In the first of a two part trip to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat we trace a strange family tree spawned by Hell Tanner's ride in Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, and see how the movie version's Land Master influenced a successful line of sci-fi toy vehicles from Matchbox - the Adventure 2000 range.
Hello dear fiends and welcome once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Over the last few weeks we've had the toy box out and have been looking at a celebrated range of diecast vehicles that dominated birthday and Christmas lists for a good half decade. First appearing in 1977, the Adventure 2000 range from Matchbox saw the veteran maker of toy cars venture into futuristic realms to deliver a host of exciting SF vehicles. As we have discovered in previous weeks, Adventure 2000 seemingly owed a debt to the Land Master from the movie Damnation Alley (1977), which was based on the novel of the same name by Roger Zelazny. The flagship vehicle of the range, the Raider Command would go on to appear in the pages of legendary comic 2000 AD as Judge Dredd's wheels in the epic saga ofThe Cursed Earth, which coincidentally owed a huge debt to Zelazny's book too.
Now whenever there's a hot new toy flying off the shelves, it doesn't take long for competing firms to start designing rival products to get themselves a slice of the action. Now in the world of diecast metal cars, Matchbox had an equally venerable competitor in the shape of Corgi, who had been making toy vehicles since the 1930s. But since the 1960s, Corgi had had a winning hand in the shape of several tie-in vehicles, most notably having the license to make toy versions of the Batmobile from the Adam West Batman series, and the rights to make miniature version of James Bond's cars. Indeed for decades the Corgi versions of the Aston Martin DB5 and the Batmobile were bestsellers, captivating generations of kids who hadn't even been born when these iconic vehicles first hit the screen.
Therefore they were somewhat miffed when Matchbox started stealing their thunder with the Adventure 2000 line, a range that was delivering exciting wholly original fantastic vehicles, complete with the kind of special features, such as firing rockers and pop-out weapons, that made the Bond and Bat cars such perennial winners. Hence in 1979, Corgi launched a rival range to compete with these usurpers in the world of fantastical vehicles - the X-ploratrons!
Like Adventure 2000, this was a line of four vehicles featuring all new designs and exciting special features. And like their Matchbox rivals, the X-ploratrons came complete with their own back story too. According to the marketing blurb, "in a fictitious disaster-wrecked world of the 21st century, the elements rebel against man!". Now I must pause here and remark that I was so relieved they pointed out that this was a fictitious future and not an actual accurate prophecy or something! Blimey, you had me worried for a moment there Corgi!
And for that matter how exactly do elements rebel? Are they rebelling against something in particular or is it just a Marlon Brando style "whatcha got?" deal? We will probably never know! Anyhow, come and meet the quartet of super-duper vehicles that had "their own individual role to play in the battle against disaster from within and without the planet!"
First up was the X-1 Rocketron (D2023) - a six wheeled tracked vehicle that "traversed icy wastes locating disasters with its sensorscope and fires solar powered rockets". See, destructive and green at the same time! Although quite what disasters could be averted by rocket bombardment the adverts weren't entirely clear. Deadly avalanches? Stroppy icebergs? No one was entirely sure to be honest. However the toy itself came with a real, working compass fitted inside the cockpit, and a rear mounted missile launcher to strike terror into the hearts of younger siblings and family pets.
Next up was the X-2 Lasertron (D2024) - apparently in the dangerous future of the X-ploratrons "dramatic and sudden changes in the arid belt cause hurricanes and sandstorms threatening to engulf continents" and this chunky six wheeler had the job of dealing with those. And how does one truck sort out such extreme weather? Well, solar powered lasers allegedly! And hence it came equipped with a lenticular prismatic disc to turn the power of the sun into laser death! Sadly however in real life the prismatic disc didn't generate lethal beams of energy, but just changed colour from yellow to black. For me, easily the weakest of the X-ploratrons, for despite looking and sounding cool, the play value of a shiny sticker was a bit limited.
Offering far more exciting play in my humble opinion was the X-3 Magnetron (D2025) - a four wheeler designed to tackle the menace of meteorite bombardment. Although the toy didn't feature the working rocket that was depicted in the art and adverts, it did come with a moveable arm fitted with a magnet and a sliding roof compartment to store samples. Well, stray paperclips, orphan screws and nails at least. But hey, a magnet on a robotic looking arm! And magnets were cool!
Finally there was the X-4 Scannertron (D2022), an allegedly amphibious craft that "scoured swamps" for "fissures which swamp cities with boiling mud and debris". I say "allegedly amphibious" because taking this one into the bath with you was, in reality, a recipe for peeling off decals and eventually, rust. But the idea of a fighting force for multiple terrains was appreciated. Anyhow, to tackle these aforementioned tectonic threats, the Scannertron came with moving jungle cutters at the front and rear, a magnifying lens mounted in the middle of the craft, and a self righting cockpit.
Now I think it is fair to say that the X-ploratrons were something of a mixed bag. For while the Magnetron has a magnet to play with, and the Scannerton had cutting blades and a magnifying glass to unwittingly start forest fires with, the Rocketron's missile was a bit weedy, and the novelty of the Laserton's shiny disco array would wear off before you got it out of the packet. However in fairness, not every model in the Adventure 2000 range was as exciting as the Raider Command, and so, in terms of exciting features I think the two ranges more or less balance each other out.
However I think Corgi didn't quite get their designs for their future fighting force to look quite as cool as Matchbox's. Adventure 2000's designs had a pleasingly realistic feel to them, whereas the X-ploratrons seem a bit more clunky and chunky, and with their bright, almost primary, colours look more toy-like and therefore to a certain section of their market, babyish in comparison. But on the plus side, Corgi had clearly clocked the Matchbox-2000 AD link-up, for the box art for their rival range featured gorgeous visuals from Carlos Ezquerra, the legendary comics artist responsible for classic 2000 AD strips such as Strontium Dog and Fiends of the Eastern Front, but more importantly, was the co-creator of Judge Dredd himself.
Apparently there were tentative plans to expand the range, and pictures of a prototype for a fifth vehicle do exist. Photos in The Great Book of Corgi 1956-1983 (1999) shows a flatbed launcher style truck, equipped a large ICBM - I'd guess this would have been dubbed Missiletron or similar. But sadly the X-ploratrons' mission was seemingly doomed to fail, for the range remained a quartet, and worse, the models were only in the shops for a year before being consigned to the toybox of history.
However despite burning briefly, it would seem the X-ploratrons did burn bright, for they are just as collectable as their Adventure 2000 counterparts, and command very similar prices these days. And fortunately the weather in the 21st century is still behaving itself... But for how long? Perhaps the X-ploratrons' day will come at last!
Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orribe 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! That's it, step inside! The Geiger counter by the door is purely a precautionary measure I assure you! We don't want any of the Brotherhood or Slay Riders sneaking in do we now? Anyhow, today we are heading out once again into the irritated badlands of late 20th century tat, to continue the strange saga that is the history of the Landmaster.
So then, to briefly recap, in the late '60s SF scribe Roger Zelazny wrote a tale of a violent anti-hero, Hell Tanner, who must pilot an armoured vehicle on a desperate mission to ferry a plague vaccine from California to Boston through a now familiar radioactive wasteland. That story was Damnation Alley, and around a decade later in 1977, it was turned into a rather cheesy SF movie of the same name. But while the film ended up being something of a mess, one positive to emerge from its own creative irradiated wasteland was that they did design a very cool screen version of Hell Tanner's "car", and this iconic vehicle was dubbed the Landmaster.
Now Damnation Alley, if you'll pardon the pun, tanked at the box office, so back in the day there was never any official toy version of the Landmaster. However as we saw last week, in the same year Matchbox released a range of three futuristic vehicles called Adventure 2000, and two of them, the Crusader and the Raider Command, seemed to owe for than a little to the Landmaster. Spooky eh? But the following year, 1978, something even stranger happened.
In the spring of 1977, IPC magazines launched a new weekly SF comic called 2000 AD. While initially the lead strip was a revamped version of legendary British comics hero Dan Dare, the veteran spacer was soon usurped by a new breakaway star who appeared in Prog #002 - Judge Dredd. Now as a future cop in a post nuclear war world, policing the mean streets of Mega City 1, Dredd quickly became the new comic's most popular strip, and would heavily influence both Mad Max and Robocop. At first, each week saw Dredd tackling some different bizarre future crime, but as the strip's popularity rose, longer stories started to appear, with the first major Dredd serial being a seven episode tale detailing a rebellion by the cities' droids, an event in Mega City history now known as the Robot Wars.
