This is another one of those "How did I get this?" magazines, where I found it in the box but have absolutely no memory of when or why I got it.The cover is in fact not a painting but a sculpture/mask combo of some sort, and I find it genuinely unsettling. Despite the goofy yuletide accessory, it feels dead and creepy to me, the way a thousand images of Boris Karloff, Glenn Strange, or Bela Lugosi as the Monster do not.
Anyway, like its more famous counterpart, Famous Monsters of Filmland, this issue features big splashy photo articles on vintage(and some contemporary) genre films, like Return of thr Vampire, Dr.Terror's House of Horrors(featuring a still with Donald Sutherland, guaranteed the only time he'd ever show up in a mag like this), Revenge of the Zombies(which really doesn't deserve the six pages of space its given), Queen From Outer Space, Tarantula, and Dracula, Prince of Darkness.
There's also an article called "Dens of Demons", focusing on the elaborate sets sometimes constructed for these films, a nice, arty touch--Warren should've given a couple more pages to this and taken them away from Revenge of the Zombies.
"It Asked For You" is the odd feature where movie stills are "dedicated" to loyal readers(um, ok), and then its time for Bill Obbagy's "Terror Talk", sort of the blog of its day.
We end with "Monsters on the Brain", a trivia quiz where you have to match movie quotes with the movies they're from(I didn't do so well). Interesting note--the quiz is written by John and Michael Brunas, who among other things grew up to co-write(with Tom Weaver) the great Universal Horrors hardcover book, a tome I've read many, many times. Nice job, boys!
2 comments:
Rob-
It really was just a carbon copy of FM; Warren trying to dip into the same well twice!
The Frank is a Don Post latex mask, I'm pretty sure - those ones we always drooled over the ads for, but couldn't afford!
-Craig W.
Warren had created a genre, the monster movie magazine, and the success of Famous Monsters inspired a slew of imitators, competitors to FM. The thinking behind Monster World went like this: If kids have the choice of 4 different monster magazines, you have, theoretically, one chance in four of them buying your title. If you publish two of the four titles, you go from a 25% to a 50% chance of the kids giving you their 35 cents. The plan is to use up display space and dominate the monster movie magazine market.
As it turned out, creating your own competition means spending more money. Monster World was an extra expense for Warren as more material was being bought, but the sales were far from FM numbers. The two mags may have been near identical, but I remember MW always felt like FM Lite, a knockoff, without the importance, the gravitas inherent in FM. I remember thinking I’d rather have a monthly Famous Monsters than being offered Monster World on off-FM months. In the end, Monster World was too much trouble, too much of a drag on Warren resources, and too close a copy of FM.
Fascinating footnote: Monster World was ditched after ten issues, and it’s run was promptly “incorporated” into that of Famous Monsters, and the numbering of FM issues jumped by 10. Quite a trick!
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