series of articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) would not be remotely possible without the internet and the ability to access decades of video, audio, and text instantly. I marvel at the work of writers who did their research during the low-tech, pre-internet days. How did they do it? More than a decade before Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), a couple of dedicated Wood fans in California named Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin assembled and self-published a chapbook about their favorite director called Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films (1981). Though crude by today's standards—the pictures are xeroxed, the text is typewritten—it remains a priceless souvenir of early '80s fan culture and a remarkable example of Wood scholarship.

This 32-page guidebook to Ed Wood's film career declares itself "a publication of The Edward D. Wood Jr. Film Appreciation Society." So what the hell is that? Did the EDWJFAS do anything else besides this? Well, maybe. In an article from the September 8, 1981 issue of The Soho News, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum mentions the EDWJFAS in his dual review of Ferdinando Baldi's 3D Western Comin' at Ya! (1981) and Gus Trikonis' rowdy comedy Take This Job and Shove It (1981). He says that the organization has formed "recently" and "produced a marathon screening and monograph." The writer suggests that audiences are sick of middlebrow mainstream fare such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and are taking solace in pure trash. Rosenbaum is in favor of this.

Podcast Tuesday: "Sixty-Three Years Cool"

You're never too old to be cool. Or are you?

             

On Happy Days, Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) stubbornly clung to the music and fashions of the 1950s, well into the 1960s. The sitcom takes place over about a decade, but Fonzie is often hesitant to update his style to match the times. There are a couple of episodes of the show that deal with this, namely "Who Gives a Hootenanny?" from Season 10 and "The Spirit is Willing" from Season 11. In the former, Fonzie learns to cope with the fact that folk music is replacing good old-fashioned rock & roll; in the latter, he has a terrifying vision of what could happen to him if he doesn't stop living in the past.

Presumably, Fonzie had to deal with the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, '70s, and beyond. Even during the 11 seasons of Happy Days, he undergoes massive personal changes. At the beginning of the sitcom, his life revolves around motorcycles and "chicks," and he's only a few years (months?) removed from being a gang member and getting into rumbles in the back alleys of Milwaukee. By the end of the show, he is a professional educator, a local business owner, and an adoptive father. And he doesn't get into fights anymore. At least not as much.

But suppose our favorite mechanic had refused to change. Ever. Suppose he kept being the same juvenile delinquent punk he'd been in the 1950s because those were the greatest years of his life. In 2001, radio host Tom Scharpling and musician Jon Wurster gave us a worst-case scenario of how this might play out when they performed their legendary sketch "The Gorch" on The Best Show on WFMU. In this segment, Scharpling warily interviews a 63-year-old man from York, PA named Roland "The Gorch" Gorchnick (played by Wurster), who claims to be the real-life inspiration for Fonzie. Over the course of a half hour, this combative gentleman reveals himself to be a pathologically violent, antisocial human being.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we finally get around to talking about "The Gorch." This is an episode I've wanted to do for years. I really hope you enjoy it.

P.S. While editing this episode, I realized that The Gorch's memories are strikingly similar to those of American Splendor comics writer Harvey Pekar (1939-2010), who grew up on the mean streets of Cleveland in the 1950s. In one story, Pekar even names a thug who, like The Gorch, fought with chains! 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 281: Johnny Legend remembers Tor Johnson (1982)

In 1982, Fangoria ran a heartfelt tribute to the departed Swedish wrestler.

Now that we have books about Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Criswell, Tor Johnson (1903-1971) is arguably the most famous person in Ed Wood's acting stable not to have a biography on the market. Perhaps someday that will change. The Swedish-born wrestler, born Karl Erik Tore Johansson in Stockholm at the beginning of the previous century, is best-known to cult movie fans for his roles in three of Ed's most-seen movies: Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). But this was neither the beginning nor quite the end of the Swede's lengthy career.

Bob Hope (left) with Tor.

For the sake of the story, Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) pretends that Eddie himself discovered Tor at a wrestling match in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and cast the large, baldheaded man in his first-ever movie role. But, in truth, Johnson started getting film work in the 1930s shortly after he moved to America. His movie and (eventually) television career continued to the 1960s. We may associate Tor with low-budget sci-fi and horror movies—and he did several of those—but his filmography is surprisingly diverse, ranging from comedies to crime thrillers. He worked alongside such legends as Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Tony Curtis, Eddie Cantor, William Powell, Abbott & Costello and more!

