Hello!

We thank correspondent Michael McQuarrie for today’s top item: a site by John Cozzoli called Zombo’s Closet. A page from June 4, 2023 features a big selection of full-resolution Hollywood pressbooks of Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

The first two are for House of Wax and the 1939 The Cat and the Canary. I liked the desperate sales copy in the sad, sad The Neanderthal Man, and it was nice to revisit The Valley of Gwangi — my pressbook copy is upstairs somewhere in the attic, hopefully not being chewed on by raccoons.

Now that’s terrific movie ad art!  The illustration above is not from a pressbook, but the original is on Cozzoli’s page as well, and it looked cool for our purposes. The actual link to Zombo’s Pressbooks is Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

Stolen from Straight from Joe Dante’s news distribution feed comes a comprehensive parade of original screen logos that once fronted films by Fox, 20th Century Fox, etc., Posted by ‘Doc Ido’s Free Repairs,’ the 7-minute montage starts in the silent era and continues through the merger, the introduction of CinemaScope, and various weird changes until the present, when the new owner of the studio dropped the ‘Fox’ altogether. Will the Doors Song no longer make sense?

We have to wonder what the future is for the vast library of Fox releases. Many Fox Blu-rays and DVDs of the past 20 years are slipping Out Of Print, and few Fox movies show up on cable or streaming … just a couple of hundred hero titles in rotation on TCM. A great many 1930s Fox pictures haven’t been seen in decades.

And we couldn’t pass up this nice bit of Disney lore on Youtube … Ben Laurence gives us an entire run-down on the history of Disney’s Abandoned 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride. Being a Southern Calfornia kid, I remembered the walk-through exhibit from childhood, and loved the moving submarines.

Laurence has excellent documentation of the ride here and in Florida. He explains that the park’s engineers and maintenance people hated the ride so much, they semi-sabotaged a demo when it came time for the head of the corporation to decide its fate.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson