Creature Features and Rubber Suit Monsters

Invasion of the Saucer Men

Godzilla.  The Creature from the Black Lagoon. We're talkin' rubber suit monster or "man-in-a-suit" horror and sci-fi vintage special effects. They are cheesy, squidgy, and interfere fatally with the willful suspension of disbelief.  So if these wiggly, campy, F/X misfires are such a disaster, then why do they remain perennial cinema and movie memorabilia favorites?  Well, to quote the man, "It's complicated, baby."

The obvious answer to why we saw them over and over again for decades was that they worked well within typical schlock-house and straight-to-drive-in B-movie budget constraints.  This is indeed how we got Godzilla.  The original monster maestro of Japan, Eiji Tsuburaya, wanted to do our now internationally beloved 'zilla-monster in stop motion a la Ray Harryhausen's King Kong.  But when Eiji told his studio that it would take years to film the special effects for the scenes needed, they told him to find another way.  Voila, the rubber suit.  Necessity was the mother of the first, and best, rubber suit monster ever.

Sci-fi and horror movie fans worth their salt also know that our favorite gummy gargoyle rubber suit Godzilla fulfills a primal human need for monsters, which by definition are mythic embodiments of our fears about the dysfunction (natural or man-made) in our everyday lives.  In Godzilla's case, that would be post World War II pop culture processing Japanese communal fears about the return of the H-bomb.  That's enough nickel psychology.

Swamp Thing battles the Arcane Monster

Why else do we keep our devotion to rubber suit monsters in the age of CG!?  According to A-list creature directors like Steven Spielberg, it all comes down to the film goers' experience.  Although Spielberg eventually worked extensively with CGI monsters, he thinks the best performances from his actors come from playing off of animatronic or puppeteer-filled rubber sharks and dinosaurs.  In other words, in order to thrill you in the theater, Spielberg claims he needed to scare the living crap out of his non-creature actors with live action rubber monsters.

This live action versus digital debate describes an important outlook in Rochester, NY where our e-commerce company, Movie Fan Collectibles, is located.  Our city is also home to Kodak and the George Eastman House Museum's Selznick School of Film Preservation.  Curators of the film library and archive wholeheartedly uplift the experience of pre-digital film technologies and special effects for their intense and visceral simulated reality.  They assert that film and live-action reaches us in a way that digital technology, at the moment, can not.  Eastman House Museum's archive and Dryden Theater are dedicated to preserving and showing original film in all its formats.  Eastman is particularly proud of their collection's live action rubber-suit creature features, including a number of 3-D prints.  For the true cinephile, we recommend a visit.

The Gill Man in Revenge of the Creature

Critics like Aussie Sci-Fi maven Robin Pen go further by saying that if these charmingly fake filmic rubber apparitions don't reach you, then it is really more of a problem with the viewer than it is with the hokey production.  Rubber suit monsters are a pleasure best partaken with a group watching in large projection format.  In a darkened theater like Rochester's Dryden, Hollywood's seminal rubber suit monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, will be weird enough to scare the young-in's and sufficiently outlandish to make the adults belly-laugh.  This multi-generational thrill is not lost on contemporary film makers as evidenced by the currently on going decades-long development of a contemporary Creature From the Black Lagoon remake.

Fun factoids:  Bill Paxton was the last actor signed to play the lead in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 2012. 

Eye Creature with Babes

Original Black Lagoon producer, William Alland, played the reporter character in Citizen Kane. At a dinner party during the Kane production, Alland got the idea for the Black Lagoon creature from an old Mexican folk tale that cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told at the party that evening.


Special thanks to Robin Pen, Wiki, and the New Yorker Magazine for their rubber suit monster reporting.

Question of the week:  Paxton is out of the Black Lagoon remake, so who should play the lead in CFTBL?  I'm thinking Brendan Fraser could carry it off the way he did with The Mummy movies.  Especially since the script is supposed to be a pre-quel to the original with Victorian explorers poking around in the Amazon when they encounter the latest gill-man swamp thing.

How to Start a Collection 1-2-3

First, analyze your reasons. Are you hoping to "buy low and sell high?" Creating a collection of anything solely for investment purposes is seldom a good idea. One should approach collecting from the standpoint of self-satisfaction. Do the objects appeal to you? Are you happy to have them in your presence? In essence - do they stir emotions within you - rather than existing as mere objects to be stored away while awaiting their value to increase?

Quick start to a collection - buy a set

Buy something because you like it and want to have it - that way you will never be disappointed if 20 or 30 years from now they have not increased in monetary value. For example, some folks make a point of grabbing up every Rookie baseball card that's printed hoping that one (or more) of these players will become the next Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth. The fact is the odds are overwhelmingly against that, and in the end the collector will have spent thousands of dollars to amass a collection that sits in a box and has less value that originally spent.

