Sometimes I just stand there, staring at myself in the mirror and wondering how I keep getting myself into these things...

This past Monday night I was here at the office, scouring the digital landscape in search of a possible topic or two for my column in this week’s issue of the newspaper, when I stumbled upon an online debate over the merits - or, in the minds of some, the perceived lack thereof - of the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Full disclosure before going any further: I w...

(Note: This is a newspaper column that I wrote last year, and which I had fully intended to post here earlier - but things happen, you know?)

I recently had the opportunity to re-watch one of my all-time favorite motion pictures, and was reminded yet again of just how great a film it is.

American Graffiti, George Lucas’ second theatrical film, was one of the first films of its era to prove the value in “word of mouth promotion.“ Dimly viewed by the studio execs at the time - who famousl...

Today's TV History lesson, prompted by a discussion I saw on a Facebook page this morning:

No, Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show was not the first woman to wear pants on TV. Yes, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance both wore them on I Love Lucy. I'm pretty sure you can find some other examples of pre-Petrie panted pulchritude as well, if one wishes to take the time to investigate. Yet it was very much Mary's pants which DID become an issue with some sponsors and network execs.

The reason...

..So I've been reading about this made-for-streaming series reportedly in the works that is a sequel to the George Lucas-Ron Howard film Willow, and I keep wondering if it will make references to the Lucas-Chris Claremont trilogy of follow-up novels. I personally liked those books a great deal, but I suspect they're now going to be shunted off into non-canon like the Star Wars Legends material.

In any event, an online conversation I started on the subject earlier today brought this response ...

I’ve been taking part over the past day or so in some interesting discussions on a couple of different FB sites regarding the nature of the Batman character, initiated by an article in which Michael Keaton - in my mind still the BEST cinematic Batman, and that is not a subject which I care to debate - decided he did not want to return for a second sequel after the franchise was turned over to Joel Schumacher. At some point I decided perhaps I might distill my thoughts in those conversations...

So somebody today on a DC Comics fans page asked fellow members to post their five favorite “DC Events” of all time. And then provided a list of storylines that included Crisis on Infinite Earths and all the post-Crisis usual suspects (Death of Superman, Nightfall, Infinite Crisis, Blackest Night, Final Crisis, et al).

My initial response was to yawn and mutter under my breath, “Not this stuff again.” Then I gave the question some deeper thought and - being the rapidly aging, unapolo...

I had the opportunity this past weekend to finally catch a trio of movies I‘d been wanting to see for some time.

First up was the current blockbuster Godzilla Vs. Kong, the fourth (and final, according to some reports) entry in the Warner Brothers “Monster Universe” series that began with 2014’s Godzilla. Like its predecessors, it is a no-holds-barred roller coster ride; not so much a remake as a complete reimagining of the 1962 Japanese film King Kong Vs. Godzilla, the new film makes ...

A Complete List (I Think) Of All The "Holy" Expletives

Uttered By Burt Ward (a.k.a. Robin, The Boy Wonder)

This is one of those silly little endeavors that grew out of another project I was undertaking at the time...

I was endeavoring to put together a chronological timeline for the 1960s Batman television series - similar to those for certain other pop culture franchises prepared over the years by such friends and colleagues as Win Scott Eckert, Rick Lai and Matthew Baugh - that would incorp...

Most fathers and sons, I’ve been led to believe over the years, bond over such things as sports. My sons and I are obviously cut from very different cloth, indeed…

I can’t remember now exactly how the subject first came up but, during an unexpected mutual lull in our daily responsibilities at the newspaper office recently, my son Josh and I found ourselves talking about crossover fiction. At one point Josh got to talking about how Star Trek has (at least in the comic books) crossed ove...

Most Doc Savage fans know about the 1975 film version of the first book, Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze, produced by George Pal (Destination Moon, The Time Machine, When Worlds Collide) and starring former TV Tarzan Ron Ely. There's been a lot of debate over the years regarding the merits of that film.

Many decry its camp sensibilities, the changes made to the original story and the lack of faith Warner Brothers seemed to have for the project (the latter foreshadowing Disney's dismal support o...

