Thursday, May 29, 2014

mediocre Schwarzenegger and comic nostalgia

hi there

i could, i suppose, just let the pictures do the talking here to go with that title. however, let me allow you to be indulged with the idea of indulging me with some waffle of words, or wordy waffle, to go along with it all.


every now and then, right, i get a sense of nostalgia about something that is (gasp) over 30 years old. i get an incidental memory of something that was quite class, try to search for it and then never find it. at least, that is, until today.

it seems that my searching for Tales Of The Uncanny was where i went wrong. the comics i remembered, from a holiday in the tropics of Torquay and the colours of Cornwall, were in fact called Uncanny Tales. oh. cheers for that, google, in not working it out sooner. your spy stuff is not all that brilliant after all, is it?

i found a fair of info today about them, then. like, for instance, they were printed by some company called Alan Class Comics, and a guess would be that the company was in some way linked to a chap called Alan. they were printed, amid a touch of controversy about little minor matters of copyright, permissions and all that sort of silly bother, between 1959 and 1989. and the target market for them, going on the lists of places you could buy them, were indeed coastal and seaside towns. so i remembered right, if that makes any sense.

just really writing it down here so if i get nostalgic once more, or have an urge to look for them again and forget that i did, here it is.

meanwhile, further postal joy today.




yeah, that right there is a set featuring two of the lesser works in the spectacular filmography of Arnold Schwarzenegger. i would agree that the above does not represent the most astute purchase i have ever made. it was kind of done on a whim, right, after a debate, of the healthy variety, around how class white suits are and how smart Charles "Chas" Dance is. this culminated in a visit to the doorway of the dreadful Last Action Hero, which i now own a copy of.

The 6th Day is one of the more interesting entries in the mediocre films of Arnie. he did this one around the time that he decided he had enough of flexing his acting versatility and wished instead to go into politics like his Dad, Clint Eastwood. worked out well, i seem to recall.


but anyway, back to these cartoon / comic book things that i got all excited about.

from what i can remember, i spent as much of my pocket money as my Mum & Dad let me on class comic books that looked like this. i sat and read them from cover to cover by the tent or down on the beach.

can i remember a single one of the stories i read, or even the cover of them? no, not at all. i still, though, for some reason have nothing but fond memories of them, thinking they were awesome, amazing things.

would love to get my hands on a few of them again, for nostalgia certainly but also because they were just so damned entertaining. a search around the sellers of the net say they are available, but at a premium price in some cases. a few you can pick up for a fiver or so, which is not so bad. the ones that are over one hundred notes, however, are not getting touched by my finances, thank you.

so anyway, this whole Last Action Hero business. it truly was a horrid affair, that film was. it came from an era when Hollywood decided that they would make "less violent" films, and for some reason film producers got it into their heads that we, the public with coins of money, wanted to see the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone in light hearted romps. we did not.

i went, as it happens, to the cinema to see Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a film starring a very embarrassed Sylvester Stallone. if i remember Gillian wished to go and see it, as for some reason she thought it would be good. it was not.

Last Action Hero was worse. much worse.



the big problem with Last Action Hero was the major problem films at that time had. that is the idea they had of casting the most scruffy, obnoxious, nasal, whiny annoying kid they could find, someone guaranteed to get on the tits of an audience, and yet they were expected to be interested in him, indeed sympathetic. much of what was wrong with Terminator 2 - and there was much - could have been fixed or covered up with the casting of someone less annoying that Edward Furlong as John Connor.

the kid in Last Action Hero was awful. his voice lacked every quality bar screechy scraped tin, and he looked just like you wished to punch him in the face all the time.

i am not looking forward to watching it again, you may have gathered. not at all. but i will, just to see if this business of Chas and white suits has any merit.


so yeah, all this Uncanny Tales business.

i probably should go past the most excellent shop where i got that Game Of Thrones thing for my (considerably) better half from, should i not? i may redeem myself in their eyes a bit.

i mean, i am assuming when i walked in there and asked for "anything that features that lass that does the dragons and that on that show" they probably had me down as a totally ignorant dick. if i walk in there, right, and say "i am looking for some of the works of Alan Class Comics, please", it might impress them a little bit.

if they actually have any of them, well then so much the better, you would say.

failing that, i will hawk around all these second hand bookshops and charity stores. you never know, fortune may smile upon me and i may well find one or two of them. or, also, maybe not. would be class if you could just buy or otherwise obtain "digital" copies, let me have a look at the original USA source for the things. King Features or something, i think.

so, yeah, that would be that for this post, almost. do i go right ahead and shove Last Action Hero in the DVD player? not sure i am that brave......



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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