Culture Shock 06.19.14: 'Deadlier Than the Male' is an underrated classic of the spy craze

Elke Sommer, left, and Sylva Koscina are "Deadlier Than the Male."

When you've seen as many films as I have, the overlooked jewels become increasingly rare. Seams run dry. But still, on occasion, you stumble across a movie that leaves you wondering how you haven't seen it before.

"Deadlier Than the Male" is just such a movie, and I'm kicking myself for only now getting to it.

One of a flood of movies released during the James Bond-inspired spy craze, "Deadlier Than the Male" (1967) gets lost among its better-known contemporaries. Dean Martin's Matt Helm films and James Coburn's "Our Man Flint" receive far more repeat airplay. Sometimes, sadly, even Turner Classic Movies falls down on the job.

Yet unlike those straight-up parodies of Sean Connery's 007 outings, "Deadlier Than the Male" could almost be a Bond film. It opens with an airborne assassination that would easily be ranked among the best pre-credit set pieces of the Bond series.

Hen's Tooth Video released "Deadlier Than the Male" on DVD, but an upgrade on that decade-old pressing is in order. Hen's Tooth's disc is widescreen but non-anamorphic. That said, it's still colorfully vivid on my HDTV, even in zoom mode.

Richard Johnson (1963's "The Haunting") stars as Hugh Drummond — like Bond, a character with literary origins, in this case H.C. McNeile's 1920s gentleman hero "Bulldog" Drummond. Updated for the swinging '60s, Johnson's Drummond is an insurance investigator assigned to look into some very expensive and deadly "accidents."

The trail leads to a scheme to eliminate stubborn businessmen who stand in the way of — well, that would be telling. Let's just say someone has a rather aggressive idea of a "hostile" takeover.

Johnson turned down the role of James Bond, not wanting to commit to a long-term contract. His loss was Connery's gain — and ours. But "Deadlier Than the Male" gives us an idea what kind of 007 Johnson would have made. With his slighter build, less-rugged appearance and greater refinement, Johnson comes across as a Pierce Brosnan-type Bond in a Connery-type Bond movie. The approach works surprisingly well, hinting that the problem with the Brosnan-era 007 movies was never Brosnan.

Yet's Johnson's charming, unflappable Drummond is destined to be overshadowed.

The "deadlier than the male" assassins referenced in the title (and the catchy title tune by the Walker Brothers) take the shapely forms of Irma Eckman, played by Elke Sommer ("A Shot in the Dark") and Sylva Koscina ("Hercules," "Hercules Unchained"). When the two emerge bikini-clad from the Mediterranean to carry out a spear-gun assassination, it's Ursula Andress times two. Calling Dr. Yes.

Sommer's trademark "Teutonic temptress" — really, even her Internet Movie Database bio calls her that — is more than a match for any man, except maybe Bulldog Drummond. But as captivating a screen presence as she is, even she is outdone by Koscina, who would also be her co-star in Mario Bava's ghostly 1972 masterpiece "Lisa and the Devil." Koscina's playfully sadistic Penelope steals the show, especially when she's called upon to torture Drummond's clueless nephew (Steve Carlson) for information, or when she's "borrowing" from Irma's wardrobe. With their banter and bickering, Penelope and Irma are like a couple of mismatched college roommates, which adds humor without quite falling into camp — as befell the Bond series starting with "Diamonds are Forever."

Rounding out the cast is underrated British character actor Nigel Green, perhaps best remembered as Hercules in 1963's "Jason and the Argonauts." Indeed, there's a lot of under-appreciated talent here, in front of and behind the camera. "Deadlier Than the Male" boasts a story by Hammer veteran Jimmy Sangster ("Horror of Dracula"), gorgeous cinematography by Ernest Steward (the "Carry On" films) and a swinging spy-fi score by Malcolm Lockyer (1965's "Dr. Who and the Daleks").

If some company wants to revisit "Deadlier Than the Male" for a much-needed Blu-ray upgrade, throwing in a bonus CD of the score wouldn't make any enemies.

Culture Shock 01.30.14: The Caped Crusader rises

As I sit at my desk writing this, the Caped Crusader — one-half of the Dynamic Duo — looks on. He has a slight smile on his face, in contrast to his usual grim determination. In place of his customary white-slit eye holes, he has twinkling baby blues. These are eyes clear of vision and of sharp focus.

