Captain's Blog: The Making of a Monster Kid

"Well, who ELSE would I be?" - Robin

A few weeks ago, I wrote a personal blog about my childhood and how my becoming a fan of a comic book character helped me become, well, me. Obviously, I’m about more than comic books as this site shows. I thought I’d write a follow up piece about how and why I became such a huge horror/sci-fi fan.

It all began a long time ago, though sadly not in a galaxy far, far away…

“Monster Kid” is a phrase I became aware of several years ago. It’s one I like. Strictly speaking, it refers to us people of a certain age, as it’s politely put. Basically, it refers to us Boomers, and I’m a Boomer and proud of it. Specifically, it’s a phrase that refers to American kids who were around in the late fifties to mid-sixties when Universal Pictures sold their back catalogue of thirties and forties horrors to television it what was known as the Shock Theatre package. These young people immediately jumped on the films and couldn’t get enough of them. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney were once again household names. The surge in interest inspired the launch of several magazines, books, model kits and so on. Universal Pictures and their brand of monster movies with their cast of recurring characters, Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, Wolfman, the Mummy etc became legends and a part of popular culture.

In a way, I was/am a Monster Kid. Despite not living in America, not having access to those wonderful movies or those magazines, the monsters found me in a small seaside town in North West Wales. And every bit as much as my discovery of Batman a couple of years earlier – their influence and effect on my life was profound and can’t be understated.

If not for the monsters, you’d be reading something else right now.

But where did it start? How did a little Welsh kid living in a rural area get swept up for over half a century with all this?

How about this?

I remember my first nightmare.

I was three, so the year was 1963. On Friday nights, one of the two TV stations we were able to receive on our black and white set (state of the art at the time) showed in an early evening slot, a puppet show called Fireball XL5 produced by Gerry Anderson who would later go on to greater success with his Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet shows. Each of these was more sophisticated in its execution that the last. So, Fireball XL5 was pretty primitive. It was probably the first science fiction I ever saw. (Not, of course that I knew I was watching science fiction.) Every week, Steve Zodiac, Professor Matt Matic and Venus would head off in their mighty spaceship to high adventure among the stars. All part of the daily routine for The World Space Patrol.

But this one episode that caught my eye opened with an alien, which I took to be reptilian, firing at the glass of a base on a remote planet. If the glass broke (actually it was a question of when) the humans would die. And that’s the part that stuck with me. I remember waking up from a dream shortly afterwards where I was hiding under the kitchen table, while that thing was looking for me in the house (I never told my parents about this.) Let’s fast forward a couple of years.

Incoming controversy. I wasn’t a Doctor Who fan. I mentioned we had access to only two TV channels. Really it was one. Our BBC reception was awful enough to render it practically unwatchable. Interference, ghosting, rolling picture. So, with very few exceptions, I didn’t see that much of the show. But if someone at school mentioned that the Daleks or Cybermen were back, I’d give it a shot, but it was hit & miss until the seventies. And I was never one of those legions of people who claim to have watched it from behind the couch (if those people ever really existed, which I doubt.) I was raised on ITV, the commercial station. There, we had not only Gerry Anderson’s shows – we had the even better Irwin Allen. As a child, I was glued to his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, more so to his Lost in Space. These were really “monster of the week” shows. Nothing subtle here. We had seaweed monsters, invading aliens from outer space, giant cyclops – most of them hitting the same psychological nerve as that Fireball XL5, I guess, of something menacing trying to get into the sanctuary where the heroes were. (Not that I could’ve articulated that high concept at the time, I was only six.) But the monsters were beginning to loom large in my limited entertainment choices. If it wasn’t superheroes, it was monsters.

Yeah… Speaking of superheroes. They’re not blameless in this. DC Comics used to run ads for Aurora model kits on their back covers. Where I was from, model kits were mainly Airfix produced Spitfire planes and other WW2 replicas, all of which were approved in the house because my father had served in the war. Aurora had a range of fabulous characters like the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy, Hunchback and so on. I might not have had a single clue who they were or what they were about – but I was curious and I knew without a doubt they were forbidden fruit. Not that they were available where I lived. Had they been, they’d have been deeply frowned on and forbidden. (Actually, I remember buying a DC comic I wasn’t that interested in because it had that ad on the back cover and I wanted to examine it.)

