Podcast Tuesday: "Coping with the Happy Days Musical (Act 2)"

The Dialtones sing one of their many, many songs in Happy Days: A New Musical.

I watch a fair amount of product review videos on YouTube, and recently, a channel I follow called Freakin' 2 tested out some novelty Easter candies. Among the items being reviewed were those Dr. Pepper-flavored Peeps you may have seen at the supermarket. I was especially interested in these because I'd tried them myself a few weeks ago and found them to be a decent facsimile of the popular beverage. But I don't really drink a whole lot of Dr. Pepper, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

The host of the Freakin' 2 video reached this conclusion: "I think occasional fans of Dr. Pepper will probably like it, but purists may not be convinced."

Well, friends, that's exactly my reaction to Happy Days: A New Musical, the show we're reviewing this week on These Days Are Ours. If you've seen a handful of Happy Days episodes and have a basic grasp of the characters and their relationships, the 2007 stage musical will probably be satisfactory to you. It's pleasant enough and doesn't overstay its welcome. But if Happy Days is burned into your brain because you've reviewed all 255 episodes, plus the animated series, the stage version may seem slightly "off" to you.

In other words, Happy Days: A New Musical is the Dr. Pepper Peeps of musicals. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Listen to our review of Act 2 and find out!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 221: Ed Wood and Admit One Video Presentations (Part 1)

This quirky company brought Ed Wood's movies to the Great White North.

The home video gold rush of the 1980s and '90s was a boon to director Ed Wood, even though he was already dead by then. By pure serendipity, the book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) made Eddie and his films famous at the same time people were starting to buy VCRs for their homes. Naturally, those folks needed plenty of prerecorded videotapes to play on those expensive new machines of theirs, and numerous distribution companies popped up to supply those tapes. Ed Wood's movies certainly were not left out in the cold. His best known works, including Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), were released on tape numerous times by numerous labels.

In the 1980s, a Canadian company called Admit One Video Presentations produced its own line of Ed Wood tapes, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the Golden Turkey publicity. Very little evidence of Admit One survives today, apart from some Ebay listings for their products, but they released editions of numerous sci-fi and horror films: Robot Monster (1953), Reefer Madness (1936), Spider Baby (1967), The Horror of Party Beach (1964), Chained for Life (1952), Satan's Satellites (1958), She Demons (1958), Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Monster from Green Hell (1957), The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958), White Zombie (1952), Lost Planet Airmen (1951), and Bowery at Midnight (1942), which came paired with Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). 

What concerns us, however, are Admit One's releases of Ed Wood's movies. It was reader Brendon Sibley who brought the company to my attention. As far as I can tell, Admit One put out its own editions of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and Glen or Glenda plus Jail Bait (1954), Night of the Ghouls aka Revenge of the Dead (1959), and The Sinister Urge (1960). In case you're counting, that's all six of the feature films Ed directed during his classic period. You must admit that's a very decent Ed Wood catalog, especially considering the Tim Burton biopic was a decade away and Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) hadn't even been published. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 220: "Never Too Late—Never Too Soon" (1973)

This article captures Ed Wood in his "Cliff Clavin" mode.

Ed Wood died less than four years before the TV sitcom Cheers debuted on NBC in September 1982. Isn't that wild? They seem like they belong to two very different eras of popular culture, but they were closer than you'd guess. In fact, I think Eddie would have been a great character on the show, had it taken place in L.A. instead of Boston. From his writing, I gather that Ed was contemptuous of "beer bars" and "beer joints," but the man clearly loved to drink and to socialize, and a bar like the one in Cheers would have allowed him to do both. (Fun fact: Eddie's last apartment was only two miles from the Paramount soundstage where Cheers was filmed.)

In the 1960s, director Joe Robertson owned a bar in North Hollywood called the Surf Girl, and Ed Wood was a regular there, sometimes even showing up in drag. I bet everyone there knew his name. I can imagine a bedraggled Eddie coming into the bar after a hard day—his wig crooked, his makeup smeared—and everyone yelling, "ED!!!!"

