My memories of the Little Golden Books of the seventies is the subject of another Flashbak article I posted this week.
Here's a snippet (and the url: http://flashbak.com/spines-gold-remembering-sci-fi-little-golden-books-seventies-32926/ )
"Today, I want to
remember another glorious bit of my 1970s childhood: The Little Golden Books.
These tiny volumes actually go all the way back to September 1942 -- the age of World War II -- when Simon and Schuster began publishing books with the sturdy golden spine for children.
Marketed
at 25 cents each, these books sold millions of copies. By the late 1970s, the
books were selling for 69 cents apiece and had come to mirror "children's popular culture over the years,"
according to the official history of the line.
Over the years, Little Golden Books have completed their commendable stated mission of reflecting children's pop culture by featuring books about such characters as Lone Ranger, Barbie, Scooby Doo and Pokemon. But for this flashbak I want to draw your attention to the genre-related movie/TV-related books from my own youth in the disco decade…of which you can see a few examples here.
Among
them: Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost ("The
Surprise Guests,") Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the
Children of Hopetown, and even one based on the Disney sci-fi movie
from Christmas of 1979: The Black Hole ("A Spaceship
Adventure for Robots.”)
Remarkably,
Buck
Rogers story does something that the actual TV series never did: it
returns to Anarchia, the post-holocaust world outside of New Chicago on Earth. In this tale, a “raggedly-dressed” boy named
Cort tells Buck and Twiki about a place called “Hopetown” -- really an old warehouse
where children are learning to live in peace, and keeping out violent mutants. But now mutants are trying to destroy this
“new world” the children are building together.
Naturally,
Buck comes to the rescue.
The
Black Hole story
is also fun, though it seems to occur in a separate continuity from the movie
itself. Here, cute robots, V.I.N.C.ent
and Old B.O.B. go on an adventure together aboard the ghost ship, Cygnus,
attempting to steer clear of the propeller-handed robot Maximillian.
Here,
the devilish robot is more like a school bully than a legitimately fearsome
villain..." (Cont. at Flashbak).
John nice trip back to my boyhood with these Little Golden Books. The Buck Rogers book looks extremely interesting and I think you are right it would have been a good season one episode of the series.
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