Before I start with the two fun topics, let me rant first. Don’t worry, nothing political. This is going to be a first. Someone, anyone, pull the Fedora alarm.
I forgot to talk about this in the ‘No longer relevant but still relevant’ entry, but there has been news coming from the Suicide Squad shoots saying that Jared Leto would take the DeNiro route & be in character off & on camera. Not familiar with this? Leto has been partaking in pranking everyone on set by sending people used condoms & dead bird corpses & pretty much doing things he thinks the Joker would do.
EDGY 4 DA KIDZ!
Here’s the sticker here, he’s not getting his paycheck cut, nor is he getting charged with workplace harassment & I assure you it is because he’s a handsome actor. Oh, but if some normie tells a lady “What’s Up!”, it’s all some fucking media storm with a Twitter hash tag, mass coverage in the mainstream news & a bunch of celebrities on some promo saying “Hi, I’m Michael Jordan. Stop talking to women like that you supposed misogynist. Get some help.” When the news hit, where were all the SJW’s when this shit happened? Normally the SJW’s would have gone all ape shit ’LE TRIGGERED’ over this & found a way to buy a tank (To be honest, it‘s a crass form of sexual harassment, so they should have jumped on it & this would have been the only time where I wouldn‘t of called them overly-offended for it), but as always if it involves a handsome man they don’t care. Logic doesn’t run in their brain, they‘re Nazis with a liberal cosmetic. That’s life, the handsome rule while the average ugly people die.
Then this whole thing reminded me of the shit I saw in High School. Handsome dude pulls some chick’s bra strap, gets away with only the girl giggling like a cucking funt. I bet you if I did the same shit, everyone would have a mob on my head & they would bring back the guillotine because of me. I am that ugly of a person & to be honsest I have no confidence in myself. Fuck you Jared Leto, you’re not Jesus Christ.
To end all this, handsome people need to be taken down a peg. Everyone is talking about equality & fair justice, let’s start by punishing pretty people!!!! That whole ‘#EffYourBeautyStandards’ is shit because all it protects is fat people & even fat people can be pretty. Also, we need to take the pretty out of Hollywood movies. Get back to the real & gritty ugliness that it once had.
Folks, what you just experienced was theeee first & the only time I (Jebus) have gotten into what is known in the internets as a ‘FEDORA MOMENT’.
Never again. I promise.
Now for my two main happy subjects.
EDGY 4 DA KIDZ!
Here’s the sticker here, he’s not getting his paycheck cut, nor is he getting charged with workplace harassment & I assure you it is because he’s a handsome actor. Oh, but if some normie tells a lady “What’s Up!”, it’s all some fucking media storm with a Twitter hash tag, mass coverage in the mainstream news & a bunch of celebrities on some promo saying “Hi, I’m Michael Jordan. Stop talking to women like that you supposed misogynist. Get some help.” When the news hit, where were all the SJW’s when this shit happened? Normally the SJW’s would have gone all ape shit ’LE TRIGGERED’ over this & found a way to buy a tank (To be honest, it‘s a crass form of sexual harassment, so they should have jumped on it & this would have been the only time where I wouldn‘t of called them overly-offended for it), but as always if it involves a handsome man they don’t care. Logic doesn’t run in their brain, they‘re Nazis with a liberal cosmetic. That’s life, the handsome rule while the average ugly people die.
Then this whole thing reminded me of the shit I saw in High School. Handsome dude pulls some chick’s bra strap, gets away with only the girl giggling like a cucking funt. I bet you if I did the same shit, everyone would have a mob on my head & they would bring back the guillotine because of me. I am that ugly of a person & to be honsest I have no confidence in myself. Fuck you Jared Leto, you’re not Jesus Christ.
To end all this, handsome people need to be taken down a peg. Everyone is talking about equality & fair justice, let’s start by punishing pretty people!!!! That whole ‘#EffYourBeautyStandards’ is shit because all it protects is fat people & even fat people can be pretty. Also, we need to take the pretty out of Hollywood movies. Get back to the real & gritty ugliness that it once had.
Folks, what you just experienced was theeee first & the only time I (Jebus) have gotten into what is known in the internets as a ‘FEDORA MOMENT’.
Never again. I promise.
Now for my two main happy subjects.
WRASTLING
I remember as a kid my parents didn’t want me to watch WWF. Like many other parents at that time they watched news reports of dumbass kids doing wrestling moves & breaking their own necks & they thought I was a dumbass & they weren‘t wrong. It wasn’t until I turned 8 when I was allowed to stay up till 10pm(ON A SCHOOL NIGHT!) on a Thursday at 8pm after two episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ & ending just as ‘Seinfeld’ began to air. That day will live on as the time I was shocked & amazed at what I was seeing. I may be mis-remembering it, but the episode I jumped on had The Undertaker (This was still Attitude era WWF) was fighting some wrestler (I believe it was Big Show. I forget) back stage into the stadium parking lot & Undertaker gets shoved into a coffin, is locked inside, then comes Vince McMahon in a monster truck, runs over the coffin & it explodes in a fiery blaze. As an 8 year old that leaves your eyes wide & your jaw hanging. Of course now that I’m a grown person that’s all cinematic spectacle, but this was the stuff testosterone dreams are made of. Then the next week Vince McMahon’s on stage talking about how he killed all the children’s favorite wrestler & acting like he was the shit. Then the lights shut down on the arena, you start hearing the hells bells that are accompanied with Undertaker’s theme song & the crowd cheers starts with their “Aw hell yea!!” expressions. My eyes are again wide open as my jaw falls to my legs. Lights come on & Undertaker appears on stage with a chair & beats the ever living shit out of Vince! With the cheers & noises I was making, my parents thought I was having a premature heart attack. I seriously thought they killed Undertaker on screen & he had the power to resurrect himself. I was religious back then, I seriously thought Undertaker was in league with Satan & I do say that made the whole experience a whole lot awesome.From then on I never missed an episode of Thursday Night Smackdown & what a time to jump in. At this point in time all the kids in school were talking about WWF, The Rock still hadn‘t of become a movie star & Stone Cold Steve Austin was still chugging beer on ring.
While everyone with antennae TV in their room talked highly about Thursday night smack down, the rich hardcore kids with cable raved more about RAW (Which was one inch harsher than WWF), then later on we started hearing about something both the rich kids & us poor kids sought after called ECW. Now ECW was the stuff that we as kids wanted to see, but you had to pay the PPV cost. ECW was sold as the X-rated verson of WWF. We as kids would have dreams of what ECW would be & we thought it would be like a snuff film mixed with wrestling. We were half right, it was wrestling with blood & the wrestlers would be using harsh weapons like barb wire & bats with nails, but we also kinda expected a live action version of Mortal Kombat with people getting chopped in half, then for some reason coming back for the next wrestling match without any cuts. It was the same thing as WWF, but with more bloody faces, yet no fatalities. We thought it was like ‘Faces of Death’, hahahaah, wee sooo stoopid. Still, it was a fun experience, if that’s hard to believe. Yea, there were those tapes circulating with a bunch of idiots wrestling in their backyard, but we as kids weren’t that fucking sleazy.