In the past, I've compared Ed Wood to Cliff Clavin, the motormouthed, know-it-all mailman John Ratzenberger played so ably on Cheers. I think Eddie considered himself something of an expert on numerous topics, and he was not one to keep his opinions to himself. This side of his personality comes through in his writing occasionally. I've also referred to this as Eddie's "professorial mode" in which he aims to dazzle us with his knowledge. And this week, we encounter another sterling example of this phenomenon.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 219: Exploring Ed Wood's contributions to Boyplay magazine (1973)

Two gentlemen frolic in the pages of Boyplay.

Do you have a "good" pair of scissors in your home, one that cuts more cleanly and assuredly than the others? How about a "good" flashlight that you always reach for whenever there's a blackout? Perhaps in your closet is a "good" pair of jeans that fits you just right, even when you've cheated on your diet a little. Chances are, if you own multiples of any item, one always becomes your favorite, simply because it works so reliably.

Here's to the "good" things in life.

For publisher Bernie Bloom—who oversaw a multimedia porn empire in the 1960s and '70s—Ed Wood was definitely his "good" writer. Bernie published a wide variety of adult books and magazines in those days under such banners as Pendulum, Calga, and Gallery (all the same company), and Eddie was his man-of-all-work. If Bernie needed text of basically any description, Ed Wood could provide it, quickly and dependably. This could mean full-length novels or nonfiction books, but it could also mean short stories, editorials, or even photo captions. When Bernie's son Noel got into making adult features and loops, he also hired Eddie frequently, but that's a whole other story.

The point is, in the final decade of his life, Ed Wood wrote a massive amount of text for Bernie Bloom. Some of that was written under his own name, making it easy enough to spot. Some was written under well-known pseudonyms like Dick Trent and Ann Gora. That's fairly easy to identify, too. Eddie himself kept track of this kind of material on his own resumes. But, once you start delving into this subject, you start to realize that a great deal of the Wood text in the Bloom publications is not attributed in any way; sometimes it's not even titled.

One thing (among many) that the late Greg Javer taught me is that, if a Calga/Pendulum/Gallery magazine contains a known Ed Wood article, it probably also contains some other, uncredited Wood text, too. As I told you in a recent blog post, I purchased a copy of Gallery Press' Boyplay magazine, vol. 2, no.2 from May/June 1973. This is the first vintage adult magazine I have ever purchased, and having a physical copy of such a publication gives me a new perspective on the world Ed Wood inhabited in the 1970s. 

Podcast Tuesday: "Coping with the Happy Days Musical (Act 1)"

The happy, happy cast of Happy Days: A New Musical.

When Howard Ashman and Alan Menken adapted Roger Corman's dark comedy Little Shop of Horrors (1960) as a stage musical in 1982, it was rather a novelty in the theater world. Stage shows based on movies weren't exactly unknown back then—think of Sondheim's A Little Night Music (1973), based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)—but generally the adaptation process went the other direction. Stage musicals became movies, not the other way around.

Nowadays, due to the success of movie-based shows like The Producers (2001), Hairspray (2002), and Spamalot (2004), it seems like every fondly-remembered pop culture property gets its own theatrical musical eventually. It's not surprising at all that Happy Days (1974-1984) would also get this treatment, especially since the long-running sitcom was already heavily influenced by the stage show Grease (1971). And so, in 2007, Happy Days: A New Musical debuted to generally positive reviews. It never reached Broadway but has become a rather popular choice for high schools and community theater troupes.

A few years ago, my cohost suggested we cover the Happy Days musical on These Days Are Ours, but I've been putting it off for some reason. Now that we've finished all eleven seasons of the sitcom and both seasons of the cartoon, it feels like it's finally time to cover the stage show, which has a book by Garry Marshall and songs by Paul Williams. That's an impressive pedigree. Does the show live up to it? This week on the podcast, we try to answer that question as we review Act 1.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 218: What motivates Bela Lugosi's character in Plan 9?