The second tip is like the first - purchase an item because you really want it - not because someone else says you should have it. You'll find lots of folks with something to sell saying "You're collection won't be complete without ____!" Let me tell you, a collection is never truly complete. There is always at least one more thing that could be added and if your goal is to create the best, most complete collection of XYZ widgets, you will end up spending lots of money and probably never achieve that goal. Don't let others define your collecting goal. Buy what makes you happy.

Beginnings of a small stamp collection

This also holds true for retailers who offer memorabilia that is specifically created to be collectible. You've seen these - they are almost always marked "Limited Edition" (LE) or "Special Edition" (SE). Hummel plates and figurines spring to mind. The seller wants you to think that the item is more desirable and holds more value because of scarcity but this is very rarely the case in the long run. LEs are usually numbered in the thousands, and when they sell out the manufacturer simply creates a slightly different version for another "Limited Edition" run. Of course, if you like and want to have a special edition item then don't deny yourself the pleasure. Just realize that a marketing scam is involved and don't pay more than it is personally worth to you.

And the third tip is like the first two - buy what you want regardless of any "rules." For example, many people focus on collecting items by only a particular artist. In the process, they obtain things that don't really appeal to them aesthetically but feel they must have, and they pass up some things they like only because they are unrelated to their collection's theme. Face it - a collection of Picassos may be impressive but not everything he created was great. Maybe adding in a Rembrandt or Van Gogh that catches your eye will be more enjoyable than a Picasso work which just doesn't "feel right." Remember - the goal of any good collection is to satisfy yourself - why buy something you don't care for, or take a pass on something because it doesn't "fit?" In point of fact, an eclectic collection is often more interesting than one that is too narrowly focused.

A Leica camera collection

The whole point is that YOU are in charge - you set the rules, or you have no rules whatsoever. Just get started with one thing that appeals to you - that you'd like to possess - and let it develop and flow from there. As you acquire more items you may see a pattern developing, or not. It doesn't matter so long as you're surrounding yourself with items that make you happy.

So why delay? Start today, or this week, with just one or two things, and let the collection begin. In a future article I'll get more specific about building a movie memorabilia collection.

Have you started collecting? Please share your experiences - the good, the bad, the ugly...

Author: Lee Richards

Sure Fire Recipe for a Movie: Girls with Guns

Judith M. Brown in "Big Doll House"

Pictured : studio publicity 8 x 10 photo stills from 1971 exploitation flick Big Doll House (Judith M. Brown), Jeannie Berlin in 1970's The Baby Maker, and 1998 Hollywood / Hong Kong action fusion movie The Replacement Killers (Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino).

French New Wave film directing legend Jean-Luc Godard (1960's Breathless starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo) once said that, "All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun."  A true genius, Godard probably didn't know how right he was; "girls with guns" may be among the longest lasting and most pervasive cinematic tropes in existence.

Easily mistaken for a kinky camp visual thrill that occasionally crosses the screen (think James Bond girls), or a character attribute (Linda Hamilton aka Sarah Connor in The Terminator films), women packing heat are all over films of every genre.  Don't believe it?  Treat yourself to Moviebadgirls.com's online compilation of every girls-with-guns image archived on IMDb (The Internet Movie Database).

Chow Yun Fat & Mira Sorvino in "The Replacement Killers"

The movie bad girls photo index has screen grabs we expect to see, like Star Wars sci-fi Princess Leia and her big handheld blaster in The Empire Strikes Back, or Pam Grier as Foxy Brown in all her Blaxploitation '70s gangsta gun-crazed glory.  But the bad girls photo index also reminds us that ladies with lethal weapons grace big screen epics like Dr. Zhivago as well.  Back in the day, Julie Christie as the peerlessly furry snow-bunny Lara, elicited an audible gasp from the audience when she pulled a pistol on her Russkie sugar-daddy lawyer boyfriend in the classic 1960s MGM epic.  How could somebody so Cinderella good be sooo bad?

Japanese print comics known as Manga, and their film cartoon counterparts Anime (Aeon Flux anyone? She was in both genres, as well as in live action Hollywood cinema played by Charlize Theron with a dark wig), would have you think that they originated the concept of babes with bazookas sometime in the 1970s. There is no denying Japanese graphic novel artists and animators score points for being pretty obssesive about keeping these dangerous girls going.  The Shaw Brothers Hong Kong Studio of the 1960s also deserves a shout out for getting the current version of the action flick chick rolling with Cheng Pei-pei in Come Drink with Me.

Mira Sorvino pictured here in the Replacement Killers publicity shot tells us that this is still an area of interest for Asian film makers and movie goers everywhere.  But Bombshells with Bullets have been on film since film existed -- a few clicks on the net will find silent cinema sweethearts like Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford assuming the position with a piece.  The Golden Age of American movies, running from the 1920s until the beginning of the TV era in the 1950s, would not have been the same without its gorgeous gaggle of gangster and crime noir molls.