This year, 2018, marks the 200th anniversary of a novel that not only changed the life of its young author but essentially created an entirely new genre of literature.

Mary was just a wee snip of a girl - merely 18 years old - when she first conceived her tale. It was born from a challenge, issued by a friend while she and her husband visited that friend in Switzerland during the rainy summer of 1816.

As the story has it, the group amused themselves one evening by reading German ghost stories t...

Once upon a time there was an enchanted land where heroes still walked the earth performing wondrous deeds, and where strange and magical things took place on a fairly regular basis. 

It was a place where children could take refuge from the humdrum realities of day-to-day life and be happy. I should know; I visited there a few times myself.

But there came to this happy land a Wicked Witch, who had forgotten what it was like to be young and did not believe in joy and happiness and fun. She looke...

Just another pointless list 

by John Allen Small

So this is how this list came to be…

On Sept. 12, 2018, I posted a picture of the cover of Batman Comics No. 251 and explained how the story - “The Joker’s Five Way Revenge!” - was one of my two favorite Batman stories of all time and shared how I remember getting this issue when it originally came out. I was 10 years old and Mom bought it for me at the old newsstand on Court Street in Kankakee. 

It was my first encounter with the ...

In one of the better-known installments of the Peanuts comic strip, Linus makes the following observation during a conversation with Charlie Brown: “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand!!”

I'm starting to feel much the same way with regards to Star Wars. I still love George Lucas' creation - it's the fans and the new distributor I'm learning to hate.

I just read an article stating that Solo: A Star Wars Story may end up being the first Star Wars movie to lose money, and that R...

Hadn't had the time to do this before today, due to deadline pressures at my day job and other obligations, so I’d like to take a moment to share my thoughts regarding  Solo: A Star Wars Story.

WHAT I LIKED: Pretty much everything, despite my initial misgivings about the project. Alden Ehrenreich actually did a pretty fair job of channeling Harrison Ford as the title character (Ford has made similar comments himself in a couple of interviews I’ve read), and Donald Glover made a better Land...

This project grew out of my son Joshua’s stated desire to read the entire run of the authorized Tarzan novels - the original series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those ERB Inc.-sanctioned novels by Fritz Leiber, Philip José Farmer, Joe Lansdale, Will Murray and Michael S. Sanford - more or less in the order in which they take place. When Josh announced his intent, I decided to compile this chronology for the purpose of helping him and other fans who might be considering a similar reading pr...

I have always loved the written word – reading it, writing it, at home or at school or at the office or sitting in the back seat of one of Mom and Dad's old Volkswagens when I was a child – and it has been my great fortune to have been able to turn this love into something resembling an actual career. (Much to the surprise, I'm sure, of a certain fifth grade teacher who once made the mistake of telling me that I would never amount to anything… but that’s a discussion for another day.)...

By this time next week it will all, at long last, be over. The American people will have spoken, and - barring any last-second temper tantrums, court challenges or some other kind of monkey wrench thrown into the works - we will know who the 45th President of the United States will be and, for better or worse, we’ll be getting our first real glimpse into what the next four years may hold for our nation.

But I don’t want to talk about the election or the candidates anymore. It’s just go...

If someone had told me while I was sitting at the breakfast table Thursday morning that I would be spending much of that day defending the decision to award Bob Dylan this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, I suspect I would have done a spit take and blew Raisin Bran all over the room…

Every year when the Nobels are announced, there is always at least one recipient who becomes the subject of some form of controversy. This year that recipient was Mr. Dylan; a lot of people agreed with the...

It occurred to me recently that it had been a while since the last time I devoted this space to reviewing a new movie. This seems like as good a time as any to rectify this - and frankly I could not have picked a better movie with which to do so.

Full disclosure: The Legend Of Tarzan was one of those movies I was looking forward to with both great anticipation and, at the same time, a certain degree of dread. Anticipation because, as I have written about many times in the past, Tarzan is a c...

(NOTE: The following is a longer version of one of my recent newspaper columns.)


Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to become reacquainted with an old friend. A fellow I first met when I was a young boy and who became one of my most faithful companions as I was growing up. A gentleman who taught me about the importance of being observant, and of not allowing emotions to overpower logic - a skill I readily admit I have yet to master, though I continue to strive in that direction...