Never is a long time, as Bela Lugosi proves in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

When I think about the movies I've seen the most times, a few titles come immediately to mind, including The Wizard of Oz (1939), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), This is Spinal Tap (1984), and The Big Lebowski (1998). Among Ed Wood's movies, however, the clear winner is Plan 9 from Outer Space aka Graverobbers from Outer Space (1957). I first sat through this notorious sci-fi horror chiller in October 1992 as part of a four-film Ed Wood marathon in Flint, Michigan. Since then, I've probably seen Plan 9 theatrically about a half-dozen more times. At home—through VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming—I've screened it dozens of times in whole or in part, often while doing research for this series.

In short, I've spent many hours of my life with this odd little film. And yet, all these decades later, it may still have things to teach me. I'll give you an example.

Critic Harry Medved, who helped give both Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space some measure of immortality with his book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), recently devoted an episode of his PBS documentary series Locationland to the making of Plan 9. Among the filming sites Medved visited was 15129 Lakewood St. in the Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles. Back in the 1950s, this charming domicile was the residence of actor-wrestler Tor Johnson, who played Inspector Daniel Clay in the film. Johnson allowed Ed Wood to use the site as the home of Bela Lugosi's unnamed character, generally referred to as Old Man or Ghoul Man. In Plan 9, we see a grief-stricken Lugosi—still reeling from the death of his young wife (Vampira)—smelling the roses outside the house before wandering into traffic and getting run over.

"Confused by his great loss," intones narrator Criswell, "the old man left that home, never to return again."

Except Lugosi totally returns again just 23 minutes later, as proven by that aforementioned episode of Locationland. When Harry Medved visited the house in Sylmar, the owner graciously let him film the outside. But Medved and his guest, comedian and writer Dana Gould, wanted to film the back porch of the house as well, because this is where Ed Wood shot the scene in which Bela's character, having been resurrected from the grave as a zombie, enters his former home, now owned by pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) and his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon). Jeff's away when Bela arrives, so Paula is all by herself and quite vulnerable when this strange figure suddenly appears in her bedroom.

Even though I've been watching Plan 9 for decades, it took Locationland to make me realize that the Trents are living in Lugosi's character's former home and must have moved into the place shortly after he died. Jeff's coworker, sassy stewardess Edie (Norma McCarty), comments that the house is too close to the local cemetery, "I tried to get you kids to not buy too near one of those things," she opines. "We get there soon enough as it is." She also says Jeff's house is "quiet alright, like a tomb." Jeff is rightfully concerned that the police keep showing up at the cemetery for unknown reasons. What exactly is going on there?

We soon find out what's happening at that cemetery, and it's more bizarre than we could have possibly guessed. Aliens from a faraway planet, represented by the arrogant Eros (Dudley Manlove) and the more pragmatic Tanna (Joanna Lee), are using their "electrode guns" to resurrect some recently deceased earthlings, including both Lugosi and Lugosi's wife. This is all part of a larger campaign to strike fear in the hearts of the human race and thus deter us from creating a weapon called "Solaronite" that will destroy the entire universe. Got all that? 

The aliens' plan is quite convoluted and doesn't come close to working. But they do manage to bring Lugosi back to "simulated life" for a short while. Once resurrected, he is more like a traditional obedient "voodoo zombie" rather than the cannibalistic, aggressive zombies we know from the George Romero films, starting with Night of the Living Dead (1968). Eros and Tanna can control the zombies to some extent, but Lugosi is apparently allowed to explore the world on his own for a while when he's revived. And where does he choose to go first? Right back to his old house.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 217: Some more info about Ed Wood's "TV" novels

Ed Wood wrote two very similar novels late in his career.

If you've been following this blog, you know that I recently reviewed two of Ed Wood's rather obscure gay porn novels from the 1970s: Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973) and TV Lust (1977), both credited to his "Dick Trent" pseudonym. Technically, Diary is one of Ed's "nonfiction" books, since it supposedly contains the true-life reminiscences of an actual gay prostitute in Hollywood. However, since the prostitute in question ("Randy") is totally imaginary and his memories utterly bogus, I consider the book just another of Ed's novels. Either way, Diary is mainly an opportunity for Ed to indulge in his love of women's clothing and describe various outfits in fetishistic detail. TV Lust contains much of the same.

