Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Adventures of Superman



Mystery Of The Lost Planet Part 01
Mystery Of The Lost Planet Part 02
Mystery Of The Lost Planet Part 03
Mystery Of The Lost Planet Part 04

Now with organ music. The alien Anthar takes Jimmy to his planet in a space shell. Don't take gravity beans from strangers, kids.

For more classic Superman check out the podcasts Golden Age Superman and The Thrilling Adventures of Superman.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Tiger & Bunny 18



Episode 18, "Ignorance Is Bliss"

Kotetsu tries to break the news that he's quitting, and Barnaby discovers new information about his parents' murder.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Progress Report

(Cover by Ken Fagg)


"Progress Report" by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides

"Progress is relative; Senator O'Noonan's idea of it was not particularly scientific. Which would be too bad, if he had the last word!"



Produced by Greg Weeks, Dianna Adair and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Adventures of Superman


The Radar Rocket Part 14
The Radar Rocket Part 15
The Radar Rocket Part 16
The Radar Rocket Part 17
The Radar Rocket Part 18
The Radar Rocket Part 19
The Radar Rocket Part 20

Can Superman and friends survive the hordes of underground lunar army ants?

Episode 16 has very bad sound quality for the first 5 mins. or so, and it even starts to tune to a different station for a second, but the rest of the show is fine.


For more classic Superman check out the podcasts Golden Age Superman and The Thrilling Adventures of Superman.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Tiger & Bunny 17



Episode 17, "Blood is Thicker Than Water"

Kotetsu goes back home to do some soul searching and makes a decision about his future as a hero.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Flaming C Returns



The Flaming C makes a surprise appearance in the Young Justice episode "Welcome to Happy Harbor" and discovers that Mister Twister is an old acquaintance.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Space Shuttle: The complete missions



Nature's tribute to the space shuttle program.

NASA's 30-year Space Transportation System (STS) program came to an end on 21st July 2011. The Space Shuttle fleet delivered the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and dozens of satellites, space probes, crew and supplies. Two Shuttles were lost: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The touchdown of Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center marked the end of an era, after 135 missions. This video shows all of them in chronological order.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Terauchi Tuesday


Psych! Time for a little summer fun. Takeshi Terauchi's surftastic eleki covers of some classical compositions.

Theme from Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)
Theme from Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky)
In a Persian Market (Ketelbey)
Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov)
Sabre Dance (Khachaturian)
Theme from Unfinished Symphony (Schubert)
Hungarian Dance Number Five (Brahms)
Toreador Dance from Carmen (Bizet)
Danube Waves (Ivanovici)
One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly (Puccini)
Fur Elise (Beethoven)


[via WFMU]

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Adventures of Superman


Superman must fly to the moon to rescue Jimmy & co. who have encountered strange beings on the far side of the moon.( It wouldn't be until 1959 that the Soviet space probe Luna 3 would photograph the far side of the moon.) Trivia: It turns out that Superman's X-Ray vision is blocked by regolith.

The Radar Rocket Part 06
The Radar Rocket Part 07
The Radar Rocket Part 08
The Radar Rocket Part 09
The Radar Rocket Part 10
The Radar Rocket Part 11
The Radar Rocket Part 12
The Radar Rocket Part 13


More technical troubles. The files posted to the Internet Archive are mislabeled again. Episode #9 is really a duplicate of episode seven, and #8 isn't there at all. But I didn't notice any gaps in the story, so I'm assuming the numbering is just off. I'm not going to mess around with renaming them this time. Instead I'll just skip #8 & #9.


For more classic Superman check out the podcasts Golden Age Superman and The Thrilling Adventures of Superman.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Tiger & Bunny16



Episode 16: "Truth Lies at the Bottom of a Well."

In this episode we find out more about Lunatic, and we learn a shocking secret about a famous hero.

Am I the only one who has a bad feeling about Mr. Maverick? There's something fishy about that guy.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Final Countdown


John Oliver goes to Cape Canaveral to witness the end of the civilian space shuttle era. As his fellow British comedian Steve Punt put it, "No more space missions. From now on all American rockets will be aimed at people."

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The Scapegoat

(Cover by Emsh)

"The Scapegoat" by Richard Maples

"Who would not have pity for a poor, helpless victim? Nobody —except another poor victim!"


Produced by Greg Weeks, Dianna Adair and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

Candace's Cthulhu Corner: Necronomicon



I wanted to post Candace's most recent chat about R’lyeh, but it's not on the site yet. So here she is to tell us about the dread grimoire itself.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

特撮 Tuesday



Ultraman scored some killer 'shrooms back in the '70's.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Then & Now


Heli-ship then...

Art by Jack Kirby

...heli-ship now.


Images via GACBS and Superpouvoir.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

The Adventures of Superman


I'm skipping ahead to a storyline with some pronounced sf content (aside from Superman being an E. T.).

The Radar Rocket Part 01
The Radar Rocket Part 02
The Radar Rocket Part 03
The Radar Rocket Part 04
The Radar Rocket Part 05

Leapin' lizards! Jimmy Olsen is trapped in space aboard the radar rocket. Can even Superman save him?

