Ed Wood's ANGORA FEVER: "Super Who?" (1972)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Angora Fever: The Collected Short Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (BearManor Bare, 2019).

The pages of Fetish magazine!

The story: "Super Who?" originally published in Fetish Annual (1972). Credited to "Ann Gora." Philip R. Frey reports that the story also appeared in Fig Leaf, vol. 2, no. 2, April/May 1973.

Synopsis: A sexy young lady in a tight-fitting sweater and miniskirt has been robbing local businesses. Her most recent target is a loan office. Detective Lieutenant Art Reason and Detective Rance Clanton are on the case. The thief always wears the same basic outfit, complete with boots and a purse. The cops learn that the mysterious bandit has murdered an elderly female bookkeeper at her latest job. Now this is a homicide investigation. When Lt. Reason learns that all of the targeted businesses have been located near vacant lots with phone booths, he thinks he may have cracked the case. And the criminal, known only as The Angel, may have a surprising secret of her own!

Wood trademarks: Title with "Super" in it (cf. "Superfruit"); sweaters (cf. Glen or Glenda); angora (in this case, a minidress made of the stuff); sexy female criminal (cf. The Violent Years, Devil Girls, Fugitive Girls); robbery that turns to murder (cf. Jail Bait); cross dressing (cf. Glen or Glenda, "Blood Splatters Quickly"); character named Rance (one of Ed's most-used names, cf. "Superfruit," "Breasts of the Chicken," "Epitaph for the Village Drunk," etc.)

Excerpt: "Her face was well made up, the lips pouted in their deep redness, and her blue eyes were enhanced by the light blue makeup over the upper eyelids… the face of an Angel… but she was no Angel."

Reflections: A book like Angora Fever is naturally going to attract the attention of those who know Ed Wood mainly from his 1950s films rather than his writing. Those fans might find themselves somewhat adrift during the first few stories in this collection, which are mostly grisly horror and crime fiction with some pornographic elements. They came here for UFOs on strings, and they got hobos being mangled in back alleys. "Super Who?" might, therefore, be closer to what people are expecting from Eddie.

For one thing, this story is a police procedural, just like most of the movies from Eddie's classic period, including Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Jail Bait, The Sinister Urge, Bride of the Monster, and Night of the Ghouls. Lt. Reason and Det. Clanton could be characters from any one of those movies. It's easy to imagine Kenne Duncan or Duke Moore in these roles. They're dour, hardworking cops who go through a lot of coffee and cigarettes while working a tough case. And, best of all, they exchange some terse, Jack Webb-style dialogue. Check out this beautiful example:

      Reason put the coffee cup on the far side of the desk and lit up a cigarette. He let the smoke ring his head then drift off into nothingness. “I want that broad. I want her on our most wanted list.”
     “We got some harder customers around which rate that spot.”
     “Not the way I figure it.”
     “How’s that?”
     “She carries a gun. My guess is it’s loaded. And sooner or later that loaded gun is going to go off and our thief will become a killer. Got me?”
     The detective nodded in agreement. “She goes on the most wanted list.”

All that's missing is the famous four-note musical stinger from Dragnet: dum-da-dum-dum!

If people are only familiar with Ed Wood's movies and don't know his fiction at all, "Super Who?" might be a good gateway drug for them. Most of the story is told from the perspective of the cops, the representatives of law and order, and justice is served at the end of the story. But there's a brief passage that gets into the mind of the killer as well, explaining that she'd killed before and might just kill again. "They could only hang her once," she reasoned. "Hell, they didn't even do that anymore!" So it's still in keeping with Eddie's more unhinged crime fiction.

Next: "Florence of Arabia" (1971)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 64: Ed Wood, Jack Webb, and police procedurals

Two hardworking cops: Harvey B. Dunn and Tony McCoy in Bride of the Monster.

Try to imagine the world as it was before Jack Webb came along. Here's how authors Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik describe that world in their review of Dragnet in the 1989 book Harry And Wally's Favorite TV Shows:

     When Jack Webb first developed the series on radio in 1949, and two years later on TV, Dragnet was a breath of fresh air in the world of pop culture cops. Before Dragnet, crime fighting was usually portrayed on radio and TV in an overly romantic light. Policemen or private eyes would effortlessly deduce the criminal's identity and then outtrick the felon, while engaging in witty repartee and romancing some young lovely at the same time.
      While this image is fine for light entertainment now and then, it paints a wildly distorted image of what real policemen go through. Dragnet changed all that. In Dragnet, thanks to Jack Webb's unwavering dedication to realism, you see the boredom, the red tape, the hard work, the long hours, and the frustration of real police work.

In other words, Webb was essential in shaping the still-vital storytelling form we know today as the police procedural. That's a type of detective fiction in which the audience is shown the steps that police officers go through in solving a crime. It remains a popular subspecies, especially in television, but also in films, novels, short stories, and plays. Dragnet has been accurately called "the most famous procedural of all time." Interesting that Webb's radio show should debut in 1949 with the television adaptation appearing just two years later on NBC. Webb and the character he portrayed, no-nonsense Los Angeles cop Joe Friday, were ascending to prominence just as East Coast transplant Edward D. Wood, Jr. was beginning his three-decade career in film and television in Hollywood.

"Unwavering dedication to realism" is not the phrase that jumps to most people's minds when discussing the work of Ed Wood. Indeed, Eddie's willingness to jump headfirst into absurdity is one of the main selling points of his work today. Dadaists, surrealists, primitivists, satirists, and outsider artists can all claim Ed as one of their own. And yet, consider this: Virtually all of the films with which Ed is most closely associated—especially those from his 1953-1957 golden years—are police procedurals to one extent or another. I'd argue that Jack Webb had as much influence over Eddie's work, if not more so, as Tod Browning or James Whale.

The trend truly starts with Ed Wood's debut feature, 1953's Glen or Glenda, but the seeds were planted even earlier. That same year, Ed wrote and directed Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid, a failed pilot for a proposed Western series starring Tom Keene, who unfortunately proved a dullard in the title role. Keene's straight-shooting character is not actually a cop; he's an insurance investigator. But the basics of his job are not dissimilar to police work. He looks into insurance claims that seem fishy, just the way a cop would investigate a case. He talks to suspects and witnesses and, when necessary, exchanges gunfire with the bad guys. Crossroad Avenger might be described as an Old West equivalent of the radio show Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which also centered around an insurance investigator. Dollar hit the airwaves just months before Dragnet.

Just a man with a job to do: Lyle Talbot in Glen or Glenda.

But then we come to Glen or Glenda, ostensibly Ed Wood's statement on his own transvestism as well as the then-shocking sexual reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen. There is no real reason for this movie to be a police procedural, and yet it is one. The movie's framing story centers around the eminently Webb-ian character of Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot, who would eventually appear in an episode of Dragnet 1967), a veteran of the police force who investigates the suicide of a transvestite. His inquiries lead him to the office of Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell). The movie-length conversation between Alton and Warren comprises the spine of the film. At one point, the doctor mentions his guest's reputation as "a hard-hearted policeman." The inspector replies with a monologue that, in its clumsy but earnest way, attempts to explain the plight of all professional lawmen:

Isn't that what's thought of most policemen? The laws are written. The policeman is hired to see that those laws are enforced. We have a job to do. As in most jobs, there is always someone who doesn't want that job to be done. In most factories today, the employer has put up suggestion boxes. Even the employer needs advice once in a while. I think in the case we're referring to, I need advice. Maybe it shouldn't have happened as it did. Perhaps the next time we can prevent it.

If this weren't a story about a cross-dresser, that monologue could have come directly from Joe Friday himself. Compare it to Friday's infamous "John Law" monologue from Dragnet. An excerpt of that speech follows:

It's awkward having a policeman around the house. Friends drop in. A man with a badge answers the door. The temperature drops 20 degrees. You throw a party, and that badge gets in the way. All of a sudden there isn't a straight man in the crowd. Everybody's a comedian. "Don't drink too much," somebody says, "or the man with a badge'll run you in." Or "How's it going, Dick Tracy? How many jaywalkers did you pinch today?" And then there's always the one who wants to know how many apples you stole. All at once you lost your first name. You're a cop, a flatfoot, a bull, a dick, John Law. You're the fuzz, the heat; you're poison, you're trouble, you're bad news. They call you everything, but never a policeman.

