Ralph Steadman Dunks President Ford In A Huge Stinking Vat Of Horror In this week’s Radio Times, an article about the 1976 Republican National Convention was accompanied by this wonderfully acerbic Ralph Steadman painting of President Gerald Ford as a scarecrow presiding uselessly over the ruin of America. Rather than scaring off carrion, he’s nothing […]

A Fantastical Film In The Cinemas On This Day In 1975 Alexander Walker in August 14th 1975’s Evening Standard gave the newly-released Rocky Horror Picture Show a considered but definitive thumbs down. But then, so did pretty much everyone. Walker was, to be fair, kinder than several of his peers. He praised the performances of […]

A Fantastical Film In The Cinemas On This Day In 1974 First released in the UK on March 14th 1974, The Exorcist was still showing in Central London even as the movie was on release across the nation. A trawl in the newspaper archives suggests that much of the moral panic kicked up by the […]

Glimpses Into The World Of UFOs In Summer 1973 Above is the Notes & Quotes page from August 1973’s The Bufora Journal, as published by The British U.F.O. Research Association. It has all of the charm and fascination of the letters page of The Fortean Times, and clearly stands as an ancestor of it. I […]

On Show In London’s West End Back In 1972 – Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes “Since Franklyn Schaffner’s engaging Planet Of The Apes of 1969, there have been two sequels, the last pretty indifferent, and now comes a third, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (Carlton, AA), by J. Lee Thompson, which […]

Who’s Next Is Released Out at the beginning of August 1971 in America and at the end of it in the UK, Who’s Next contains nine songs from the band’s stymied, sci-fi, multi-media epic Lifehouse sans its fearsome, protean bulk and its narrative context. While some of the surviving tracks sit easily outside their original […]

Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew Disappoints In Not Being What It Isn’t The Future Now: Bitches Brew And The Establishment’s Disdain A common trope in fantastical fiction concerns the traveler who’s journeyed so far out that he’s lost the ability to communicate with the citizenry he came from. There’s something of this in Benny Green’s review […]

In The Year 2525 was a new entry at 29 in UK singles chart during this August week in 1969. It was a huge success for Zager & Evans in its day, but they would go on to be the only act to score a number one in both America and Britain without ever registering […]

The Week In Fantastical Cinema, Central London Edition There wasn’t much to cheer up The Almanac in London’s West End cinemas on this day in 1968. Just three fantastical movies, if we’re to push the already-woefully vague term’s envelope, were there to be had. The newest of them was the animated Yellow Submarine, which had […]