However roughly a year and a half into the 2000 AD's life, the comic's alien editor, known to us Earthlets as the Mighty Tharg, decided on an even bolder step - a Dredd mega-epic, a serial tale that would run for a whopping 24 weeks! Of course such a big story needed an equally big plot, and hence legendary writer Pat Mills devised a tale that would take us beyond Mega City 1; a story that would not only explore the wider world of Dredd's universe, but also detail some of its previously unrevealed history. And what was the epic plot line to accomplish these lofty aims? Well, stop me if you've heard this one before...
A lethal plague has broken out in Mega City 2, the giant metropolis on the West Coast of America. Mega City 1, which is occupies the Eastern seaboard of the former USA, has come up with a vaccine to send over to its beleaguered sister city. However between the two cities is the Cursed Earth, a huge irradiated wasteland full of monsters and mutants. Thanks to extreme weather flying over the Cursed Earth is impossible, and hence a land mission is set up. Naturally the man to undertake this dangerous mercy mission is Judge Dredd. However to accompany him, Dredd enlists a criminal biker called Spikes Harvey Rotten, with the offer of a free pardon. And so they set off to deliver the vaccine in a specially armoured vehicle, the Land Raider...
Quite why Zelazny never sued them, I really don't know. However in fairness, although the central concepts are very similar, the actual events of in the stories are far different. Dredd's epic, known as The Cursed Earth, sees the judge encountering psychics, mutants, robot vampires, aliens, and war droids. As an aside, there's even a sequence where Dredd tangles with some dinosaurs that were scientifically resurrected by a process similar to cloning for a future theme park! Yes, Pat Mills also ripped of Jurassic Park, but very cleverly avoided being sued by doing it a whole 12 years before Michael Crichton wrote the original novel. Anyhow...
The Cursed Earth ranfrom May to October in 1978 (2000 AD progs #61 to #85 fact fans) and quickly became a classic of British comics. And if you want to hear more about it, I guested on this episode of the Mega City Book Club Podcast to discuss it.
However, if there weren't already enough weird links clustering around this mega epic, there was another exciting twist to this saga. For excited readers soon spotted instantly that the Land Raider, seen below being put through its paces, was in fact identical to Matchbox's Raider Command. And if you look at the dialogue in the pages reproduced below, you'll notice that they even have the same serial number - K-2001.
Now here is where it gets interesting, for as yet no one is quite knows exactly how this particular toy ended up in the pages of 2000 AD. Matchbox itself made no particular fuss about it, and there was no official announcement in the comic at the time either, which could suggest the Raider Command was unofficially borrowed at first. Not that us kids cared of course - we were just too excited about either a) being able to own a Judge Dredd related vehicle, or b) suddenly seeing a favourite toy appearing in 2000 AD. Plus we learned that the armoured rear module was called the Killdozer!
But however the deal came about - for surely there must have been a deal - a few weeks into The Cursed Earth running in 2000 AD, in Progs #80 and #81 to be exact, our beloved alien editor, Tharg the Mighty acknowledged that a very cool Matchbox toy was appearing in the strip. And what was more, the Mighty One was launching a competition that could win you the entire Adventure 2000 range! Running over two weeks, and involving a bit of code breaking, this competition saw 60, yes 60 complete sets of the Adventure 2000 range up for grabs!
So then, given that most kids were likely to be either too lazy to enter, or too dense to crack the code (and the answer was... work it out for yourself grennix!), a huge 60 sets meant you had better odds than usual at winning something! As it was, I didn't enter this competition myself as I already had the Raider Command and the Flight Hunter. Ironically though, in the end I never did manage to get the Crusader and complete the set. But still, I had many happy hours recreating scenes from The Cursed Earth with the two I did have.
However even if you had snagged one of the 60 sets offered by Tharg, the fact was your new collection of die-cast future vehicles wasn't going to stay compete for long. For as you can imagine Adventure 2000 was a highly popular range, and therefore it wasn't long before Matchbox brought out some new additions to it. But that dear friends is a tale for next time...
Welcome once again guys and ghouls to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Well then, dear fiends last week we were poking about the spider-infested garages of the 'Orrible Old 'Ouse and uncovering the history of a curious vehicle - the Landmaster! Now this 12 wheeled armoured behemoth was the star of 1977's ill-fated movie adaptation of Roger Zelazny's seminal SF tale Damnation Alley. And as we recounted last time, although 20th Century Fools, I mean Fox, had this production aimed at bustin' the proverbial blocks, the movie instead ran straight into a wall, and Star Wars (rightly) cleaned up at the box office.
Now this meant that the only real merchandise - as far as I can tell - was a re-release of the original novel with the movie poster on the cover. And despite being a very cool future vehicle, there was never any Landmaster toys made. Which was a real shame, as it looked like a cross between Captain Scarlet's Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle (S.I.G!) and the SHADO 2 Mobile from UFO. I'm sure that a Dinky Landmaster would have sold by the ton, and much like the toy versions of Gerry Anderson vehicles, would have continued to sell for years after the movie had vanished from our screens. Anyhow, remembrances of Dinky toys past is a subject for another day...
Top - Shado 2 Mobile, Bottom - Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle (but you knew that already right?)
However there was actually a Landmaster toy of sorts, and therein lies a strange tale! Now the origins of this now much prized plaything are somewhat obscure, possibly for a variety of legal reasons. For in 1977, Matchbox, the famed maker of metal cars, released a new line of toys entitled Adventure 2000. Branded as SF vehicles, this range consisted of three vehicles that came with little plastic figures shaped like soldiers or lawmen from the future. The catalogue blurb gives us a tantalizing sketch of a backstory for these exciting vehicles -
The year is 2000 – The planets prepare for battle. Re-enact the excitement of inter-planetary conflict with the action-packed vehicles from Adventure 2000
Now the trio consisted of the Flight Hunter (K-2002 for collectors) which was a snazzy little space-age sports car that had the added bonus of pop-out wings. Yes, a flying car! Pretty nifty right!
OK so far, so cool. But the next vehicle was highly intriguing - the Crusader (K-2003). While fast cars might be very swish, and the additional power of flight was a suitably SF extra, for the eternal wars waged by small children, you can't beat a good tank! And so, enter the Crusader, which just happened to be an eight wheeled armoured truck... Sounds a bit familiar, no? Just look at that snub nosed front. And the rear-roof mounted rotating gun turret... Yes, now you come to mention it, it does have a certain Landmaster-y quality to it. Funny that...
However where things get very interesting indeed is with the flagship vehicle in the range, the mighty K-2001 Raider Command. Now this toy was the mutie's meatballs, and I have to say, one of the most exciting die-cast toy vehicles you could own back in the day. This beast of a fighting machine actually split up into two vehicles, with a fast front section for speedy pursuits, while the armoured rear section was equipped with tank tracks and a rocket launcher. Plus with the press of a button, the Raider Command didn't just separate, but the front module actually fired off, sending it zipping over carpets and floors at high speed. The rocket launcher actually worked too - not real rockets obviously, it was just the usual spring powered launcher. But it was very pretty deadly, or at least hazardous to younger siblings and pets.
However, once again, the nose of the front module is somewhat familiar, while the armoured rear's red rocket array and triangular wheel arrangement should be ringing so bells too. Now as I said, this range of toys was launched in 1977 the same year as the movie of Damnation Alley was released, and as we remarked last week, the pre-publicity for the movie did put the Landmaster front and centre. But interestingly, the copyright date for the Adventure 2000 range is listed as 1976 which rather suggests that visual echoes of Damnation Alley in the designs might be just a coincidence.
Furthermore while no one really predicted before the fact that Star Wars was going to be a mega-block buster and start a whole boom for science fiction and fantasy flicks, there was a general feeling in the air that SF was going to be the Next Big Thing. For example, consider Britain's top SF comic 2000 AD which was also launched in 1977. Now, as we all have 1977 imprinted into our brains as the year that Star Wars was born, we assume that the Mighty Tharg's thrill-powered comic was created to cash in on the Star Wars boom. But the fact is George Lucas's opus didn't hit British cinemas until the end of the December (the 15th to be precise fact fans), and that was just the London opening, with most folks in the UK actually seeing it in early 1978. Now 2000 AD was launched on the 26th February 1977, a good eleven months before anyone in the UK knew what a wookie was, and even three months before the movie's US premiere on the 25th of May!