You might think that a nonconformist like Wood, who surrounded himself with outcasts and deviates, would be incompatible with the notoriously straight-arrow, right-leaning Webb. But Eddie was a conservative man in matters of politics. He didn't approve of illicit drugs, rock music, hippies, or protesters. As Eddie got further and further into writing paperback novels in the late 1960s, one of his pet themes was how Los Angeles was being overrun by long-haired, androgynous degenerates. That was largely what Dragnet was about during those same turbulent years. Eddie and Jack might have agreed on a lot, had they ever met.

Moore and Duncan: They're cops!

But let's get back to the 1950s, when Ed Wood was making the movies on which his professional reputation would one day depend. In the Wood films from that period, there is one motif that comes up over and over and over again, even more than angora sweaters or the resurrection of the dead. Watch Jail Bait or Bride of the Monster or Plan 9 From Outer Space or Night of the Ghouls, and you know what you'll see? Hard-working, stressed-out police officers tasked with solving seemingly impossible cases. 

How appropriate that Ed's career as a mainstream (or mainstream-ish) director ended with 1960's The Sinister Urge, maybe the single most Dragnet-esque movie in Wood's entire filmography. Here, Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore are police officers dedicated to stamping out the menace of pornography, even if that means spending hours sorting through the smut themselves. Tough break, guys. Wood must have been fond of these characters, as he planned to bring them back for a never-to-be sequel called The Peeper.

Most of Wood's cop characters are plainclothesmen, just like Joe Friday. Their hours are long. Their pay is short. And the job wreaks havoc on their private lives. Poor Duke Moore spends Night of the Ghouls in a tuxedo, having been called away from attending the opera with his wife. Even when detectives Lyle Talbot and Steve Reeves stop off for a drink after work in Jail Bait, their professional duties don't end. They immediately run into a pair of known criminals and have a tense conversation with them. A policeman's job is never done. No wonder Reeves barely has time to half-heartedly flirt with Dolores Fuller's character.

The cops who populate Ed Wood's movies are in the Jack Webb/Dragnet mold in that their work brings them no apparent joy whatsoever. Their jobs are anything but effortless, and they don't engage in any "witty repartee" either. Even if Ed could have written such dialogue, his characters wouldn't have been in the mood to recite it. Their lives do not seem fun. In Plan 9, two uniformed patrolmen played by Conrad Brooks and Paul Marco are dispatched to the local cemetery to investigate the strange goings-on there. "What are we doing out here?" Brooks whines. "I was off duty an hour ago." Marco is not sympathetic: "Aw, don't ask me any questions. I'm just a hired hand, just like you."

That outright hostility is not typical of Wood's cop characters, but the general air of world weariness is. Marco sees himself and the other police officers in the film as "hired hands," men who have a job to do. It may not be a glamorous job or even a safe one, but it has to be done by somebody. That's something both Jack Webb and Ed Wood inherently understood.

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't mention Joe Friday's deathless catchphrase, "Just the facts, ma'am." Jack Webb never actually uttered those four words on Dragnet, but the line became associated with the character anyway because of numerous parodies and impersonations. And, as every Ed Wood fan knows, one of the hallmarks of Wood's writing is that his characters insist on being told "the facts." Whether this is a symptom of Webb's influence on Wood is unknown, but it does lend credence to the theory anyway.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 6: "Death of a Transvestite" (1967)

Four years after his debut novel, Ed Wood gave us a sequel, Death of a Transvestite.

"Pure determination held me by the groin."

- Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1967)

Ed Wood's standard headshot.

