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Spooktacular album covers for Halloween

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Fuck Winter—Halloween’s coming!

Moving apartment, packing and unpacking boxes of belongings, I rediscovered a few old LPs and cassette recordings of the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and David McCallum telling tales of terrible things I’d long forgotten. Suppressed memory, you might say. It was quite a discovery, happy and sad, like finding photographs of long lost lovers and knowing the reason you split and why you were such a dick. Recordings of horror stories which were once so very, very important but now much less so. Perhaps

These were recordings of the very best reading great tales that could entice, enthral, and entertain.

I still listen to such today. Downloading podcasts of The Horror from Relic Radio, or listening to Old Time Radio classic tales by Wyllis Cooper and Arch Obler for Lights Out, or those other shows like Suspense, Himan Brown’s Inner Sanctum, The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave, or E. G. Marshall and his three-act The CBS Mystery Hour.. Today’s equivalent is the wonderful podcast series Tales from Beyond the Pale devised and produced by Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid.

It’s not that entertainment was somehow better in the past, it is rather there was a bigger and more diverse range of imaginative material produced than all the tawdry remakes, or the repetitive Marvel superhero movies or the tick-box detective shows/sci-fi series available 24/7 today. Imagination has had its wings clipped by money, politics and Twitter mobs, and will never fly to giddy heights in a cage.

But back to the point of this post: Halloween’s coming. And here to get in the mood is a gallery of vintage album covers featuring some of biggest names in movies and entertainment (Karloff, Lugosi, Price, McCallum) reading classic tales of terror and imagination. Plus a few novelty records to show not everything was golden in the past…
 
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More eerie album covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.16.2019
08:33 am
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Vincent Price narrates a musical journey to the amazing year 2000
10.06.2017
09:14 am
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Magazine ad for the 1962 World’s Fair
 
The June 23, 1962 issue of Billboard reported that Capitol would be distributing “the Seattle World’s Fair official album,” The World of Century Twenty First. I wonder if the designation of Alexander Laszlo’s “Musical Panorama” as the official LP of Expo 62 hurt the sales of the other World of Tomorrow releases, like Attilio Mineo conducting Man in Space with Sounds or Vincent Lopez’s Music out of Century 21. At least, did it annoy their managers? Did someone get a phone call?

Laszlo was a composer of TV and movie music whose credits included Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and Beast from Haunted Cave (1959). The record sounds like the future as imagined by a 1962 TV orchestra joined by a mad scientist on synthesizer and theremin; in fact, it’s the State Symphony of Hamburg (a/k/a the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra)  and some unnamed “electronic devices” Laszlo used to make what he called “Electrosonic Music.” 
 

 
Vincent Price narrates, reading the parts of both the wise tour conductor and his passenger, a bewildered 20th century sap who stands in for you, the listener. The Monorail hurtles into the future (Price doesn’t say exactly when, but the Popular Science feature about the exhibit was titled “What’ll It Be Like in 2000 A.D.?”), stopping at tomorrow’s modular, movable house, with its electroluminescent lighting, tax-preparing “computer robot,” and mysterious home electronics:

We still have broadcasting, but no sets anymore. Receivers? Yes, like this little matchbox in my hand. Speakers for our high-fidelity stereo broadcasting are just two tiny pellets sized like a pill. They may be placed in curtains or in draperies. The television screens are part of architecture and interior furnishings. See this painting? It converts into a television screen when you wish.

[...]

We are very, very proud of our phone system that is televised. Notice, first: every baby born in the century 21 receives a birthday gift of his own phone number. This is his for life. No similar number will exist for any earth-born individual. Whether you remain at home, where messages can come by TV phone, or traveling, receiving calls over your own radio wristphone, the call will always be transmitted on your private, individual number, by simply speaking the number into the phone.

Vincent-1 and Vincent-2 hop in the car for a demonstration of the new scientific system that controls the weather outdoors. The auto of the future has no need of a “gasoline motor” or wheels; its anti-gravity air jets are powered by atomic energy beamed from radio transmitters. As we learn on the track “Atom For Humanity,” all the cheap, abundant energy buzzing through the air is a product of nuclear fusion. Science has also discovered how to produce fresh water from the ocean, where we grow “unlimited tons of nourishing foods at low prices,” and rockets are flying all over the place:

Both time and space are telescoped into an awe-inspiring whole. Rocket travel to distant places on the earth and moon has become a daily business. Global mail service is done mainly by rockets. The countdown has become a part of daily life.

