Wacky Tacky Museum Finds

I don't think we've mentioned Geppi's Entertainment Museum here on WWoB before but we should have! It's a wonderful attraction located in Baltimore's Inner Harbor right outside of Camden Yards stadium. Inside you'll find the history of our country as traced through popular culture. There's everything from comic books, toys, dolls, books and posters all on display to take you on a tour from the very first newspaper comic strips all the way up to Spongebob and The Simpsons. I did a post about my first visit to the museum on a Disney website called The Blog Wore Tennis Shoes. Last week I took the kids there to see all the Super Hero stuff. But instead of posting pictures of old comic books and valuable antique toys, I snapped a few pictures of some wild and wacky crap that they have on display there...

Before cable TV and videos, one of the only ways kids could revisit movies over and over again was through a Storyreader Record Album. Everyone had a Star Wars or Muppets record when they were younger, but not many kids probably had this recorded dramatization of the classic 1964 science fiction epic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians! This is one of those movies that many people will put on their list of "movies that are soooo bad they're good"!?! Well, I've seen Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and I can tell you that the film is just plain bad. It is so bad that you can't stop looking at it...kind of like a car accident...but by no means is it a good film. This was actually one of the first movies I bought on VHS when I was younger. I had read about the movie in a book and some years later found it around Christmas time at the mall. Ten bucks was a lot of money for a 13 year old in 1986, but it didn't matter to me - I just had to see this movie! Perhaps it's better if you just hear about the film on a record than actually seeing it!

Here's the actual Playbill program for another legendary production, the stage version of the Superman story! It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman was a flop of a Broadway musical that opened on March 29, 1966 and closed on July 17, 1966. The whole idea is so ridiculous that, like Santa Claus and his martians, the show has taken on a life of it's own in later years. I always pushed for this to be our spring musical in high school but we always did little known shows like My Fair Lady or Camelot! Another play I've always wanted to do is called Pinocchio Don't Smoke That Cigarette, but that's a story for another time...

Besides the occasional "Weird Al" Yankovic song, novelty records don't get much respect. However, things were different in the earlier days of rock n' roll. Some silly songs became so popular that merchandise was created to cash in on the songs popularity. (A few weeks ago we featured the board game version of Hello Muddah, Hello Fuddah.) In 1958, a gentleman named Sheb Wooley went all the way to the number one spot on the Billboard charts with his ditty titled The Purple People Eater. Here's a cool little plastic hat that you can slip on and become a Purple People Eater yourself! They must have sold plenty of these because the song stayed on the charts for 6 weeks! Can you imagine a month and half of hearing that song on the radio every hour or so!?