With his shaved head, imposing physique, and heavy Swedish accent, Tor was an unmistakable presence onscreen. But his outsized, boisterous personality made him just as memorable offscreen. Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) includes numerous, colorful anecdotes about the wrestler-turned-actor—the massive meals he ate, the toilet seats he broke, etc. He seems like a jovial, fun-loving guy. But there are some potentially upsetting details about Tor in the book as well, including a quote from actor Tony Cardoza who says that the wrestler hired the services of an underaged prostitute while touring India. In some interviews that Grey left on the cutting room floor, Plan 9 actress Mona McKinnon remembers Tor becoming intoxicated at a party and carrying her away against her will.

So who was this man? Until someone pens Super Swedish Angel: The Tor Johnson Story, what we have are various newspaper and magazine articles about Tor that have appeared over the years. A very intriguing example is "I Remember Tor," originally published in issue #22 of Fangoria from October 1982. In it, the late wrestling manager, musician, and film producer Johnny Legend (1948-2026) shares his memories of Tor, who had been deceased for over a decade but whose films were just then coming back into vogue thanks to The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 173: The weird, wild works of Spenser & West (updated in 2026!)

Ed Wood wrote several books (for different publishers!) under the name "Spenser & West" in the late 1960s.

NOTE: I promised last week that I would complete my review of The Oralists (1969) today, but I unexpectedly received bonus information about some other, related Ed Wood books and decided that they deserved an article of their own. The second half of my Oralists review will appear on this blog next week instead. - J.B.

Last Wednesday, I published the first half of my review of The Oralists (1969), Ed Wood's truly depraved guide to oral sex and those who love it. Eddie wrote this book—and possibly a few others—under the pen name Spenser & West. Jean Spenser and Roger West are supposedly a married couple of sex researchers who write books together. It's all bunk, of course, but it theoretically makes the books seem somewhat more credible. (This isn't just smut. It's science.)

I'd always assumed these fictional sexologists, Jean and Roger, were inspired by William H. Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia E. Johnson (1925-2013), two famous real-life sex researchers who actually were married to each other for over 20 years. While M&J's pioneering book Human Sexual Response (1966) was already out on the market and very well-known to the public, including Ed Wood, William and Virginia didn't actually tie the knot until 1971. They divorced in 1993.

In The Oralists, Eddie refers to a previous Spenser & West book called Sexual Fantasia. I was initially unable to find any information about this book whatsoever and assumed Ed Wood just made it up to bolster the fictional resume of Spenser & West, but reader James Pontolillo corrected me on this issue. Like The Oralists, Sexual Fantasia was published by Tiger in 1969. James kindly provided pictures of the front and back covers.

The front and back covers of Sexual Fantasia.

According to James, Sexual Fantasia is quite rare. In fact, his copy might be one of the few left in the world. Naturally, since this book is a companion volume to The Oralists, I wanted to know if Ed Wood had also written it. Here's how James answered:

I've read through it once very breezily and I will say a provisional "Yes". But I really need to take it back out and go through it much more carefully before rendering a final verdict. It definitely has that "Late Wood" porn novel characteristic mixture of corny writing ("my forest is on fire, baby.... get that big hose out and go to work already") with disturbing content (example: very young-age pedophilia). I need to come up with a reasonable solution to scan the rare paperbacks I have in order to get them circulating to interested parties. Perhaps I'll drop some serious $$$ on this in a few years when I retire and will have the time to scan books.

That certainly sounds promising! 

James also helpfully sent me a copy of the table of contents page from Sexual Fantasia as well as the front cover of yet another Spenser & West book, The Prostitutes (1968). The page from Sexual Fantasia is especially interesting because it contains summaries of the book's seven chapters. It's obvious from the summary of Chapter Two that Sexual Fantasia revisits some of the same disturbing themes from The Oralists. The book doesn't appear to be limited to the topic of oral sex, however.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast vs. 'The Curse of Ed Wood' (2003)

The council of elders has reconvened to cover a most unusual movie from 2003.

Making a movie is hard, you guys. I mean, just so ridiculously goddamned hard. Merely getting the actors to show up when and where you told them is a chore in and of itself. And then you actually have to film them saying and doing stuff. It's a nightmare. Something can (and probably will) go wrong at any point in the moviemaking process—from preproduction to production to postproduction. Even after all that turmoil and strife, the fate of your film is in the hands of skeptical viewers, jeering critics, and a vast network of middlemen and sleazeballs.

No one knew these struggles better than writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). From the late 1940s to the late 1970s, he struggled to get his ideas and his stories onto the big screen. Along the way, he faced any number of obstacles: a scarcity of money and resources, hostile and humiliating reviews, shaky or nonexistent distribution, his own out-of-control alcoholism, and (according to some) a total lack of aptitude. But despite all this, he managed to make some movies that have resonated with viewers for generations, including the immortal Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). It's no wonder he's become a hero to low-budget, independent filmmakers everywhere.

