Dragonslayer, the comic book!

In case you haven't seen it, Paramount/Disney's 1981 fantasy movie Dragonslayer is a really good example of the genre that holds up surprisingly well for a movie that old. The effects were done by Industrial Light and Magic, all powered up from their recent Star Wars rise to supremacy, and long before they abandoned practical effects in favor of amateurish superfake computer-generated effects. The four-limbed (as opposed to sillier four-legs-plus-two-wings designs) design of the dragon is one of the best-looking dragons ever committed to film. It's definitely worth your popcorn.

Apparently, Marvel produced an authorized comic book novelization sort of thing that coincided with the release of the film. Bear in mind that this was quite a ways before you could buy the DVD within two months of seeing a movie in theaters. If you were twelve years old and your folks wouldn't pay to see the movie again and again, a comic bookification may not have seemed like a bad deal to spend your lunch money on.

The PAG Antique Store and Garage Sale Assault Force found this book and paid five big American dollars for it, which is double the cover price. Not a bad investment for thirty six years, if the original owner had chosen to retire on his or her shrewd paperback novelization profits.

Apart from the cover painting, the artist isn't credited anywhere in the book. This could lead us to assume that projects like this were mass-produced by a staff of artists an didn't receive the loving attention of one dedicated illustrator. Let's have a look inside.

On page four, we meet Galen, the hero of the story. He's a somewhat round-faced goof who's always getting into trouble with the Master's assistant, Hodge. Oh, that cranky old Hodge.

Thirty four pages and a week or so later, dramatically speaking, Galen is a square-jawed decathlete. It looks as though part of his apprenticeship to the wizard Ulrich may have involved building the castle they lived in.

That, or the artwork in the book may have been handled by more than one person with differing opinions about how Galen should look. Neither is the spitting image of Peter Macnicol, who played Galen in the film, and who you may remember from Ally Mcbeal.

What about Valerian, the love interest?

She, disguised as a boy for reasons that we won't spoil here, first appears on page eight, leading a group of villagers who come to Ulrich's castle, asking for help with their dragon problem. This isn't a bad likeness for the actress, Caitlyn Clark.

By page 140, she could be any generic Marvel heroine. Truly a magical transformation?

Maybe you identify with early-book Galen, always getting himself into mischief and having his ear tweaked by cranky old Hodge? You're in luck, because, we have a decent square crop of ear-tweak Galen for you to use as your online avatar or profile picture on whatever service you use to talk to other humans, for some reason. You're welcome!

Click for big.

Pallophotophone - Engineering the talkies.

Back in 1927, sound recorded on film was a big new thing. It eliminated sync problems during movie playback, since both sound and picture were run on the same machine. Here's an article from the May 1927 issue of Popular Science Monthly, after the first public demonstration of the new technology. Of the two sound-on-film recording techniques (Fox/Western Electric and RCA Photophone), the invention of C.A. Hoxie, reported here, was to become the dominant technology in the industry. To hear the machine described, it's kind of a freaky achievement for 1927. Apparently, people were smarter than we generally give them credit for.

If this isn't interesting to you, then you may want to come back tomorrow, when there'll maybe be some jokes or something.

The P.A.G! Images and Scanning Them Team apologizes for the visible binding in the left side of the image. Instead of cutting out the pages out of the magazine for a super clean scan, it was scanned intact, in accordance with our catch-and-release policy of sustainable magazine imaging.

Click for big.

Arrow Ties - Some obsolete British slang to go with your obsolete tie.

Hey! You know how most of our slang comes from advertising? No? Correct! Nothing's squarer than an advertising executive trying to be cool, or - God help us - define coolness. Although they would dearly love to be the arbiters of cool, advertising can never be that. This perfectly innocent ad for Arrow ties is trying to get us to adopt some British slang from a previous century. Nice try.

If Arrow is to be believed, "wizard" and "pip-pip" mean "great" or "terrific". This is the first I'd ever heard of "wizard" being used as an adjective and "pip-pip", in my experience, has always been what an embarrassing Yankee says when he or she is trying to pull off a British accent of Dick Van Dyke-caliber, and failing to do so with a Dick Van Dyke level of cringeworthy lameness. Van Dyke was a perectly serviceable actor, but a vocal chameleon, he was not. To perform your own Dick Van Dyke-style British accent, just talk with a golf ball in your mouth.

I could find no evidence that "pip-pip" means "good". My actual paper copy of British English A to Zed has this to say about "pip" (and has no entry at all for "pip pip"... possibly because no British person ever actually used the phrase with sincerity.).

This makes sense with the dfinition I found at EffingPost.com: "Pip pip - Another out-dated expression meaning goodbye. Not used any more." The beeps or "pips" heard during a telephone call may have come to be used as a greeting or "goodbye". But this is my own conjecture based on some bits of information I found out, and should not be interpreted as historical fact.

I have heard "pip" used to describe a person, usually in cockney slang, as seen here at Merriam-Webster: "one extraordinary of its kind."

As for "wizard". This one seems like crazy talk. A quick Google search shows that it was used in the early scenes of the movie Juno:

FLASHBACK - Juno approaches a boy hidden by shadow. He's
sitting in an overstuffed chair. She slowly, clumsily lowers
herself onto his lap.
A 60's Brazilian track plays from a vintage record player.
WHISPERED VOICE Do you know how long I've wanted
this?
JUNO Yeah.
WHISPERED VOICE Wizard.

I found this prehistoric blorg post from 2007, where Melora Koepke was predicting that soon all The Kids would be using "wizard" instead of "cool".

be warned, "Wizard!" may well be everywhere, soon. Move over, Napoleon Dynamite imitators: Juno is about to transform the teenage idiom once and for all!

Yep! Nope. It didn't. I enjoyed the snappy dialogue in Juno, but I forgot the "wizard" thing. First I've heard of it. What's my copy of British English A to Zed got to say about "wizard"?

Hm! I guess it does mean what Arrow says it means. It's just not sweeping the nation like Melora Koepke thought. "Wizard" has had its chance to become a thing since World War One-ish, and it just hasn't happened. However, it does show you how deep Diablo Cody dug for improbably kooky things for her characters to say when writing the script for Juno. Honest to blog.

Much to the chagrin of Advertising, I'm sure, you know where a lot of our slang and euphemism comes from? The Bible, Shakespeare, and the military. A LOT of the entries in my British English book cite military as the source of unconventional Briticisms. You can find that interesting all you want, but I wouldn't go so far as to thank Hitler.

Click for big.

Bond's 50th Anniversary - Thunderball?

With the release of Skyfall, the Bond movies are 50 years old. So, here's an article on Thunderball from a 1964 issue of LIFE magazine. Thunderball was not the first Bond film. It was the 4th.  Somebody dropped the magazine on my desk, and it just may be my favorite Bond movie, so in it goes. It certainly has my favorite Bond girl: the positively dreamy Domino. Also, be sure to scroll to the bottom for a snooty review of Thunderball from the same issue.

Here's an interesting thing: Roger Moore just said that Daniel Craig is hie favorite James Bond. Wow! Pretty cool guy. LINK

There's a lot of pictures in today's post, so so keep it from getting too vertically-scrolly, the images are small, and you can click on each for the big version where you can actually read the text.

Below is the review of Thunderball by Richard Schickel. It's a comparison with another spy movie of the time: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. He really seems to hate Thunderball, because it's not gritty and realistic. Uuuh, yeah. Rich? Adventure movie. he also says that, with Thunderball, the producers are "straining, straining, straining to top themselves". Hah! I guess movie reviewers feel like their friends will make fun of them if they give a positive review to an action movie. I wonder how he feels about the film now?