Recent television in some of the less traveled pathways...

The Man in the High Castle (Amazon)
Midtown (TuffTV broadcast/Amazon streaming)
Everyone's Crazy But Us (Funny or Die/YouTube streaming)
The Hotwives of Atlanta (Hulu)
No, You Shut Up! (Fusion cablecast/YouTube streaming)
W/Bob & David (Netflix)
The Price of More (Crackle streaming)
Falcón (CinéMoi cable/streaming)
Spotless (Esquire Network/streaming)
Flesh and Bone (Starz)

Though to refer to Netflix, Amazon, or certainly YouTube as less-travelled pathways generally than broadcast or the larger cable channels is almost wrong these days, it isn't, quite, yet, in terms of viewership of at the highest levels, which still clusters to broadcast, or the odd megahit on cable such as The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. And these series might, with the probable exception of the first (one of two miniseries based on classic sf novels we'll see this season, along with Childhood's End on the SyFy Channel), easily pass by those who aren't keeping an eye out for them.



The Man in the High Castle is, of course, based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same title (referred to rather awkwardly in the opening credits as the "book" by Dick, as if we are to take it as possibly a testament, instead), one which I read over thirty years ago and haven't reread...hence, I'm not sure how faithful to the Book are such details as the suppression of the Judeo-Christian Bible in both the Nazi- and Imperial Japan-occupied North America...that seems rather less Dickian than I'd guess, as well as leaving open questions of how the Italian Fascists and their satellite allies in Spain and elsewhere, with 110% support of the Church, might've fared in the world of the triumphant Axis powers posited here. And posited rather well, with all the creepiness one can squeeze from a 1962 set in the New York City of the North American territories of the Reich, the San Francisco of the Imperial Japanese occupied territories, and the somewhat improbable "neutral zone" in, essentially, the Mountain Time Zone and along the Rockies, specifically in a small Colorado town. Excellent performances from Alexa Davalos, (particularly) Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Rufus Sewell (much, not all, of Sewell's role as primary villain as written seems almost as easy as that which DJ Qualls assays, though he too better than you might expect from the dire comedies he first came to public attention with) lead those from a fine and convincing cast. The slipping in the novel by its end into a sort of surrealist dream driven by I Ching divination is rather more abruptly dealt with here, and makes for a rather enigmatic ending that reading the novel will prepare one for better than one might be by simply watching the series. Small moments, such as the Japanese police inspector assuring the family of those he's just pointlessly had executed that he, the inspector, is no monster, or the thrown-away detail of a NYC airport named for US Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, give the series a heft that adds to the verisimilitude.  A third fine series from Ridley Scott's production unit, after NUMB3RS and The Good Wife.

Rather closer to home, Midtown is a low-budget improv sketch comedy series set among the uniformed police stationed in midtown Manhattan, one which
hopes to remind viewers of Barney Miller even by using the same skyline angle-shot of that part of the city in its opening and transitional montages; however, the majority of the series episodes I've seen take place in the squad car of primary characters played by actual ex-cop Scott Baker and fellow improv veteran Tom Malloy; they are a bit lunkheaded but definitely not stupid characters, and it's a pleasant and reasonably funny series. The small broadcast network aimed at young men, Tuff TV, is running it weekly; Amazon has episodes up for streaming free for Prime members.


Everyone's Crazy But Us isn't quite another improv series, but it still has a similar energy even when fully scripted in short, typically bite-sized webisodes of about five minutes each, with a very impressive primary and guest cast in the several episodes currently available (produced by Funny or Die, the most visible website devoted to professional web comedy, and accessible through YouTube).  Janet Varney (San Diego Sketchfest co-founder and -director, cast member of You're the Worst, and of The Legend of Korra) and Diedrich Bader (Veep, The Drew Carey Show and current Spider-Man animation series) play the rather brittle and self -impressed but not quite completely farcical parents of a small boy, coping with the petty jealousies and rather stronger insecurities of dealing with the status of a married couple and parents in upper-middle-class US suburbs of today. 