MEMOIRS OF A BAT-FAN

In case you happened to miss it (you’d be surprised, it seems like there is always a few who somehow manage to not receive the memo), this past Tuesday marked an important milestone in the history of American popular culture. 

Well, it was important to some of us, anyway...

January 12 marked the 50th anniversary of the night that the television series Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, premiered on the ABC television network (WLS-TV, Channel 7 in Chicago if y...

Tomorrow, September 1, marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of my favorite author: Edgar Rice Burroughs, father of Tarzan, chronicler of Barsoom and Pellucidar, and the man whose stories helped teach me to read and made me want to become a writer myself. 

In celebration I thought it might be appropriate to share a poem in tribute to Burroughs that I wrote roughly 20 years ago now…

IN MEMORIAM: ERB

A Poem By John Allen Small

With simple words on paper

He drew a map that led me

On a ...

This past weekend my wife and son Joshua and I went to see the fifth entry in the popular Mission: Impossible film series, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. 

And just as was the case with the previous four movies, I came away with mixed feelings. 

On the one hand, it was a fun, entertaining, well-made film... probably the best one in the series so far, in fact, strictly in terms of overall entertainment value. Witty and reasonably intelligent, with strong performances all around and a bet...

Every now and then something happens that makes me just sit back, scratch my head and wonder at what point the cosmic axis shifted so violently that I ended up in a world so different from the one I grew up in.

Case in point: 

Just before noon Tuesday, while putting together this week’s issue of the newspaper where I work as News Editor, I took a break long enough to walk across the street to the post office and retrieve my daily mail. One of the items I pulled out of the mailbox happened...

I read an article the other day which reported that the Pez candy company is planning to produce a movie based on their candy dispensers, more or less along the same lines as The Lego Movie.

Hmmm....

Now I stand second to no one in my fondness for Pez. I remember my brothers and I using our Pez dispensers as pseudo-action figures when we were little kids, and often find myself wishing that I still had the Green Hornet Pez Dispenser my parents bought for me (for a mere 33 cents, if I remembe...

Here's something I promised Win Eckert I would post when I got home, following a discussion on the topic that we had at his house during our recent visit... 

During the first wave of Star Wars prose fiction that began with Del Rey’s publication of Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye in 1978, L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian trilogy (which takes places prior to Han Solo’s ownership of the Millennium Falcon) represented the earliest chronological adventures in the series; t...

I have written a time or 10 in the past about my great childhood love of two great old TV series, Batman and The Green Hornet, both of which originally aired on ABC in the 1960s. Both shows were produced by a gentleman named William Dozier, who - in an effort to garner a larger viewership for The Green Hornet, which wasn’t quite bringing in the ratings of the other show - came up with the idea of having the Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato appear in an episode of Batman.  

Now you have t...

A few years back, the folks at Archie Comics put a new spin on the age-old question of which of his two girlfriends their teenage hero would ultimately wind up with: spoiled rich girl Veronica Lodge, or down-to-earth “girl next door” Betty Cooper. 

The resulting six-part mini-series, entitled “The Married Life,” had Archie Andrews imagining what his future life might be like under either scenario (with three issues apiece devoted to each would-be bride). The “what if” premise pro...

Even after my parents bought our first color television set when I was a little boy, it seemed that most of the programs I enjoyed watching were those that had been filmed in glorious black and white.

After school every afternoon it was the Three Stooges, the Little Rascals and the original Max Fleischer “Popeye” cartoons on Channel 32. Around dinner time Mom or Dad would flip the switch over to Channel 9 for the nightly reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show. Channe...

(Above left: The poster at the entryway of the Kingston Trio traveling exhibit at the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City through May of 2014. Above right: KT founding member Bob Shane holding copies of both the paperback and hardback editions of the anthology The Green Hornet: Still At Large, which contains my story "Bad Man's Blunder" in which The Hornet meets Bob, Nick Reynolds, John Stewart and Dean Reilly. Below: Just a few of the great KT albums released over the years.)

Longtime r...

I have long maintained that there is a tie for my all-time favorite motion picture: "Star Wars" (the orig...

It was nice to see Tishomingo resident and fellow writer Tom Morrow stop here at the newspaper office the other day bearing copies of his recently released second novel, Yesterday’s Gone – The Senior Class of ‘61. 

Yesterday’s Gone is a follow-up to Tom’s first novel, Dust In The Wind, which followed the adventures of  17-year-old Dave White as he leaves his home in Oklahoma for a job harvesting wheat in the summer of 1960. The new book begins with Dave returning home, and follows ...

The year 1933 was an important one for American pop culture. That was the year that saw the debut of not one but two of our country’s most popular and enduring fictional icons, characters who still live in the hearts of millions of fans nearly a century later. 

One was Dr. Clark Savage Jr. - better known to his legion of admirers as Doc Savage, the intrepid adventurer, surgeon and crimefighter who was the lead character in 181 issues of his own pulp fiction magazin...

(Note: This is a recently revised version of an article I originally wrote about 10 years ago. If anyone who reads this is aware of any titles I may have missed, or has additional information that should be included, please let me know so I can make any appropriate changes for a future revision.)

Doc Savage has had a rather spotty history so far as the comics have been concerned. 

In 1936, Lester Dent and pulp illustrator Paul Orban submitted a proposed “Doc Savage” comic strip to vari...

"Best Of The West" Collection

by John Allen Small

(NOTE: The original version of this article was written two years ago, but I've never been able to determine whether it ever actually saw print in the publication for which it was intended. My messages to the publisher were never returned and no confirmation of its publication was ever forwarded to me. So I'm posting a slightly updated version here for those who have the same fond memories of these marvelous ...

As a lifelong bookworm I always like it when I get the opportunity to read books in order to review them in my weekly newspaper column. Over the Christmas-New Year’s holiday season I had the opportunity to peruse several such recent releases that I felt were worth passing along to our readers. 

It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of this column (or anyone who knows me well at all) that my favorite among this crop of recent material is the long-awaited biography of my all-time f...

Perhaps it should have come as no surprise that this week’s report by NASA, regarding the data collected by the Mars rover Curiosity, was do doggone anti-climactic in light of all the Internet buzz and media hoopla that ensued after scientist John Grotzinger announced that the findings were destined “for the history books.” 

It’s hard to live up to that kind of advance publicity. Just ask Kim Kar...

It was the Autumn of 1970. There is no earthly reason why I should remember it so clearly today, seeing as how I was all of 8 years old at the time and I sometimes seem to have trouble these days recalling things that happened just a few minutes ago. But for me that era burns bright in my memory like some eternal sunny summer day, a warm shelter o...

Lancelot had his Holy Grail; Indiana Jones, his Lost Ark. And, for many years,  I had The Record.

Not just any record, you understand. The object of my quest was an album entitled Somethin’ Else, recorded by The Kingston Trio and released by Decca Records in November of 1965. 

I’ve been a fan of the Kingston Trio since I was a small boy. Between the two of us, my father and I had managed to collect every album that the Kingston Trio ever recorded… except this one. So I spent close to ...

A Poem By John Allen Small

With simple words on paper

He drew a map that led me

On a pathway to adventure:

From Africa and Hell's ...

One of our current county commissioners here where I live has a favorite expression that he voices whenever the discussion turns to the differences between the way things are done now and the way they were done in days gone by:  “We’re not in Mayberry anymore.”

I understand what the gentleman means when he says this, but each time I hear it I find myself fighting back the urge to respond: “We never were living in Mayberry! Mayberry doesn't exist. It’s an entry in the Atlas of Make-...

Somebody – it may have been one of my high school English teachers, but I can’t remember at the moment – once told me that a person can’t learn anything valuable from reading science fiction, or from watching it on television or at the movies.

Who says? 

If, indeed, my old college professor Dr. Bill Finger was correct in observing that there are lessons to be learned at every stop we may make along the way in this life, then it stands to reason that popular fiction in general – a...

As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, it was 35 years ago this week that a trip to one of the local movie houses where I lived had an unexpectedly profound impact upon my imagination – and, indeed, upon my life.