I’m not talking about the ‘Summerslam’ or the hugely anticipated ‘Wrestlemania’. I was too poor for that shit, but I did love it when the wrestlers would travel to some base in Iraq for Christmas & perform for the troops. That was pretty cool & fun. Childhood memory here: Me, my neighbor & my older sister were watching that special back in the early 2000’s & we started cracking up at this K-Mart commercial. We could not stop laughing because the narrator of this advert sounded like he was saying ‘Gay Mart’. Then later on we changed the channel to that religious channel ‘TBN’ & we saw Ronald McDonald (Dude in full makeup) talking about some house charities & I coined the perfect reaction to that.:
“Hey look! It’s Ronald McDonald!! Uhhh!!! Uhhh!!! (Girl Screams)”
I used to scream like a girl, can’t anymore, my nuts dropped.
After a while, as I grew into my teens, I gave up wrestling. It wasn’t because it was all ‘Fake’ as people say, but because the episodes started to lack in shock value & surprises. Sadly, I can’t really blame WWF, oh wait, I’m sorry, I mean WWE. At that point WWF turned to WWE because some ‘Protect the pandas’ charity took that name & so the World Wrestling Federation had to change to World Wrestling Entertainment. I’m sure there’s more to it than greedy pandas, but that’s how I see it. (Care to elaborate more info for me, email: blacktime.epress@aol.com).
The fun & goofiness of it started to melt as more real world shit began to happen. I’m sure everyone in my neck of the woods knows about Eddie Gurrero’s untimely death, as well as the craziness that happened with Chris Beniot where he killed his wife, then offed himself. Along with that you also had all the steroid abuse going around (Which has been happening before the media coverage, let’s not forget that) & the stupid shit some hugely popular wrestlers have been doing like Hulk Hogan’s racist, incestual, reality TV stupidity. I respected Hulk Hogan, I was a Hulkamaniac until he started doing all that stupid egocentric Reality TV bull & all it got him was a chance to be a nut in a local commercial for some car loan scam. Slumming it. In the TMZ age it was pretty easy to see the muck behind once beloved wrestlers & of course WWE stopped with having goofy fun (Kinda blame Vince McMahon for his idiotic corporate decisions).
Jake The Snake & Bret Hit Man Hart were the shit!!!! Jimmy Snooka getting knocked out with a coconut was some hilariously racist shit there! We went from fun characters like ‘Doink The Clown’ and ‘The Iron Shiek’ (Which could not be done today) to unforgettable people like ‘The Miz’. What the fuck is a Miz?
Of course there were some memorable characters that I remember for their personality in the 2000‘s Smackdown era. Kurt Angle, the Olympic winner who wore a patriotic onezie. JBL was freaking hilarious, he is what you get when you let Jeb Bush’s wear a cowboy hat & let him think he can wrestle. There was that one time he pissed off all the Mexican people in the arena when WWF played in Texas. He wore a sombrero & started speaking stereotypically, then come both the Gurrero brothers running on stage, kicking ass & asking questions later. That was hilarious.
The Boogeyman was theeeee most disturbing, yet awesome character I’ve ever seen in my life & I’m saddened that he didn’t have as long of staying power. He was awesome, his special would be reaching his arm into the bucketful of worms, munching them in his mouth, then spitting it into the face of the already pinned down enemy. He was awesome & I don’t know if that movie ‘Boogeyman’ was based off him. I hope so. He was so hardcore, Undertaker was like “Whoah whoah whoah! Take it easy bro.”
I mentioned Eddie Gurrero, his brother Chavo Gurrero annoyed the hell out of me, pissed me off & scared me. He would be coming on stage with his brown supremacist jargon & I’d be up in front of the television screen, yelling “Shush! Shut up!! Do you want to start a race war?” It freaked me out as the paranoid kid I still am. You wouldn’t believe how many times the image of a ton of dark skinned people in a concentration camp plagued me at that time.
Can’t talk about Eddie Gurrero’s without talking about that time Eddie & Rey Mysterio (That masked motherfucker) were fighting for custody of Dominic, Rey Mysterio’s son. Yes folks, that happened & this wasn’t some media TMZ scandal regarding paparazzi or a legal courtroom battle. This was all settled with a wrestling match, the victor was the true kid’s father. Don’t know how this works without examining genetics, but alright! This was like the balls out version of a soap opera subplot & everyone from kids to adults ate it all up! It was also like watching a Shakespearean drama in real time, except it was starring buffed out wrestlers & lines like “YOU GOIN DOWN!!” I forgot the outcome, but from what I remember Rey Mysterio conceded with tears in his eyes, may not be true but I remember it being heavily emotional. With Eddie Gurrero’s catchphrase being “I lie, I cheat, I steal”, I truly believe Eddie Gurrero had a run in with Rey Mysterio’s wife, just saying.
Then we get to the one I bet all you internet people have been waiting for me to talk about, John Cena. “Doop doot doooot doooooo. Doop doot dooot doooooo….Egh.” (Not really motivated John Cena Theme). I’ll tell you right now, me & my middle school friends saw his debut at the time & we laughed our asses off when we saw him. He was that white kid who acted like he was hood, but everyone knew he lived in a suburb eating pop tarts while his mom listened to Kenny Logins. He was a freaking poser, yet he seemed to last longer than Boogeyman. He was a joke, not this highest paid badass that everyone sees him as now. He was a joke & I kinda still see him as a joke now, especially with that meme they made of him recently. And here comes the hate mail, bring it in. ( blacktime.epress@aol.com )
As I grew up into my cynical self I started to see the BS, the fake publicity stunts & the characters weren’t interesting anymore. That’s when I started to see more of the start ups appearing on independent television & cable like ‘Ring OF Honor Wrestling’, which reminds me more of 80’s & 90’s WWF to an extent.
At this time WWE was trying hard to stay relevant to where the last Saturday morning kid’s block ‘Vortex on the CW’ had this show called ‘WWE Saturday Morning Slam’ which was basically softcore wrestling with little comedy skits for kids & montages of these wrestlers helping out in charaties (Which was something I always dug. I used that as an example to let my parents watch WWE instead of letting my sister watch ‘America‘s Next Top Model’ at the time). It was what it was, nerfed down WWE for the kiddies, even though kids would rather wait till Thursday or Monday to watch the crazier stuff. It showed how long we came, especially with parents who steered kids away from physical violence on TV.
Haven’t been watching a lot of ROH (It airs here in L.A at 6.am in the morning for some reason), but it looks fun. You have the shock value of wrestlers kicking the faces of the announcers & the spectacle of wrestlers beating each other with steel objects, sometimes fighting in the street & most the wrestlers have a lot of charisma.
Then you got ‘New Japan Pro Wrestling’ which deals less with the crazy drama & it’s all about the spectacle & honor of the moves these guys pull of . I’m serious, some of the moves these wrestlers do are freaking hilarious, yet awesome to look at. The Kobashi Smack is by far the funniest shit you’ll ever see in your life. The only way I can say is NJPW is like watching an episode of ‘Ultraman’ without the rubber suits or the buildings & is well worth the watch. And the female Japanese wrestling is freaking harsh. You got ladies pulling each other’s hairs & twisting their backs to contorted proportions. I get sqemish watching that & It’s pretty hilarious seeing these young teen girls & middle aged moms watching these ladies wrestle & getting caught up in the heat of it. Oh my god, what are you doing!! Muhahahah!!!. Awesome, but very freaking painful, more than I can say with the male division of Japanese wrestling.
I remember seeing one on a Saturday night, of course my parents (Especially the sister I shared a room with) wouldn’t let me see. I remember coming from a baby shower at midnight, turning on the TV & seeing a wrestling show full of very sexy women in stereotypical lignerie. It wasn’t G.L.O.W (GLOW is that badass women‘s wrestling, containing the same goofy fun 80‘s WWF had), but this division was more along the lines of the WWE Divas in their own show. It was a nurse fighting a school teacher with the clichéd sexy outfits. All I gotta say is that was something, my parents disapproved of & of course it could only have happened in the early 2000’s. Saw it once & could never find it again, like a freaking mermaid, a slutty mermaid.
Then of course there was Mexican wrestling & I have to be honest I was never interested in Mexican wrestling. Yeah, some people would argue it was the real deal, but it lacked the fun & craziness American wrestling contain. Mexican wrestling focused only on the wrestling & the mystery behind the masks, yet this is the same industry that had characters like ‘El Santo’ & ‘Blue Deamon’ that starred in movies as themselves fighting evil scientists, wolf men & vampire women. I wanted that in the wrestling. Though the idea of wrestlers not taking off their masks for anyone (Not even their lovers) was a concept I was very allured by & the family tree of it all. Blue Demon has a son, he too is a wrestler & he goes by ‘Blue Demon Jr’, that‘s dank. I like the characters & the mythology of it all, but was never into watching the wrestling on TV.
I guess the new extreme thing the kids are into now is UFC which I’m not as a big fan of, but I do enjoy watching the matches between Ronda Rousey & Misha Tate & all the other female fighters or when the fighters get injured horribly with ears being torn off & the very squeamish broken legs (Yughh! Looking like a ball dropped inside a large tube sock). When it comes to females in UFC, they seem to turn that into a bloodbath than when the male fighters get on the octagon. Not a fan, but I do enjoy those two ladies.
Overall, I will always remember that time wrestling was forbidden to when I became hooked on the weekly soap opera plot, mixed in with suplexes & body slams. Still, what was up with the ‘Sci Fi Channel’ airing Monday Night Raw? I knew Kane was a freaking robot, but what else is Science Fiction about wrestling?
Now that we got that out of the way, time to get off the Nostalgia boat & nerd out!!
LOS PULPOS
I know Pulp & Pulpo mean two different things in two different languages, but who cares, this is blogbabble!
Think about it, the 1930’s weren’t a happy time. Stocks fell, employment fells, the working class is struggling to make ends meet & emotionally man was feeling defensless not being able to feed their family. Rather than reading some depressing, rich people problem books like ‘Anna Karenina’ or ‘Crime & Punishment’, how about a book where the heroes are heroes, rescue the dames & defeat the bad guy (at times kill off the bad guy in such a gruesome way that gives off a cathartic release). In the 30’s there was a huge readership of the pulps that cannot be nearly as replicated as today. Not only that, but the pulps were cheap, they were a bang for your buck & they were produced cheaply too. This would lead to sometimes publishers not making as much money. The publishers then started to see that writers would send more than one manuscripts, but they would reject them for two reasons: they didn’t want the same writer published in the next or same issues & sometimes they didn’t want to pay for multiple stories from the same writer. That’s when these writers decided to take on pseudonyms as a response to rejections & to get double the paycheck. In Ray Bradbury’s book ‘Zen in the Art of Writing’ he’d talk about how he would go to the UCLA library to spend 50 cents an hour typing his stories on a pay typewriter & living in a garage with his wife, that pretty much shows how little pay these guys were getting for one story. Other than that, they were shoving out thrilling & very much entertaining stories. Sure, today people would see them as a joke with their formulaic stories, now trite archetypical characters & sometimes absurd cover art, but to me I’m not expecting high art, but I am expecting a story that will entertain the living hell out of me. It’s comfort reading, the same way an episode of ’The A-Team’ is comfort viewing. I do love artsy transgressive stuff like ‘1Q84’ or ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ or even stuff like ‘Dante‘s Inferno’, but at the same time I really need a break & read some cool stuff like ‘Doomsday Warrior’. Though despite that, I could kinda see the writers trying to at least improve the vocabulary of people that are basically just reading a story where everyone knew the main character & the damsel would make it out alive. This would lead to various things described in intricate detail or pretentious boredom since most writers would be paid by the word.
There were so many genres to choose from, War stories, Caped heroes, Romances for the housewives & teen girls, Cowboy adventures, (The term people today find offensive) Oriental Adventures & as the 50’s/60’s rolled around you had the genres getting a little mature with the more mature reading material dealing in still taboo kinks like BDSM, the swinger lifestyle & Infidelity. There was something for everyone in every age & that played a huge part in having a mass readership of the pulps. For the clean & sorta violent stuff for the kids you had titles like Tarzan: The Ape Man, The Shadow (Hey all you gangsta people, John Woo didn’t invent the dual gun style. The Shadow did! He’s the real O.G dual gat guy) & then we get to my favorite, Conan the Barbarian. It’s odd, if you read any of the original Robert E. Howard stories, Conan the Barbarian was never this buff swordsman with the girl wraped in his leg slashing people in half. It wasn’t until the 60’s (or 70’s, don’t know the exact decade) when Sprague D.Camp & Frank Frazetta jumped into the franchise & basically exaggerated the character. Still, the books are awesome & Frazetta pretty much gave all of us black metal shirt wearing guys an eyegasm. Who doesn’t like Frank Frazetta? He gave a voice to ass men & us ass men respect him for that. NO, NOT PROCTOLOGY. EW. Then you have the not so popular characters like ‘The Spider’ which was basically a ripoff of The Shadow from what I remember, except he looked like something Zorro & The Shadow would give birth to.
Funny story here, I bought a mass market paperback version of The Spider & took it to Mexico on that 4 week trip I went on a few years ago. When I got to Mexico the book was already disintegrating & pages were missing, so I threw it away & began reading Stephen King’s The Shinning. Hueh! Rest in Peace copy of The Spider :,(
Most of it was fun & good clean material that kids could read & adults would enjoy, but even then there was that section of pulps that were & still are edgier than any Eli Roth film. I’m talking about the Men’s Adventure magazines, this was exactly like the exploitation films in book form. As most issues brandished torture from female Nazis, the books were way more harsher than the covers depicted. It was odd seeing that people got in such a huge stink over subject matter in comics & film, but books & magazines were well off in their unregulated insanity. I remember reading one where some gangsters poured piping hot lead into a woman’s vaj, that’s an image I cannot get out of my mind now. Thanks, 1960’s! The format would mostly be True war stories, then there would be fiction in the way of crime stories, man vs. nature & then the crazy fictional war stories & the gravy on top would be periodicals, articles (Most of them dealing with the fear of being gay for some reason) & of course my favorite, the Pin Ups gals. Then as these Men’s Adventures continued publishing through the decade from the 40‘s till the 70‘s, they decided to make the idiotic decision to remove the fiction & true war stories & mainly focus on the editorials & pinups, basically they were what Maxim & (Now that they gave up prinitng nudes) Playboy are today.
As the pulps continued well into the 50’s, they started getting some heavy competition with Film, Comics & even television. That’s when these pulp heroes started crossing over to film & comics & the original stories were being reprinted in this new format called the ‘Mass Market Paperback’. This a huge improvement for writers wanting to expand more on the story than they could on the pulp magazines. This was also the time when the pulp influence started getting to the publishers & began to publish English classics with these very lurid, at times hilarious covers & brandished taglines, the same a movie poster would. The editors would tell the artists to paint scandalous covers like partial nudity in a cover for a Victorian era book or that hilarious as hell hand painted cover for 1984 with a very buff Winston. Editors assured the artists that they would write that aspect into the book, which they wouldn’t.
I seriously forgot who said this (I’m sorry, I read so many articles on the pulps, they’re all jumbled into one in my mind), but this publisher guy (Unnamed) was spot on when he said that the pulps may be gone, but the spirit of the pulps lives on, even today. I think the last time we had very pulpy originality was in the 80’s during the tail end of the cold war, then in the 90’s we had more of a resurgence of science fiction literature & the 2000’s was kinda sorta a resurgence of the pulps with the E-books being done by people who couldn’t get published. Not only that but we have companies like ‘Galaxy Press’ reprinting the original pulps, but I have a problem with those guys. There are so many writers out there who wrote for the same publications, yet they only focus in the works of L.Ron Hubbard. I’ve read one of his stories & it wasn’t bad. I can tell these guys at Galaxy Press are scientologists. They boast they’re all about science fiction & the stories, yet all they publish is L.Ron Hubbard. Give Ray Bradbury a chance! Cuthulu is hip with the kids, why not reprint those H.P Lovecraft tales? Give Harlan Ellison a chance! Also that’s why I don’t fuck with their ‘Writers of the Future’ contest. The rules don’t bother me, it’s just you can tell there’s a lot of back door politics involved within that awards ceremony. I’d rather go to Clarion, it’s the same rules, but it’s both a workshop & a contest. It‘s either Harlan Ellison calling my stories shit after reading them or not being given the light of day because I‘m not a scientologist.
So the pulps have stuck with the times as their licenses were picked up & turned into comics. While I do love what DC Comics did with Doc Savage, especially with The Shadow (They put him in the 80’s & had him shooting punks rockers & occultists), the champion of pulp based comics has to go to Dark Horse. They had fun with these pulp heroes like Tarzan & they too had the Shadow license for a while before settling down on Dynamite Comics.
They were successful in the comics medium, but seriously failed in film & I believe I know the reason for it. Aside from the studios not being fans of the source material, you’re dealing with a very different audience with pulp films. At this point audiences weren’t immune to the suspension of disbelief, especially when you have a hero like ‘The Phantom’ running around the jungle in purple. Of course that also leads to changes between the film & the books, most of the justified like removed the racism angle. If they did this when pulp heroes were competing with musicals & westerns, it would have been very successful. Most of the ‘contemporary’ pulp films we know of (The Shadow, The Phantom, Tarzan & The Lost City) were released in a time when Stallone was decorating thugs with bullets & Schwarzenegger was cutting dude’s arms off (& shouting lines like “Who killet deh Dinosoars? Teh ice edge!!!! Deh Ice man commeth!”).‘Dick Tracy’ (Though not a pulp film, but feels like one) bombed at the box office & that movie was very faithful to the comics, not to mention had a very colorful style. I can say it was due to the cynisim of the 90’s when these pulp films were released, but also these studio people were using the success of the 1989 Batman film as their template to sell these pulp adaptations. Pour a ton of money on the merchandising & the film & hope the audience gets hyped for it. The 1994 ‘The Shadow’ film oozed with the studio thinking “This will make more money than that 1989 Batman film, so let‘s copy it.” & also it has one of thee most out of place tie in songs only the 90’s could provide. Taylor Dynne- Original Sin, that‘s like choosing ‘Julie Cruise‘ for a tie-in song for a superhero flick. I think my hate for that has to do with the fact that my VHS copy of the film plays the music video before the film & the music video gives away too much of the film & honestly it was a little too slow paced for an action flick. Not even Jerry Goldsmith (Thee greatest action film musical composer) couldn’t save the film. For some reason Kenny Stark Udar (Creator of The Fiend House) loves that film. You know what, why is that? Why does he like this film, I wanna hear his response. Let’s ask him! Let’s counter act my reasons as to why I’m not so fond of it.
RANDOM INTERVIEW!!
I remember as a kid my parents didn’t want me to watch WWF. Like many other parents at that time they watched news reports of dumbass kids doing wrestling moves & breaking their own necks & they thought I was a dumbass & they weren‘t wrong. It wasn’t until I turned 8 when I was allowed to stay up till 10pm(ON A SCHOOL NIGHT!) on a Thursday at 8pm after two episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ & ending just as ‘Seinfeld’ began to air. That day will live on as the time I was shocked & amazed at what I was seeing. I may be mis-remembering it, but the episode I jumped on had The Undertaker (This was still Attitude era WWF) was fighting some wrestler (I believe it was Big Show. I forget) back stage into the stadium parking lot & Undertaker gets shoved into a coffin, is locked inside, then comes Vince McMahon in a monster truck, runs over the coffin & it explodes in a fiery blaze. As an 8 year old that leaves your eyes wide & your jaw hanging. Of course now that I’m a grown person that’s all cinematic spectacle, but this was the stuff testosterone dreams are made of. Then the next week Vince McMahon’s on stage talking about how he killed all the children’s favorite wrestler & acting like he was the shit. Then the lights shut down on the arena, you start hearing the hells bells that are accompanied with Undertaker’s theme song & the crowd cheers starts with their “Aw hell yea!!” expressions. My eyes are again wide open as my jaw falls to my legs. Lights come on & Undertaker appears on stage with a chair & beats the ever living shit out of Vince! With the cheers & noises I was making, my parents thought I was having a premature heart attack. I seriously thought they killed Undertaker on screen & he had the power to resurrect himself. I was religious back then, I seriously thought Undertaker was in league with Satan & I do say that made the whole experience a whole lot awesome.From then on I never missed an episode of Thursday Night Smackdown & what a time to jump in. At this point in time all the kids in school were talking about WWF, The Rock still hadn‘t of become a movie star & Stone Cold Steve Austin was still chugging beer on ring.
While everyone with antennae TV in their room talked highly about Thursday night smack down, the rich hardcore kids with cable raved more about RAW (Which was one inch harsher than WWF), then later on we started hearing about something both the rich kids & us poor kids sought after called ECW. Now ECW was the stuff that we as kids wanted to see, but you had to pay the PPV cost. ECW was sold as the X-rated verson of WWF. We as kids would have dreams of what ECW would be & we thought it would be like a snuff film mixed with wrestling. We were half right, it was wrestling with blood & the wrestlers would be using harsh weapons like barb wire & bats with nails, but we also kinda expected a live action version of Mortal Kombat with people getting chopped in half, then for some reason coming back for the next wrestling match without any cuts. It was the same thing as WWF, but with more bloody faces, yet no fatalities. We thought it was like ‘Faces of Death’, hahahaah, wee sooo stoopid. Still, it was a fun experience, if that’s hard to believe. Yea, there were those tapes circulating with a bunch of idiots wrestling in their backyard, but we as kids weren’t that fucking sleazy.
I’m not talking about the ‘Summerslam’ or the hugely anticipated ‘Wrestlemania’. I was too poor for that shit, but I did love it when the wrestlers would travel to some base in Iraq for Christmas & perform for the troops. That was pretty cool & fun. Childhood memory here: Me, my neighbor & my older sister were watching that special back in the early 2000’s & we started cracking up at this K-Mart commercial. We could not stop laughing because the narrator of this advert sounded like he was saying ‘Gay Mart’. Then later on we changed the channel to that religious channel ‘TBN’ & we saw Ronald McDonald (Dude in full makeup) talking about some house charities & I coined the perfect reaction to that.:
“Hey look! It’s Ronald McDonald!! Uhhh!!! Uhhh!!! (Girl Screams)”
I used to scream like a girl, can’t anymore, my nuts dropped.
After a while, as I grew into my teens, I gave up wrestling. It wasn’t because it was all ‘Fake’ as people say, but because the episodes started to lack in shock value & surprises. Sadly, I can’t really blame WWF, oh wait, I’m sorry, I mean WWE. At that point WWF turned to WWE because some ‘Protect the pandas’ charity took that name & so the World Wrestling Federation had to change to World Wrestling Entertainment. I’m sure there’s more to it than greedy pandas, but that’s how I see it. (Care to elaborate more info for me, email: blacktime.epress@aol.com).
The fun & goofiness of it started to melt as more real world shit began to happen. I’m sure everyone in my neck of the woods knows about Eddie Gurrero’s untimely death, as well as the craziness that happened with Chris Beniot where he killed his wife, then offed himself. Along with that you also had all the steroid abuse going around (Which has been happening before the media coverage, let’s not forget that) & the stupid shit some hugely popular wrestlers have been doing like Hulk Hogan’s racist, incestual, reality TV stupidity. I respected Hulk Hogan, I was a Hulkamaniac until he started doing all that stupid egocentric Reality TV bull & all it got him was a chance to be a nut in a local commercial for some car loan scam. Slumming it. In the TMZ age it was pretty easy to see the muck behind once beloved wrestlers & of course WWE stopped with having goofy fun (Kinda blame Vince McMahon for his idiotic corporate decisions).
Jake The Snake & Bret Hit Man Hart were the shit!!!! Jimmy Snooka getting knocked out with a coconut was some hilariously racist shit there! We went from fun characters like ‘Doink The Clown’ and ‘The Iron Shiek’ (Which could not be done today) to unforgettable people like ‘The Miz’. What the fuck is a Miz?
Of course there were some memorable characters that I remember for their personality in the 2000‘s Smackdown era. Kurt Angle, the Olympic winner who wore a patriotic onezie. JBL was freaking hilarious, he is what you get when you let Jeb Bush’s wear a cowboy hat & let him think he can wrestle. There was that one time he pissed off all the Mexican people in the arena when WWF played in Texas. He wore a sombrero & started speaking stereotypically, then come both the Gurrero brothers running on stage, kicking ass & asking questions later. That was hilarious.
The Boogeyman was theeeee most disturbing, yet awesome character I’ve ever seen in my life & I’m saddened that he didn’t have as long of staying power. He was awesome, his special would be reaching his arm into the bucketful of worms, munching them in his mouth, then spitting it into the face of the already pinned down enemy. He was awesome & I don’t know if that movie ‘Boogeyman’ was based off him. I hope so. He was so hardcore, Undertaker was like “Whoah whoah whoah! Take it easy bro.”
I mentioned Eddie Gurrero, his brother Chavo Gurrero annoyed the hell out of me, pissed me off & scared me. He would be coming on stage with his brown supremacist jargon & I’d be up in front of the television screen, yelling “Shush! Shut up!! Do you want to start a race war?” It freaked me out as the paranoid kid I still am. You wouldn’t believe how many times the image of a ton of dark skinned people in a concentration camp plagued me at that time.
Can’t talk about Eddie Gurrero’s without talking about that time Eddie & Rey Mysterio (That masked motherfucker) were fighting for custody of Dominic, Rey Mysterio’s son. Yes folks, that happened & this wasn’t some media TMZ scandal regarding paparazzi or a legal courtroom battle. This was all settled with a wrestling match, the victor was the true kid’s father. Don’t know how this works without examining genetics, but alright! This was like the balls out version of a soap opera subplot & everyone from kids to adults ate it all up! It was also like watching a Shakespearean drama in real time, except it was starring buffed out wrestlers & lines like “YOU GOIN DOWN!!” I forgot the outcome, but from what I remember Rey Mysterio conceded with tears in his eyes, may not be true but I remember it being heavily emotional. With Eddie Gurrero’s catchphrase being “I lie, I cheat, I steal”, I truly believe Eddie Gurrero had a run in with Rey Mysterio’s wife, just saying.
Then we get to the one I bet all you internet people have been waiting for me to talk about, John Cena. “Doop doot doooot doooooo. Doop doot dooot doooooo….Egh.” (Not really motivated John Cena Theme). I’ll tell you right now, me & my middle school friends saw his debut at the time & we laughed our asses off when we saw him. He was that white kid who acted like he was hood, but everyone knew he lived in a suburb eating pop tarts while his mom listened to Kenny Logins. He was a freaking poser, yet he seemed to last longer than Boogeyman. He was a joke, not this highest paid badass that everyone sees him as now. He was a joke & I kinda still see him as a joke now, especially with that meme they made of him recently. And here comes the hate mail, bring it in. ( blacktime.epress@aol.com )
As I grew up into my cynical self I started to see the BS, the fake publicity stunts & the characters weren’t interesting anymore. That’s when I started to see more of the start ups appearing on independent television & cable like ‘Ring OF Honor Wrestling’, which reminds me more of 80’s & 90’s WWF to an extent.
At this time WWE was trying hard to stay relevant to where the last Saturday morning kid’s block ‘Vortex on the CW’ had this show called ‘WWE Saturday Morning Slam’ which was basically softcore wrestling with little comedy skits for kids & montages of these wrestlers helping out in charaties (Which was something I always dug. I used that as an example to let my parents watch WWE instead of letting my sister watch ‘America‘s Next Top Model’ at the time). It was what it was, nerfed down WWE for the kiddies, even though kids would rather wait till Thursday or Monday to watch the crazier stuff. It showed how long we came, especially with parents who steered kids away from physical violence on TV.