In fact, I did manage to get hold of one of those Aurora kits when I was 14. It was The Mummy. Standing amid ruins and sand, one arm tucked in, one reaching out. I took a great deal of pride and time building it and painting it. I wanted it to look just right, not an easy feat when you’re building something where the available reference material is all black and white. Well, I had gone to Liverpool for a few days during the summer holidays, staying with one of my sisters. Around the corner from her house was a shop selling model kits. Off I went. Being unsupervised, I made the purchase. Something I’ll never forget is the complete lack of comprehension as I was building my model in the evenings. Rather than just accept that I was by now a fully fledged monster fan, they assumed I was developing an interest in Egyptology. (Face. Palm. Slap.)

Back to the story.

Summer 1968. A huge turning point for me, and what I would become. As big a turning point as 1966 and my Batman discovery. School was out; it was a sunny Saturday. Early evening, eight-year-old me had noticed ITV (I never used to even bother checking the BBC listings at that point) were showing King Kong (1933). I recognised the name from one of those Aurora ads. (Sadly, it just appeared to be a big gorilla, from the picture – just my luck.)

I remember one of my older sisters telling me that it was a true story – to this day I’m not sure whether that was a half-assed attempt at a joke, or whether she believed it was a documentary.

What I saw that Saturday evening changed, well, everything.

I don’t know what I was expecting. But I don’t think I was expecting what I saw. King Kong was my first ever monster movie. Looking back, I still think it’s a perfect introduction to that whole genre. It has mystery, jungle adventure, dinosaurs, and a monster rampaging through a city with a heroic but tragic defiant last stand on top of the Empire State Building in New York. There’s not a single wasted second. Plus, despite my sister’s feeble efforts to convince me otherwise, I knew what I was watching wasn’t real – but to that eight-year-old, watching a (then) 35-year-old black and white movie on a black and white set, it LOOKED real. And THAT was a huge life changer. I could suspend my disbelief during the film, but it awoke an insatiable curiosity to know exactly HOW they made it look real. Right there, right then, that eight-year-old was on a lifelong mission to find these things out. I loved the story, yes. But I needed to know how the film was made. That made my interest a two-tiered one.

I tried to ask the holders of all knowledge in my family, which means everybody who was older than me, and therefore wiser (I was the youngest and apparently the dumbest). The usual answer was “who cares?” Um…I did. I cared. So, my quest began. I became the weird kid who knew how stop motion animation was, how forced perspectives and mattes worked. (In many ways, I’m still that weird li’l kid.)

One of the things that occurred to me was that if King Kong was a motion picture, then those other characters pictured in the Aurora ads might also be film characters. Whoa, that was big. TV shows were one thing – movies were another. They made movies about these…monsters? Mind blown. There was a whole world of this stuff out there, waiting for me to find it.

My mind would have to remain blown as it was in its limited little way for the time being. One TV channel, single figure age, older sisters who had my parents’ ears voicing disapproval for the hell of it – my window to the forbidden fruit was very, very limited. But at least I had King Kong. And if he was out there, there would be others. The fire was ignited.

I was ten years old. ITV used to show a Sunday night movie, just before my bedtime. And if I stayed very quiet in the front room, while my mother was in the kitchen with my sister, I could possibly watch a film through to the end. (Unless of course my sister figured I was having too good a time and reminded my mother that my bedtime was coming up.) Two films were shown in that slot that didn’t really change much, because my course was already set. But they reinforced it. I saw Them! (1954) a film that warned us about the risks of cold-war testing of nuclear devices in the desert – it resulted in giant ants, who began their reign of terror by attacking a vacationing family in a caravan before moving on to colonise the storm drains of Los Angeles. I don’t pretend to know what ants sound like, but in that movie, they make a weird trilling noise that gave me the chills for days afterward. The other film I remember seeing that left its mark was War of the Worlds (1953). Get this – at age 10, I had no idea that the movie was based on a book by H.G.Wells, and that it was what my parents would’ve called a “proper” book. I only knew this when the book was adapted and serialised in an educational magazine they bought for me and insisted I read it, to try and get me away from all this monster and superhero nonsense. (Good grief!) It was this “approved” magazine that told me that War of the Worlds was a type of story called science fiction. Not only that, but it also confirmed that Superman was a science fiction character. Finally, this…stuff…that I was into had a name. And there was a lot of it out there. Incidentally, speaking of books in 1970, I discovered a comic strip adaptation of King Kong and bought it immediately. I still have it, see? (I guess we'd call it a graphic novel now.)

What I wouldn’t or couldn't have known is that this book was the foundation stone of what would become my movie memorabilia collection, which has grown to an extent that it now occupies an entire room and several storage containers. (So long, lifelong disposable income.) Had I known, there's absolutely no guarantee it would've changed anything.