Ed Wood was many things, but lazy was not one of them. The man just never quit. When I think of Ed now, my image is not of a man standing behind a movie camera but rather a man hunched over a typewriter, churning out manuscripts and screenplays at a frenzied pace. In one of the innumerable documentaries about this odd auteur, actor Paul Marco ("Kelton the Cop") fondly recalled Ed typing away at a story while smoking, drinking, and carrying on conversations with friends. When asked which possessions he would save in case of an emergency, Ed selected his typewriter. What about his wife, Kathy? She could follow him, he explained. The man had ink and alcohol in his veins.

Getting the funding to make a movie is damned hard and frustrating work, and Eddie simply wasn't good at it. That's largely why his directing career evaporated after about a decade. But writing more or less eliminated the troublesome middlemen. There were no studio executives or financial backers to tell him no. It was just his brain, the typewriter, and the paper. Ed could bang out a novel and sell it to a publisher fairly quickly, and this would provide the cash he desperately needed to buy his booze and pay his rent, the former always taking precedent over the latter. But while Wood may have had a figurative gun pressed to his temple while he wrote these volumes, do not labor under the delusion that these books were soulless, mercenary endeavors.

On the contrary, there is much of the man himself in these sentences, perhaps in a form even purer or less diluted than one might find in his films. I won't say that "to read Ed Wood is to know Ed Wood," because the man was profoundly unknowable. Even his own wife, Kathy O'Hara, the woman who stayed with him for decades and was as close to him as anyone, considered her husband a "lost being on this earth" who "doesn't belong here." I will say, though, that Ed's written works give us valuable insight into this surprisingly complex man.

Fortunately, this project has finally given me an excuse to delve into the shadowy literary career of Edward D. Wood, Jr., something I've wanted to do ever since reading Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., which contains an extensive Ed Wood bibliography. In fact, the image from that book which really piqued my interest was the original 1967 cover of the novel which I'm reviewing today.

How could I not be intrigued by Death of a Transvestite? After all, the book's original cover depicts a man wearing a black bra, black panties, black garters, and fishnet stockings. He would look very much like a character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were it not for the cover's other ominous trappings. A small black rectangle, for instance, cancels out the man's eyes. And, of course, he is standing in a prison hallway which terminates in an electric chair. At the bottom of the page is the book's unforgettable tagline and tantalizing ad copy:    

LET ME DIE IN DRAG! 

The last request of a prisoner in the
death house. A revealing insight to the
"other life" of a man of action...

ADULTS ONLY

Now, at last, I get to see what was behind that arresting cover. Ah, the joys and privileges of adulthood! Incidentally, that cover photo was of actor Hugh Hooker from the movie Suburbia Confidential (1966), directed by Stephen Apostolof (aka "A.C. Stephen"), who worked with Ed many times in the 1960s and 1970s on film projects. Anyway, onto the book itself:

DEATH OF A TRANSVESTITE (1967)

Ed Wood in one of the angora sweaters over which he obsessed so fervently.

Alternate titles: Let Me Die in Drag (sometimes credited to "Woodrow Edwards"); I Want to Die in Drag (Kindle edition), Hollywood Drag; Muerte de un travesti (translated into Spanish)

Availability: The most common edition is Death of a Transvestite (Four Walls Eight Windows 1998; reprinted by Da Capo Press, 1999), but an edition with the original cover is available as well (Angora Press, 1990). Those who want the Spanish language edition can opt for Muerte de un travesti (Punto de Lectura, 2002). And those who prefer to have the novel as an e-book may purchase I Want to Die in Drag: The Transgender Classic (Amazon Digital Services, 2005).

A few of the many editions of Death of a Transvestite.
Notice how many bear Ed's own name.

The backstory: A great deal happened in America in the four years between the publication of Ed Wood's debut novel, Killer in Drag (aka Black Lace Drag), and the appearance of its bizarre sequel, Death of a Transvestite (aka Let Me Die in Drag). The country lost a whole lot of its innocence between 1963 and 1967. The president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in full view of the public. His alleged killer, too, had been gunned down in full view of the cameras. Under the leadership of hawkish new president Lyndon B. Johnson, the war in Vietnam had escalated severely and was claiming the lives of many young American men who had not volunteered for military service but instead had been drafted.