The Hotwives of Las Vegas is (the second season of) a parody of the flourishing "reality tv" franchise The Real Housewives of [various US cities] and a few spinoffs from that set of self-indulgence videos; the first season was The Hotwives of Orlando. The season premiere threatens to be a bit too affectionate a parody for my taste, but the scalpel's a bit sharper in episode two, both of which are available for free viewing on Hulu (one can easily see the balance during their free trial, but I haven't yet done so). It has a tough act to follow, in the wake of The Bachelor/The Bachelorette lampoon Burning Love, but the less tightly-focused absurdity of the Real Housewives series are still full of the kind of childish acting-out that makes parody both easy and difficult to keep in believable check; Dannah Phirman and Danielle Schneider are the creators and showrunners for the scripted series. 


No, You Shut Up! is a Very high concept series, basically a parody of the likes of The McLaughlin Group with a panel populated mostly by Muppets, from the Henson Alternative studio, though the host and moderator is human-in-the-clear Paul F. Tompkins (there are usually segments featuring human guests). As too often in such circumstances, the concept tended to hamstring particularly some of the early episodes, as a somewhat clueless male talking hot dog and a reactionary if cute female squirrel puppet add a certainly level of difficulty to putting across the kind of topical comedy one might expect of this heir, of sorts, to such series as Spitting Image (where at least the puppets in question represented actual political and other figures, rather than types of political creatures that show up on such panel discussions)...perhaps with just a touch of Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse. However, the absurdities and political satire have sharpened as the series has continued, having added very good 2016 Election Specials between the third season and the fourth season coming early next year.


W/Bob & David is and isn't a reunion of the HBO cult sketch series Mr. Show (with Bob and David), perhaps the best of the American heirs to particularly Monty Python's Flying Circus and SCTV; the Bob Odenkirk and David Cross-hosted and -created series had a remarkable ensemble cast (nearly all of whom have at least a supporting role in one or another of the sketches in the new Netflix limited series) and even, for the several seasons of its original run on HBO, had the same timeslot, Saturday morning ("Friday night") at 12:30am, as the NBC network version of SCTV Network 90. Odenkirk and Cross have certainly kept busy since...Odenkirk most visibly in Breaking Bad and as the star of Better Call Saul, Cross similarly in Arrested Development and currently in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret...and, as Cross has noted in at least one recent interview, fifteen years of experience as writers and performers since Mr. Show can be felt in the new series, where the transitions between sketches are even more oddly smooth than the Pythonesque links of the earlier series, and there's even more framing in the new series (Paul F. Tompkins is back not only as sketch actor but also as audience warm-up/stage and shot set-up distraction comedian, and these usually off-camera sequences are taped and presented at various points as part of the show). Great fun, even if one doesn't have any memory of Mr. Show.

From Crackle: Heavy Lies the Head

The Art of More is one of the new series on Sony's attempt to compete with Hulu, Crackle, and it's not too shabby. Co-produced by and co-starring Dennis Quaid, it's mostly an amiable if not altogether extraordinary crime drama dealing with the world of high-stakes art dealing. Quaid and Cary Elwes (as differing sorts of not terribly scrupulous art collectors)  are having some fun, and the other best-known cast member Kate Bosworth is given an opportunity to demonstrate her chops that most of her earlier films ill afforded; Christian Cooke, as the protagonist, formerly a US soldier and art smuggler in Iraq and now a junior associate at an important auction house, is somewhat less charming than he apparently thinks he is, but this might simply be due to his character being so as well. His past comes back to do more than haunt him, as the fellow reps and staff in his house and in their most important rival firm (where Bosworth's character is the stressed heiress-to-be, or not, to the ownership) have their own problems, as do the people involved in the back-stories of the items up for auction. It's well-produced, and a pretty clever design for an open-ended series, even if it feels a bit like something that might just as easily been cablecast on the USA or TNT channels, or broadcast on CBS or NBC. 

Falcón is a four-part adaptation of two novels by Robert Wilson, a coproduction for Sky TV, Canal+ and ZDF in various European countries, and imported by the cable/satellite channel CinéMoi; the (figuratively) haunted police detective at the core of the series is the son of a famous, deceased painter, and this becomes uncomfortably relevant to his most recent investigation. Falcón (Marton Csokas, of the latter two The Lord of the Rings films), in the first episode (the only I've seen, I believe the only one cablecast in the US so far) is brought to the scene of the torture and murder of a weathy restaurant owner, and husband of the actual restauranteur Consuelo Jimenez (Hayley Atwell, of Agent Carter).  The dead man had had his eyelids cut away (we are not spared how this leaves the corpse) to force him to watch something disturbing. Since I haven't seen the second episode (which concludes the story begun in the pilot), I can simply note that the acting is impressive, the adaptation of the first novel (which I haven't yet read) seems smooth, and the use of digital video to record the drama allows for the program to seem to be filmed at times, and to look more like the sharper, "flatter" image of high-definition video at others, which is used deftly to cause a subtle sense of dislocation from one sequence to another, or even within scenes. The cast also includes Kerry Fox as Falcón's sister and Emilia Fox as his ex-wife, which almost could seem like a joke on the plenitude of sexual impropriety in this series and the two that follow below. (Also, it somehow seems a bit odd to have all the Spaniards speak with British accents...)

CinéMoi is making episodes available online here.


Another, newer Canal+ series is being imported by the cable channel the Esquire Network, which will also stream the series if you'll let them get around your cookie protection. Spotless involves two brothers from France, with some difficult times in their childhood, making their way through the world of small-time drug-smuggling (the elder, ne'er-do-well Martin Bastière, played by Denis Ménochet) and crime-scene cleanup in London (the protagonist, younger Jean Bastière, Marc-André Grondin). This one also doesn't shrink from portraying the heavy ugly inherent in the difficulties the brothers and their friends and family find themselves in...in the first four episodes (all that have been cablecast in the US), having stepped in Trouble, they keep finding themselves deeper in, as a local mob boss wants to employ them to clean up or at least restage the murders his crew perform, and isn't going to take No for an answer. And other things get more recomplicated from there.  I'll be checking in for more. Created by Corinne Marrinan (CSI and its spinoffs) and Ed McCardie (Shameless) and about what you'd expect from that sort of creative parenthood.  Esquire Network, despite being a cable channel and not beholden to FCC language restrictions, nonetheless is coy about only one word in the dialog; sadly, "fuck" is commonly used enough to make silencing it and only it on the soundtrack a bit ridiculous. 


And in some ways the least of the series in this rundown, the Starz pay-cable series Flesh and Bone is soap-operatic and over-the-top while dealing half-well with very serious matter indeed; the ballet corps and support staff at the heart of the series, and their new-discovery ballerina escaping her tough Pittsburgh background to join the fictional American Ballet Company in NYC, are collectively riven with all kinds of physical and emotional problems. Some of them are inherent in a dancer's life, particularly in women's ballet (where going on pointe, not required of the men, tends to mess over the women's feet, at least); others, in this series, include child abuse and abandonment, anorexia and attendant other disabilities, incest, rape and lesser assault, schizophrenia, combat-induced PTSD, sex trafficking in young teen girls, and more...I can't help but think this ballet series owes its inspiration in nearly equal parts to Mozart in the Jungle, Fame and Flashdance, and manages to amp up the most ridiculous aspects of all three, being the kind of series where everyone compliments, even if backhandedly, the protagonist on her flawless beauty (not so much); series creator-producer Moira Walley-Beckett also worked on Breaking Bad. The Svengali of the company is a tantrum-prone monster who, in the process of chewing the protagonist out, more from his insecurity than her misstep, after (too) many anticipatory quick edits turns to a nest of baby birds on the window ledge, whose chirping has been bothering him, and instead of walking away from the window or closing it, picks up the nest and hurls it several stories down to the street below. And yet, after many, many similarly casually cruel encounters with his employees and others, we're supposed to buy that everyone just puts up with and Deep Down Really Loves his Tortured Genius. Meanwhile, and I know less about dance than I do about nearly any other major area of the arts, even I can tell that some of what is being presented here is pretty impressive, and some, meant to be equally so, is Ballet and Modern Dance 101. The largely dancer/actor cast does its best to keep the series watchable, and a fair amount of sex in the pay-cable series doesn't hurt that aspect, but there's simply too much of a muchness going on here to allow it to be taken particularly seriously. It's also the kind of series where no one even mentions the possibility of an abortion to deal with a pregnancy from incest...I suspect that once a certain rather more widespread taboo is broken, it's a matter that will come up no matter how firm one's beliefs against it might be, even if only to be shot down. 