I would watch what I could, when I could, but at age 13, the gates fully opened. I was the only child left at home, and with that came an amount of freedom. Bedtimes were later and this allowed for the watching of more late-night horror movies. Even on school nights. I was lucky because the first horror/monster movies I saw in a Monday night slot on ITV after the 10:00pm news that ran several weeks were the Universal Pictures. I finally saw what most of those Aurora ads were about. My heroes became old-time actors like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. I never saw their films as ridiculously old fashioned. I saw multi layered morality tales, where evil was defeated, but the monsters still had a tragedy about them and elicited sympathy. It was at this age that I received a gift of The Pictorial History of the Horror Movie, a book I still treasure.

This book became a vital timeline of how the films had developed, what order series of films should be watched and so on. It also became a catalogue of the bewildering number of films out there. In short, it was a real eye opener. I would add to this arsenal of horror movie books and magazines maniacally over the years. Horror and sci-fi movies became not only staple viewing on TV, but whatever showed up at our local cinemas were fair game as well. I was a well-behaved kid at the cinema, so I never had a problem getting in to X certificate movies underage. So, I saw some Hammer films, which were another stunning surprise. I mean, back then, Hammer films were pretty much hardcore. Whereas Universal’s Frankenstein films coyly shied away from blood and gore, Hammer went in for a close-up with a crescendo of music.

I was hooked. Hooked for life, it appears.

Flash forward to 1981. I had left school four years previously. I had an office job which didn’t exactly stretch me. I was filing papers, basically. I felt I needed something. I needed to do something. Something that gave me some fulfilment. I had decided to buy a typewriter. I had, since before leaving school, notions of writing. I had harboured an ambition to become a journalist actually. So, I bought a typewriter in the summer. And a small desk, because I figured I was going nowhere, so I spent some money upgrading, refurnishing and decorating my bedroom. Plus, a typewriter. There was no plan, other than writing…something. (The best laid non-plans of Robin Pierce, right?) That typewriter sat gathering dust from August until November because I didn’t have a single clue what to write about.

November saw a series of Monster Movies appear on Thursday nights on the BBC, which included titles I had never seen, films like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Gorgo (1961) and kicking it all off – King Kong, which I hadn’t seen since that summer of ’68. It was a pleasure seeing it again – but as soon as it was over, I had yet another of those life changing moments. This one was a real epiphany. A lightbulb above the head moment.

I loved films. I wanted to write. I had nothing to write. Why not write about films? Why not indeed? So, bearing in mind I couldn’t even type, I was using the hunt & peck method, and several pots of white-out. Determined, and now with a project and a purpose, I sat down and painstakingly, laboriously typed out a short one-page review – just for the sheer hell of it. I’ve still got it, along with all the others I typed out in the next five years, in two ring binders, that I like to look at, very occasionally. Those early ones make me wince and cringe a little bit, but they also make me smile. They’re very self-conscious, but by the third one, I can see I’m developing my own voice, and inserting some personal bits and pieces and asides to the review. (I never have the face to try and convince anybody that what I do has a “style” to it. That’d just be pretentious.) I had found a way to expand my hobby and add to my enjoyment, while also doing something creative. Happy days.

The following year, I bought my first VHS player. 1982 was the cusp of the home video revolution, and I was right there in it. Now I could actually collect all those monster/horror/sci-fi movies I had loved over the years which is something I had yearned to do. I had previously flirted with the notion of buying a Super 8 projector. According to an old ad in a Starburst back issue, I could buy all 4 fifteen-minute reels of Star Wars in black and white without sound for £25. (So, an hour in total of a two-hour movie for a week’s wage. Nope.) Amusingly, I thought I’d stop at 20 video tapes. Nowadays although everything is on disc, we’re at 4322. And I’m still going.

Writing-wise, well, I’ve been online since ’98 and I started a blog over on MySpace back in 2005, which eventually evolved into this website, and which also led me to being recruited as head writer of Gore Zone Magazine, four years later I was a lead writer for Starburst Magazine which was an integral part of my reading pre-internet.

None of this would’ve been possible without seeing that giant ape climbing the Empire State. In my study, he’s paid tribute to in various sculpts, and when I visited New York for my 50th years ago I was able to go to the top of the Empire State myself. (Relax, I took the elevator, I didn’t clamber up the outside).

Naturally, I proudly wore a King Kong t-shirt for my visit. Let’s face it, you don’t get to be any more of a Monster Kid than that!