Jeannie Berlin in "The Baby Maker"

Occasionally a trope outgrows its fictive boundaries and prolapses into the real world.  Such is the case for this genre.  Buff action honeys in the flesh busting out of their glamoflage cami muscle shirts can be found selling real guns to real armies on the net (check out TacGirl.com, they'll send you a pin-up calendar of these real-life Lara Croft wannabes).

In case that fantasy incursion of TacGirls with guns into real life isn't weird enough for you, then you will love the reports coming out of Afghanistan about "FETS."  FETS is military speak for "Female Engagement Teams."  Apparently our American heroes G.I. Joe -ing around the Afghani countryside is really making Islamic folks uncomfortable about our combat soldiers so much as looking at Afghan ladies, let alone trying to speak with them.  The Pentagon's answer to the problem is FETS, or regular army women in cami fatigues with guns on patrol working to win the hearts and minds of people in rural Afghanistan.

If all this real world guns and gals is too much for you, then you won't have to wait long to ogle some fresh female arm-candy with ordinances back on the big screen where they rightfully belong.  Zack Snyder's new girls with guns actioner, Sucker Punch, will be out in 2011.  Sucker Punch's one-line, high-concept description from the director is, "Alice in Wonderland with machine guns." 'Nuf said.

Total snaps to the excellent website "TVTropes.com" for sending this Blog in the right direction.

Spanish Mini Movie Posters are Special

We recently purchased a collection of over 500 mini movie posters (sometimes called heralds) dating from the 1940s and '50s. Boy have these been fun to peruse!

In a number of foreign countries the movie distributors figured out a really neat way to get people to theaters - give them miniature posters that could also be used as admission passes. So from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and other Spanish-speaking lands we have some great artwork that truly classifies as ephemera. As neat as these little posters are, no one ever really intended for them to be saved. That makes it wonderful to have them "in hand" now some 50 to 70 years later!

And these truly are little works of art - often different images from the large poster creations put on display in the theaters. They average around 3-1/2" x 5" in size, and most all just seem to explode with eye-catching color!

We've got some great classic movie titles, and even more classic movie stars in our collection. So let's drop a few names: Bob Hope, Roy Rogers, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Hedy Lamarr, Dorothy Lamour, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Alan Ladd, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Lucille Ball, Gloria Swanson, Ray Milland, Gary Cooper, Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Boris Karloff, Orson Welles, and more.

See why I'm excited! And some of the great titles we have include: Henry V, The Green Glove, Drums of Fu Manchu, Road to Bali, Sands of Iwo Jima, Pride of the Yankees, Black Magic, Johnny Angel, Algiers, Submarine Attack, Man In the Iron Mask, Kit Carson, Captain Kidd, Sign of the Cross, and more.

With 500+ posters it will take us awhile to make them all available but it will be a delicious time spent in nostalgic recollection of Saturday afternoon matinees.


Author:  Lee Richards

Cigarette Cards: Intimate portraits of early movie star screen idols

Cigarette cards were first introduced in the 1880s as stiffeners for individual cigarette packs. The U.S. was first to produce cigarette cards, but Britain followed suit shortly afterward. The first two decades of the Twentieth Century are considered the 'golden age' of the card production, with literally hundreds of suppliers producing them. The cards usually had a nautical or military theme reflecting the interests of soldiers and sailors as the main consumers of tobacco.

The demand for cards decreased during the great war because of print supply shortages, and then resumed popularity again in the inter-war period, but now with a broader variety of pictorial subjects. Advances in printing technology in the 1920s also allowed for this new proliferation of card subjects, including sports, motor cars, and boating.

At MovieFanCollectibles, we became intensely interested in cigarette cards produced in the inter-war and post WWII era as movie memorabilia, because of our passion for lobby cards, movie stills, and other vintage movie promotional materials. We like the aesthetic experience of viewing cigarette cards, which is quite unlike that of looking at other forms of movie memorabilia.

The card's small size that allows them to fit into a cigarette pack also gives them a jewel-like cameo or locket quality, which is meant for one viewer at a time. The experience is one of intimacy with the subject matter. Some of the cards have surprisingly high resolution with much visual data available given their cigarette-pack size. Other cigarette cards, which may have a lower resolution in their printing process gain their charm from special die-cut shapes such as the oval lozenge-shaped cards pictured here with Clark Gable and Laurel & Hardy in all their glory.

Material shortages put an end to the cigarette card craze, although some printers and tobacco companies were considering bringing them back in the 1960s. But it was never to be.

Pictured: Clark Gable, Robert Young & Claudette Colbert, Laurel & Hardy, Ilona Massey

Thanks to Franklin Cards for cigarette card info