Aside from some basic facts about the Earth's moon the science gets kind of silly, even for a kid's show. Take this fun quiz and see how you compare to the characters in this episode. You're stuck in orbit 16,000 km above the Earth. Do you a) jury-rig a radio transmitter and send an SOS, b) adjust the rocket engine to act as a signal flare, or c) attach weights to pigeons and throw them out of the spacecraft with messages tied to their dead, little feet? Yeesh.


For more classic Superman check out the podcasts Golden Age Superman and The Thrilling Adventures of Superman.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Tiger & Bunny 15



Episode 15: "The Sky's The Limit…"

This one is a touch sad. So, what's the deal with Kotetsu's power? Is it really as bad as his ex-manager thinks? Keep your eyes peeled for the allusions to Robby the Robot and Metropolis in this episode.

Friday, July 8, 2011

The Last Launch



Bon voyage, Atlantis.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Monarch of the Rings

I was paging through Everett F. Bleiler's Science Fiction: The Early Years when I came across a story description that caught my eye. It's Paul Ernst's novel The Black Monarch which was serialized in five parts in Weird Tales in Feb.-June 1930.

"We've got to stop meeting like this."

The story involves an evil overlord who uses rings to control the wills of others in an attempt to conquer the world. What struck me about the story is how similar the main plot strand is to Tolkien's later fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately the novel has never been reprinted. And since there are no scanlations of these issues available, and since the actual copies of Weird Tales can run $100 each, I've never read it. So I have to rely on Bleiler's summary, which goes like this...

Novel. World peril, a criminal mastermind, and a kitchen sink full of oddities. * 1992, mostly Algeria. * Neil Emory awakens from a somnambulistic episode to find himself partly through the porthole of his ocean-liner cabin. The attempt seems to be linked with an antique ring set with a blue diamond that he is wearing. Not long after this Emory sees another man (Dr. Eden Sanderson) go through the same actions. He, too, was wearing a ring like Emory's which he then discarded. * Sanderson tells a strange story: His foster-father, an inventor, after creating a machine that responded to thoughts waves, attuned it to locate evil. He found one enormous focal point, but before he could isolate it, a stranger visited him, leaving a ring, and after that the invention did not work. But the ring shows images of a gigantic man with a metal arrangement over his head. * Sanderson's foster-father reared Sanderson to be a champion against the evil being, and Sanderson invites Emory to join the quest, which centers on Algeria. * For a time the men search unsuccessfully, until a landslide reveals a tunnel leading to an underground world illuminated by golden plates. The land is inhabited by small, robot-like men. After separate adventures, Sanderson and Emory are captured and are taken before Rez, an enormous man with a metal head who rules the underworld. * Rez (who resembles H. Rider Haggard's Ru in She and Allen) is an ancient Egyptian more than six thousand years old. He wears a metal case to accommodate his enlarged brain. The master of an incredible science, he has very highly developed paranormal powers, conversing by telepathy and controlling the wills of others through a diamond crystal a dozen feet across. Fragments of this crystal, set in rings, are distributed around the world, and through them Rez controls his victims. Rez has fostered wars, greed, cruelty and crime, and is about to push the world into a war that will end civilization, after which he will emerge and take over. * Actually, he summoned Sanderson and Emory and caused the landslide which admitted them. His purpose: He needs surface men on whom to test his mind drugs and mental surgery. The two men resist, but the great crystal easily overpowers them. Rez's drug them turns Emory into a zombie-like being with no memory of the past. * The situation seems hopeless, but Sanderson conditions the nearly mindless Emory into smashing the diamond and then bests Rez in mortal combat. Neil, led by a surface woman they met below, escapes, but Sanderson dies holding back the zombie-like guards. Outside, Emory gradually regains his mind.

In addition to sounding like the plot of any number of comic book stories - just add leotard clad vigilantes and stir - and like the template for Richard Shaver's entire output, it's also surprisingly similar to the main plot of The Lord of the Rings. Since it's extremely improbable that Tolkien ever heard of this novel, let alone read it, I'm sure this is just a strange coincidence. But I find it fascinating that years before anyone had heard of Hobbits or Middle-earth there was a dark lord seeking world domination through the agency of the rings he controlled.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Tokusatsu Tuesday



In the end the producers decided against calling the show Cowboy Samurai Football player Denziman.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Independence Day


The cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid as part of an elaborate Fourth of July ceremony hosted by the Freemasons - so who knows? Maybe it does hide a death-ray.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

The Adventures of Superman


Looking For Kryptonite Part 21
Looking For Kryptonite Part 22
Looking For Kryptonite Part 23
Looking For Kryptonite Part 24

As the storyline concludes, Superman is imperiled by kryptonite and it's up to Batman and Robin to save him.

Although this radio show is notable for its vocal advocacy for racial tolerance, one of these episodes does display the insensitivity of the times as Robin refers to the Japanese revanchist helping Jones as a "Jap."

These episodes are mislabeled on the Internet Archive site. The episode listed as #21 is actually #22, and all the following episodes are off by one. Episode #22 is really #21, #23 is #22, etc. So if you download them from the links I posted don't be surprised that the file names don't match.

For more classic Superman check out the podcasts Golden Age Superman and The Thrilling Adventures of Superman.

Golden Age Superman Promo

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Tiger & Bunny 14



Episode 14: "Love is Blind"

Friday, July 1, 2011

Candace's Cthulhu Corner: Dagon



Candace Bailey gets all Gothed up to mispronounce the names from the Cthulhu Mythos.