Posts by Ken Begg

As some of you may have noticed, the site went down last week due to hosting issues. Mucho thanks, as always, to FoJ Carina Magyar to riding the rescue AGAIN. Endlessly, really. Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were looking at the spooky comedies of Abbott & Costello. This was their biggest film,…

The was only the duo's fourth film, made during their early box office peak. While they also made a few very fun comic murder mysteries (A&C Meet the Killer Boris Karloff and 1942's Who Done It?), it was in 1948 when their screen career was skidding that they made, of course, A&C Meet Frankenstein,…

This was made over a decade after Spooks on the Loose, and the 'boys' were showing their age. Still, that poster would have gotten my quarter back in the day.

A spin-off from the serious social drama Dead End, the East Side Kids lead by Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, appeared in half a dozen other major films, including Angels with Dirty Faces with Cagney and Bogart and the John Garfield starrer They Made Me a Fugitive. Universal had a competing group called the…

At least she doesn't have haunts in her pants.

Spin-offs have been happening for a long time. Harold Gildersleeve was a character on the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly (the one with the avalanche-prone closet) who got his own radio show, and then a short series of filler B-movies. As was often the case with this sort of skein, one of the…

A few years ago at B-Fest, in the middle of the night we were weirdly confronted with the Mickey Rooney picture Andy Hardy's Private Secretary. GalaxyJane and I exchanged puzzled looks, but both opined it would at least probably only run about an hour. Sadly, we were incorrect. This was the longest chapter of…

I really wonder at the economics of these figures. There seem to be literally thousands of them. How much are the license fees? How many of each figure do they have to sell to reach profit. I'm just amazed at how these things took off.

Halloween is over, but this feels similar enough in tone not to be jarring. I hope everyone had a happy holiday.