Image and sound quality are excellent, and lest any buyers have misgivings about the short running time, note that the feature itself is only a small percentage of the content on this double-disc set.Īpart from the documentary, disc one also contains an entertaining video segment in which Feldstein and writer Ray Bradbury (whose work inspired a handful of EC tales) sit down for the first time on camera with comic historian Jerry West for a look back at the golden days of EC. The documentary flows much better without those pesky commercials and does a good job of offering a cohesive but concise history of the magazine (apart from short-changing the Amicus years in the 1970s, with only the theatrical trailer from Tales from the Crypt popping up briefly as a token nod). Originally aired in truncated form on American Movie Classics, Tales from the Crypt: From Comic Books to Television! appears on DVD in a longer 'director's cut' complete with a spiffy 5.1 audio mix. While it would be nice to say that we now know better and can give kids credit for distinguishing between utter fantasy and reality, times have sadly not changed much at all in our PG-13-safe world. The docu features a huge amount of colorful artwork from the original comic books, plenty of rare photos and anecdotes, and a clear-eyed view of the moral panic that ensued as children were presumably being turned into deviants thanks to reading about reanimated corpses, slaughtered spouses, and various creatures of the night. The Tales from the Crypt TV series (which lifted its plots directly from the comic pages) also gets its due with a variety of clips and comments from producer Joel Silver.

Romero, John Carpenter, and Goosebumps' R.L.

Interview subjects include EC editor and artist Al Feldstein, artists and comic historians like Jack Davis, Al Williamson, Jack Kamen, Marie Severin, Robert Overstreet and Russ Cochran, and 'EC children' like George A.

Told in linear fashion from EC's beginnings as the brainchild of comic pioneer William Gaines, this documentary covers all of the bases with an engaging and flashy style that often replicates the comic book format, complete with gaudy lettering and sliding panels. Though EC eventually had to retire its ghastly offerings by 1954, the influence lasted for decades as those same kids grew up into the writers and directors who revolutionized the genre beginning in the 1970s. Directed by Chip Selby / CS Films (US R1 NTSC) / DD5.1įor those who think the 1950s were a wholesome, straitlaced decade devoted to promoting nuclear family values, let's just remember one of its most significant contributions to popular culture: EC Comics, the notorious comic book company whose volumes like Tales from the Crypt entranced a generation of impressionable kids and outraged their parents enough to prompt legal action. Tales from the Crypt: From Comic Books to Television!Ĭolor, 2004, 56m.

PANIC by Russ Cochran