SCTV (1976-1984): not quite as overlooked a fictional television network

The Second City, the improvisational comedy troupe which has helped groom an impressive lot (to put it mildly) of comic actors and standups over the years (the list can begin with Anne Meara, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Alan Arkin, Ed Asner, improv gurus Del Close and Severn Darden, Jane Alexander. Shelley Berman, Valerie Harper...and not too long after gathering the likes of Zohra Lampert, Fred Willard and Joan Rivers), began in Chicago (hence the name) and set up satellite workshops/theaters in Toronto and eventually Los Angeles. National Lampoon's Lemmings (a stage revue spun out of the The National Lampoon Radio Hour) and NBC's Saturday Night (as it was first known) were among the productions picking up on the early/mid-'70s talent in both Chicago and Toronto, and so it seemed like not the worst idea to create a Second City television series, beginning in 1976...which, in fact was the title of the first several seasons, Second City Television, produced in Canada for the then very small Global network and syndicated to commercial stations in the U.S. (at the same time, the second series known as The David Steinberg Show was being shot for a single season for CTV in Canada and syndicated in  the U.S. as well, featuring most of the SCTV cast in supporting or guest roles).

Second City Television, SCTV (on CBC and syndicated in the US), SCTV Network 90/SCTV Network (CBC and NBC) and SCTV Channel (cable channels Superchannel [Canada] and Cinemax [US]) all had a relatively similar format: a parody of the programming on a poorly-funded, small-time station (or. later, network) based in the possibly U.S., possibly Canadian town of Melonville. 

First-season episodes slightly repackaged to go with with chopped-up longer later episodes for latter 1980s syndication in the U.S., and rerun on Canada's Comedy Channel and US's cable station Ha!/Comedy Central:




3rd Season CBC/US syndication episodes:




CBC/NBC episodes:






SCTV Channel nearly complete excerpts:

Part 2

SCTV Remembers: Part 1

Part 2

A sort of grandchild of SCTV: latter-day Second City video:

Saturday Music Club on Monday: some rather funny songs

Maggie and Terre Roche (featuring the Oak Ridge Boys): "If You Emptied Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change"


Karen Kilgariff: "Couldn't Love You More"


Tom Smothers: "Mediocre Fred"


Fairport Convention: "Million Dollar Bash"


The Kinks: "Wicked Annabella"


Utopia: "Everybody Else is Wrong"


The Damned: "Grimly Fiendish"


Trusty: "Goodbye, Dr. Fate"


The Virgin-Whore Complex: "The Coldest Night of the Year"


Annie Ross: "Twisted"; Lambert, Hendricks & Ross with Williams: "Every Day I Have the Blues"

FFB: COLLEGE PARODIES edited by Will and Martin Lieberson (Ballantine 1961) (and a bit about I, LIBERTINE by Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine)

Ballantine Books was always ready to be an innovative publisher, in the years that Betty and Ian Ballantine were in charge...sometimes the execution was less impressive than the inspiration, but they had smashing successes with publishing collections of the first years of Mad comics, while Harvey Kurtzman was still editing and mostly writing the title, and such famous comic hoaxes as I, Libertine by "Frederick R. Ewing" (where Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine wrote a novel in a marathon session, to quickly publish after New York City-based radio host/storyteller/comedian Jean Shepard asked his listeners to go ask booksellers for a nonexistent book, to see if they could get a nonexistent joke onto then as now corruptly assembled "bestseller" lists; Shepard and Sturgeon did a first edition signing in a drugstore). So, it was only natural that other such projects should arise, such as Harvey Kurtzman's

Jungle Book...and this volume, collecting mostly magazine parodies from the college humor magazines that had preceded Mad into existence, and in fact had already been gleaned for a 1920s newsstand magazine, College Humor, a spiritual though not direct ancestor of the current website of that name. Although The Onion began as a UW Madison-based publication, the Harvard Lampoon has been probably the (otherwise) most famous and the most durable of these campus magazines in the U.S., as well as the direct inspiration for the National Lampoon in the 1970s, which has left a legacy at least as large as that of its parent, which survives it (and Harvard staffers have certainly gone onto post-collegiate comedy careers in an old-grads-club, usually old-boys' sort of way, particularly on the writing and production staff of  various television series; a slightly amusing prefiguring of future interaction occurred at Harvard when future NBC television CEO Jeff Zucker, as head of the campus paper the Harvard Crimson, had