Haven’t been watching a lot of ROH (It airs here in L.A at 6.am in the morning for some reason), but it looks fun. You have the shock value of wrestlers kicking the faces of the announcers & the spectacle of wrestlers beating each other with steel objects, sometimes fighting in the street & most the wrestlers have a lot of charisma.
Then you got ‘New Japan Pro Wrestling’ which deals less with the crazy drama & it’s all about the spectacle & honor of the moves these guys pull of . I’m serious, some of the moves these wrestlers do are freaking hilarious, yet awesome to look at. The Kobashi Smack is by far the funniest shit you’ll ever see in your life. The only way I can say is NJPW is like watching an episode of ‘Ultraman’ without the rubber suits or the buildings & is well worth the watch. And the female Japanese wrestling is freaking harsh. You got ladies pulling each other’s hairs & twisting their backs to contorted proportions. I get sqemish watching that & It’s pretty hilarious seeing these young teen girls & middle aged moms watching these ladies wrestle & getting caught up in the heat of it. Oh my god, what are you doing!! Muhahahah!!!. Awesome, but very freaking painful, more than I can say with the male division of Japanese wrestling.
I remember seeing one on a Saturday night, of course my parents (Especially the sister I shared a room with) wouldn’t let me see. I remember coming from a baby shower at midnight, turning on the TV & seeing a wrestling show full of very sexy women in stereotypical lignerie. It wasn’t G.L.O.W (GLOW is that badass women‘s wrestling, containing the same goofy fun 80‘s WWF had), but this division was more along the lines of the WWE Divas in their own show. It was a nurse fighting a school teacher with the clichéd sexy outfits. All I gotta say is that was something, my parents disapproved of & of course it could only have happened in the early 2000’s. Saw it once & could never find it again, like a freaking mermaid, a slutty mermaid.
Then of course there was Mexican wrestling & I have to be honest I was never interested in Mexican wrestling. Yeah, some people would argue it was the real deal, but it lacked the fun & craziness American wrestling contain. Mexican wrestling focused only on the wrestling & the mystery behind the masks, yet this is the same industry that had characters like ‘El Santo’ & ‘Blue Deamon’ that starred in movies as themselves fighting evil scientists, wolf men & vampire women. I wanted that in the wrestling. Though the idea of wrestlers not taking off their masks for anyone (Not even their lovers) was a concept I was very allured by & the family tree of it all. Blue Demon has a son, he too is a wrestler & he goes by ‘Blue Demon Jr’, that‘s dank. I like the characters & the mythology of it all, but was never into watching the wrestling on TV.
I guess the new extreme thing the kids are into now is UFC which I’m not as a big fan of, but I do enjoy watching the matches between Ronda Rousey & Misha Tate & all the other female fighters or when the fighters get injured horribly with ears being torn off & the very squeamish broken legs (Yughh! Looking like a ball dropped inside a large tube sock). When it comes to females in UFC, they seem to turn that into a bloodbath than when the male fighters get on the octagon. Not a fan, but I do enjoy those two ladies.
Overall, I will always remember that time wrestling was forbidden to when I became hooked on the weekly soap opera plot, mixed in with suplexes & body slams. Still, what was up with the ‘Sci Fi Channel’ airing Monday Night Raw? I knew Kane was a freaking robot, but what else is Science Fiction about wrestling?
Now that we got that out of the way, time to get off the Nostalgia boat & nerd out!!
LOS PULPOS
I know Pulp & Pulpo mean two different things in two different languages, but who cares, this is blogbabble!
Think about it, the 1930’s weren’t a happy time. Stocks fell, employment fells, the working class is struggling to make ends meet & emotionally man was feeling defensless not being able to feed their family. Rather than reading some depressing, rich people problem books like ‘Anna Karenina’ or ‘Crime & Punishment’, how about a book where the heroes are heroes, rescue the dames & defeat the bad guy (at times kill off the bad guy in such a gruesome way that gives off a cathartic release). In the 30’s there was a huge readership of the pulps that cannot be nearly as replicated as today. Not only that, but the pulps were cheap, they were a bang for your buck & they were produced cheaply too. This would lead to sometimes publishers not making as much money. The publishers then started to see that writers would send more than one manuscripts, but they would reject them for two reasons: they didn’t want the same writer published in the next or same issues & sometimes they didn’t want to pay for multiple stories from the same writer. That’s when these writers decided to take on pseudonyms as a response to rejections & to get double the paycheck. In Ray Bradbury’s book ‘Zen in the Art of Writing’ he’d talk about how he would go to the UCLA library to spend 50 cents an hour typing his stories on a pay typewriter & living in a garage with his wife, that pretty much shows how little pay these guys were getting for one story. Other than that, they were shoving out thrilling & very much entertaining stories. Sure, today people would see them as a joke with their formulaic stories, now trite archetypical characters & sometimes absurd cover art, but to me I’m not expecting high art, but I am expecting a story that will entertain the living hell out of me. It’s comfort reading, the same way an episode of ’The A-Team’ is comfort viewing. I do love artsy transgressive stuff like ‘1Q84’ or ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ or even stuff like ‘Dante‘s Inferno’, but at the same time I really need a break & read some cool stuff like ‘Doomsday Warrior’. Though despite that, I could kinda see the writers trying to at least improve the vocabulary of people that are basically just reading a story where everyone knew the main character & the damsel would make it out alive. This would lead to various things described in intricate detail or pretentious boredom since most writers would be paid by the word.
There were so many genres to choose from, War stories, Caped heroes, Romances for the housewives & teen girls, Cowboy adventures, (The term people today find offensive) Oriental Adventures & as the 50’s/60’s rolled around you had the genres getting a little mature with the more mature reading material dealing in still taboo kinks like BDSM, the swinger lifestyle & Infidelity. There was something for everyone in every age & that played a huge part in having a mass readership of the pulps. For the clean & sorta violent stuff for the kids you had titles like Tarzan: The Ape Man, The Shadow (Hey all you gangsta people, John Woo didn’t invent the dual gun style. The Shadow did! He’s the real O.G dual gat guy) & then we get to my favorite, Conan the Barbarian. It’s odd, if you read any of the original Robert E. Howard stories, Conan the Barbarian was never this buff swordsman with the girl wraped in his leg slashing people in half. It wasn’t until the 60’s (or 70’s, don’t know the exact decade) when Sprague D.Camp & Frank Frazetta jumped into the franchise & basically exaggerated the character. Still, the books are awesome & Frazetta pretty much gave all of us black metal shirt wearing guys an eyegasm. Who doesn’t like Frank Frazetta? He gave a voice to ass men & us ass men respect him for that. NO, NOT PROCTOLOGY. EW. Then you have the not so popular characters like ‘The Spider’ which was basically a ripoff of The Shadow from what I remember, except he looked like something Zorro & The Shadow would give birth to.