Legions of so-called "baby boomers," the children born during the prosperous, optimistic years following WWII, had started to reach their teens and twenties, and they began to form their own parallel society, separate from that of their parents, which became known as the counterculture. These young people were fiercely anti-war (after all, they were the ones expected to go fight it) and protested vigorously against it, often on college campuses. Moreover, they were tired of the strict, repressive, morality-bound world in which they had been raised and were eager to experiment with sex, drugs, art, music, and fashion.

Cultural observers began to speak of a "generation gap" emerging between the older folks and their children. Ed Wood, then 43, would have been closer in age to the parents and definitely fell on the pre-war side of the generation gap. People who know of Ed's transvestism and prodigious consumption of alcohol might have guessed that he'd be sympathetic to these adventurous young folks and their newfangled ideas. Nothing doing. As Rob Craig astutely points out in his book Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Study of the Films (McFarland Press, 2009), Ed was "a unique cross between libertine and prude." Both sides are well represented in Death of a Transvestite.

The Sunset Strip in the '60s.

Those of you who have read Killer in Drag will recall that, in that book, cross-dressing New York assassin Glen Marker (aka "Glenda Satin") was falsely accused of the murder of wealthy homosexual Dalten Van Carter and had to go on the run. He got as far as Colorado, where he purchased a small carnival and began a relationship with troubled prostitute Rose Graves. Unfortunately, the carnival only brought Glen/Glenda unforeseen new problems, and he reluctantly left Rose to go to Los Angeles. In doing so, he barely escaped from a pair of crooked cops, Mac and Ernie, who died in a wild climactic car chase. While Glen/Glenda was making his way to the West Coast, his former mob bosses from "the Syndicate" back East were dispatching another drag queen to hunt him down. That's how Killer in Drag ends.

The sequel picks up with Glen Marker on death row, having apparently been convicted of murder (we never find out precisely whose, though) and about to go to the electric chair*. He has one final wish, though: to be allowed to die in drag as his "Glenda" character. In exchange for this final courtesy, Glen agrees to tell the warden his entire story. The bulk of the novel is a series of flashbacks -- Glen's memories intermingled with those of other characters in the saga and various lawmen, waitresses, bellboys, and others who just happened to witness some of the events. The overarching narrative is of Glen Marker's attempts to establish himself in Los Angeles, while constantly being pursued by the vicious, hawk-nosed Paul/Paula, a thrill-killer turned professional assassin, who once idolized Glen and now must destroy him.

Despite this unpleasantness, Glen/Glenda manages to start a romantic relationship with rising young actress Cynthia "Cindy" Harding, who is the "kept woman" of wealthy, aging, would-be lothario Ronnie Dixon. Together, Glenda and Cindy explore the nightlife of Los Angeles, including the gay and lesbian bars of the Sunset Strip. But the Strip is being infiltrated by rowdy "teenagers" and "beatniks," attracting the unwanted attention of the police. A full-scale riot breaks out one night, providing the chaotic backdrop for the final, bloody showdown between Glen/Glenda and Paul/Paula. His story told, Glenda bravely accepts her fate in the death house, clad in an angora sweater and brown skirt borrowed from the warden's daughter.

*HISTORICAL NOTE: While capital punishment was the law in California in 1967, the electric chair has never been used in that state. Capital punishment was briefly suspended in California from 1972 to 1978. In reality, Glen Marker could have opted for lethal injection or the gas chamber.

A typical scene from Jack Webb's Dragnet 1967

The reading experience: Befuddling and compelling at once. Killer in Drag was written in a third-person omniscient voice and told its eccentric story in a basically typical pulp novel style. The plot of Death of a Transvestite unfolds in a much more disorienting, fragmented way.