Oh, and war has been abolished, along with hate.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.06.2017
09:14 am
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Scary Monsters & Super Cheap Thrills: The awesome movie poster art of Reynold Brown

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House on Haunted Hill’ (1959).
 
If I had the money, I guess I’d buy an old abandoned cinema somewhere downtown or maybe one of those big ole drive-ins that’s been long left for dead some place out in the desert. I’d refurbish it then screen double-feature monster movies each and every day. Double-bill after double-bill on continuous performance. Choice picks from the whole back catalog of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, dear old Peter Cushing, and “King of the Bs” Roger Corman. Yeah, I know, I would probably go bust within six months—but hell, it would have been worth it just to see these classic horror movies and glorious science-fiction films on the big screen where they belong and not on flickering cathode-ray tube of childhood memory.

The walls of this fantasy cinema would be covered with the finest movie posters and artwork by the likes of Albert Kallis, Frank McCarthy, and Reynold Brown—“the man who drew bug-eyed monsters.”

Brown has probably impacted on everyone’s memory one way or another as he produced a phenomenal array of movie posters. Brown supplied artwork for B-movie features like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Attack of the 50ft. Woman, mainstream movies like Spartacus and Mutiny on the Bounty, to those classic Corman horror films House of Usher and The Masque of Red Death. I know I can hang large parts of my childhood and teenage years by just one look at a Reynold Brown poster. Straight away I can tell you when and where I saw the movie and give a very good idea of what I thought and felt at that time. Now that’s the very thing many a great artist tries to make an aduience feel when they look at a work of art. While artists can spend a lifetime trying to achieve this, Reynold Brown was doing it as his day job.
 
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The Thing That Couldn’t Die’ (1958).
 
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Tarantula!’ (1955).
 
More of Reynold Brown’s classic sci-fi and hooror movie posters, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.28.2017
01:18 pm
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Stranded! Vincent Price on BBC’s ‘Desert Island Discs,’ 1969
04.27.2017
09:01 am
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Vincent Price on the beach in 1966’s ‘Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs’

Who better to be stranded on a desert island with than Vincent Price? He could probably recite all kinds of poetry and dramatic dialogue from memory, and he could certainly cook. Then, when the tedium and awful island fever and scurvy and parasites got you down, I bet he would liven things up a bit by threatening to kill and eat you. “I’d love to have you for dinner,” that sort of thing.

In the summer of 1969, Price was a guest on the long-running BBC radio series Desert Island Discs. All the “castaways” who appear on the show are asked to name a favorite record; Price’s charming selection was his own reading of “America the Beautiful” from his 1961 LP of the same title.

But then, he was into language, Vincent Price. Only four of the eight records he chose for the show had any music etched on them: Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse,” Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben,” Beethoven’s “Zärtliche Liebe” and Nat King Cole singing “Nature Boy.” The other half consisted of spoken word records like “America the Beautiful,” in addition to which Price chose a speech on human rights by FDR, John Gielgud reading “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and Alec Guinness in the first production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. His book is Leaves of Grass, his luxury a double bed.

Below, in the only surviving fragment of the broadcast, Price doesn’t mention any of his selections, but he discusses his education, his early years on the stage, and his work with museums and art foundations:

That goes, really, back to my debt to the president—President Roosevelt—because I feel that the actor, if he is an important actor in the public’s mind, that part of his debt to himself, particularly, and to his public, is to be a public servant, and to do something good. The one thing I knew before I became an actor was the history of man through his art. And in America, we were a nation, quite honestly, of blind people. Actually, musically, we’re terribly aware, but we’re still just learning how to open our eyes and see. We aren’t concentrated, and it’s a big effort to go and see pictures. Television has flunked it. Radio gave us music at its very best. You know, the world is conscious of good music, of all kinds of music. But television has given us no pictures.