So then clearly as early as 1976, there was a general sense that SF was going to be the proverbial next big thing. Obviously both Matchbox and IPC Comics were angling to get in on the ground floor, and somehow both settled on using the then reeking of the future date 2000 in the titles of their products.
But all that said, in 1978 something happened that would link the novel Damnation Alley, the Landmaster from the movie, Adventure 2000, and 2000 AD too, in one exciting package! And Provided the Slay Riders don't get you, next week meet me back here in the radlands of pop culture to discover what happened next! (But here's a drokking large clue...)
Hello again dear fiends! Welcome once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now as listeners to my podcasts and other scribbling will be aware, I am very interested in the origins and roots of things, in particular seeing how different concepts or tropes evolve over time in the steaming jungles of pop culture. And this week dear friends we have a very interesting family tree to trace, with some branches bearing prized fruits and others... Well, others not so much. Anyhow, in accordance with the wise words of Maria Von Trapp, let us start at the very beginning...
In 1967, the star feature of the October issue of the famed Galaxy Magazine was a novella by SF legend Roger Zelazny. Now back then old Rog was still a young gun in the world of fantastic fiction, only a few years into his remarkable career, and his now classic novel Lords of Light had only just been published earlier that year. Now that novel would scooped him several awards, however the novella published in October would also bag him a Hugo too. This short work was Damnation Alley, a thrilling post apocalyptic tale set in a world ravaged by nuclear wars. Indeed the story went down so well, Zelazny later expanded into a novel that was published in 1969.
The plot line of both versions is the same - in the post-nuke America, there is no more United States, just some separate enclaves holed up against extreme weather and deadly radiation. However the Boston area has fallen victim to a deadly plague and while a cure has been found, unfortunately the vaccine is in California. Constant hurricanes and freak weather make air travel impossible, and hence the job of taking the vital vaccine over land through the wasteland of America, now dubbed Damnation Alley, is given to former biker and convicted killer Hell Tanner (and yes, that is his real name) on the condition that if he makes it, he will receive a full pardon.
Zelazny's novel became one of the great influences on post-apocalypse fiction. Countless books, comics and films drew inspiration from his vision of a nuked out world filled with radioactive hazards and marauding mutants. And it is still a huge influence to this very day - for example, the video game series Fallout owes a great deal to Zelanzy's book, with the Lonesome Road add-on being very much a homage to it. In fact, much like Day of the Triffids, it has been pillaged so much over the intervening decades that new readers approaching the book now sometimes find it somewhat cliched, as it has been so thoroughly mined by other works. Indeed between Zelazny and Wyndham, they pretty much wrote the entire playbook for post-apocalyptic worlds.
However one element that has become something of an influence in itself is Tanner's mode of transport. For to traverse a country full of extreme storms, mutated animals, and feral savages, Tanner is given a special vehicle, whose description I will now quote -
There were no windows in the vehicle, only screens which reflected views in every direction, including straight up and the ground beneath the car. Tanner sat within an illuminated box which shielded him against radiation. The “car” that he drove had eight heavily treaded tires and was thirty-two feet in length. It mounted eight fifty-calibre automatic guns and four grenade-throwers. It carried thirty armour-piercing rockets which could be discharged straight ahead or at any elevation up to forty degrees from the plane. Each of the four sides, as well as the roof of the vehicle, housed a flamethrower. Razor-sharp “wings” of tempered steel – eighteen inches wide at their bases and tapering to points, an inch and a quarter thick where they ridged – could be moved through a complete hundred-eighty-degree arc along the sides of the car and parallel to the ground, at a height of two feet and eight inches. When standing at a right angle to the body of the vehicle – eight feet to the rear of the front bumper – they extended out to a distance of six feet on either side of the car. They could be couched like lances for a charge. They could be held but slightly out from the sides for purposes of slashing whatever was sideswiped. The car was bullet-proof, air conditioned, and had its own food locker and sanitation facilities. A long barrelled .357 Magnum was held by a clip on the door near the driver’s left hand. A 30.06, a .45-caliber automatic, and six hand grenades occupied the rack immediately above the front seat.