Funny story here, I bought a mass market paperback version of The Spider & took it to Mexico on that 4 week trip I went on a few years ago. When I got to Mexico the book was already disintegrating & pages were missing, so I threw it away & began reading Stephen King’s The Shinning. Hueh! Rest in Peace copy of The Spider :,(
Most of it was fun & good clean material that kids could read & adults would enjoy, but even then there was that section of pulps that were & still are edgier than any Eli Roth film. I’m talking about the Men’s Adventure magazines, this was exactly like the exploitation films in book form. As most issues brandished torture from female Nazis, the books were way more harsher than the covers depicted. It was odd seeing that people got in such a huge stink over subject matter in comics & film, but books & magazines were well off in their unregulated insanity. I remember reading one where some gangsters poured piping hot lead into a woman’s vaj, that’s an image I cannot get out of my mind now. Thanks, 1960’s! The format would mostly be True war stories, then there would be fiction in the way of crime stories, man vs. nature & then the crazy fictional war stories & the gravy on top would be periodicals, articles (Most of them dealing with the fear of being gay for some reason) & of course my favorite, the Pin Ups gals. Then as these Men’s Adventures continued publishing through the decade from the 40‘s till the 70‘s, they decided to make the idiotic decision to remove the fiction & true war stories & mainly focus on the editorials & pinups, basically they were what Maxim & (Now that they gave up prinitng nudes) Playboy are today.
As the pulps continued well into the 50’s, they started getting some heavy competition with Film, Comics & even television. That’s when these pulp heroes started crossing over to film & comics & the original stories were being reprinted in this new format called the ‘Mass Market Paperback’. This a huge improvement for writers wanting to expand more on the story than they could on the pulp magazines. This was also the time when the pulp influence started getting to the publishers & began to publish English classics with these very lurid, at times hilarious covers & brandished taglines, the same a movie poster would. The editors would tell the artists to paint scandalous covers like partial nudity in a cover for a Victorian era book or that hilarious as hell hand painted cover for 1984 with a very buff Winston. Editors assured the artists that they would write that aspect into the book, which they wouldn’t.
I seriously forgot who said this (I’m sorry, I read so many articles on the pulps, they’re all jumbled into one in my mind), but this publisher guy (Unnamed) was spot on when he said that the pulps may be gone, but the spirit of the pulps lives on, even today. I think the last time we had very pulpy originality was in the 80’s during the tail end of the cold war, then in the 90’s we had more of a resurgence of science fiction literature & the 2000’s was kinda sorta a resurgence of the pulps with the E-books being done by people who couldn’t get published. Not only that but we have companies like ‘Galaxy Press’ reprinting the original pulps, but I have a problem with those guys. There are so many writers out there who wrote for the same publications, yet they only focus in the works of L.Ron Hubbard. I’ve read one of his stories & it wasn’t bad. I can tell these guys at Galaxy Press are scientologists. They boast they’re all about science fiction & the stories, yet all they publish is L.Ron Hubbard. Give Ray Bradbury a chance! Cuthulu is hip with the kids, why not reprint those H.P Lovecraft tales? Give Harlan Ellison a chance! Also that’s why I don’t fuck with their ‘Writers of the Future’ contest. The rules don’t bother me, it’s just you can tell there’s a lot of back door politics involved within that awards ceremony. I’d rather go to Clarion, it’s the same rules, but it’s both a workshop & a contest. It‘s either Harlan Ellison calling my stories shit after reading them or not being given the light of day because I‘m not a scientologist.
So the pulps have stuck with the times as their licenses were picked up & turned into comics. While I do love what DC Comics did with Doc Savage, especially with The Shadow (They put him in the 80’s & had him shooting punks rockers & occultists), the champion of pulp based comics has to go to Dark Horse. They had fun with these pulp heroes like Tarzan & they too had the Shadow license for a while before settling down on Dynamite Comics.
They were successful in the comics medium, but seriously failed in film & I believe I know the reason for it. Aside from the studios not being fans of the source material, you’re dealing with a very different audience with pulp films. At this point audiences weren’t immune to the suspension of disbelief, especially when you have a hero like ‘The Phantom’ running around the jungle in purple. Of course that also leads to changes between the film & the books, most of the justified like removed the racism angle. If they did this when pulp heroes were competing with musicals & westerns, it would have been very successful. Most of the ‘contemporary’ pulp films we know of (The Shadow, The Phantom, Tarzan & The Lost City) were released in a time when Stallone was decorating thugs with bullets & Schwarzenegger was cutting dude’s arms off (& shouting lines like “Who killet deh Dinosoars? Teh ice edge!!!! Deh Ice man commeth!”).‘Dick Tracy’ (Though not a pulp film, but feels like one) bombed at the box office & that movie was very faithful to the comics, not to mention had a very colorful style. I can say it was due to the cynisim of the 90’s when these pulp films were released, but also these studio people were using the success of the 1989 Batman film as their template to sell these pulp adaptations. Pour a ton of money on the merchandising & the film & hope the audience gets hyped for it. The 1994 ‘The Shadow’ film oozed with the studio thinking “This will make more money than that 1989 Batman film, so let‘s copy it.” & also it has one of thee most out of place tie in songs only the 90’s could provide. Taylor Dynne- Original Sin, that‘s like choosing ‘Julie Cruise‘ for a tie-in song for a superhero flick. I think my hate for that has to do with the fact that my VHS copy of the film plays the music video before the film & the music video gives away too much of the film & honestly it was a little too slow paced for an action flick. Not even Jerry Goldsmith (Thee greatest action film musical composer) couldn’t save the film. For some reason Kenny Stark Udar (Creator of The Fiend House) loves that film. You know what, why is that? Why does he like this film, I wanna hear his response. Let’s ask him! Let’s counter act my reasons as to why I’m not so fond of it.
RANDOM INTERVIEW!!
Well, can’t argue with that, especially now that I am growing fond over the 90’s Batman Schumacher films for their cheesiness & pompous studio backing (I know, it‘s hypocritical of me to say that, especially it‘s the reason why I don‘t like The Shadow‘ film. I may need to re-evaluate that film now). I’d take that over that Batman V Superman: Edgy for no reason movie.
But getting back to the topic, this whole lack of interest in movies based on pulps wasn’t just restricted with the 90’s. The Tarzan movie from Disney was a hit in 99, it also included talking animals, but it was still dark enough for it to still be faithful to the source material. It had a cartoon series in the same animation style & it was awesome, sadly it seems like both the animated feature & the series had gone to obscurity. Then a few years ago we had that John Carter film which bombed. An awesome film I’m told that suffered from terrible marketing & not enough name recognition. I swear, I had no idea it was a pulp character, I just saw the trailers & thought “Oh hey, those creatures look like Gungans.”
PS: The test footage to sell the film was freaking amazing & beautiful, it left me in tears of joy by how close to the pulp tradition it was.
But getting back to the topic, this whole lack of interest in movies based on pulps wasn’t just restricted with the 90’s. The Tarzan movie from Disney was a hit in 99, it also included talking animals, but it was still dark enough for it to still be faithful to the source material. It had a cartoon series in the same animation style & it was awesome, sadly it seems like both the animated feature & the series had gone to obscurity. Then a few years ago we had that John Carter film which bombed. An awesome film I’m told that suffered from terrible marketing & not enough name recognition. I swear, I had no idea it was a pulp character, I just saw the trailers & thought “Oh hey, those creatures look like Gungans.”
