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News Roundup W/E 2021-04-25

Personal / Website News

Podcast News – H. P. Lovecast

Brand new episode of H. P. Lovecast Presents: Fragments is online. In this episode Michele and I talk about the film The Vast of Night. The episode can be streamed at our Buzzsprout website or via your podcast application of preference.

We’ve also finished conducting interviews for our first episode of H. P. Lovecast: Transmissions. This week, Michele will be editing the episode and publishing it the final day of April. Guests on the debut are Candace Robinson and Howard David Ingham.

Podcast News – Scaredy Cats

Recently I was a guest on the Scaredy Cats Podcast talking about the film The Slumber Party Massacre. That episode has been published and it can be listened to at Buzzsprout or any other podcast platform.

Podcast News – Scholars from the Edge of Time

New episode of The Scholar from the Edge of Time is online at BlogTalkRadio. In this episode I discuss the video game Story of a Gladiator. Stay tuned as I do a write up on this neo-peplum game for my website here.

This upcoming Tuesday I’ll also be making another appearance on the Voice of Olympus program.

General Neo-Peplum News

Thor: Love and Thunder

Gladiator star Russell Crowe has revealed he will be playing Zeus in the upcoming Thor film.

Rest in Peplum

Felix Silla passed away at the age of 84. He was in numerous sci-fi and fantasy products (such as playing an Ewok in Return of the Jedi) but for the sword and sorcery genre, he was a voice actor in Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings film.

Polish actress Wiesława Mazurkiewicz passed away at the age of of 95. She was in a Polish peplum film called Pharaoh (1966).

Rest in Peplum To Physical Media?

Animation historian Jerry Beck has posited that Warner Brothers is transitioning away from physical media and devoting more to streaming content and HBO Max. Come 2022, it sounds like Warner will shutter their physical line of DVDs and Blu-Rays being produced (but they could possibly be outsourced to another company). Regardless, there’s a few peplum films under the Warner Achives Banner at risk. Fans may want to consider plucking them up. Some titles include Hercules, Samson And Ulysses, The Colossus of Rhodes, and The Slave.

Hercules and the Captive Women

Hercules and the Captive Women recently got a nice re-release on Blu-Ray. Previously only available as a DVD in the long out of print Hercules Collection published by Retro-Media years ago, the new Film Detective release has many bells and whistles, including the MST3K version of the film. Specs can be found at DVDBeaver.

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News

News Roundup W/E 2021-02-07

Personal / Website News

New issue of Exotica Moderne

Exotica Moderne #10 is out! Copies can be ordered from House of Tabu. My contribution to this issue is pretty minimal, I only did a mini review of Zeena Schreck’s EP Bring me the Head of F. W. Murnau. However, I am ahead of the game for issue 11, which will contain my interview of Miss Pinup Miami. That interview is conducted, concluded, edited, and turned in!

Cover for Exotica Moderne #10

StokerCon 2021/AnnRadCon News

Official announcement has been made through the Stokercon channels that StokerCon 2021 will be a digital-only conference, with a physical one to resume when the world is safer from the COVID19 pandemic. This also means the AnnRadCon for 2021 will also switch to an online/digital mode. More details forthcoming as we get things sussed out. The official announcement can be read at StokerCon2021.com.

On a slight positive note, the cover art for the StokerCon 2021 souvenir book has been published online! Michele and I have a short essay in the book about AnnRadCon and the conference’s accomplishments thus far. The book is edited by Josh Viola, with cover art by Aaron Lovett and will be published by HEX Publishing.

Cover art for the StokerCon 2021 book

Podcast News

Episode 7 of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast Presents: Fragments is online! In this episode we interview Lee Murray. The episode can be listened to on our site at Buzzsprout or on your podcast application of preference.

Call for Papers

The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.

Citation News

In the autumn of 2020, James Arthur Anderson had his book, Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction, published by Lexington Books. This text cites his essay, “Four Quadrants of Success: The Metalinguistics of Author Protagonists in the Fiction of Stephen King,” which appeared in Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays.

Cover Art

My essay “Permission to kill: Exploring Italy’s 1960s Eurospy Phenomenon, Impact and Legacy” from James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy has been cited by Samhita Sunya in their essay “On Location: Tracking Secret Agents and Films, between Bombay and Beirut” which appears in the journal Film History Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall 2020.

Journal issue cover

General Neo-Peplum News

Story of a Gladiator Physical Release

On Friday Limited Run opened a pre-order for 1,500 copies of Brain Seal’s game Story of a Gladiator for the Playstation. It, of course, sold out by the day’s end (but your’s truly, who has an Xbox and not a Playstation, had to buy a copy because reasons). Though the physical copy of the game was sold out, digital copies can readily be had on the Xbox, Playstation, Switch, and Steam. As I’ve been enjoying the Xbox incarnation, expect some sort of write-up about it in the very near future.

Rest in Peplum

Legendary actor Christopher Plummer passed away at the age of 91 from hitting his head from a fall. Renown for The Sound of Music (1965) he starred in numerous pepla productions:

  • The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
  • Oedipus the King (1968)
  • Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
  • Caesar and Cleopatra (2009)
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011 – voice)

Haya Harareet passed away at the age of 89. She is best known playing Esther in Ben-Hur (1959)

Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno passed away at the age of 97. He worked on numerous filoni and his sword and sandal contributions include:

  • The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966)
  • Fellini Satyricon (1969)
  • Red Sonja (1985)