Sometimes, those indie filmmakers pay tribute to Ed Wood through their own weird little movies. And that's how we get films like Tim Swartz's surreal softcore effort Barely Lethal Lebanese Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood (2003). (I'm disguising the title somewhat in an effort to flummox the censors.) I was recently made aware of this totally-forgotten film thanks to an unexpected Google Alert. After watching five minutes of it, I decided I needed to get some other Woodologists involved. 

In short, it was time for a new episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. The redoubtable James Pontolillo did some in-depth research into the history of this misbegotten film, including contacting its director. W. Paul Apel and Rob Huffman brought their own insights and ideas to the table. And I was there to add some moments of levity. Naturally, none of this would have been possible without the late, great Greg Javer, who created the podcast in the first place. You can watch the latest episode right here:

Podcast Tuesday: "The Most (To Say the Least)"

Donny Most just wants you to listen to some songs, okay?

"Strike while the iron is hot." 

That's the saying, right? You've gotta take advantage of opportunities, especially financial ones, when they come along. If you wait too long, they could disappear. As a wise man named Jerry Reed once said (or half-sang), "When you're hot, you're hot. And when you're not, you're not." But what does that mean if you're an actor on a top-rated TV sitcom? Sure, the iron is hot, but how exactly do you strike it? What do you strike it with? Do you try to get a movie deal? Endorse a chain of frozen yogurt places? Start a chain of frozen yogurt places?

These were the questions facing Donny Most in 1976. A showbiz lifer who'd been performing since childhood, he was suddenly mega-famous due to his portrayal of jokester Ralph Malph on Happy Days. This was as hot as the iron was ever going to get, and Donny struck it. Specifically, he signed a deal with United Artists and recorded a mix of golden oldies and relatively recent tracks for the label. The resulting LP, cleverly titled Donny Most, was not exactly a chartbuster in its day but gained something of a following among Happy Days fans and was even reissued on CD some years ago. 

But is the darned thing even listenable to modern ears? That's what my cohost and I try to find out this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. We were both familiar with one track, the boldly-titled "Rock is Dead," but what about the other nine? I hope you will accompany us on this strange musical journey.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

The elusive T.K. Peters, sometimes misidentified as Ed Wood.

Encyclopedia of Sex ad

As I prepared to write this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I decided to do a quick search of eBay, to see if the old myth of Dr. T.K. Peters being a pseudonym of Ed Wood still persists. You guessed it (merely one example, sadly). Apart from inflating prices, it continues to muddy the waters of Woodology, this muddying now its own niche within the larger spectrum. Dr. T.K. Peters was real, and we'll refute some counter-claims that his esteemed name was "borrowed" from the real "Kim" in future Ed Wood Wednesdays.

In the past, Pendulum Publishers, Inc. and its myriad offshoot imprints (covered ad nauseam in previous posts) published two series of photo-illustrated sexual paperbacks in the early 1970s, sourced from the comprehensive sexual study by Dr. T.K. Peters that he sold to Pendulum boss Bernie Bloom (itself rooted in his work as a marriage counselor in Atlanta from 1950 through 1965, following his retirement from Oglethorpe University...but that's another story that WILL be told). 

Fully three-fourths of the Peters' titles constituted SECS Press' (an unincorporated Pendulum imprint) Encyclopedia of Sex, the rest being the Sexual Enlightenment Series published under the Calga imprint, unleashed just on the cusp of legal, accessible and affordable hardcore sexual imagery via multi-media. For some alchemical reason, the censorship damn bursting encouraged a propensity toward the weird, the extreme and the just plain fucking nuts. In all, between Ed's own resume and an additional few titles in his collection with title-page inscriptions by him, Ed wrote or co-wrote roughly 25% of the Peters paperbacks. That index, too, is another story. Suffice to say that Ed's cohort on West Pico in the Pendulum mag office played a large role in the Pendulum Peters canon. Ed collaborated with fellow staffers Charles D. Anderson and Leo Eaton. William D. "Bill" Jones produced Peters, and so did Robin "Redbreast" Eagle. They did this under a slew of pseudonyms, one of them, Norman Bates, still falsely claimed a pseudonym of Ed. It's impossible to talk about T.K. Peters without running into these clumsy mis-Ed-tributions. That's a charitable statement and I'll leave it at that.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 87: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" (1975)

This week, Eddie takes us back into nudie movie history.

A coin-operated peep show.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. is, for better or worse, still known primarily as a filmmaker rather than a writer. Even though Eddie's books and articles represent a vast and colorful body of work, rich in themes and ripe for rediscovery, most documentaries about the man make only passing references to his writing career. A typical doc might show a couple of paperback covers from the 1960s before going back to talking about Ed's movies. Cue the umpteenth clip of model flying saucers dangling on the ends of strings.