Nice ride or what? And of course, Tanner's "car" would go on become the usual cover star of any cover art for the novel, as you can see above. Plus it would go on to inspire whole generations of post-apocalypse vehicles too. But more about that next week...
Anyhow, perhaps inevitably, around a decade later it was decided to make a movie of this seminal SF tale. Featuring a bleak vision of the future coupled with lots of action and a tough anti-hero, Damnation Alley seemed to fit right in with the cinematic SF of the time, the era that gave us flicks like Soylent Green (1973) and The Omega Man (1971), plus the franchise that dominated the early '70s Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequels and spin-offs. Indeed initially allocating the film a massive $17 million budget and putting Jack Smight, the man who helmed the seminal disaster movie Airport '75 in charge, showed that 20th Century Fox was looking to make a quality production to follow in the footsteps of the movies mentioned above.
But things didn't quite work out that way. The production was troubled, with the budget being cut, the shooting script - that was fairly faithful to the novel - being pared down and then changed, poor Jack Smight pretty much being chucked out of the director's chair, and the movie ending up being radically recut. Hence the plot line of travelling from coast to coast to deliver a serum vanishes, and instead they are just heading out to find other survivors. The novel's anti hero Hell Tanner pretty much vanishes too. Instead we have a Jake Tanner, played by Jan-Michael Vincent in his pre-Airwolf days, who is a far more respectable former USAF lieutenant, and is reduced to something of a sidekick for George Peppard's Major Denton. But most damaging of all, Zelazny's visions of a tortuous journey through a radiation wasteland end up being some dodgily coloured in skies, a few badly matted scorpions, and a lot of driving about in the same bit of desert.
Let's make no bones about this, the movie Damnation Alley (1977) is pretty bad, and if you want to hear a full autopsy on the movie, tune into this episode of the Black Dog Podcast. OK, I know some of have fond memories of this flick having seen as little kids, and I'll not begrudge you your nostalgia - I'm immensely fond of loads of tatty old movies. I like Zoltan Hound of Dracula for Pete's sakes! But all the same, it is still a shame the movie isn't better, for Zelazny's book is just crying out for a faithful big screen adaptation.
However in fairness, the film does get one thing right - the realisation of Tanner's "car". Indeed, the movie actually brings something new to the table here - for Zelazny somewhat missed a trick in not giving Tanner's ride a cool name, whereas the movie makes the genius move of actually dubbing the super duper armoured vehicle, the Landmaster! And you got to agree that is the perfect name. And while one wonders where all the money went when looking at dull bits of desert shot through coloured filters, when the Landmasters are rolling out you can see the dollars up there on screen. Now the design does diverge from Zelazny's description: this Landmaster does have windows, and sadly lacks most of the weaponry, but in fairness, all the cover art versions take similar liberties too. But the important thing is the Landmaster as a vehicle still looked very very cool indeed.
And indeed, I think it's fair to say that just as the Damnation Alley movie has a cult following, the actually Landmaster itself has a cult all of its own. Despite fumbling nearly all other aspects of the production, 20th Century Fox did get the Landmaster right. And they recognised that this iconic vehicle was the real star of the movie, with it appearing a lot in the promos and press for the movie's launch. For example, the magazine Popular Science even did a piece on it in the March 1977 issue - which you can read here. Mind you, as the Landmaster was custom-built by top custom-car creator Dean Jeffries for the film at a cost of $350,000 - or according to my calculations, $1,522,544.14 in today's money - you can understand why it was at the forefront of the publicity!
Now oddly enough 20th Century Fox had another little SF film on the go at the same time as Damnation Alley was being made, but they had little faith in it. In fact they were banking so much on Damnation Alley being a huge blockbuster, they let that other little movie's director keep all the merchandising rights. Fast forward to a year later however and that other little movie - called Star Wars, you might have heard of it - was still packing them in and the shops were awash with merch. Damnation Alley on the other hand... Well, put it this way, there was never a toy version of the Landmaster to buy...
...Or was there?!? I'll meet you back next week to discovery the strange truth!