 
Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.27.2017
09:01 am
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Frank Zappa plays a hunchback on a children’s show narrated by Vincent Price, 1983


 
During the 80s, Shelley Duvall hosted a Showtime series for children called Faerie Tale Theatre. It attracted what we call in Hollywood “quality-ass talent.” Jeff Bridges and Gena Rowlands joined Duvall for “Rapunzel,” Paul Reubens played Pinocchio, Susan Sarandon and Klaus Kinski starred in “Beauty and the Beast,” and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, Mick Jagger underwent the showbiz Caucasian-to-Asian transformation (local stylists call this dangerous procedure the “Mickey Rooney”) for the series’ adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” in which Mick portrayed the Emperor of China. What the fuck.
 

Mick Jagger as the Emperor of China on ‘Faerie Tale Theatre’
 
But the 1983 episode “The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About The Shivers,” based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, is remarkable because it’s got Frank Zappa playing a Transylvanian hunchback named Attilla and Vincent Price narrating, not to mention performances by Christopher Lee and David Warner. Here’s the plot, as summarized on the back of the old Betamax box:

Overcoming fear is a problem for most people. But there once was a boy whose problem was his complete lack of fear! Peter MacNicol stars as that boy in this amusing production narrated by Vincent Price. The King, played by Christopher Lee, promises the boy treasure and a beautiful Princess, Dana Hill, if he can defeat an Evil Sorcerer who has haunted the King’s castle. The boy meets an ominous mute hunchback, a headless man, and finally, in a duel to the death, the Evil Sorcerer himself! Yet still he knows no fear—until the surprising conclusion. Featuring production design inspired by the work of Breughel and Durer and marvelous performances from a superior cast, this is a tale you should be afraid… to miss!

 

 
As I learn from Román García Albertos’ detailed Zappa videography, Frank discussed the role on Australian TV a few days after the shoot:

FZ: Recently, just for a laugh, I did a role of a hunchback in a fairy tale that was completed about three days ago, in a show called Faerie Tale Theatre, which was produced by Shelley Duvall and airs on Showtime cable network here in the United States. I don’t know whether they have distribution outside the US.

Interviewer: Don’t think we get it, no.

FZ: Well, I think that they’re probably going to be trying to export the thing, but it’s a whole series of fairy tales. The first one that they did was “The Frog Prince” and it starred Robin Williams as the frog. He was really great. And things are all done on video, they use a lot of video effects. Mick Jagger did the last one that was on the air, he played a mandarin in “The Nightingale.” And so I got to be a hunchback in a story called “The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About The Shivers.”

Interviewer: Did he?

FZ: Eventually, yes, he found out about the shivers in one of the more humorous scenes in the thing.

Interviewer: Did you have lines in it?

FZ: Yes. Here are my lines: “Uh uh uh!” and “Oooh, heh heh!”

Watch’s Zappa’s appearance as the “ominous mute hunchback” on ‘Faerie Tale Theatre’ after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.18.2016
09:00 am
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Have a very scary Christmas with Vincent Price

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Habits often start through the comfort they give. While the tree may be up, the decorations hung and the lights a-twinkling I never feel truly festive without rereading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It’s a habit I started long ago, a ritual you might say, and each holiday I return to those opening lines:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s the mix of atmospheric ghost story with a deeply humanist moral that makes Dickens’ tale so irresistible. There were, of course, many other ghost stories before A Christmas Carol but none that so intrinsically linked the festive season with the supernatural.

The story of the ungrateful miser Ebenezer Scrooge finding personal redemption after a visit from three ghosts was inspired by the deleterious effects of the Industrial Revolution on the children of poor and working class families. Dickens was horrified at the conditions of the poor and originally considered writing a political pamphlet to highlight the issue—An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child—but thought that such a pamphlet would have only a limited appeal to academics, charity workers, liberal politicians and philanthropists.

After addressing a political rally in Manchester in October 1843, where he encouraged workers and employers to join together to bring social change, Dickens decided that it would be far better to write a story that could carry his message to the greatest number of people. Thus he wrote A Christmas Carol. Since its publication in 1843, it has never been out of print and its humanistic themes—to learn from our mistakes, enjoy the moment and find value in human life not things—continue to inspire generation after generation.

While I enjoy reading Dickens’ tale, I can think of no greater delight than hearing it told by Vincent Price—one of the few voices that could read YouTube comments and make them sound interesting. On Christmas Day of 1949, the debonair Mr. Price hosted a holiday special where he read an edited version of A Christmas Carol....