These eyes see justice, good citizen. Rest assured, they say, all is well.

The Caped Crusader.

As I type this, Batman gives me a knowing nod of the head. Wait! No, it's just my imagination. It's not a nod but a bobble. This Batman is a bobblehead I keep on my desk, right next to my coffee mug, an Associated Press paperweight and my Pez dispensers. And for the first time in decades, this Batman bears an unmistakable resemblance to Adam West, Batman of the pow! bam! boom! 1960s TV show, who for years was the character's most visible depiction — and his curse.

Two weeks ago, Conan O'Brien — of all people — let slip the news via Twitter: The 1966-68 “Batman” TV series is finally coming to home video, sometime this year.

That's not exactly an official announcement, but Warner Bros. confirmed the news shortly after Conan's tweet. The studio will release all three seasons of “Batman” on DVD in 2014. All else remains a mystery: price, bonus features, whether there also will be a high-definition Blu-ray release, etc. Knowing the long wait for “Batman” is almost over will have to be enough — for now.

So, why the long wait? As usual, lawyers are to blame. Warner Bros. owns DC Comics, which owns Batman. The '66 TV series, however, is owned by Fox. And as there was no such thing as home video in the 1960s, bringing “Batman” to home video required a lot of negotiation.

Contentious, time-consuming negotiation.

Signs of a deal began to appear last year, when licensed products based on the '66 “Batman” — like my bobblehead — hit the market. DC Comics even released a digital comic book series based on the '66 show. “Batman '66” so captures the spirit of Adam West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin, the Boy Wonder, it's like watching reruns.

The reruns, by the way, never went away entirely. They currently air Saturdays on Me-TV (WZDX 54.3), but they're no substitute for owning the series. And there is a lot of pent-up demand to be met. Readers of the website TVShowsOnDVD.com have long ranked “Batman” as their second-most-requested unreleased TV show, after only “The Wonder Years,” which remains unreleased because of music licensing issues. Those pesky lawyers again.

And before you ask: The quickie “Batman” movie made between seasons 1 and 2 falls under a different deal, and Fox released it on DVD years ago.

Given all this anticipation for the TV series' home video debut, it's worth keeping in mind there was a time when Bat-fans despised it.

"Faster, Robin! The rear projection is gaining on us!"

While a parody of morally upright, square-jawed and just plain square superheroes, the '66 “Batman” nevertheless reflected the goofy sensibility of 1950s and '60s Batman comics. But by the '70s and '80s, comic book Batman had grown darker, and the Dark Knight bore little resemblance to the Caped Crusader. Fans resented their favorite hero still being known mostly for his campy Adam West incarnation.

Now, however, after the doom and gloom of Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” it's safe for fans to admit their shameful secret: Many of them liked West's Batman all along. And maybe, just maybe, “The Dark Knight Rises” shows how it can be even more absurd to take Batman too seriously.

When it's at last available as a convenient box set, perfect for weekend binge viewing, the '66 “Batman” will be ready for a long-overdue reappraisal. Every Batman reflects his day, and the duly deputized Batman who protected Gotham during the social unrest of the late '60s is no different.

Culture Shock 08.08.13: TV and movies experience reversal of fortunes

Two new books, taken together, perfectly illustrate the divergent fortunes of television and the movies.

The first is "Difficult Men" by GQ correspondent Brett Martin. In this case, the (overly long) subtitle — "Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad' " — says it all. Television is no longer mostly just sitcoms and episodic police procedurals, although both are still around and doing fine. Now there are complex shows with ongoing stories that attract some of the best actors in the business, the sort of actors who used to do only movies and looked down on TV work.

Driven by writer-creators rather than by directors, television has become the go-to platform for long-form, narrative storytelling.

At the other, seedier end of the street is Lynda Obst's "Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business." Obst is a producer who has a hard time producing movies nowadays, even though her credits include hits like "Adventures in Babysitting" and "Sleepless in Seattle."

The reason is Hollywood doesn't make the kind of modestly budgeted films she makes anymore, unless they're horror films or star-driven comedies. Everything is either low-budget indie films, on the one hand, or grotesquely budgeted effects-driven extravaganzas based on brands with built-in audience appeal. That's why everything Hollywood produces seems to be a remake, a sequel or based on a book, comic book or old TV show.