If people haven't read Nightmare of Ecstasy or Muddled Mind, they may have no idea that Ed Wood was a writer at all, other than his screenplays. Part of the problem has been availability. Due to rights issues, only a few of Ed's dozens of novels (Killer in Drag, Devil Girls, Death of a Transvestite) are readily available on sites like Amazon today. The rest are expensive collectors' items. In recent years, the anthologies Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever have made nearly a hundred of Eddie's short stories easily accessible to his fans. But this represents merely a tiny fraction of Wood's written output

And Ed Wood's nonfiction remains even less known than his fiction, if that's possible. While Eddie's short stories and novels have been somewhat neglected over the years, his fact-based articles and books, nearly all of them sexual or sex-adjacent in nature, have been basically abandoned. Almost no one writes about this material, voluminous though it is. So, today, I thought I'd shed some light on one of Eddie's lesser-known nonfiction works from later in his career.

The story: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" Originally published in Body & Soul, vol. 8, no. 1, May/June 1975. Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

A "camp" classic.

Synopsis: Though the porno film may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, it's actually part of a heritage that goes back to the earliest days of filmed entertainment. In the old days, there were arcades with hand-cranked machines that allowed the viewer to flip through photographs. Then there were primitive "peep shows" that displayed brief filmed striptease routines. Eventually these shows evolved, adding color and full nudity. Many of these shows focused on nudist camps, since that setting allowed filmmakers to present nudity in a non-sexual way. Eventually, the appeal of these nudist films wore off, and the coin-operated machines weren't profitable enough for film producers or arcade owners.

The next step was projecting these films onto a big screen for an audience, rather than showing them to one viewer at a time. Nudity started becoming commonplace in theatrically exhibited films made after World War II and shown at burlesque theaters. Some of these films had stories, but many were simply the same old strip shows of the past. Patrons back then would sit through live strippers and old newsreels before getting to see the films. Even though these films were cheaply made and shown in black-and-white, they initially attracted long lines of curious spectators.

But this, too, lost its novelty, and producers realized they would have to invest more money in these movies. Some of that money came from theater owners who depended on the producers to stay in business. By the mid-1960s, the movies featured some "petting and kissing" between boys and girls. And, at long last, color became standard. But the stories were still "weak." Ultimately, knowledgeable audiences simply demanded that the films include actual sex. And this practice continues now, despite the efforts of "pressure groups," who have only succeeded in making sex films into a thriving multi-million-dollar business.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 21: "Necromania" (1971)

Ed Wood's return to directing came in 1971 with the X-rated Necromania. 

   

"We thought he was making a comedy, to tell you the bloody truth."

-Ric Lutze, an actor in Ed Wood's Necromania

  

Goodbye, Tor.

And now it is 1971. Whether he knows it or not, Edward Davis Wood, Jr. has only seven years to live. He and his wife, Kathy, have lost their little house on Bonner Street in North Hollywood and have moved into the seedy, violence-prone Mariposa Apartments at the intersection of Yucca and Cahuenga in LA. Before the year is out, Ed's longtime friend and long-ago star, Tor Johnson, will have died of heart failure at the age of 67. Nevermore will the ex-wrestler break one of Ed's insufficiently-reinforced toilet seats with his massive bulk.

Meanwhile, the world seems to be growing stranger and uglier by the day. President Nixon promises his 207 million constituents that he will end the nation's involvement in Vietnam. Public support for the war dwindles every day, especially when an American-supported SVA offensive in Cambodia fails after six miserable weeks.

On the homefront, the so-called "generation gap," a moral and aesthetic schism between the old and the young, has been turned into a sitcom, rechristened All in the Family, and given a spot on the CBS Saturday night lineup, right before Funny Face with Sandy Duncan. There are astronauts driving a buggy on the moon. The boxer once known as Cassius Clay has KO'd a draft-dodging rap. And down in Orlando, Walt Disney World finally opens five years after the death of its nameake.

On the radio, the ex-Beatles are either singing hymns to God ("My Sweet Lord") or questioning His very existence ("Imagine"). On movie screens, Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood are both playing rule-flouting, fascistic cops to critical and popular acclaim, either acting as the urban saviors for whom we've been praying or embodying all our worst fears about what happens when power goes unchecked. Elsewhere in cinema, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange asks us which is more disturbing: an amoral generation of lawless punks who steal, rape, and kill simply to relieve their boredom.. or a totalitarian government which will resort to truly perverse and unnatural measures to stop them?

Clearly, it is a time of transition for America.