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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Monster Party!

August 20, 2009

When we reviewed Rankin/Bass’s beloved Mad Monster Party upon its first DVD release back in 2002 (https://www.videobusinesss.com/article/CA618405.html), we noted how there were originally plans for the inclusion of a making-of featurette, but the the plans were scrubbed because certain talent releases hadn’t been signed, proper monies hadn’t been paid, and so on. In place of a featurette, then-distributor Anchor Bay included an impressive, picture-filled 24-page color booklet by Rankin/Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt.

 

Well, it’s more than seven years later and Lionsgate has acquired the rights to the 1967 all-star stop-motion animation extravaganza and the studio has finally delivered the supplements that the film deserves. Mad Monster

Party: Special Edition (available on Sept. 8) is outfitted with 30 minutes of making-of featurettes produced by Jon Mefford, including pieces on the creation of the film, its music and voiceovers and another on the painstaking art of stop-motion animation. On board for the ride and offering their recollections and insights are Goldschmidt, producer Arthur Rankin Jr., storyboard artist Don Duga, composer Maury Laws and voiceover artist Alan Swift (whose name is incorrectly spelled in the on-screen IDs!). (Unavailable for comment were the film's stars: Dracula, The Mummy, The Frankenstein Monster, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Wolfman and Phyllis Diller!) It’s Rankin who provides the biggest chuckle when he speak of working on the film’s production with the stop-motion animators in Japan where his primary job was costuming the movable stop-motion figures for the shoot.

 

“Dressing up dolls is a strange thing for grown man to be doing, but I did it,” he chuckles.    

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on August 20, 2009 | Comments (1)