75 Years of Universal Monsters Paperback – August 1, 2006

John Flynn’s 75 Years of Universal Monsters is a wonderfully-researched book, with great commentary and stunning insider details about the monster movies I love. Chapter by chapter, Author Flynn details the literary history of each of those great monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, the Creature, and many others. Flynn seems to have a personal favorite which is the Phantom of the Opera, and this should come as no surprise to readers because the author has written an entire book about the Phantom. Nonetheless, he details the various Phantom movies that were mounted by Universal, and his background details about Lon Chaney’s Phantom and Claude Rains’ Phantom as well as others come to life right on the page. In this third edition, he also talks about Universal’s recent attempts to revive the famous monsters of filmland, with the Mummy movie starring Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, Peter Jackson’s shot-by-shot remake of King Kong (originally an RKO monster) and Del Toro’s beautiful and Oscar-winning Shape of Water which was actually made by a rival studio when the director failed to get the green light from his own remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In addition to the great monsters, Flynn also includes the Metalunean monster in This Island Earth, The Birds from Hitchcock’s great film, Stephen Sommer’s remake of The Mummy, Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, as well as Universal’s Dark Universe plan to remake the original monsters. I loved this book, and actually keep it handy as a resource when I am looking for something to watch on tv. I have added check marks next to his complete list of monster movies in the Appendix. While I see that I still have a lot of movies to watch, I refer to Flynn’s excellent book over and over again as I am checking off the monster pictures I watch. What a great book! Thanks so much!

This modest studio created an immortal legacy fantasy/horror films that made them recognized world wide as leaders in their field. The production values included matchless make up as well as set design and optical effects. Even as the years wore on and the budgets waned, the quality was still far beyond anything produced by other studios. Even into the fifties, Universal maintained the lead in atomic powered nightmares.If there hadn't been a Universal, there would have been no Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.

An interesting book, but the Kindle conversion leaves a lot to be desired. For example, this description of "The Shape of Water," cited as a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" inspired film: "According to Eisner, the remake will capitalize of advances in version. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1962, during the Cuban special effects and make-up technology while remaining true to the Missile Crisis, his story follows a mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) at a 1954 classic..." Literally, two different paragraphs merged at alternate lines of text. Most of the pictures are also rendered as a series of narrow horizontal strips with white space or text between each section, leaving only the rare image that's actually clearly shown.These are obviously flaws in the conversion for Kindle and presumably easily corrected if someone wants to take the time to fix them (which they should). There's also a bit of laziness indicated by the use of the same description of "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" in the sections referencing each of those monsters. Logically, if the author wanted to use the same text, it would have been better to simply add a note referencing the first description rather than repeat it verbatim.All in all, it's not a bad book, and most of the information is useful enough. It's definitely in need of some serious editing and reformatting, though, and there are obvious errors here and there that could have been avoided by, well, rewatching the movies just before writing about them.