Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 9 - 1975

Bear with me. It's going to be quite a time-twisting, decades-hopping path before we get to the memory in question this time...

1975:

The trivia:

• In July of 1975, Neville Ebbin from Hamilton, Bermuda was hit by a car and killed whilst riding his bicycle. It was exactly one year after his brother Erskin was also killed - riding the same bike, at the same junction, by the same taxi driver, who was carrying the same passenger.
• During an episode of "The Goodies" comedy television show called "Kung Fu Kapers", a Scotsman battled a master of the Lancastrian martial art known as "Ecky-Thump" - which involved wielding a black pudding as a weapon. Viewer Alex Mitchell laughed so much that he died of a heart attack.
• When Agatha Christie killed off Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the novel "Curtain", he  receive a front-page obituary in the New York Times.

The memory:

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

Doc Savage first appeared in his own magazine in March 1933, following on from the success of "The Shadow". Although often classed as the world's first superhero, he actually had no powers. Instead Clark Savage Jnr had been trained almost from birth by a team of scientists assembled by his father. This punishing regime honed his mind and body, giving him huge strength, agility and fighting skills, a photographic memory and a vast knowledge of science. Main writer Lester Dent envisioned him as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan, coupled with an innate sensed of goodness.

Headquartered on the 86th floor of Manhattan's tallest skyscraper (implied to be the Empire State Building), Doc also possessed a large array of vehicles, futuristic gadgets and weaponry, including the "mercy bullet" which only put its victim to sleep. His fortune came from a hidden South American gold mine that was bequeathed to him after his very first adventure. He also had a secret retreat in the Arctic wastelands known as the 'Fortress of Solitude' (Superman stole that idea) where he could carry out experiments, meditate and get away from the stresses of everyday life.

Possessed of distinctive bronze skin and hair and golden eyes (traits shared by his cousin Patricia) and accompanied by his five friends who were all experts in their fields - Ham, Monk, Renny, Long Tom and Johnny - Doc punished evildoers and solved mysteries across 181 'super-sagas' all the way thorough to 1949. Controversially, Doc also sometimes operated on the brains of the criminals he subdued, curing them of their evil ways.

I'd first come across Doc and his friends in my mid-teens via some very battered Bantam paperbacks that my friend Matt showed to me at a London comic-mart. Bantam had been reprinting the stories since the 1960s, many featuring the now classic James Bama cover images of a titan of a man with a sharp widows peak hairline and a tattered shirt showing off his huge muscles. The artwork on the front was certainly intriguing enough but at the time I was more interested in comics and modern science fiction and fantasy novels than pulp stories from the 1930s, so I dismissed them as a relic of the a bygone era...

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Back in the days before it was a countrywide chain of hugely successful multi media pop culture stores, there were only two shops called "Forbidden Planet" in London. In St Giles High Street you had "FP2", which was the film and television hub. This was less than two minutes walk from the flagship store in Denmark Street - and in the 1980s that was the absolute mecca for fans of science fiction, fantasy and comic books.

(From the comics in the window this picture was taken in mid-1987...)

I absolutely *loved* Forbidden Planet. Even now, decades after they moved premises, I just have to walk past the old shop front and the memories come flooding back from the myriad times I visited over the years from around 1980 onward. I even went weekly when I started working in the big city. There was no CCTV back then, so after spending five minutes gawping at the current weeks comics displayed in the window, you had to hand any bags you had into the guy sat on the stairs as you walked in through the narrow doorway off the street. In return he would hand you half a playing card and clip the other half to your possessions with a clothes peg. Thus identified and secure, you were then allowed through the door on the left into the shop itself.

It was a long narrow space with dozens of  low shelves of novels at the front and racks of comics at the back - with everything else crammed in between. Back issues, posters, artwork, models - it was an absolute cornucopia of stuff, suffused with that old comic book smell which you just don't get in today's pristine mega-stores.  I still have a T-shirt with one of the Brian Bolland promotional images on it (although I'm far too large to fit into it now). I attended signings, made new friends and purchased hundreds of new comics and novels - all thanks to this magical place.

This is all very interesting you might think, but how does this relate to the "Man of Bronze"? Well, Forbidden Planet was where I rediscovered this classic Golden Age character...

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On one of my regular visits to the shop in the summer of 1988, I was doing my usual trawl through the bookshelves in search of something new to read when I came across a deep blue cover showing the figure of a burly man in a ripped shirt in front of a bolt of lightning. "Doc Savage Omnibus  #5" it proclaimed "Five Doc adventure classics in one giant volume!". Vaguely remembering a similar image from many years ago I took a look at the back cover and inside blurb. Hmmm... these stories sounding quite interesting.

