Youtube user SecretCavern is my new favorite person ever, for posting a mess of video versions of those old book-and-record sets from Power Records. If you're too young to have owned them (or your parents just didn't love you enough to buy them for you), Power Records used to sell these awesome packages featuring a comic book and a 45 record with an audio drama adaptation of the comic. The stories featured various popular franchises of the time - everything from the original Star Trek to Planet of the Apes to superheroes from Marvel and DC - and reading the comic at the same time you listened to the audio version brought the story alive in a way that wasn't like anything else. It was a weird hybrid of cartoons and old time radio that shouldn't have worked, but did.
I had a few of these sets growing up, and my favorite featured Spiderman going up against Draco the Dragonman, a reptilian supervillian with a most colorful origin story. I haven't read/heard the story for many a year, and it's a real trip to discover it lurking on Youtube in 2009. Seeing this on Youtube probably won't give you the full experience of flipping those pages one by one, but this is still a fun story and it will be a total kick in the head for anybody else who grew up with these things.
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Oh, these were fun, but there were TOO many when they came out, no way for a 12-year-old to buy all those at the time (though I did buy several new) when each one was the cost of seven or eight new comic books. One thing that makes little sense is the often-sloppy redone lettering in some of these (when compared with the original, pre-reprint versions) though the color and printing overall were quite good. The fact the company used good, durable paper means that these have aged quite well.
"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden
Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?
Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.
1 comments:
Oh, these were fun, but there were TOO many when they came out, no way for a 12-year-old to buy all those at the time (though I did buy several new) when each one was the cost of seven or eight new comic books. One thing that makes little sense is the often-sloppy redone lettering in some of these (when compared with the original, pre-reprint versions) though the color and printing overall were quite good. The fact the company used good, durable paper means that these have aged quite well.
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