After the jump, Vincent Price and “the oldest extant straight adaptation” for television of ‘A Christmas Carol.’
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.22.2015
09:23 am
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Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album ‘An Adventure in Demonology’
09.25.2015
10:49 am
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Black Sabbath shared a manager with an explicitly Satanic band called Black Widow, and some people had a hard time keeping the two straight, or pretended they did. Nick Tosches’ crazed review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid mixed up Ozzy and Black Widow’s singer Kip Trevor, who does not, in fact, sound like “Keith Relf whining about the tampons stuck up his nostrils.”

I mention this because I’d never heard of Vincent Price’s nearly 90-minute-long occult crash course Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure In Demonology before I read an interview with Black Widow’s Clive Jones in the book Black Sabbath FAQ. Talking about the popularity of horror movies in the late 60s, Jones went on a tangent about his relationship with Price:

Vincent Price gave me… because he was on CBS, whenever he released an album, he gave me an album, which I still use to this day, of him talking about black magic and the war, and how black magic was used for good causes, as well as worshiping the devil type stuff.

 

 
As soon as I read those words, I made haste to Discogs to track this sucker down. Look, I don’t know what your idea of a good time is, but when it is the witching hour, and the autumnal equinox, and everyone is making ready for the festival of Samhain, and like that, fun for me means settling down with a hot mug of tannis root tea and an hour and a half of Vincent Price talking demonology, accompanied by spooky sounds from a 1969 synthesizer. From the bewitching intro:

Do you believe in witches and magic? [Chuckles] I hope so, because it can be unwise not to. Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in luck? Do you believe in premonitions—being somewhere where you know you’ve been before, although you know you’ve never been there? Do you believe in dreams and the unseen forces of astrology? Do you believe that there is order and genius in the hundred thousand million galaxies similar to our own? Do you believe that the life of our bodies is the beginning and end, or do you believe in reincarnation? Perhaps in heaven and in hell? Do you believe in prophecy and poltergeists? Heh? Do you?

Yes, you see, the universe is populated with spirits: unseen forces which permeate all things, both tangible and intangible, both visible and invisible. Things we see and things we don’t, things we know or think we know and things we know nothing of: the natural and the supernatural. So come with me into the magic world of the supernatural—the world of witches and demons, warlocks and sorcerers, oracles and seers, alchemists and wizards—into the unfathomable world of the unknown, the world of the spirits and unseen forces that guide our destiny. They are everywhere. Let’s turn down the lights and throw another log on the fire.

Original pressings of Witchcraft-Magic apparently included a booklet called (gulp) “The Hand of Glory,” and one wonders who put so much research and care into this set. The album’s script, which traces the history of witchcraft through the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazi Germany before turning to practical instruction in the dark arts (see side three, track three, “How to Make a Pact with the Devil”), is the work of a mysterious figure named Terry d’Oberoff, whose only other credit appears on the 1970 debut of an LA soul group called—wait for it—Black Magic.

Below, hear a needle drop of the whole double LP. If you’d like to hear more wailing of damned souls and less surface noise, Amazon has it on MP3 for $4.99.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.25.2015
10:49 am
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Macabre masterpieces: Art exhibition celebrates the life and career of Vincent Price
08.10.2015
10:49 am
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A. Nancy Cintron, “Programmed for Love & Destruction”
 
The Good Goat Gallery in Lakewood, Ohio, has decided to use the summer of 2015 to celebrate one of the finest actors in the sci-fi/horror pantheon (and a longtime DM favorite), the utterly ineffable Vincent Price. The modest storefront art space has mounted an exhibition of paintings inspired by Price’s life and career; the title of the show is “Six Degrees of Vincent,” and it is currently open for viewing on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons until August 29.

The gallery and the exhibition are the brainchild of A. Nancy Cintron, an artist whose paintings address topics from popular culture in amusing ways. “Six Degrees of Vincent” contains roughly 40 works of art, virtually all of which actually feature Price as a subject. Technicolor Vincent, black-and-white Vincent, campy Vincent, forbidding Vincent, interpreter of Poe Vincent…. so many representations of Vincent, all executed with noticeable skill and (far more important) evident affection and admiration for the actor’s work and unusual persona.

