by Randy Palmer
—Paul Blaisdell
As ridiculous and purposeless as it might seem now, there was a time when a kind of anti–AIP prejudice blanketed much of fantasy film fandom. It became fashionable to disdain the black-and-white “cheapies” made during the 1950s. As the fans grew older, they even shrugged off Famous Monsters of Filmland as “kids’ stuff.” The serious film student had to appear to be at least somewhat discerning. By categorizing certain films or groups of films as either “worthwhile” or “worthless,” these fans believed they were legitimizing their devotion to the genre in the eyes of their compatriots. Trashing easy targets like The Beast with a Million Eyes seemed to prove that they were no longer indiscriminating monster lovers, but serious devotees of horror film art.
The problem, as many fans later recognized, was that in their eagerness to prove to the world that horror films should be taken seriously, they damned anything that failed to match a set of preconceived standards that purported to define what was good and what was bad. Could these elitists admit to actually liking pictures with titles like How to Make a Monster or I Was a Teenage Werewolf? Of course not. Not if they wanted to be taken seriously. The result was that nearly every one of American International’s pre–1960 productions was denigrated as substandard fare unworthy of the attention of the Horror-as-Art constituency.
It took a long while for this generation of film fans to outgrow their own self-accelerated hubris, but once they did they were better able to understand the notion of relative values, to discriminate without being discriminatory, and to salute the AIP films for what they were. True, The She-Creature was not in the same league with Curse of the Demon, but that didn’t make it any less worthwhile a picture, merely a different kind of picture. Eventually a term was coined to describe certain AIP productions: drive-in classic. Today at last, no one shies away from admitting a certain fondness for some of the films AIP produced during the 1950s and 1960s.
Toward the end of the 1970s, Blaisdell began feeling ill. He was constantly having problems with his teeth, which required extensive dental surgery. That, of course, cost money, a lot of money. His and Jackie’s savings, which had been seriously eroded by the Fantastic Monsters fiasco, took an even further beating.
California began experiencing a series of rainstorms and severe flooding around this same time, but Paul somehow managed to maintain a stiff upper lip through it all. Remarkably, his correspondence remained as light-hearted and cheerful as ever. Every time he and Jackie experienced a setback, they just brushed the debris from each other’s shoulders and got back to work. As Paul commented at the time,
If you’ve seen or heard the news, you know about the California floods. Here in the southland, Mandeville and Topanga canyons were two of the hardest places hit. We make Robinson Crusoe on Mars look like the Conrad Hilton. There’s lots of damage to repair, and lots of pain and strain to recover from. I wonder if anyone could supply us with a surplus WW2 U-Boat? I’m not worried about raising a crew. Since the flood started, we’ve got ’em all the way from one foot to eight legs. I don’t need spooky movies, I need a biology book…. Two flood seasons practically back to back, with tons of roaring water coming storm after storm, propelling thousands of pounds of wreckage ahead of it to smash all obstacles like giant battering rams…. Homes battered, destroyed, and obliterated, along with cars, vans, corrals, and businesses. With twelve miles of wall-to-wall wreckage in this canyon, it looks like the aftermath of a Martian invasion! Consider the creeping cold and dampness, along with the mold, mildew, and wood rot, complete with undermined collapsing foundations and breaking trees, and you can figure it takes a long time to pick up all the pieces. I could cheerfully strangle the guy that first said “sunny Southern California.” People who have to live in this godforsaken state are lucky if they see the sun four months out of the year! By the way, if anyone wants to send us a “Care” package, be sure and send canned ham. It goes with my theatrical career!
Paul had held onto many of the props, masks, and costumes he and Jackie had made over the years, and some of them were irreparably damaged by the floods. Most of his glossy stills were saved, thanks to their protective backings and glass frames, but one of the few remaining Saucer Men heads came close to being totally destroyed, and what was left of the She-Creature costume was ruined entirely. (Years earlier, a family of raccoons had crept into the Blaisdell homestead and discovered that Cuddles was very soft and warm and would make quite a nice nesting place. After that, there wasn’t much left to get water-damaged.)
Paul and Jackie Blaisdell’s secluded Topanga Canyon, California, home, with Bob Burns peering out the back window. A suspension bridge (not visible here) led to the front of the house. Paul’s workshop was in the basement (courtesy of Bob Burns).
More trouble was the last thing in the world the Blaisdells needed at this point, but as Paul worked day-by-day to air out the house and straighten up the wreckage, he began feeling worse and worse. Dental problems were one thing, but this was something else again. He felt weak. There were intermittent pains, sometimes very bad ones, and he was losing weight. Something was seriously wrong.
But Paul was loath to schedule an appointment with a doctor. Perhaps he was afraid of finding out what was wrong, or maybe he thought it was something that would clear up in time. Then again, he might have sensed the truth, and merely dreaded hearing a doctor’s confirmation.
Whatever the reason, Paul put off going to his physician for as long as possible. No matter how much Jackie pleaded with him to go, he refused, until he was too weak and exhausted to protest any longer.
The diagnosis, when it came, was exactly what Paul had feared most: cancer. By now it was too late to do much of anything about it except treat the pain and the symptoms. Paul had let things drag on too long without getting diagnosed. He was shot through with cancer; it was everywhere. There was no hope.
Cutting out localized cancer cells was one thing. Along with radiation therapy, this was the kind of treatment that had already rescued thousands of victims from a life of intolerable pain and suffering. But treatment wasn’t possible in Paul’s case. The cancer was no longer localized. In fact, at this late date there was no telling exactly how, where, or when the cancer had first gotten its hold on Paul’s metabolism.
They left the doctor’s office and returned home, Paul clutching a prescription for painkillers. Even now he could barely move from one room to another without feeling exhausted.
Months passed, and the disease slowly ate away at Paul’s physique. Each week he lost more weight. When the pain attacked, he exorcised it with a pill. One day the pills didn’t work any more. His doctor wrote a new prescription for even stronger medication. The pain subsided again. For a while.
The end came relatively quickly and was a blessing. Paul’s body had been ravaged by the disease, and he was down to just over 80 pounds. Cancer had robbed him of everything, even his dignity. In his final months, he couldn’t walk. Jackie carried him to the bathroom, washed him, dressed him, talked to him, read to him, loved him.
It was a great relief for them both when Paul closed his eyes for the final time, on July 10, 1983, eleven days shy of his 56th birthday. Jackie later expressed her great loss by noting: “Needless to say, nothing is the same … nor will it ever be, for me. There are cherished memories, nearly forty years of them, but they are certainly surrounded by an awful emptiness.”
The loss of his friend moved Bob Burns deeply:
Over the years Paul had become more and more secluded. Then he got cancer, but no one except Jackie knew. He was on heavy-duty cancer medication, but I didn’t know that at the time. When I talked to him on the phone, he would say, “Oh, I just got back from the dentist and the novocaine hasn’t worn off.” He was trying to give me a reason why he sounded so weak and out of it, you see. He did not want me to know how bad off he was. I guess he wanted me to remember him as he had been, young and robust. You can’t imagine how much I miss him. He and Lionel [Comport, Jr.]
were my best friends.
Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Blaisdell’s death went unnoticed in the film industry. No obituaries appeared in either Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.
Many artists have toiled during their own lifetimes only to receive little or no recognition for their efforts. Sometimes their works have captured the fancy of later generations, belatedly catapulting them to a posthumous fame. Paul’s story doesn’t end much differently. Neglected for the most part during his own lifetime, long forgotten by an industry that benefitted from his love of films and fantasy during the 1950s, Blaisdell’s name finally achieved a degree of prominence in the field in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A series of model kits manufactured by a company called Billiken USA brought Blaisdell’s creations to the attention of a new coterie of fans. The company’s U.S. president, Michael Ruffalo, was a fan of Blaisdell’s work and wanted to add his creations to the Billiken lineup. Like many other youthful monster lovers, Ruffalo had put together the plastic models issued by Aurora in the early 1960s, but he wondered why the company only produced kits based on Universal characters. He had been watching “Chiller Theatre” along with millions of other youngsters, and some of his favorite film fiends had originated amid the nuclear nightmares of the 1950s.
Years dragged by without further ado until Ruffalo finally decided to take matters into his own hands and recreate his favorite 1950s monsters himself. Living in Japan at the time, he befriended gifted artist and sculptor Hama Hayao and convinced Hayao to lend his talents to the project. Ruffalo wasn’t interested in mass-producing cheap plastic kits to turn a quick profit; his ambition was to create top-of-the-line, finely detailed, faithful renditions of motion picture “B-creatures” to offer to serious collectors. To realize that dream, he began amassing photos from as many different sources as he could to show Hama what he had in mind. Eventually he got in touch with Bob Burns, who loaned Ruffalo dozens of black-and-white and color shots from Blaisdell’s films. Ruffalo also got hold of clippings from Famous Monsters, Monster World, Fantastic Monsters, and similar publications, and had literally hundreds of 35mm frame blowups made from the original theatrical prints. These were turned over to Hayao, allowing the sculptor to see in great detail every scale, antennae, fang, hair, and claw.
Ruffalo’s vision finally bore fruit in 1985 when Hayao finished the first model in the Blaisdell series, the mushroom monster from It Conquered the World. Using frame blow-ups and 8"×10" glossy stills supplied by Bob Burns as reference materials, Hayao was able to create a perfectly detailed replica of the mushroom monster, even down to the “porthole” between its eyes (the viewing aperture that Blaisdell used when stationed inside the costume). Photographs of the work in progress were forwarded to Burns so that he could see how things were proceeding, but nothing could prepare him for the unveiling of the sculpture “in the flesh.” The exactitude of the finished work was simply astounding. “They are great lovers of Paul’s work in Japan,” Burns pointed out, “and that is made obvious by the great amount of care and detail that Hama Hayao put into his work on this project. It’s just incredible.”
Before models of Hayao’s sculpture could be developed and marketed to the public, it was necessary to seek permission from the one person who still owned the legal rights to Blaisdell’s work—Sam Arkoff.