A 1973 collection/special issue from HL

Lampoon editor Conan O'Brien arrested for a prank the magazine staff played on the Crimson staff and their product). But certainly most colleges and universities of any size or wherewithal were likely to have at least a mayfly humor magazine from time to time; the UC Berkeley Pelican published Ron Goulart's piece "Letters to the Editor," a parody of a letter column in an sf pulp, that was reprinted in an early issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as Goulart's first professional sale, and the Yale Record and any number of other titles managed to flow, with no lack of sophomoric humor usually wrapped around any gems, through the last century (the tradition is even longer in the UK, unsurprisingly, where it gave early training to staffers for Punch and so many other magazines and other entities over the decades).  Not long before Borders Book Stores folded, the were carrying the current Harvard Lampoon on their newsstands, and sadly, it wasn't brilliant, for the most part...but, then, I haven't been a fan going back at least as far as their Bored of the Rings, the parody of Tolkien reprinted widely in mass-market paperback in the wake of JRRT's massive success in the latter '60s onward. 

A certain lack of brilliance also afflicts College Parodies, as fitfully amusing as it is (and was even when I first read it as a young teen and Mad enthusiast), and as interesting as a curio of its era (it mostly reprints 1950s items from the various campus magazines, with perhaps a few earlier parody bits); it's a sort of fun to see what's mocked (complacency, manfulness, "corn") and what isn't (homophobia certainly rules OK) in the assembled humorous critiques of mass-market culture (from a period when the magazines parodied were somewhat more central to the popular culture than they are today, even if the websites that are their heirs or even sometimes their direct legacy are somewhat similar in influence now). Some of it remains on-target, at least for me..."Normal Wellwell" and the Charles Atlas ads fairly begged for the treatment they receive...even when it could've been better. But often these were early, even the first attempts to make some of these points this way, or nearly this well...definitely a book to look at if this kind of thing holds interest for one as a student of our popular culture, rather than a book to seek out as a Laff Riot, and not worth pursuing if expensive. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

For more on parody and humor on this blog, very much including the comics tradition (in at least two senses), please see this post, which collects most of the others published so far.

The Panther Books (UK) paperback

Contribution from the Fitzgeralds...CH did have to
Keep Up with The Smart Set and the original Life,
the humor magazine, after all...

Frank Kelly Freas's cover for the Ballantine paperback, annotated. Courtesy FlickLives.com

FFB: INSIDE SCIENCE FICTION #53: The F&SF Parody Issue (1958)

The 53rd issue of the ambitious and rather impressive fanzine Inside Science Fiction was given over in part to a parody of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (and to some extent its stablemates, including the then-recently sold Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine), with parodies of the house ads as well as the editorial content and covers (of both F&SF and, within, of Venture, F&SF's shortlived sf sibling, given here as Censured).

from the FictionMags Index, this entry by Ned Brooks

Inside [#53, September 1958] ed. Ron Smith (25¢/30¢, 64pp, digest s/s, cover by Dan Adkins) cover as by “Mel Humdrum”.

• "The Magazine of Science Fiction Fantasy And" with spoof contents page
• F&SF parody contents:
• _5 · Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo · Henna Zenderson · ss
• _8 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Fakeout · Anon. · ss
• _9 · Bleak Fate Intervenes · Thomas Hardy · ss
• _10 · The Night After We Land on Mars · R. S. Dickson · ss
• _12 · Recondemned Reading · Anthony Twin · ar
• _14 · Platitudes · Walter Jose Alverez · ss
• _19 · Song of the Spaceways · Fredric Beige · ss
• _20 · Censured house ad: "The Same Old Story..." · humor
• balance of issue:
• 21 · book reviews · Bob Leman, James Gunn, Lawrence Janifer/Larry Harris, Lin Carter, Dave Foley (not the comic actor), Bill Donaho · br
• 35 · Blurb Happy · Bob Tucker · ar; humor
• 40 · Sound the Anti-Tocsin · Walt Willis · hu
• 42 · Letters Found in an Author’s Drawers · Robert Bloch · hu
• 46 · The Slitherer from the Slime (as by "H. P. Lowcraft") · Lin Carter & Dave Foley · humor; satire.
• 51 · Miller by Moonlight · Bob Miller · cartoons
• 56 · How They Did the Doggie at the Curbside · David R. Bunch · ss
• 62 · Khartoum · Anthony Boucher · vi Stefantasy Aug 1955