They're not all bad, but for every "Iron Man" there are a dozen "Man of Steels," crowding out other types of movies. Once, these big-budget would-be blockbusters were tentpoles around which studios built their release schedules. Now, Obst complains, just about every studio movie is a tentpole.

Even a big-name director like Steven Spielberg has to scrape together funding when he wants to make a non-tentpole like his Oscar-bait biopic "Lincoln."

That prompted Spielberg and George Lucas, jointly credited/blamed with creating the "summer blockbuster," to warn that Hollywood's big tent is on the verge of collapsing.

The common denominator behind both TV's and films' fortunes is DVD sales.

The rise of DVDs (and video on demand) in the past 15 or so years made movies more available, a development that was one thing driving pay-TV channels like HBO into original programming as a way to differentiate themselves. The subsequent decline in DVD sales, however, broke all of the Hollywood studios' financial models, leading to the tentpole-dominated model that prevails now.

The decline of DVDs is in part the work of Netflix, which is also credited with helping change TV for the better by encouraging "binge viewing" and producing its own shows like the Emmy-nominated "House of Cards," a fourth season of "Arrested Development" and the latest critical darling, "Orange is the New Black." It's not too much of an exaggeration to say Netflix changed everything.

So, is everything roses for TV and curtains for the movies? Not necessarily.

Television still falls prey to formula. For all the talk of a "creative revolution," how many of these daring new shows can be summed up as "family man (or woman) with a secret criminal life"?

And Hollywood has been here before, when big-budget disasters like 1963's "Cleopatra" nearly sank studios and cleared the way for a new generation of filmmakers who made smaller, more personal films. After a decade of bloated epics, we got the generation of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and, yes, George Lucas.

Lest we forget, the original "Star Wars" was also a modestly budgeted film, by today's standards.

Culture Shock 09.27.12: Prescription for 'Hysteria?' Give it a rest

For a film inspired by actual events, there is surprisingly little about "Hysteria" that rings true.

Director Tanya Wexler’s third and most ambitious movie is a romantic comedy set in the 1880s, when Queen Victoria reigned and Victorian values ruled. Unfortunately the romance is painfully obvious and the comedy is sorely lacking.

And that’s a shame, because a movie about the invention of the vibrator should be ripe for exploitation. You could even build a great advertising campaign around it, with "Banned in Alabama!" emblazoned across the posters.

But what we get with "Hysteria," new to DVD and Blu-ray, is yet another uninspired entry in the genre I like to call "Making Fun of the Victorians."

It goes like this: "Oh, those silly Victorians and their silly ideas about sex and medicine and politics. It’s all so laughable, but thank goodness we’re far more sophisticated now."

Well, yes, people in Victorian times did believe lots of things that turned out to be wrong, and sometimes laughable, just as people who lived before them did. And, one day, 100 years from now — or sooner — people will look back at us, and they’ll point and laugh, too. It’s the way of things. But I’m not sure I’d try to build a movie around it.

Perhaps if the screenplay by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer, from an original story by Howard Gensler, had stuck closer to the actual events rather than merely being inspired by them, then going off on the rom-com tangent, "Hysteria" wouldn’t be a limp, cliched snoozer that wastes the considerable talents of its cast.

We begin by meeting a young, idealistic doctor named Mortimer Granville, based on the real-life inventor of the electric vibrator and played by Hugh Dancy (the forthcoming "Hannibal" TV series). He has some crazy, new ideas about diseases being caused by germs and can’t keep a steady job at any of the local hospitals, where leeching patients is still the default treatment. So he takes a job assisting Dr. Robert Dalrymple (the always wonderful Jonathan Pryce), who has a lucrative practice treating wealthy women for the most ubiquitous disease of the Victorian age: hysteria.

Hysteria is a catch-all diagnosis, purportedly explaining everything from unladylike temperaments to thoughts of sex. And the treatment?

Manual stimulation. Unsurprisingly, the handsome Dr. Granville quickly becomes popular with Dr. Dalrymple’s patients. And soon, Dalrymple is eager to keep his medical practice in the family by marrying off his younger daughter Emily (Felicity Jones) to his protege.