The movie in question had actually opened in other cities a couple of weeks earlier; between that time and the day it finally arrived at the old Town Cinema theatre in Kankakee. Illinois, I had seen a number of news rep...

For much of the past several months I have been devoting much of my free time to helping to promote what is STILL my favorite motion picture of the year thus far: the Disney Studios’ release John Carter. 

As I noted in this space earlier this year, this wonderfully crafted film – based on the first novel in an 11-volume series of science fiction tales penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan – was unfairly pegged as a “flop” even ...

The latest example occurred just after Christmas, when I became the target of ridicule hurled in my direction by  someone I could only assume is too young to remember a time when personal computers were...

Ran across a thread on www.moviefanfare.com yesterday where guest blogger Peter Eramo, Jr shared his own personal top five celebrity crushes - stars who, to use his own words, "are simply hot, hot, hot!"

It was an interesting list to say the least. Not surprisingly it included three current celebrities - Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel and Christina Hendricks - two of which I have to admit have never done much for me. (I'll leave it to others to figure out which two.) I was impressed t find...

Flipping through the television channels some years back, I stumbled upon a television news program which had devoted its entire hour to examining what has apparently one of the most popular religions in modern America.

One segment of the program which particularly fascinated me followed four members of this faith as they travelled about their own personal version of Mecca, pausing at various shrines to pay tribute to the object of their earnest devotion: a statue bearing his likeness, the p...

When I was a little boy, there were two heroes that I really looked up to.

The first was my father. Well, I suppose that’s typical enough…every little boy I ever knew wanted to grow up and be just like his old man, and all the little girls wanted to be like their mommies. That is, until all those little boys and girls grew into teenagers, and suddenly Mommy and Daddy were somehow transformed (if only for a brief time) into Mother and Father. The Dreaded Enemies.

The other great hero of ...

As long as we're on the subject of "Star Trek," let me begin by stating that there's a story behind the above illustration...

Back in 2000, as much for my own amusement as anything else, I wrote an essay entitled "The Eugenics War Declassified," in which I attempted to explain how the Eugenic Wars first mentioned in a 1966 "Star Trek" episode could have still occurred given what had actually transpired historically during the intervening years. As a fan of Philip José Farmer and his Wold Ne...

“I didn’t know you were a Trekkie, Small.”

The comment was made by my boss one day a number of years ago as he happened to overhear a conversation I was having with a co-worker. We were talking about the film “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” which I found (and still find) to...

(Note: The following was my entry in a contest Time magazine held in the late 1990s - I forget the exact year right off - in which the publication asked its readers to submit ideas for an episode of a television series in which characters from another series make an appearance. The winner was some dummy that had Homer SImpson turning up on an episode of "E.R." I still like MY idea better....)

*      *      *

Dear Time:

My name is John Small. I live in Ravia, Oklahoma, and the following is ...

By John Allen Small

On occasion in various regions of the planet Earth during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there we...

“Mythology  n. The collective myths and legends of a particular people, usually describing the exploits of gods and heroes…”

Every era of Mankind’s existence has produced its own unique set of heroes, and the past century has ce...

I have often been accused of not being in step with the rest of the world when it comes to my preferences, beliefs and outlooks on life. Personally I’ve never much cared about such things, and typically when the accusation has been thrown my way my response is that I’m fine and it’s the rest of the world that is out of synch. 

This test was created to determine if I’m really that far off into my own little world, or if there are more of us out there than the masses would care to beli...

I was digging through some old files the other night and ran across something I wrote that suddenly seemed noteworthy again in light of our most recent celebrity controversy... 

It was written in response to a lengthy discussion amongst members of the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society concerning an article in the July 7, 1999 edition of Variety in which it had been announced that former actor, former governor and philandering husband Arnold Schwarzenegger was planning to star as Doc Savage i...

Somebody once told me that I didn’t have any culture.

It happened way back during my college days, but I remember the incident as vividly as if it were yesterday. Some classmates and I took a trip up to Chicago one weekend (apparently it was one of those all-too-rare weekends when none of us had any term papers to write), and while we were there one of our number suggested that we pay a visit to one of the city’s famed art galleries.

I didn’t really want to go. To be honest, I don’t...