Here's a twist. Usually, I present the trailer first, then the full film it represents. But I can't find the full film for Roger Corman's Amazons trailer (1986) above. And I can't find the trailer for the feature length Queen of the Amazons (1947) below. So you get the trailer for one, and then the full other feature. But they are both so bad, you probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't mention it, despite a 40-year gap and one being in color and one in B&W!!
Governments sometimes produce comic books for propaganda or educational purposes. "Confidencias de un Senderista" is an example of this genre. (According to Google Translate, that means "Confessions of a Hiker"). It was a 37-page comic book produced by the Peruvian government in 1989 and handed out in shantytowns around Lima in order to inform people about the violent tactics of the Shining Path. Reportedly the comic book met with "mixed reactions."
If you read Spanish, you can check out the entire comic book over at scribd.com.
Nine Circles never entered a recording studio and performed only once, at a Dutch radio station in 1982. Unbeknownst to them the engineer recorded the session and over the years it was bootlegged over and over becoming a Flexipop cult track. [The singer] never found out about this until I rang her up [in 2011].
Bruce Clayton's survivalist masterpiece, Life After Doomsday, certainly belongs in any collection of weird non-fiction. It comes from a time, not so long ago, when the general consensus was that we were all going to be blown to smithereens in a nuclear war, and Clayton offered detailed instructions on how to stay alive should you survive the actual bombs. Below is the 1981 Newsweek review of the book, as well as Clayton's diagram of how to turn your home into a fortified bunker. And hey, why not read it together with Paul's After the Collapse to get a real apocalypse vibe going!
Bruce Clayton's fantasy derives from the myths of frontier America: we have only to draw our wagons into a circle to survive a nuclear war. The war won't be as bad as you have heard. Assuming the Russians know what they are doing, 90 per cent of America will be fallout free. Clayton is interesting because virtually every point he makes will not have been considered by most of his readers: what about sex in the fallout shelter? he asks, or "How many members of your family are you willing to regard as acceptable losses?"
His point is, you must do something: "The question of which assault rifle you should buy isn't nearly as important as the fact that you must get one" — to mow down ghetto refugees or your neighbors in search of your food supply. In fact, refugees won't be much of a threat because the roads will be blown up along with the cities, but as for your friend next door — well, the Heckler and Koch HK91 heavy-assault rifle firing a 7.62 NATO cartridge works very well. If you're on your roof hosing down the fallout, a Colt Commander .45 autopistol modified for combat is easier to carry. He shows us, too, how to convert our houses into efficient fire zones, and suggests we store away five years' supply of wheat, milk, sugar and salt. A wheat stew in every pot and an Armalite AR-180 in every loophole will see us through, as long as we've ordered our gas masks (Clayton tells us where).
Back in 1987, the financial firm E.F. Hutton had just suffered some bad years that included scandals and major losses. So the senior executives came up with what they thought was a great idea. They'd boost the morale of all their 18,500 employees by sending everyone a coloring book (with crayons) that laid out the problems faced by the company in grade-school language. The book included "cute drawings of houses, racing cars and children" while warning employees that they all had to work harder because "we're no longer the nicest house on the block." The gesture was received by the Hutton employees about as well as you might think it would be. [google news archive]
Those coloring books are now collector's item. The going price on eBay is $125.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Tue Jan 15, 2013 | Comments (7)
Category: Books, 1980's
Gather around, children, and you shall learn of an ancient time, before the internet. A day of paper fanzines and weird information obtained only via books delivered by snailmail.
The main purveyor of such good stuff was the Loompanics catalog. Alas, they were driven out of business in 2006. The current website using their domain name is a shell and a scam by cybersquatters.
Over one hundred Loompanics books have been tagged as a Goodreads collection. You can get a small sense of what they were all about there.
to get a real apocalypse vibe going!
Category: Movies, Fantasy, 1940's, 1980's, Women