A Wood twofer.

The reason I reviewed Diary of a Transvestite Hooker in the first place is that a reader named Leonard Johnson mailed me a bootleg reprint from Amazon that he no longer wanted in his collection. Somehow, having a physical copy in hand (rather than just another PDF on a screen) made me think about the book for the first time in quite a while and consider it as an individual work. Once I'd written extensively about Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, it only felt right to review its little sister, TV Lust, since those two books are so similar thematically. They were even published as a twofer in 2009 under the title Wood on TV by Ramble House. How could I break up such a perfect set?

Side note: When I first bought a copy of Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) about 30 years ago, I was so unschooled in the ways of porn that I didn't even know "TV" was slang for "transvestite." I figured that TV Lust was about the proliferation of sex on television or something similar. Ed Wood was known to watch hours and hours of television, so it's not an entirely far-fetched notion.

Anyhow, in my review of Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, I noted that my bootleg edition contained the full text of the book as well as the photo captions but was missing the actual photographs from the original 1973 paperback Well, as usual, the ever-reliable James Pontolillo swooped in to rescue me. Not only did he have the pictures, he had some trivia to go along with them. Here are two pics from Diary, supposedly depicting the book's subject on the job.

Randy conducts a typical transaction. Note the john's plaid pants.

Due to the obvious signage, you can easily see that these photographs were taken on the 7000 block of Hollywood Boulevard, near the Hollywood Walk of Fame. More specifically, in the background, you'll spot a business called The London Shop. According to James, this was "housed in the ground level of the Roosevelt-Hollywood Hotel." The Roosevelt is still very much in business, but The London Shop has since gone the way of all flesh.

The world's ugliest?

As it happens, I do have the photos from TV Lust in my collection. I didn't comment on them in my review because I wanted to focus solely on the text of the book, which may well be the last Ed Wood novel published in the author's lifetime. In Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001), David C. Hayes described the pictures thusly:

The novel is illustrated with photos of the world's ugliest transvestite in some really awful poses.

Ouch. I feel that Hayes may have been experiencing some burnout by the time he got to TV Lust, having worked his way through many Wood books in a row, and this may have clouded his judgment somewhat when it came time to write his review. Once again, James Pontolillo had some insights to offer on the book's mysterious cover model:

The model featured in TV Lust (1977) went variously by the names Dean Noel and Dena Noel and appeared in only one photoset, apparently originating in 1975. Contrary to the TV Lust cover banner proclaiming “Exclusive Photos,” all of the book's photos came from this photoset, portions of which were first published in Female Mimics magazine some two years earlier. Various pictures of Dean/Dena were published from 1975-1985 in a variety of East and West Coast adult fetish magazines (Female Mimics, Guys in Drag, Ladies by Choice, More She-Males, Transsexuals) and novels (Transvestite Bride, Transvestite Housewife – both by Star Distributors).

Thanks again to James for providing some interesting background information on these striking photographs.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Top 5 Episodes of The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang"

Scenes from various episodes of the '80s animated series The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.

Rather like Joanie Loves Chachi, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang occupies a place of infamy in the Fonzieverse. Why did we even need an animated version of Happy Days? Why does it feature a talking dog and a "future chick" with magic powers? Why are the characters traveling through time in a flying saucer? The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang seems like another example of the Happy Days franchise completely selling out and betraying its own origins as a sweet, simple show about 1950s nostalgia. File it alongside that time Fonzie jumped over a shark in Season 5.

But, over the course of doing These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast since 2018, I've learned a few surprising things. Joanie Loves Chachi, though totally disposable, is a competent, occasionally amusing sitcom. The "jump the shark" episode is actually a lot of fun if you don't take Happy Days seriously (and you shouldn't). And even The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang has its redeeming qualities.

This week, my cohost and I go over our respective picks for the Top 5 episodes of the animated series, and we talk about our overall impressions of the show and its characters. It'd be awfully nice if you would join us.