In a previous entry in this series, I wrote that Ed's script for The Violent Years was clearly influenced by Jack Webb's seminal radio and TV police series of the 1950s, Dragnet, with its deadpan narration by a police officer and its supposed basis in fact. Well, more than anything, reading Death of a Transvestite is like watching an episode of Jack Webb's revival series, Dragnet 1967, only told largely from the criminal's point of view and incorporating the transvestism and wild sexual experimentation which were the hallmarks of Wood's work. Perhaps you've seen Dragnet 1967 in reruns. In it, Sgt. Joe Friday (Webb), still as straightlaced and humorless as he was in the 1950s, comes face to face with the counterculture: hippies, longhairs, acid freaks, gurus, and more. This incredible contrast between old and new, the "generation gap" neatly encapsulated, has made the revival series a longstanding camp classic.

Ideologically, Ed Wood had a surprising amount in common with super-conservative Jack Webb. The policemen in this book are the same dutiful, honest lawmen you'll find in most of Ed's work. (The crooked cops of Killer in Drag are an anomaly.) Ed's utter contempt for the youth culture, whom he amusingly misidentifies as "beatniks," a term roughly a decade past its expiration date, is plain. Remember, this is a man who eagerly joined the Marines in WWII, so he would have had no sympathy whatsoever for the anti-Vietnam movement.

What seems hypocritical to me is his condemnation of the drug scene, specifically acid and marijuana. (There is one brief reference to "the white stuff," by which he means heroin, not cocaine.) I say "hypocritical" because Ed was altering his own consciousness with alcohol whenever he could, and the characters in his novels do likewise. Booze is nearly as central a motif in Death of a Transvestite as angora.

First edition of Robert Bloch's Psycho.

Beyond this consideration, Dragnet's documentary-style approach to storytelling causes Ed to treat this novel as a factual report compiled from various confessions and eyewitness reports. One is reminded of the prologue of Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), in which Criswell insists the story is factual, "based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal." The weirdest aspect of Death of a Transvestite is the fact that the novel, despite its supposedly "official" nature,  is written in the lurid, panting, purple-prose style of any sleazy dime novel and contains sordid details and dreamy digressions which would never, ever appear in a police document. How would waitresses and airport employees even know what the main characters were thinking, unless LA is populated by psychics? It's as if the LAPD dutifully gathered its source material then turned it over to Harold Robbins, Grace Metalious, or Jacqueline Susann (or perhaps all three, taking turns) for editing.

And maybe Robert Bloch might have taken a turn spicing this material up, too, since the Paul/Paula character bears a certain resemblance to Psycho's Norman Bates. Like Norman, Paul is a cross-dressing mama's boy who kills the women who sexually excite him. The briefly-glimpsed-yet-crucial character of Paul's indulgent mother is perhaps yet another example of Ed Wood using his writing to work through some deeply-ingrained Oedipal issues.

For such a slim, slight volume, Death of a Transvestite is surprisingly heady stuff and provides the aspiring Wood-ologist with all sorts of fodder for theories and fantasies. Copies of it are plentiful and cheap. Do yourself a favor and pick one up at the earliest convenience.

Next week: Literary month continues as I tackle another one of Ed's novels from 1967. Make plans to be back here in seven days for a review of the spicy-sounding Devil Girls.

(today's zomby) AND VINTAGE "DRAGNET" FINGER PUPPETS!

Forgive me for double-dipping on the Dragnet nostalgia, but yesterday's post reminded me of something I absolutely must share with you!

Gannon and Friday from Dragnet 1967; Blue Boy

Back in 1995, when Nick at Nite was still quite awesome, one of the staples of their schedule was Dragnet 1967, the infamous hippie-era revival of the straightlaced police procedural in which uptight Joe Friday came into contact with the "free love" generation and didn't like what he saw one bit. That series' very first episode, "The LSD Story" (a.k.a. "The Big LSD") from January 12 1967, was also its most beloved and notorious, thanks largely to Michael Burns' character "Blue Boy", an acid casualty who painted half his face blue. 

Back in the summer of 1995, as part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Nick at Nite put out a one-time only magazine filled with articles and trivia about some of the shows on its lineup. Easily, the best feature of the magazine was a page of Dragnet finger puppets by artist Chip Wass! For the benefit of you, my readers, I have decided to scan and post these finger puppets along with the original instructions and scripts included in the Nick at Nite magazine from 1995.

Enjoy!