You see, in the intervening years I'd learned a new appreciation for the characters from prior decades and those that had been the antecedents of the superheroes that I loved. There was a vast wealth of history out there, both prose and pictorial and now being in my early twenties  - and only very recently having read the bombastic update of "The Shadow" by Howard Chaykin, I was just in the right frame of mind to explore the world of the pulp heroes of the past. Forgoing my usual insistence to only buy a new book series from the first volume (#1-4 not being present on the shelves at the time), I took the omnibus to the friendly guy behind the counter and paid my £5.99.

It's worth mentioning here that it wasn't until much, much later that I discovered that not only was this not the first omnibus in the series, but the stories collected each each book were not even necessarily in chronological order. As I mentioned earlier, Bantam had been reprinting Doc Savage since 1964, but as the tales got shorter they combined them first into double novels and then these multi-story omnibuses. Volume five reprinted "super-saga's" 170-174, but such a sequence was unusual and other books had adventures seemingly at random from across the decades.

At the time though I didn't known any of this, so as I worked my way through "No Light To Die By" and the subsequent stories, I lost myself in a world of 1930s mystery and intrigue with ex-Nazi's, a rented gorilla suit, a female poisoner and a sunken ship. Sure the plots were a bit creaky and obviously of their time, but I found them very enjoyable. This first quintet only featured, Doc, Ham, Monk and a guest appearance from cousin Pat, but mentioned other characters that were "off on their own adventures" or "busy". I wanted to know more, so a few weeks later I went back to Forbidden Planet and found Omnibus # 6. That was it - I was hooked...

Over the coming months and years I would buy all of the Omnibuses and through second hand book-shops and similar places also purchase quite a few of the older Bantam reprints. I never did amass a complete collection of all 181 stories (I have since through the wonders of e-books), but that was okay. In 1991 Bantam began printing *new* Doc Savage novels, beginning with "Escape From Loki" by long-time Savage aficionado Philip Jose Farmer (remember him from back in 1971?) and I got all those too, right through until 1993 when the series was first cancelled.

As an aside, Farmer also wrote a 1973 biography of  Doc from the viewpoint that he was a real person and that "Kenneth Robeson" was just recording fictionalised versions of the Savage memoirs. Farmer also linked Savage to dozens of other fictional characters in the "Wold Newton Family". Alan Moore has commented that this concept was a significant influence on his work on the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" comic book and its various sequels. It's a fascinating idea, and one that I may come back to at a later date.

So, we have established that I developed a love of the Doc Savage stories from the 1930s, which I rediscovered in the 1980s and that I read the books well into the 1990s - so how does all this fit into a memory of something from 1975 ? The answer involves Tarzan...

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When I was much younger I loved the "Tarzan" TV series. Although it was originally transmitted between 1966 and 1968, the British TV channel "ITV" showed the series on what seemed like a continuous loop on Saturday mornings in the 1970s. Like the Adam West "Batman" show, it became imprinted on the memories of most children of that decade. I was already familiar with the character from the black and white Johnny Weissmuller movies that my dad liked to watch, but this was a more educated ape-man, returning to the jungle after becoming tired of living amongst "civilised" men. With high production values, action packed storylines and filming in real jungles (admittedly Brazil rather than deepest Africa) it was a technicolour feast for the eyes. Accompanies by local boy Jai and ever-present chimpanzee Cheetah, Tarzan was one of my favourite TV heroes.

The real reason for the show's success was of course the amazing Ron Ely in the title role. An impressive well-built figure who could act, swim, fight and interact with animals - and do all his own stunts - he had a real screen presence and embodied the the role of the Lord of The Apes for a generation.  I've never forgotten him.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this long rambling piece. One Saturday somewhere around 1989, I was flicking through the TV channels and paused to watch the end of a TV show (the name of which I can't remember). After the credits rolled, there was an announcement of the following programme, something along the lines of "Up next it's the afternoon film. Ron Ely is Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze".

What !?  WHAT !? There was a Doc Savage movie? How had I missed this? Somehow in the year since I'd started reading the books I'd not come across this fact. Quickly I took a look on the "Teletext" pages for the channel (this is pre-internet remember. Oh and if you don't know when Teletext is, I recommend you look at the pages here. Hours of fun.) Ah, this film was made in 1975 -  that might explain why I had missed it. That plus it probably wasn't shown that often. Or when it was shown the name didn't ring any bells. Who knows. The point was it was on now! This was too good an opportunity to miss. Quickly I grabbed a blank videocassette, put it in my machine and pressed record just as the sonorous voice over and the patriotic strains of John Philip Sousa's "The Thunderer" march began...