Yet where there’s a younger daughter there must be an older one, and that’s the idealistic, headstrong Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who may be suffering from hysteria herself, what with all her outlandish notions of helping the poor. And already you can guess where things are going.

Gyllenhaal does her best, but there’s no escaping the fact that as a character Charlotte is a cheat. Every time she goes off about how the world should be or will be, she’s speaking with the anachronistic knowledge of the screenwriters’ 130 years of hindsight. After a while, it doesn’t matter if she’s right; the whole exercise is tedious.

As for Granville, he’s so popular his hand can’t take the abuse. So with the help of a conveniently rich and technology-obsessed friend (Rupert Everett, playing a bored aristocrat all too convincingly), he invents the vibrator. The rest is not exactly history — the real-life Granville didn’t intend his muscle relaxer to become the Hitachi Magic Wand — but you have seen it before, in a hundred other romantic comedies.

My prescription: Give "Hysteria" a rest.

Culture Shock 04.05.12: Roger Corman is modern Hollywood's unlikely father

Jack Nicholson hiding behind his hands as he struggles to stay composed is the most emotionally honest sight I've seen in a movie this year.

That moment of truth comes in Alex Stapleton's heartfelt new documentary "Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel."

For the first decade of Nicholson's career, producer/director Roger Corman was the future star's one source of steady work, both as an actor and as a screenwriter. And despite taking a few good-natured jabs at the films they made together — Nicholson says Corman occasionally made a good movie "by mistake," but he wasn't in any of them — Jack clearly has a lot of love and respect for his old mentor.

The rest of Hollywood has rarely felt the same, forcing the soft-spoken Corman to become its most unlikely rebel, forging a successful career that is even more notable for the other careers it launched.

Stapleton's film doesn't make the — admittedly grandiose — comparison, but Corman comes across as a Moses-like figure: He led others to the Promised Land but couldn't enter himself.

"Corman's World" is that story.

When he didn't get the credit he thought was his due for helping bring 20th Century Fox's "The Gunfighter" to the screen — he was an uncredited story editor on the picture, which was a hit for Fox — Corman decided he would produce and direct his own movies. He developed a method that included shooting fast, shooting cheap and avoiding hassles like getting the proper permits.

From outward appearances, Corman is the least likely guerrilla filmmaker ever, yet he became the most successful.

He produced films on his own and, when he needed larger budgets, with American International Pictures, which released Corman's best works.

Corman has never been a darling of critics. Some of his earliest films even he will admit aren't very good. But the Edgar Allan Poe movies he made with Vincent Price stand with the best horror movies of their day, and Martin Scorsese, who got his start directing "Boxcar Bertha" for Corman, holds up the 1967 LSD film "The Trip," starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, has a worthy effort.

Corman's reputation today is largely the product of the directors, screenwriters and actors who learned their craft on Corman's sets.

Many in the generation that reinvented the movies in the late '60s and early '70s — Scorsese, Fonda, Hopper, Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola — got their start with Corman.

But Corman himself could never make the leap to mainstream respectability.

His one stab at it was 1962's "The Intruder" — William Shatner's first lead film role. Unfortunately, this blunt look at race relations in the South was too controversial. "The Intruder" became Corman's one flop.

He'd never make that mistake again.

Despite once saying he was "almost" a communist, Corman succeeded as the ultimate movie-making capitalist. His audience — his customers — were always right.

The judgment of the market is the only authority Corman really respects. All other authorities are oppressors to be challenged or at least circumvented.

Today, despite finally receiving an honorary Oscar, Corman still works on the fringes, producing a somewhat lower class of B movies to sell to what used to be called the Sci-Fi Channel.

Meanwhile, the movies that fill the multiplexes are the kind of movies Corman used to make — only with bigger budgets.

It's Corman's world after all.

Culture Shock 09.30.10: Doomsday is approaching for the DVD

A little more than a decade after its introduction, the DVD is already on its way out. It's a quick end to what was the most quickly adopted media format in history.

The evidence of the DVD's demise is overwhelming.

Best Buy plans to greatly reduce the amount of floor space it devotes to DVDs this holiday season, using that space instead for netbooks and tablet PCs — products that are actually in demand. And if you've been in a Best Buy recently, you've probably noticed the big-box retailer has already scaled back its DVD selection. Just try finding anything other than recent films or classics like "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca." The midlist selection has all but disappeared.

Earlier this year, Movie Gallery, the nation's No. 2 video rental chain, went out of business. Last week, the No. 1 chain, Blockbuster, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in a last-ditch — and probably futile — effort to avoid the same fate.

Neither Movie Gallery nor Blockbuster could withstand the onslaught of Netflix, which delivers DVDs by mail, offers an unsurpassed selection and never charges late fees. But even Netflix is trying its best to phase out DVDs.

Netflix is aggressively pushing its on-demand service, which streams movies directly to viewers via the Internet. This month, Netflix began streaming films released by Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM under a new deal worth nearly $1 billion.

Netflix would much rather pay the movie studios for the right to stream movies than pay the Postal Service to deliver DVDs to customers within one day. Netflix's executives can see the future, and it doesn't include physical media like DVDs, which are rapidly going the same way as compact discs. (Best Buy is cutting back on CDs this year even more than on DVDs. You can blame — or praise — Apple's Steve Jobs for that.)

None of this means that DVDs are about to disappear completely. The Hollywood movie studios are still banking on high-profile new releases, and Blu-ray, the high-definition successor to DVD, still appeals to people with home- theater systems. But the studios are already cutting back. Most older movies still languishing in studio vaults will probably never be released on DVD.

To meet the lingering demand for those catalog titles, a couple of studios are adopting a middle ground. Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures have launched print-on-demand services via their company websites and Amazon.com. The studios burn films to DVD-R discs when you order them.

DVD-Rs don't offer the same quality as commercially released DVDs, but they'll have to do for fans of obscure films that have not, and likely will not, make their way to DVD. For instance, Sony had scheduled a DVD release of the 1965 Sherlock Holmes film "A Study in Terror" for last year, to coincide with the release of the latest Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. But the DVD of "A Study in Terror" never arrived.

This month, Sony finally made "A Study in Terror" available as a DVD-R at its website. Clearly, someone at Sony has reconsidered the studio's approach to older films with cult followings.

Warner Bros. has been especially aggressive in shifting to DVD-R. It's print-on-demand films include "Under the Rainbow" with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, the foodie murder mystery "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" starring George Segal and Jacqueline Bisset, and Peter Sellers in "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu." A few years ago, when Best Buy was still stocking midlist titles, all would have been candidates for traditional DVD.

A few other catalog titles may find their way to DVD through small, special-interest labels that have always catered to the cult-film audience. Synapse Films will be releasing three long-awaited horror films that had been gathering dust in the Universal Studios and Fox vaults: "Vampire Circus," "Twins of Evil" and "Hands of the Ripper."

Vinyl record albums have disappeared except for the few pressed to satisfy a small but devoted following of aficionados. DVDs seem destined to follow the same path.

Culture Shock 08.12.10: The future finally arrives for ahead-of-its-time show 'Max Headroom'

The future has finally caught up with "Max Headroom."

When it aired on ABC in 1987, it was ahead of its time — and ahead of most viewers. It was a critical darling, but a ratings disaster after ABC shifted it to the Friday-night death slot opposite "Dallas" and "Miami Vice." So, after just 14 episodes, ABC canceled it.

Yet if "Max Headroom" aired today, it would probably be a huge hit. It would go on for five or six seasons, have a complex and increasingly convoluted story arc, and just end up disappointing everyone with an unsatisfying series finale that resolves none of its major mysteries.

You know, maybe it's a good thing "Max Headroom" aired when it did. There are worse things to be than brilliant but canceled.

So, for those of you too young to remember 1987, who don't know how brilliant "Max Headroom" truly is, there's good news. All 14 episodes are now on DVD as "Max Headroom: The Complete Series."

An ambitious mix of "Blade Runner," Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and what would later be known as "cyberpunk," "Max Headroom" is science fiction that confronts — head on, shall we say — the impact of technology and the media on everything from privacy and politics to religion and medicine.

Canadian actor Matt Frewer ("Watchmen") stars as Edison Carter, an investigative journalist for Network 23, the most watched and most powerful media outlet in a dystopian world set "20 minutes into the future" — or about 2004, actually — where all real power rests with the media.

In its never-ending battle for ratings dominance, Network 23 has a secret weapon: an unpredictable, anarchistic, computer-generated talking head created from Carter's memories — Max Headroom.

While Carter uncovers political and corporate wrongdoing, often involving his employer or its main advertiser, the nefarious Zik Zak corporation, Max has free rein to pop up whenever and wherever he chooses, both on Network 23's airwaves and inside its computer network.

Occasionally, Max stumbles upon information that helps Carter's investigations. And sometimes he even remembers to share it. For Carter, dealing with Max is like dealing with his inner child — a spoiled-rotten inner child who could probably do with a good spanking.

The show's creators intended "Max Headroom," in part, as a warning about the direction in which they saw society and the media moving.

For better or worse, some of their predictions have panned out, from e-mail to reality television.

Another purpose was to point out that the media often has an agenda of its own, which was always true, but not nearly so obvious before Fox News and MSNBC came along.

"Max Headroom" was subversive for its time, when three stodgy broadcast networks and PBS were the beginning, middle and end of the TV universe. But that doesn't mean it got everything right, and some of its predictions and warnings seem pretty silly today.

For example, Zik Zak is a Japanese-owned corporation run by stereotypical — and borderline offensive — Japanese bosses who speak loudly in broken English. Zik Zak represents 1980s paranoia about the Japanese "buying up" America, a non-threat at the time, and a ridiculous one in light of Japan's "lost decade" of economic stagnation.

On a larger level, "Max Headroom" overestimates the power of television, portraying it as an uncontrollable force that comes at you, whether you want it to or not. In "Max Headroom," TVs don't even have off switches; all you can do is change the channel. Television is top-down, authoritarian and inescapable.

In reality, in our world of 2010, we've never had more control over TV. We watch what we want, when we want, how we want. Between TiVo, Hulu, Netflix and on-demand, broadcasters have lost control. In effect, you can program your own network and, if you want, even avoid the commercials.

But even when it's wrong, "Max Headroom" is interesting. And science fiction always has more to do with its own time than any imagined future.

"Max Headroom" is a time capsule of a decade when we worried about all the wrong things.

Culture Shock 02.11.10: Aqua Net fog can't hide awful '80s cartoons

So many fools. So much pity.

When it comes to nostalgia, I consider myself a child of the 1970s, but the '80s are finally making a play for my affections.

So, I was initially excited to learn Warner Bros. is producing a two-DVD set of "classic" '80s cartoons.

The studio will release "Saturday Morning Cartoons: The 1980s Vol. 1" on May 1, and while Warner Bros. hasn't announced the set's contents, the package art holds a few clues — which is why my excitement quickly turned into disappointment.

Apart from "Thundarr the Barbarian," which holds up surprisingly well, the DVDs will include "Monchichis," "The Flintstone Kids," "Dragon's Lair" and "Mr. T."

Ah, yes. Despite the Aqua Net haze of time, I remember it clearly: Saturday-morning cartoons during the '80s were, for the most part, awful. How did I forget?

The soft-focus lens of nostalgia obscures many of blemishes. By any reasonable standard, the cartoons I love from the '70s weren't particularly good, either. Still, they had something that most of the subsequent decade's Saturday-morning programs lacked. But whether that something was creativity or kitsch is probably a matter of taste.

Many of the most fondly remembered cartoons of the '80s — "Transformers," "Robotech," "Thundercats," "She-Ra," etc. — aired in weekday syndication. Saturday mornings, burdened by more stringent broadcast standards, were tame and lame in comparison.

There were three main types of Saturday-morning cartoons during the decade: cartoons based on real people or live-action TV characters, cartoons based on video games, and cartoons based on tiny, mythological creatures created by Belgians.

The A-Team's Mr. T., for example, told youngsters to stay in school and off drugs. Gary Coleman of "Diff'rent Strokes" fame lent his voice to a guardian angel who helped children in trouble. And Punky Brewster (aka Soleil Moon Frye) did pretty much the same stuff she did on her nighttime sitcom.

Nowadays, video games are incredibly sophisticated and inspire Hollywood movies. Back then, they were incredibly simple and inspired cartoons with plots that had nothing to do with the games because the games didn't have plots. Pac-Man, Q*bert, Frogger, Donkey Kong and Pitfall all inspired Saturday-morning adaptations, each more suspect than the last.

And then there were the Smurfs. Dreamed up by Belgian cartoonist Peyo, the Smurfs were a race of small blue men, each three apples tall. And by men, I mean they were all males, at least until Smurfette showed up, which begs lots of questions about Smurf procreation.

NBC had so much success with "The Smurfs" that it commissioned "The Snorks," created by yet another Belgian cartoonist. The Snorks were just like the Smurfs except they lived underwater and were less communist.

In retrospect, that's a pretty bleak television landscape, and one that never recovered, as the best cartoons moved to cable TV and Saturday mornings became, due in part to the Children's Television Act of 1990, a dumping ground for soulless "educational and informational" programming.

I might pick up "Saturday Morning Cartoons: The 1980s Vol. 1" just for "Thundarr," but if Warner Bros. releases a Vol. 2, I hate to think what it will contain. Saturday mornings only go downhill from here.

Movie studios tease fans with Halloween DVDs

Summer has just begun, but, right on schedule, I’m getting my annual, premature bout of Halloween anticipation.

It’s not my fault. It’s simply that this is the time of year that movie studios announce release dates for the horror movies they plan to release on DVD in time for the Halloween season. Halloween is big business, and Americans spend more money celebrating it than on any other holiday except Christmas. Hollywood isn’t about to be left out of the cash bonanza.

In years past, I could count on MGM raiding its vaults and releasing at least half a dozen chillers from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Then Sony Pictures purchased a stake in MGM, and MGM’s “Midnite Movies” line went dormant.

Sony’s co-investors were not pleased. Not only did Sony fail to exploit MGM’s catalog of horror titles, Sony didn’t get anywhere with most of MGM’s movie library. So, the other investors took charge and sold the DVD rights to MGM’s films to Fox.

It’s taken a while, but that move is finally paying off for fans of vintage horror. Fox has more than a dozen releases planned for Sept. 11. The list includes MGM-owned films plus several of Fox’s own. Most retailers are already accepting pre-orders.

The bulk of Fox’s announced releases are two-disc double features:

• “The Beast with a Million Eyes” and “Phantom From 10,000 Leagues”
• “The Beast Within” and “The Bat People”
• “Blueprint for Murder” and “Man in the Attic”
• “Chosen Survivors” and “The Earth Dies Screaming”
• “Devils of Darkness” and “Witchcraft”
• “Gorilla at Large” and “Mystery at Monster Island”
• “The House on Skull Mountain” and “The Mephisto Waltz”
• “Konga” and “Yongary, Monster From the Deep”
• “Pharaoh’s Curse” and “Curse of the Faceless Man”
• “Return of Dracula” and “The Vampire”
• “Tales From the Crypt” and “Vault of Horror”

The best of the double features is “Tales from the Crypt”/“Vault of Horror.” Produced by Amicus Productions and released in 1972 and ’73, respectively, both films are anthologies based on EC Comics stories. Amicus specialized in horror anthologies, and these are two of the studio’s best.

Like all Amicus films of the period, both boast casts filled with well-known British character actors, including Joan Collins (“Dynasty”), Peter Cushing (“Star Wars”), Denholm Elliott (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) and Tom Baker (“Doctor Who”).

Also on Sept. 11, Fox will release a three-movie set featuring the 1958 version of “The Fly” and it’s two sequels, “Return of the Fly” and “Curse of the Fly.” Horror icon Vincent Price takes a bow in the long-awaited DVD release of “The Witchfinder General” (aka “The Conqueror Worm”). And giant animals terrorize mankind in the 1976 schlockfest “Food of the Gods,” loosely based on an equally silly H.G. Wells story.

But I’ve saved the best for last: director Stuart Gordon’s second foray into the bloodcurdling tales of H.P. Lovecraft — “From Beyond.”

“From Beyond” reunites Gordon with “Re-Animator” stars Jeffery Combs (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) and Barbara Crampton (“The Young and the Restless”) for a tale of blood, guts and otherworldly monsters.

The “special edition” Fox/MGM DVD brings Gordon’s original version to America for the first time. The theatrical version released in 1986 omitted some gore and part of Crampton’s infamous “S&M” scene in order to get an R rating. The new disc restores the film to its intended glory.

That’s enough horror on DVD to frighten almost anyone, not the least of which is my bank account.