Posted on the wall near the entryway to the show is a statement from Cintron that reads as follows:

English was my second language … I actually learned it from watching a lot of television. Unfortunately, I was raised on incredibly raunchy comedy shows, hence my gravitational pull towards the perverse and the absurd. Vincent Price’s Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine was right up my alley. Although I have always preferred his classy macabre films, I have very much appreciated his ridiculous role as Doctor Goldfoot.

I have visited the exhibition twice, and on both occasions I had an extended discussion with Cintron. The gallery has a room that is not connected to the Vincent Price exhibition with a bewildering variety of works from multiple artists operating in an intriguing, whimsical, and macabre zone reminiscent of Tim Burton, Edward Gorey, Tara McPherson, etc. The Mexican tradition of Día de Muertos also serves as an inspiration for some of the artists.

Cintron’s enthusiasm for Vincent Price is obviously shared by the artists who have contributed works to the show, and she has somehow encouraged the painters to think outside the box when it comes to approaching the canvas mounted on the wall (although that may have been their idea all along, of course). In other words, a good many of the artworks have a 3-D component or combine sculptural elements in ways that bear some resemblance to the diorama or the puppet show. Indeed, one of Cintron’s own Price-inspired creations, “Product of My Warped & Twisted Genius,” features a knob that juts through the surface of the canvas with which the viewer can manipulate a music box—remarkably, it is not the only piece in the show that incorporates a music box.

As the statement above indicates, Cintron’s several works in the show focus on a 1965 movie of Price’s called Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and its sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, which came out in 1966. From the looks of Cintron’s work, the movie is a goddamn pip.

The artists represented in the show come from locales such as Mexico, France, Italy, and England, as well as less remote hubs of artistic activity such as Dayton and Cleveland (the latter of which which borders Lakewood). Victoria Price, the daughter of Vincent Price, has helped oversee the show, part of the proceeds of which will be donated to a scholarship foundation dedicated to the macabre master.

Cintron noted with some satisfaction that a remarkably high percentage of the depictions of Vincent Price in the exhibition (of which only a handful are shown here) featured Price’s trademark cocked eyebrow—proof enough that the artists aren’t kidding about the fervency of their ardor for the actor’s work.

On Friday, August 28, there is a reception to mark the end of the exhibition, which may find itself in such far-flung places as Los Angeles or Australia in the not-too-distant future.

Some of the works below can be viewed in greater detail by clicking on them.
 

A. Nancy Cintron, “Product of My Warped & Twisted Genius”
 
More delightful paintings of Vincent Price after the jump…..
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.10.2015
10:49 am
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Vincent Price has some thoughts on racial prejudice and religious hatred
03.20.2015
10:09 am
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As if anyone needed any further proof of the ultimate badassery of Vincent Price…

In this crucial speech from the conclusion of the “Author Of Murder” episode of The Saint, which aired on NBC Radio on July 30, 1950,  Price lays out his feelings on prejudice being antithetical to a free society. Price denounces racial and religious intolerance as a “poison” which fuels support for the nation’s enemies. These are powerful words for 1950, but just as important, necessary, and applicable today.

And, of course, Price’s delivery always guarantees chills.

Ladies and gentlemen, poison doesn’t always come in bottles. And it isn’t always marked with the skull and crossbones of danger. Poison can take the form of words and phrases and acts: the venom of racial and religious hatred. Here in the United States, perhaps more than ever before, we must learn to recognize the poison of prejudice and to discover the antidote to its dangerous effects. Evidences of racial and religious hatred in our country place a potent weapon in the hands of our enemies, providing them with the ammunition of criticism. Moreover, group hatred menaces the entire fabric of democratic life. As for the antidote: you can fight prejudice, first by recognizing it for what it is, and second by actively accepting or rejecting people on their individual worth, and by speaking up against prejudice and for understanding. Remember, freedom and prejudice can’t exist side by side. If you choose freedom, fight prejudice.

From the original broadcast:
 

 
From: The Vortex of Our Minds

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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03.20.2015
10:09 am
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Vincent Price visits ‘The Dating Game,’ 1972
10.30.2014
07:18 pm
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On October 31st, 1972, a 61-year-old Vincent Price paid a visit to the ABC game show, The Dating Game. Many notable entertainers were contestants on the show such as Karen Carpenter, Sally Field, Farrah Fawcett and Steve Martin. Dusty Springfield, Andy Kaufman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and even a serial killer made The Dating Game scene.