It's a pretty delightful, knowing, and only slightly heavyhanded parody of Boucher's F&SF by the end of his editorial tenure, with the Fredric Brown micro-vignette parody, for example, squeezed down to one word on the page in part by the thunderous weight of Boucher's headnote, and the Philip Jose Farmer, Zenna Henderson and Robert S. Richardson parodies not Too overdone, and a Thomas Hardy lampoon of sorts standing in for F&SF's reprints. The mockery of Venture (and particularly of the Boucherish ad copy for the attempt at a highly literate but also sexually and otherwise thematically as well as literally adventurous magazine that it was) and of the other Mercury Press magazines, such as Mercury Mystery and Bestseller Mystery as well as the just-sold EQMM is also particularly on-target. The balance of the magazine features a preponderance of satirical material as well, with fannish and literary japes by Tucker, Willis, Boucher and Bloch, and Carter and Foley's Lovecraft lampoon, and a typically acidic short story by David R. Bunch. Inside would suspend publication shortly thereafter, after its impressive run (I have yet to read their similar? parody of Astounding Science Fiction, the predecessor of today's Analog), come back with a few more issues several years later, and then change hands to become the long-lived if less clangorous Riverside Quarterly.  There is at least one copy of this issue on sale on eBay at the moment, and if any candidate is ripe for web-archive, Inside is certainly high on the list (I hope to be instructed I've overlooked it being extant)...along with such later examples of similar work as the New York Review of SF-staff parody of Pulphouse magazine, Pulphaus...("because the fans want it...").

For more and more conventional books for this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

The David Feldman Show: Teri Garr and many more

 

Teri Garr

with Paul Dooley, Paul F. Tompkins, Fred Stoller, Eddie Pepitone, Janie Haddad Tompkins, Mark Thompson, Frank Conniff, Jeremy S. Kramer, Ben Zelevansky and Chris Pina. Our show is written by Steve Rosenfield, Guy Nicolucci, Ben Zelevansky, Paul Dooley, Frank Conniff, Dylan Brody, Eddie Pepitone and Karen Simmons. We are mixed and engineered by Alex Steen. Edited by Darren Ayres, and our production assistant is Alicia Cordova. Our Executive Producer is Troy Conrad.

The recurring "ads" teasing the gritty CBS cop show (parody) Muntz might just be the highlight of this episode of the Pacifica Radio series, up at the link on Garr's name...
 

Peanuts (Charlie Brown et al.) Xmas reunion in the style of LOUIS (the Louis CK/Szekely sitcom)

FFB: THE COMPLEAT OVA HAMLET by Richard Lupoff (as illustrated by Trina Robbins and introduced by Philip Klass aka William Tenn) among others...

It's 1977, and my friend Steven Durost has just flashed a copy of a magazine called Fantastic that he found in the Londonderry Junior High library...the June 1971 issue, no less (six years seemed very long before at the time), with a cover devoted to Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (editor Ted White always liked to keep things a bit mixed up, so the straightforward sf of the Anderson was in Fantastic while the borderline surreal fantasy of Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven was being serialized simultaneously in the sibling Amazing Science Fiction). I knew I had to read that, and that my father might want to check it out, as well...since it had one of the few unreprinted Larry Niven short stories in it, a collaboration with Hank (later Jean Marie) Stine called "No Exit," as Niven had with his 1960s and early '70s work temporarily dislodged Arthur C. Clarke as my father's favorite writer. Generally, it looked cool.
The librarian was happy to let me have the 1971 Galaxy, Worlds of If, and F&SF issues that someone, presumably a teacher, had left in the library sometime over those years, and not actually added to the collection nor apparently disturbed till Steve plucked the Fantastic (he liked the Fantastic Adventures pulp reprint in the issue the best, Festus Pragnell's "War of Human Cats"...well, it was strange and endearingly goofy), and Steve let me know when he was returning the Fantastic, and it was passed onto me for good as well.

And it was a fine issue of Fantastic, as it turned out...clever horror or surreal fantasy by Richard Peck, Ed Bryant (both at the beginning of their careers), and this odd, hilarious parody, "War of the Doom Zombies," attributed to an eccentric old woman supposedly named Ova Hamlet, who worked through her obvious alter ego, one Richard Lupoff (whom I knew as a contributor of a short novel to the clangorous anthology Again, Dangerous Visions). Fantastic would make much hay with Conan pastiches over the rest of the '70s, though entirely too many of them were by Lin Carter (or Carter in collaboration with L. Sprague de Camp, ready to begin his years-long argument with Robert Howard's supporters with his first essay on Howard and the first of his biographical and critical essay series "Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers," which would also run for years in the magazine)...but this "Hamlet" evisceration was far more savage than any of the Cimmerian's attacks on a foe. I dug it, to say the least. And while most of the Lupoff I would stumble across in new publications and the random back issues I would find were in other modes (I found his "Lupoff's Book Week" column in Algol/Starship particularly enjoyable, along with the fiction, the critical/historical nonfiction, and the odd anthology), I was always very happy to find a Fantastic back issue with a Hamlet story, and was bitterly disappointed that the shakeup at Fantastic and Amazing delayed indefinitely (it seemed) the publication of the promised "Two Sort-of Adventurers," taking on Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (the next-most-famous characters in sword & sorcery fiction, really, after Conan, and great favorites of mine). I (barely) caught word of the 1979 publication of the first edition of this collection, but didn't take sufficient initiative to seek it out specifically via mail-order (since in the southern New Hampshire/Boston and then the Honolulu suburbs, I had no walk-in access to true specialty shops in '79 and '80)...but it's taken me only four years to rectify this oversight with the 2007 expanded and revised Ramble House edition.
Phil Klass's introduction is unsurprisingly urbane, and adept in delineating the differences between parody, which requites capturing the flavor and rhythm of the work being critiqued, and burlesque and similar modes, which can simply mock. Trina Robbins, like Lupoff an important figure in comics as well as sf/fantasy prose and fannish circles, provides charming caricatures to go with most of the items here (including at least one new to this edition), though I miss the (Jeff Jones? Joe Staton? I don't have a copy of the issue at hand) illo from "Doom Zombies"'s original appearance. [Late bulletin: ISFDb informs us it was Bill Graham.]

The parodies are detailed (not quite completely) on the back cover:
J. G. Ballard: "In the Kitchen" (within the context of a parody of Judith Merril, as crusading editor of England Swings SF, here given as Isle of Man Swings SF)
Norman Spinrad: "Music in the Air"
Harlan Ellison: "Battered Like a Brass Bippy"
Robert E. Howard: "War of the Doom Zombies"
H. P. Lovecraft: "The Horror South of Red Hook"
Philip K. Dick: "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX"
Barry Malzberg: "Grebzlam's Game"
L. Ron Hubbard: "Young Nurse Nebuchadnezzer" (one of the items I'd read in another Fantastic back-issue, long before I'd ever seen an example of the "Old Doc Methuselah" stories...at least I'd seen Conan books and comics before the Howard story!)
Kurt Vonnegut: "The Wedding of Ova Hamlet"
Philip Jose Farmer: "God of the Naked Unicorn"
"John Norman": "Nosepickers of Dawr"
Fritz Leiber: "Two Sort-of Adventurers" (it was eventually published by White successor Elinor Mavor)
Stephen King: "Phannie"
and Mickey Spillane: "Death in the Ditch"

It's a great mix of nostalgia and newfound pleasure to have these all together, and note how few missteps Lupoff, one of our sharper observers at any given time, takes.
This book is not out of print, but Ramble House, and Lupoff, deserve your support in the offer of this fine, even necessary volume (I've been lucky enough to meet both the late Phil Klass and the happily still-writing Lupoff on a couple of occasions each, as well as host a scrap of Dick's writing here a few weeks back. If you find yourself moving on from this to Lupoff's more straightforwardly satirical or even utterly more straightforward work, all to the good...old fans of Ova will need to read Blodwyn Blenheim's account of Hamlet's recent course through life...and you get a photo of Hamlet, or just maybe Lupoff, as an infant in 1938 on the back cover, to boot...).

The Google Books "preview" and the Ramble House and Lulu pages.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.