Adapting the basic plot of the first novel, "Doc Savage: Man Of Bronze" sees our fearless hero investigating the death of his father. Vowing to solve the murder, Doc and the "Fabulous Five" attempt to travel to the republic of Hidalgo, but are opposed at every turn by a stream of tribal natives, relentless assassins and supernatural creatures - plus the ruthless and maniacal Captain Seas - who wants the riches of Hidalgo for himself.

Many of the core elements of the character are present - the 1930s setting, the 86th floor headquarters, Doc's daily exercise regime, the Fortress of Solitude, the strange "trilling noise" that Doc makes during times of mental stress or excitement and the various eccentricities or habits exhibited by his faithful companions. Even Monk's pet pig Habeus Corpus gets a look in. There are also plenty of bronze coloured retro gadgets and vehicles.

 But if you are expecting a straight-laced action / adventure story in the mold of "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which faithfully adapts the usual serious tone of the novels, well this is not the film for you. If however you enjoy the kind of tongue in cheek, camp, self-aware, winking at the audience kind of thing that the "Batman" TV series did so well and can go with the flow then you will "get" it. It's very very silly in places  - for example the cartoonish villain's henchman sleeps in a giant baby crib and the final fight sequence (with subtitles) has to be seen to be believed, The production values are great but there is some cheap looking animation and the acting is sometimes so far over the top, it comes back down the other side. But the truth is that all of that can be forgiven because it's just so much damn fun and outrageously entertaining - I adored the film that first time I watched it and I still do. This is the kind of film that the words "cult classic" were invented for.

Ron Ely was perfectly cast as Doc. Benevolent, intelligent, always three steps ahead of the bad guys he exuded charisma and inhabits the role as if it was made for him. Like Adam West before him, Ely plays it absolutely straight even in the oddest of situations. Likewise the look of Johnny, Long Tom, Ham, Monk and Renny may not be exactly true to the books, but they are close enough that you can recognise the characters that Lester Dent created.

Apparently not everyone could see the fun side of having a humourous Doc Savage movie. "Purists" absolutely hated it. I can kind of see their point. They had probably been waiting years for a faithful adaptation of their favourite pulp franchise - and this certainly was not it. Maybe because I had come late to reading the books and only discovered the film fourteen years after its initial release I was able to enjoy it more on it's own merits rather than weighing it down with decades of expectation. It seems that the musical choices (the Sousa marches, etc,) came in for particular scorn. If you want that all removed and some of the effects updated, there is a fan-edited "Detarnished Edition" out there on the interweb. I do have a copy and while it turns the film into something more akin to a colour version of the old Republic cliffhanger serials, it also loses some of the charm.

There's one other thing that I want to mention about "Man of Bronze" and that's Doc Savage's car. It's a now extremely rare bronze Cord Model 810 convertible with modified running boards (for Clark Savage Jnr to stand on) and it is just absolutely stunning. I have always appreciated cars from the early decades of the 20th century and for me this one is just at the top of the pile. I. Want. That. Car. Sadly unless I win the lottery and can have one custom adapted to look just like that picture below I think I'm out of luck..

In conclusion - nearly thirty years after reading my first Savage story I still enjoy Doc's adventures in novel and comic book form and I'm looking forward to the Dwayne Johnson movie in a few years. But - and I know I may be in the minority here - despite it's flaws, watching "Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze" just makes me smile. It's not a guilty pleasure at all.

Time for some music...

Honourable mentions:

• Jaws - Probably my favourite film of all time and certainly the one I have purchased in more different versions than any other. Just about everything is perfect and forty-odd years later it's as powerful and scary and dramatic as ever.  The USS Indianapolis scene is an acting masterclass from Robert Shaw which sends shivers down my spine every single damn time.  I'll never tire of watching this film. 

• The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Back when my Rocky Horror enthusiasm was at it's height  I must have been watching this on a weekly basis. Richard O'Brien was my idol. I went to every live stage show and film screening I could find dressed as Brad in his white lab coat and underwear. I personally didn't have the figure for the full basque and fishnets as Frank N Furter - but that didn't stop my short tubby friend Matt -  though his full beard was a bit incongruous.

• Space:1999 - Gerry Anderson's finest live action series (in my opinion), which also had one of the best theme's in the history of SF television (up there with the original "Battlestar Galactica"). Martin Landau was never less than brooding magnificence and Barbara Bain was worthy if a little dull. My favourite however was the wonderful Barry Morse as Professor Victor Bergman. A shame he only lasted the one series. Oh and yes, like every school boy I had a massive crush on Catherine Schell as Maya...