“Arkoff was very helpful,” Michael Ruffalo noted, “and he was delighted with the idea of a series of model kits based on his company’s pictures.” (Why wouldn’t Arkoff be delighted? This was going to mean more money in his already-bulging pockets, though it would have been nice to at least share the windfall with Jackie Blaisdell.) Ruffalo had to pay Arkoff a copyright fee for each Blaisdell monster whose likeness would be packaged and sold in kit form.*
Although Hama Hayao had completed Beulah from It Conquered the World first, his second work in the series was actually marketed in the U.S. first. While details of the copyright agreement were being ironed out between Ruffalo and Arkoff, Hayao had begun working on a unique sculpture of a Martian and one of the diminutive actors of AIP’s 1957 production, Invasion of the Saucer Men. With this piece Hayao showed he could sculpt not only monsters, but human figures as well.
Once Arkoff’s monetary interest in the AIP monster models had been sated, Ruffalo was free to begin selling kits under the Billiken banner. He opted to release the Invasion of the Saucer Men kit first because he thought (probably correctly) that fans were more familiar with the exophthalmic Saucerians than Beulah the magic mushroom. Initial sales of the Saucer Man model were brisk, so Ruffalo instructed Hayao to begin work on a third in the series, the She-Creature, while It Conquered the World kits were readied for release.
Blaisdell’s original costume was so detailed it took Hayao over nine months to sculpt the She-Creature to his own exacting standards. But the long wait turned out to be more than worthwhile because the finished piece was a triumph, perfect in the most minute detail.
In fact, all the models released by Billiken were so finely crafted and had taken so long to produce that the company was forced to ask $48 for the She-Creature kit and $33 each for the kits of the mushroom monster from It Conquered the World and the Saucer Man. In terms of actual production expenses, it cost Ruffalo about $19 to produce each She-Creature unit, not including costs for advertising, packaging, and shipping.† The hand-crafted kits were being produced at the rate of twenty per day in Japan—an extremely slow rate by American manufacturing standards—in order to maintain optimum quality. “The consumer was really paying for the craftsmanship,” Ruffalo pointed out. “We could have made these kits very easily and very cheaply, but that’s not what I wanted to do. These are collector’s items. They are limited editions.” Despite strong initial sales of the Saucer Man model, profits leveled off. The mushroom monster model sold respectably well, though not as well as the Saucer Man. Surprisingly, sales of the She-Creature kit were disproportionately low.
Billiken’s Saucer Man model kit came with an extra Martian head that could be placed over the actor’s own (courtesy of Bob Burns).
(The AIP movie monster kits may have been ahead of—or behind—the times. A few years earlier American toy manufacturers such as Kenner had been producing models kits and movable “action figures” of popular movie monsters such as the Alien, which were generally priced between $5 and $20. Similarly, just a few years after Billiken’s mid– and late–1980s releases, a new line of high-priced collectibles from Japan began enjoying a reign of success in the U.S. as fantasy fans willingly laid out $100 and more for “supermodel” imports of Godzilla, Rodan, and other Japanese film characters. Reactionary American manufacturers immediately began producing their own self-described “collectibles,” including a variety of high-priced figures from the movies Aliens and Alien3. The ongoing popularity of these high-ticket items remains a mystery.)
The She-Creature model kit produced by Billiken USA. Sculptor Hama Hayao studied hundreds of photographs and frame blowups from the AIP film to make certain the model would be anatomically exact (courtesy of Bob Burns).
The sparse sales of Billiken’s later releases impacted on Ruffalo’s plans for releasing kits of Paul’s monsters from It! the Terror from Beyond Space and Day the World Ended.‡ The final Billiken release associated with an AIP film was the monster from War of the Colossal Beast.
Although the Billiken model kits appealed mostly to a specialized customer, Blaisdell’s work could be judged by an entirely new audience when the original films finally began turning up on home video in the early 1990s. Day the World Ended, The Spider, It Conquered the World, Voodoo Woman, It! the Terror from Beyond Space, Cat Girl, Invasion of the Saucer Men, How to Make a Monster, The Amazing Colossal Man, and War of the Colossal Beast were all issued by Columbia-Tristar Home Video in just a little over a year. Although valued at “sell-through” prices (generally $10-20) for the home market, retail sales were spotty, and future releases were pulled from the company’s schedule. (The She-Creature, penciled in for a May 19
93 release, was canceled at the last minute.) Rights to the AIP material, of course, reverted to Sam Arkoff, who is not interested in rereleasing the films unless there is a significant buck to be made. In 1995 he was approached by a company which was interested in releasing definitive versions of a number of AIP pictures on videodisc, but negotiations were stalled by Arkoff, who was holding out for a high-dollar percentage. Unfortunately for the fans, unless Arkoff realizes that any profits to be gained on the American International movies from the 1950s are going to be marginal at best, the films may never be released.
Paul’s monsters sometimes turn up in the oddest of places. Most recently, cartoon caricatures of “Cuddles” and “Beulah” appeared in a 1994 special edition of Cracked, a competitor of Mad. Typically, the drawings in Cracked’s Monster Party credit neither Blaisdell nor AIP. They also do not mention film titles. Presumably Cracked’s editors would like their readers to think that the magazine’s own artists came up with the She-Creature and the mushroom monster concepts on their own.