Harry Houdini Circumstantial Evidence (HHCE) will be on hiatus for a week or two for some much needed R&R.
1907 photo of Harry Houdini on wharf in New Orleans
I have a cinema chat series planned for when I return.
Another Weird Tales Sketch Card just sold on eBay. Congratulations to the winner. This is another image from the Grim Game.
See my blog from last week for more information on Weird Tales Sketch Cards and information about Houdini’s contributions to the Weird Tales Magazine.
This is a scan of an original character sketch card by Studio-Hades that sold on eBay last month. The scan contains slightly more contrast and considerably less detail than the original, the scan really does not do this piece justice.
It is from the WEIRD TALES 2 sketch collection and is numbered 13 in the series; there is only one of each card in a series.
The following text appears on the back of the card:
Few periodicals have had such a lasting impact on literature and popular culture as Weird Tales. First published in 1923 during the heyday of the pulp magazine, Weird Tales broke the constraints of what was conceivable in popular fiction at that time. Crafted by a diverse group of authors, including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Tennessee Williams and August Derleth, they seamlessly melded themes as disparate as space viruses and necrophilia to sword and sorcery and historical speculation – all for a penny a word. Conan the Barbarian, arguably Weird Tales most famous son, enjoys more fame now than at the time of his creation.
Acheron Mint celebrates the unholy legacy of the strange, occult, the supernatural and bizarre and the fearless writers who conceived it with the Weird Tales Sketch Collection Set Two.
The sketch is of course from The Grim Game. In fact, it was from the following famous image that can found in the Library of Congress.
Harry Houdini was a frequent Weird Tales contributor. Here are some Houdini Weird Tales covers.
I was intrigued by the following posts from John Cox at WildAboutHoudini.com:
It led me to find the following VHS video:
Excerpts from the Harry Houdini serial, The Master Mystery are ridiculed by a wisecracking commentator for the entertainment of the enlightened 1948 audiences.
Click on the link below to load a 4 minute 115MB .wmv file in a separate window; it may take several minutes to load the video I took with my iphone of the VHS tape playing.
I was hoping to find lost footage from the Master Mystery, but that was not the case. The footage is misidentified on the tape as being from The Man From Beyond. The footage is actually from episode 2 and 3 of the the Mastery Mystery. The Baker’s dock sequence which suffers severe nitrate deterioration on the Kino DVD aprears to be in better shape on this 1948 version that appears on the 1980 VHS tape, although you can’t really tell from the poor quality of the compressed .wmv taken with my iphone.
The search for lost Houdini footage that has not deteriorated continues…