Mad Monster Party ? (1967)



English

Mad Monster Party (on-screen title Mad Monster Party?) is a 1967 American stop-motion animated musical comedy film produced by Rankin/Bass Productions for Embassy Pictures. The film stars Boris Karloff, Allen Swift, Gale Garnett, and Phyllis Diller. Although less well-known than Rankin/Bass' holiday specials, it has become a cult film.
The film was created using Rankin/Bass' "Animagic" stop motion animation process, supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Productions in Tokyo, Japan. The process involved photographing figurines a frame at a time, then re-positioning them, exposing another frame, and so forth.[citation needed] In addition to Mochinaga along with assistant director Kizo Nagashima, many other "Animagic" technicians of MOM (re-established as Video Tokyo Production after Mochinaga left for China) including puppet makers Ichiro Komuro and Kyoko Kita, and assistant animators Hiroshi Tabata and Fumiko Magari[citation needed] also worked on the film for Rankin/Bass, but are uncredited.[citation needed] Known as stop-motion animation, it was the same approach used in RKO Radio Pictures' King Kong, Art Clokey's Gumby and Davey and Goliath, and many other films, commercials and TV specials. In partnership with MOM and Dentsu, Rankin/Bass had created several "Animagic" productions including the syndicated television series The New Adventures of Pinocchio, the enormously successful Christmas television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the first full-length film Willy McBean and his Magic Machine. Classic monster movies were enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the late 1960s along with humorous monsters like The Addams Family and The Munsters. This campy film is a spoof of horror themes, complete with musical numbers and inside jokes.
Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman penned the script (with writer Len Korobkin) and Mad artist Jack Davis designed many of the characters. Davis was a natural for the job, being famous both for his humor work and his monster stories in the pages of EC Comics. It has long been rumored that Forrest J. Ackerman had a hand in the script, but while the dialogue is rife with Famous Monsters of Filmland-like puns, Ackerman's involvement has never been confirmed and his name never appeared in the on-screen credits or in original promotion for the film at the time of its release. In fact, Rankin/Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt, in liner notes accompanying the Anchor Bay DVD release, denied Ackerman was ever involved, at the same time as the DVD packaging promoted Ackerman's name. Goldschmidt repeated this on this in a 2006 blog entry, based on his interviews with Korobkin, who claimed to have written the original screenplay which then was revised by Kurtzman, but never worked with Ackerman.
In addition to the famous monsters seen in the film, Mad Monster Party also features several celebrity likenesses. Karloff and Diller's characters are both designed to look like the actors portraying them, while Baron Frankenstein's lackey, Yetch, is a physical and vocal caricature of Peter Lorre. Allen Swift also does impersonations when voicing his characters like doing his rendition of Jimmy Stewart when voicing Felix Flankin, Sydney Greenstreet when voicing the Invisible Man, and Charles Laughton when voicing the Freighter Captain.
Mad Monster Party was one of several child-friendly projects Karloff lent his voice to in his final years (such as the TV adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!). It was his final involvement in a production connected to the Frankenstein mythos that had propelled him to stardom some 36 years earlier.