Halloween is for unearthing old but vital haunts. This year, let’s turn back to the greatest jam band on the bones, and a master of literary horror, reanimated:
Who Is Little Tibia and the Fibias?
The mop-topped skeletons thrash out a funky garage jam that makes Phyllis Diller want to mosh with a mummy (and Igor, too). The band’s song “The Mummy” is the coolest tune found in Rankin-Bass’ 1967 stop-motion classic Mad Monster Party.
Starring Boris Karloff, penned by Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman and featuring avatars for Jimmy Stewart and Peter Lorre, the film went on to inspire Tim Burton’s equally awesome Nightmare Before Christmas and still retains a cult following.
But it’s not all good news: The actual band that performed Little Tibia and the Fibias’ most excellent “The Mummy” has yet to be identified, on the soundtrack or anywhere else. I contacted Rankin-Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt for help, but he explained even the film’s composer Maury Laws couldn’t remember the band’s real-world counterparts.
“I read a DVD review that said it was Dyke & the Blazers,” Goldschmidt explained. “But I’m not positivethat is true.”
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Poe, Reanimated: Extraordinary Tales
Director Raul Garcia’s Extraordinary Tales is an animated anthology of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories that’s as stylistically diverse as it is existentially engrossing.
Starring voices of the late, great Christopher Lee, the iconic Bela Lugosi (from beyond the grave), filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, B-movie influential Roger Corman, and veteran horror and fantasy actor Julian Sands, Extraordinary Tales brings Poe’s harrowing stories to the screen for newer generations raised on boundless technologies and influences. Opening last Friday, Garcia’s 73-minute, unrated animated anthology ambitiously pulls art, literature, comics, film, and collaboration into its dark embrace and doesn’t let go.