In case you’ve never seen the show, here’s the premise: three “eligible bachelors” (or bachelorettes) are kept behind a partition as a potential romantic prospect asks them each questions to determine who she (or in some cases he) should go out with. On this episode however, Price, who was promoting his 1972 film, Dr. Phibes Rises Again!, ran interference with the trio of single guys on behalf of the show’s contestant (who was always referred to as “Miss X”), 19-year-old actress Janit Baldwin.

The affable Price is ridiculously entertaining and in line with the Halloween theme of the show, he tweaks his questions to include subject matter just so, leaving the bachelors to respond in ways that are totally cringeworthy (which was business as usual on this program, by the way). Apologies for the quality of the video but it was just too good not to share!
 

Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.30.2014
07:18 pm
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Craptastic: Vincent Price hosts ‘Strange But True: Football Stories’
04.24.2014
11:36 am
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“Sometimes pro football is like the Bermuda Triangle…. strange and unusual things happen that can’t be explained.”

Although it tries to come off like the Mondo Cane of NFL football or something, the Vincent Price-hosted Strange But True: Football Stories, a direct to VHS home video release from 1987 is basically just tales of uncanny victories, player superstitions and dumb luck. A few stories are more amusing than others, but all in all, one has to wonder just how desperate Vincent Price was for a paycheck at this stage of his career by agreeing to host this In Search Of meets the NFL lameness. I want to believe he shot this piece of crap in a day to underwrite the purchase of an expensive painting or a bottle of fine wine. It’s basically stories of unlikely wins with scary music and Price showing up every once in a while. He doesn’t come off as much of a football fan, does he?

From the back of the VHS box:

Travel off the beaten path with Vincent Price as he unearths the strange plays and bizarre players who have inhabited the NFL for the past half century.

Step right up and see for yourself the one-eyed quarterback who led the NFL in passing one year. Meet the player whose diet consisted of blood and raw meat. See weird team rituals. The strangest games. Discover the fattest achievers who ever played. And relive such out-of-this-world plays as “the Holy Roller,” “The Immaculate Reception” and “The Miracle of the Meadowlands.

So enter, if you dare, into the weird, wild and wacky world of the NFL. This is one fantastic voyage you won’t want to miss.”

That’s pretty debatable unless you’re a glutton for punishment. But it tries so hard…
 

 
More supernatural sports with Vincent Price after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.24.2014
11:36 am
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Cooking with Vincent Price to a funky beat!
03.28.2014
11:57 am
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Here’s Vincent Price’s very own recipe for boneless pork sirloin like you’ve never heard it before. Price boasts that “the meat will be as tender as a woman’s heart and the flavor can only be described as… reckless.”

Mix by RenRok.

 
With thanks to Colony!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.28.2014
11:57 am
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Devil’s Food: Alice Cooper and Vincent Price in ‘The Nightmare’
02.07.2014
10:44 am
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As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a total nut for Alice Cooper. But Alice Cooper, the band. The solo Alice? Eh, not so much.

The “classic” Alice Cooper albums I can play over and over and over again. I played them obsessively when I was a child and I still play them a lot today (especially Billion Dollar Babies). There was one year—1986 to be exact—where I pretty much only listened to four things: James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (don’t laugh, they’re fucking awesome) and Alice Cooper. To the exclusion of all else.

From Pretties for You through Easy Action, Love It to Death, Killer, School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies, Alice Cooper could do no wrong in my eyes. Those albums are perfect (well maybe not the first two, but they do have their perfect moments.)

Muscle of Love is basically a shit album. There’s a reason why it was in the cut-out bins so soon after it came out. It’s a weak record and the band split after it.

Then comes solo Alice. Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, Lace and Whiskey... and the singles for fuck’s sake, Alice Cooper was singing ballads! Sensitive ballads. Even if I do have soft spots for “Only Woman Bleed,” “I Never Cry” and “You and Me,” this was AM radio lovey-dovey stuff that could have been written by David fucking Gates coming from the coal-eyed ghoul with the snake ‘round his neck who’d given the world “Black JuJu,” “Dead Babies” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”!!! What gives?

