When I was a kid I used to get a lot of these. Some were good, some bad. The plots agreed with the movies, and not generally with the Classics Illustrated story.
What amazed me is that Dell would apparently do adaptations of just about anything. I could understand them doing Disney movies, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, In Search of the Castaways, Kidnapped, Swiss Family Robinson and so on. I could even understand them doing Jack the Giant Killer, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, and the like. They even did the first Bond movie, Dr. No.
But they also did The Dirty Dozen, Ensign Pulver, The Hallelujah Trail. I can’t see a big audience for those.
And what really amazes me is that they did absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel flicks:
**The Three Stooges Meet Hercules
The Sword and the Dragon ** (One of those Finno-Russia films they did on MST3K) The Raven
They even did Santa Claus Conquers the Martians !
One of the oddest things they did was what looked like an adaptation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. But when you read the story, it didn’t really resemble the movie at all. At the end, the Creature has left a sort of cocoon filled with little baby “creatures” to the boat!
Remember any of these?
Oh, yeah – here’s another one. Countdown, starring a then unknown James Caan. Totally forgotten 1960’s science fiction about the race to the moon. The lunar lander looks like a Gemini spcecraft stuck on the bottom of a LEM:
Is it possible that Dell was working from a script that was changed during shooting? It’s my understanding that it isn’t unusual for the company that gets the rights to do the adaptation to get a copy of the script well before the movie is released (so that the comic can be finished and on the shelves to coincide with the movie release).
I doubt it. The comic book came out years after the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and differs significantly from it.
I’m very sure that, in the case of Jack the Giant Killer, the movie was at least mostly completed before the comic was done. Even as a kid I was struck by how closely some of the panels duplicated what was on the screen. It’s clear to me that the artist had a copy of the film (or at least some stills from it) to work from. There’s a long enough delay between the wrap-up of filming and the release of the film for that to occur.
