View-Master: THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE

Cartoonist and children's author Ted Key is best remembered today for creating the Mister Peabody & Sherman characters for Bullwinkle & Rocky as well as the long-running Hazel comic strip (which itself was the inspiration for a successful TV series), but the TOS crew first encountered his name during the 1970s when he wrote a trio of live-action animal comedies for Walt Disney Productions: THE MILLION DOLLAR DUCK (1971), GUS (1976), and THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE (1978). A big fan of the first two movies, Po-Man was an age-appropriate Disney die-hard when he saw the third during its theatrical run, and even then found it as lackluster and formulaic as its title, despite a cast of familiar faces and old pros (Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Harry Morgan, Roddy McDowall, McLean Stevenson, Jesse White, Alan Young, Hans Conried, James Hampton, Howard Platt, William Prince, Hank Jones, Rick Hurst, Sorrell Booke, and Ronnie Schell, who has an onscreen role and provides the voice of the titular feline). That still didn't stop him from buying the Pocket Books novelization -- also penned by Key -- or this neat View-Master packet, which is more enjoyable than the movie itself thanks to brevity and 3 reels of eye-popping 3D images. As for the booklet, which has been scanned and posted below for your amusement, please note that top-liners Berry, Duncan, and the darn cat are nowhere to be found in any of the photos.

Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales

"Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales" was a weekly syndicated comic strip that ran from July 13th, 1952 to February 15th, 1987 and serialized (usually in 13 weeks) the Walt Disney movies that were currently in theatrical release. I grew up a huge fan of the Disney live-action comedies of the 1960s and '70s -- especially the ones starring Dean Jones, Kurt Russell, Tim Conway and Don Knotts -- but only had limited exposure to the comic strip because the newspapers in my neck of the woods never carried it. I caught up with some of the stories when they were reprinted as comic books in the "Walt Disney Showcase" series...


...but many of the films, like the nine sampled below, never appeared in comic form again after their initial newspaper runs. I'd like to see these and others get reprinted in color eventually (Jack Kirby's adaptation of THE BLACK HOLE would be a great way to kick off the series), but for now I'm satisfied with the black-and-white copies I've been able to track down.