Although I thought it was great when I was a kid, Welcome to My Nightmare is a really mediocre album. I listened to it recently and the only things I liked were the title song, the aforementioned sappy ballad and the one number that really rips on that album “Cold Ethyl,” which is absolutely fucking amazing. It’s tame, slick and uninteresting. Even backed by Lou Reed’s stellar Rock & Roll Animal band, these albums are a pale, pale version of what preceded them.
 

 
Now having said all that, I can forgive the lapse in musical quality and still enjoy “The Nightmare,” a late-night 1975 TV special that aired on ABC’s Wide World in Concert on its own terms (or at least on the terms that I first saw it on, as a wide-eyed nine-year-old Alice Cooper fanatic up well past his bedtime). It’s basically an extremely campy “rock opera” type treatment of Welcome to My Nightmare (itself a bit of a concept album to begin with, with a guy trapped in a bad dream he can’t escape from) with Cooper, Vincent Price (who is featured on the album prominently) and a variety of dancers, including Alice’s future wife, Cheryl. The former “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the more mainstream-friendly, Muppet Show-appearing Alice was still a lot of fun at this point—for at least for a little while longer—so enjoy!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.07.2014
10:44 am
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Vincent Price wrote a book about his dog Joe
12.31.2013
12:05 pm
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If you didn’t have enough reasons to love Vincent Price, here’s one more.

Vincent Price loved animals, in particular dogs, and his favorite dog was the one he owned, a dog called Joe.

Vincent was so enamored with his four-legged pal that he wrote an entire book about him called The Book of Joe, in 1961, which begins as follows:

“This is a tale of how I went to the dogs or, to be numerically correct, to the dog. Now please do not expect this book to end with a glorious proclamation of rehabilitation. Not a chance. After fourteen years I’m incurably hooked on, intoxicated by, and addicted to - my dog Joe.”

I had never heard of Mr. Price’s foray into canine biography before, but now have it on my growing list of books I would like to read,  and going by some reviews on Good Reads, it sounds like a treat:

If you are ever lucky enough to find this out of print and rare book, you will be delighted by the WONDERFUL stories it contains. Told as elegantly and masterfully as only Vincent Price could tell. I could hear his distinct voice within every written word. A real rare gem for Vincent Price fans or Dog lovers in general.

This book tells not only the story of Joe but of other Price pets. Including apes, camels and roosters, just to name a few. The book is somewhat auto-biographical in nature as it relates to his love of animals. Sometimes sad but often hilarious, I laughed more often than I cried. I always enjoy a happy ending and so Mr. Price deliveres as the climax and ending becomes triumphant yet poignant.

This book helped me remember that the world lost not only a great Actor when Mr. Price died, but a loving husband, father, gourmet cook, art critic, and one of a dog’s best friends.

It appears Vincent Price’s The Book of Joe is a much sought after and rather difficult to find book, so I guess until I’m lucky enough to own a copy, I will have to make do with these charming ink drawings by artist Leo Hershfield, which illustrate Mr. Price’s book.
 
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More from Vincent and Joe, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.31.2013
12:05 pm
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‘Dracula—The Great Undead,’ fun vampire doc with Vincent Price
11.20.2013
04:19 pm
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Tales of vampires have existed for millennia, but the idea of the vampire as we understand it today comes from late-17th and early-18th-century Europe where oral traditions told of vampires as revenants of evil beings, including suicides and witches, who preyed on the living.

Of course, the most famous vampire is Count Dracula the undead nobleman created by novelist Bram Stoker who spent seven years researching European folklore and vampire stories before writing one word of his classic tale. Yet Dracula was not the first fictional vampire: there had been Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla in 1871, which was the tale of a lesbian vampire who preyed on young women; before this James Malcolm’s Varney the Vampire (1847), a grisly “penny dreadful” that became a best-seller; and at the beginning was Vampyre, a story written by Doctor John Polidori during a madcap summer spent with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, which also inspired the creation of Frankenstein. That must have been one hell of a vacation.

Part of Dracula‘s great allure is the historical association with the bloody Transylvanian Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia or “Vlad the Impaler.” In the documentary Dracula the Great Undead, the ever-watchable Vincent Price traces the true story behind one of fiction’s greatest characters. As our host, Price is his usual charming self, and makes this documentary a delight to watch.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.20.2013
04:19 pm
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