PS: The test footage to sell the film was freaking amazing & beautiful, it left me in tears of joy by how close to the pulp tradition it was.
Recently there was the Tarzan film & from the people who saw it tell me it’s basically the same crap the cartoon film & the Christopher Lambert film have already shown us, except done too seriously. There have been talks that Doc Savage is going to get rebooted starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson (Hey, that connects to the wrestling aspect you talked about earlier, Jebus! We cum full circle) & you know what, that can work & as gravy on the news Shane Black is going to work on it. Shane Black, the guy who brought us Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout & Iron Man 3‘, the property is in good hands. I enjoyed the 1970’s Doc Savage film, it was fun & the theme song is catchy as hell! I hope this gives us the Pulp cinematic universe where Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, Conan The Barbarian & Tarzan with laser guns share the same movie.
I love to scan through the books at my local Target (Tar-jay if you wanna sound pretentious), but I’m not finding anything pulp related or even done with a pulp style. Most books today are either teen fantasy, housewife romance novels or military spy thrillers for old people (Who most assuredly were enlisted in the military in their youth). But what about the adventure stories? They’re still selling harlequin romance novels (Which are pulps for women, let‘s face it), but nothing in the realm of pulps for men. I agree we live in a cynical age, but I’d at least expect something like a Jason Borne knockoff. People can‘t stand by archetypes in favor of thrills. I do admit the ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘ novels are like pulps, especially since all those books follow on the same adventure, the second one ending in a cliffhanger & the recent fourth one starting an all new adventure.
I know Barnes & Noble have their reprints of pulps that have been published in huge omnibuses, but the problem I have with these books is they always ditch that gorgeous hand painted covers in favor of digital paintings or worse, PHOTOSHOPPED COVERS that make the book look like I’m buying gay erotic fiction. I got a lot of stares checking out from the library a Tarzan omnibus that had nothing but Tarzan’s abs on the cover. Who was that book sold for?
Most of the books on the shelves no longer sport hand painted covers & that makes me sad, but I must admit that the pulps are living on. Recently I played through ‘Max Payne 3’ & it hit me that the inner monologues & the setting would pass as a full on action pulp, especially with a character like Max, except with more blood , violence & cursing. Most of the video games we play are modern variations of what would have been pulp novels. Hideo Kojima wanted Metal Gear Solid to be a book series, but the publisher rejected his manuscripts. Most of the movies we see, the video games we play & the comic superheroes we enjoy could have been & could not have exist if it weren’t for the pulps.
In an age where we have too much bright shit messing with our eyes from interacting on social media with smartphones, playing video games & watching internet videos, it’s essential to give it all up for an hour & pick up a good book. With pulps you don’t have to deal with subtext only educated Harvard snobs will get. They’re easy (& quite honestly very quick reads) as all that is needed to know is who’s the hero? Who’s the damsel in distress? Who’s the villain? What’s the villain doing to make us hate them & is the villain’s death going to make us squee?
This is a pretty good time to end it here. I hope you enjoyed the nostalgia & the information of it all from my geeking out of pulps & wrestling. I hope to do something like this again, because while I do like ranting about current affairs & using this blog as a stress release by pouring anger, most of these real world horrors really bum people out, as well as me. We shouldn’t ignore the real world, but at the same time it’s okay to delve into the escapism of our little bubbles. I got no clue what I’m going to write about next time, but I hope it’s not going to be as anger inducing as that last entry. Seriously, the whole world just fell on me on that entry.
The moral of today: READ A GODAMN FUCKING BOOK OR PULP NOVEL OR READ SOME OF OUR STORIES. The Fiend House, He Came Tumbling Over. It’s all good, or wait up for my new series ‘The Woman Lost in the City of Gods & Devils’ is gonna premiere on the 29th of July, it’s gonna be TURNT! Kids still say turnt?
Once again a very special thanks to Kenny Stark Udar for his opinion on our one question random interview. I swear, one of these days I’m gonna have to interview people on this joint.
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I love to scan through the books at my local Target (Tar-jay if you wanna sound pretentious), but I’m not finding anything pulp related or even done with a pulp style. Most books today are either teen fantasy, housewife romance novels or military spy thrillers for old people (Who most assuredly were enlisted in the military in their youth). But what about the adventure stories? They’re still selling harlequin romance novels (Which are pulps for women, let‘s face it), but nothing in the realm of pulps for men. I agree we live in a cynical age, but I’d at least expect something like a Jason Borne knockoff. People can‘t stand by archetypes in favor of thrills. I do admit the ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘ novels are like pulps, especially since all those books follow on the same adventure, the second one ending in a cliffhanger & the recent fourth one starting an all new adventure.
I know Barnes & Noble have their reprints of pulps that have been published in huge omnibuses, but the problem I have with these books is they always ditch that gorgeous hand painted covers in favor of digital paintings or worse, PHOTOSHOPPED COVERS that make the book look like I’m buying gay erotic fiction. I got a lot of stares checking out from the library a Tarzan omnibus that had nothing but Tarzan’s abs on the cover. Who was that book sold for?
Most of the books on the shelves no longer sport hand painted covers & that makes me sad, but I must admit that the pulps are living on. Recently I played through ‘Max Payne 3’ & it hit me that the inner monologues & the setting would pass as a full on action pulp, especially with a character like Max, except with more blood , violence & cursing. Most of the video games we play are modern variations of what would have been pulp novels. Hideo Kojima wanted Metal Gear Solid to be a book series, but the publisher rejected his manuscripts. Most of the movies we see, the video games we play & the comic superheroes we enjoy could have been & could not have exist if it weren’t for the pulps.
In an age where we have too much bright shit messing with our eyes from interacting on social media with smartphones, playing video games & watching internet videos, it’s essential to give it all up for an hour & pick up a good book. With pulps you don’t have to deal with subtext only educated Harvard snobs will get. They’re easy (& quite honestly very quick reads) as all that is needed to know is who’s the hero? Who’s the damsel in distress? Who’s the villain? What’s the villain doing to make us hate them & is the villain’s death going to make us squee?
This is a pretty good time to end it here. I hope you enjoyed the nostalgia & the information of it all from my geeking out of pulps & wrestling. I hope to do something like this again, because while I do like ranting about current affairs & using this blog as a stress release by pouring anger, most of these real world horrors really bum people out, as well as me. We shouldn’t ignore the real world, but at the same time it’s okay to delve into the escapism of our little bubbles. I got no clue what I’m going to write about next time, but I hope it’s not going to be as anger inducing as that last entry. Seriously, the whole world just fell on me on that entry.
The moral of today: READ A GODAMN FUCKING BOOK OR PULP NOVEL OR READ SOME OF OUR STORIES. The Fiend House, He Came Tumbling Over. It’s all good, or wait up for my new series ‘The Woman Lost in the City of Gods & Devils’ is gonna premiere on the 29th of July, it’s gonna be TURNT! Kids still say turnt?
Once again a very special thanks to Kenny Stark Udar for his opinion on our one question random interview. I swear, one of these days I’m gonna have to interview people on this joint.
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