Comic Cuts — 29 October 2021

I hit the 10,000 word mark on Action this weekend and then powered through to 15,000 by Wednesday. I'm writing this Thursday morning and thinking about the critical reaction to the comic that began almost the moment it was published, with the first big article appearing on 23 February 1976, only two weeks after the first issue hit the newsstands.

As I write, I'm including a few personal thoughts as I was a 13-year-old reader of the paper when it came out, so I know what it was like to know about the movie Jaws, which was big news around New Year of 1976, and being unable to see it... and then along came 'Hook Jaw'! I was already a reader of crime thrillers by the  likes of Ian Fleming and James Hadley Chase, but I was surprised to discover that I hadn't even seen all of the Bond movies prior to Action coming out. I saw a double bill of Thunderball and From Russia With Love in, I think, 1969, when I was 7 (I went with my school friend Richard Wood, who lived just up the road, and his Dad); then I saw Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun when they came out in 1973 and 1974. But the other Sean Connerys I didn't see until they began broadcasting them on the TV, which wasn't until 1975.

Now, that makes me wonder how long it took before other films reached the small screen. I remember being a big fan of the Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) films. I'm pretty sure that the first one I saw was Billion Dollar Brain (much derided by some, but I love it!), then The IPCRESS File... but when would they have first appeared? What about other thrillers like Bullitt, Dirty Harry and The French Connection?

I must have seen these on TV, same as I saw all the Hammer movies on television. I have a vague memory of horror films appearing late at night on BBC2 and watching them on a little black & white portable in my bedroom. Mind you, my memory is terrible and badly jumbled, and that little portable TV wasn't disposed of until I was in my thirties! I moved to Colchester in 1992 and one of the first things I did was buy a colour TV and a video player so I could catch up on hundreds of movies I'd missed. This might sound bizarre in today's world of multiplexes, but when I moved away from Chelmsford, there wasn't a single cinema in the town. There used to be five; when I was visiting cinemas in my twenties the number was down to three until the Regent turned into a bingo hall; then the Pavilion became a used car lot, and finally the Odeon shut down. An old bingo hall, the Empire, was reconverted into a cinema, but didn't last long. And it was a year or two after I left that the Odeon opened a new multi-screen cinema.

I loved the old Odeon, which was also a music venue where I saw Wishbone Ash and XTC. It was a 1,000-seater with a balcony. Back in the days of support features, you could buy a ticket and watch a film through twice without anyone kicking you out. I remember being one of only a handful of people sitting in this vast auditorium watching Alien for the first time, and then watching it all the way through again!

The Odeon tended to have the bigger films and our Nan would take me and my sister to the cinema during the summer holidays. I remember one year we went to the Odeon and watched Herbie Rides Again, or some such nonsense, much to my disappointment, because I wanted to see Swallows and Amazons at the Regent. I was 12 and outvoted and very grumpy. I still have no love for that damn love bug.

The Pavilion had more adult films. My strongest memory is that I took Kate Jackson on a date to see Death Wish II. My reasoning was that it had a soundtrack by Jimmy Page and she was into Led Zeppelin. I still cannot think of a more inappropriate film to take a girl to on a date. I was mortified.

I have since made better choices. Mel and I saw Dune on Sunday and it was as good as I hoped it would be. I have been slightly obsessing over it for a couple of months, nervous that it would be delayed yet again and that if it failed to perform even slightly a sequel would be canned for the most stupid of reasons — it would struggle to find a slot in the schedule. All the Marvel movies have been pushed back again and there are a number of big ticket films in the works that will dominate the multiplexes — the Avatar sequels, for instance — and you can't tell me that Disney will keep Star Wars spin-offs out of the cinema for too long, not after spending $4bn to buy the franchise. The well-deserved buzz around The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett (which I'm really looking forward to) surely means that there's someone at Disney sharpening a pencil and jotting down potential release dates. If they can fit one in while Marvel Phase IV is going on, they will.

(I just took a quick look to see if anything was scheduled and it looks like Patty Jenkins is directing Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for release on 22 December 2023. So I was right!)

Anyway, the good news as that Dune part 2 has been greenlit and is due out on 23 October 2023. What a relief.

Just going back to James Bond for a second... that Thunderball image from the 1965 poster (see the column header above), I had a jigsaw puzzle with that image on, or a similar scene from that underwater sequence. And I had a second Bond puzzle with Sean Connery hiding behind a rock with a rifle from a menacing helicopter. This must be from when I was nine or ten, which goes to show that while I might struggle to remember my pin number at the cash machine, my memory for trivia seems fine.