Monday, June 24, 2013

The Masks of Famous Monsters - 1970-72

Welcome to the twenty-second installment in The Masks of Famous Monsters Series. Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine was an absolute treasure trove of early mask history. By combing through the 191 issues published between 1958-1983, it's possible to gain a good understanding of the decades of evolution and history of Don Post Studios and Topstone monster masks. The eventual goal of this series is to catalog and archive each monster mask appearance in the pages Famous Monsters.


With the golden years come and gone and new monster mask material in Famous Monsters becoming ever more scarce, we'll be covering issues in blocks of years rather than blocks of individual issues. For this edition, we enter a new decade... the 70's. We'll encounter an odd skip in issue numbers during this post due to the decision by Warren and Ackerman  to skip from issue number 69 in September 1970, to issue 80 in October 1970.

The first issue of the decade (Jan. 1970) would contain no mask ads or articles. In fact the half page ad that would pop up in most, but not all, issues during 1970 had made it's debut several issues ago and was not really anything new to readers of the publication...


Issue #65 released in May, would feature a nice full page photo of the Don Post Skull prop...


The decade would wind down with a brief monster mask glimpse in the Dec. 1970 issue  (#81) with a Frankenstein monster mask in the "Monsters of the Month" department...



1971 would essentially come and go with random appearances from the same 3/4 page ad pictured above. 

1972 would feature a new format for the Don Post Studios mask ad which would shrink down to a half-page format. This scan comes from the January 1972 issue...




Nov 1972 would be the 1st time both a DPS and Topstone mask ad ran in FM since before the Langdon days at DPS almost a decade ago when this half page ad appeared on page 47. This would end a long absence of Topstone mask ads in Famous Monsters of Filmland...




1 comment:

  1. Very cool. It's crazy how far practical FX makeup has come (especially looking at John Carpenter's The Thing) yet I think the makeup and mask work in the original Frankenstein and The Creature From the Black Lagoon still hold up perfectly fine today. Such a shame CGI is so overused now.

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