Schlockmania Ponders Fangoria #10

in which Don Guarisco confronts the question of the ages: Which is scarier – an exploding head or a Faeries TV special?

As I noted in my comment to Don's writeup, I have to wonder if Fangoria #10 can go down in history as the first magazine to put an exploding head on its cover. Has anyone else done it? Famous Monsters? Castle of Frankenstein? Car and Driver? I think not.

Read Don's description on Schlockmania.

Ed's Pop Culture Shack Takes the Fangoria Challenge

It looks like Schlockmania has competition:

Check out Ed's Pop Culture Shack for a new series of Fangoria magazine restrospectives, starting with the earliest issue in his collection, #2 from 1979.

Readers of my blog already know about Schlockmania's fun series chronicling the early years of Fango.

Is there room for both series? Absolutely. It's fun to get each person's take on the issue, the films highlighted inside, and the times (the '70s were a definite watershed for many folks!). I like them both, and I recommend them for any movie magazine fan and horror film fan who wants to do some digital time traveling back to those pre-digital days.

As everyone knows, I like to do that.

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Zombie Rabbit Award Gets Spacey

Schlockmania's Don Guarisco has bestowed the Zombie Rabbit Award on this not-very-humble blog, Weimar World Service.

The award is one of those pay-it-forward things, so I won't spend too much time praising Shlockmania in turn. I've done so in the past on this site and I link to it along the right-hand side of the page. What I do have for you is 10 web sites on which I am in turn bestowing this award, in the hopes that it helps raise their visibility a bit.

And Now the Screaming Starts: For the title, if nothing else.

TvBarn: Not genre-confined, but the Kansas City Star TV critic covers everything in the world of television, including horror and science fiction.

Horrorblog.org: Well-done German-language site.

Radiator Heaven: The name intrigues, no?

Marooned – Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Books on Mars: If there's one better title out there for a blog than Weimar World Service, at least in the confusion department, this might be it.

Frowntown: Puppets, kids. Sound scary enough?

Gay Sci-Fi Nerds Podcast Blog: I know, not horror, but I have to open up this list a bit, since my leanings are definitely science-fictionward. Besides, this blog shows that, when we're not busy trying to undermine "opposite marriage," gays are heavily genre-active. Oh, hey, I just coined a term. Like radioactive.

Gay of the Dead: Speaking of which, Sean Abley's long-running blog at Fangoria.com.

Science Not Fiction: Okay, okay, this might be a stretch for this list, but it's my list, so don't hassle me. Science. Fiction. Science fiction.

Watchman's Science-Fiction Blog: Because SF is cool, okay?
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Unearthing the History of Fangoria: Schlockmania on Issue #7

If you've been enjoying the Starlog Project here on this blog, but you like your genre magazines a little more ... wet, then you should check out Don Guarisco's ongoing exploration of the early issues of Fangoria, Starlog's unruly younger brother.

Don's just posted his writeup for Fango issue #7, which was something of a turning point for the horror film magazine. As then-editor "Uncle Bob" Martin notes in a comment he posted to the article, it was the first issue of the magazine to actually make money. It was also the issue (if you ask me) where Fango's horror specialization started to gel.

Read Don's description of the issue, and Uncle Bob's additional background info, for more.

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

Fangoria Fans Finally Find an Online Project of Their Own

As my Starlog Project (in this blog and on its permanent site has grown (currently at issue #83), I've seen the enthusiasm people have for this classic science-fiction magazine they read as a child, as a teen, and well into their adult lives. It has also been enjoyable for me to go through these 30-year-old magazines and chronicle their content, design, the big movies and TV shows they covered, and more.

In an earlier post on this blog, I noted that I probably wouldn't have time to do a similar project for Starlog's sister magazine Fangoria, but I knew there were many -- dare I say rabid? -- fans of Fangoria, and surely one of them would do that magazine proud by chronicling its many issues. Now it looks like Don Guarisco is doing just that over at Schlockmania. Guarisco writes a comprehensive and entertaining profile of each issue, putting it in perspective for its time and describing the articles; he's not afraid to call the magazine on the carpet when he thinks they underperformed (or just weirdly performed -- anyone really want Disney's The Black Hole covered in Fango?). He's on issue #4 at the time of this writing, so it's still early days. If you're a reader of Fangoria or were in the past, now's a great time to climb aboard this nostalgia train.

I'm glad to see someone's taken on the Fangoria project.

So that's one thing I can cross off my to-do list ...

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE