June 2012

Looking Ahead to PulpFest

Posted in Conventions on June 9, 2012 @ 10:41 pm

I’ve just returned from New York City, where my day’s activities included attending a four-hour meeting of the Gotham Pulp Collectors Club. The group assembles at a library in downtown Manhattan on the second Saturday of every month, and members can always count on a lively time. Some of us continue to gab during lengthy […]

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FIRE-TONGUE: Not So Hot.

Posted in Recently Read on June 8, 2012 @ 9:01 am

For me, Sax Rohmer novels (along with those of Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a half dozen other authors I could name) are the literary equivalents of comfort food: easy to digest, easy on the palate, and full of familiar flavor. Every now and then, though, I devour one that just […]

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DON WINSLOW OF THE NAVY: Finally, a Good-Looking DVD!

Posted in Serials on June 7, 2012 @ 3:03 pm

Props to the good people at Hermitage Hill Media for their new, bargain-priced DVD edition of Don Winslow of the Navy, a 1942 Universal serial based on the once-popular comic strip by Frank V. Martinek and Leon Beroth. It features brawny, iron-jawed Don Terry as the intrepid Winslow, Walter Sande as Don’s sidekick Red Pennington, […]

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Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

Posted in Pulps on June 6, 2012 @ 10:56 am

I’ve just read that Ray Bradbury died this morning in Los Angeles at the age of 91. He had been in failing health for several years now, but he never lost his zest for life or his enthusiasm for the genre he helped shape. I imagine most folks today remember Ray for his SF works, […]

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Hoppy birthday, William Boyd: Part 2

Posted in Western Movies on @ 9:42 am

The first series entry, Hop-a-long Cassidy, was released on August 23, 1935. Within weeks it was playing in thousands of theaters, most of them owned by Paramount. Reviews were positive but not especially enthusiastic; Variety, for example, called the film “not overly exciting” but allowed that it “moves along smoothly, without going in too heavily […]

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Hoppy birthday, William Boyd: Part 1

Posted in Western Movies on June 5, 2012 @ 8:01 am

One hundred and seventeen years ago today, William Boyd was born in Hendrysburg, Ohio. When he was seven his family moved to Oklahoma, where Bill’s parents both died before he finished high school. Left to fend for himself, the strikingly handsome youth initially found work as a grocery-store clerk, then as a surveyor and oil-field […]

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DVR Alert: THE LONE RANGER (1956)

Posted in Uncategorized on June 1, 2012 @ 2:44 pm

Tomorrow (Saturday, June 2), at 4:30 PM Eastern time, Turner Classic Movies will be running The Lone Ranger (1956), which in my humble opinion is the best celluloid incarnation of this character. A Warner Brothers feature film directed by the underrated Stuart Heisler, this is a happy example of a Western made on an A-movie […]

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William MacLeod Raine’s THE PIRATE OF PANAMA (1913)

Posted in Recently Read on @ 2:18 pm

Readers of Blood ‘n’ Thunder are aware that I have a special interest in pulp yarns adapted for Hollywood movies of the silent and early-talkie eras. So you can imagine how eager I was to tackle a recently acquired copy of William MacLeod Raine’s The Pirate of Panama, which was serialized in three January 1914 […]

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