Gannon and Friday

Blue Boy and some props (sugar cubes, badge, coffee cup)

Joe Friday's car from Dragnet 1967

ALL RIGHT PAL, cut along the dotted lines, including the small notches on the tabs. Slide or tape the notches together. If you want to use the props, cut a small slot between each character's arms and torso, then insert the tab of the prop. Tape the white band below the car against the edge of a table and your scene is set. Now keep your hands where we can see them.


DRAGNET
FINGER PUPPETS
CUT 'EM OUT, PUT 'EM TOGETHER, AND START TALKING IN A CLIPPED, STACCATO RHYTHM. USE OUR SAMPLE DIALOGUE OR WRITE YOUR OWN... AND DON'T TRY ANYTHING WITH THOSE SCISSORS.

From Episode #1:

GANNON: Stand still.

BLUE BOY: REALITY, man, r e a l i t y . I could see the center of the earth, purple flame down there--the pilot light, all the way down there, purple flame, the pilot light. The pilot light of, of all creation.

GANNON: He's clean, Joe, except for these. (Bill displays five sugar cubes in his palm.)

BB: Reality, r e a l i t y .

FRIDAY: What' s your name, son?

BB: You can see my name i f y o u look ha r d eno u g h.

FRIDAY: C'mon now, what's your name?

BB: D O N ' T y o u k now my name? MY NAME'S BLUE BOY!

GANNON: What do you think, Joe? Cartwheels?

FRIDAY: Sugar cubes. I'll make you book he's been dropping that acid we've been hearing about. All right, son, you're under arrest. It's our duty to advise you of your constitutional rights. You have the right to remain silent and any statement you make may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed before any questioning. Do you understand that?

BB: T h e r e I a m . I'm over there now. I'm not here anymore. My hair is green and I'm a tree.

If you prefer soliloquizing with your finger puppets, here's Joe Friday's immortal "John Law" speech from Episode #6:

FRIDAY: Sure, it's awkward having a policeman in the house. Friends drop in, a man with a badge answers the door. The temperature drops 20 degrees. You throw a party and everybody's a comedian. "Don't drink too much," somebody says, "or the man with the badge will run you in." Or "How's it going, Dick Tracy? How many jay-walkers did you pinch today?" Then there's always the one that wants to know how many apples you stole. All at once you've lost your first name: You're a cop, a flatfoot, a bull, a dick, John Law. You're the fuzz, the heat, you're poison, you're trouble, you're bad news. They call you everything but never a policeman.

The dialogue you just read was TRUE.

(today's zomby) AND TOM HANKS RAPS!

And speaking of bizarre iterations of classic American TV shows...

Hop hop pioneers Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks

Admit it. You probably don't think about the 1987 film version of Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd. and Tom Hanks all that often do you? I probably think about it more often than most people, since it was the only Hollywood movie premiere I've ever witnessed. I was an impressionable Midwestern kid on vacation in California with my family, and our tour group just happened to be driving by when the stars were arriving for the premiere. The bus driver stopped and let us watch as the stars got out of their limos and walked to the theater. To me, it seemed like a big deal. As a souvenir, my parents even got me a copy of the movie's soundtrack album. (On cassette, of course. My father complained bitterly about the $6 or $7 it cost.) I think I might still own it. On that very same trip, during our tour of Universal Studios, we got to see a bit of Jaws: The Revenge being filmed, too. That was not quite as exciting, since all they were filming that day was what looked like a very large swimming pool (meant to represent the ocean) with an equally large blue backdrop (meant to represent the sky). Why they needed a fake ocean and a fake sky when the real ones were readily available was beyond me.

But getting back to that Dragnet soundtrack! Certainly the oddest track on it was a novelty rap tune called "City of Crime" by Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd. The latter performs his verses in character as Joe Friday, while the former mainly just yells. The background music, which is suspiciously reminiscent of AC/DC's "Back in Black," was created by Dan's brother, Peter Aykroyd.

Anyway, here's a vintage slice of 1987. Enjoy!



Say what you will about "City of Crime," at least it's not as bad as the hip hop output of Tom's son, Chet Haze.