CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL:

Of the other "name pirates" standing alongside Kidd and Bonney, only Blackbeard (Mike Ross) has anything much to do. The names of Calico Jack, Stede Bonnet and James Avery are tossed out haphazardly and with no real characters attached, while another famous pirate, Bartholomew Roberts, gets both of his names farmed out to two separate characters, a Captain Bartholomew and a Captain Roberts. I guess the writers got a short list of famous pirate-names and ran out. Anyway, as far as crossovers of legendary historical characters are concerned, only Kidd, Bonney and Blackbeard rate. 

 

MONSTER MASHUPS #105

 EC artist Jack Davis did a lot of lobby cards and album covers on "monster mash" themes, but this might be the best of them, even if one doesn't necessarily consider most of the Addams Family "monsters."

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 From my review of the 1978 sex comedy FAIRY TALES:

Fairyland in this case is more like one of the many "all-fairy-tales-sold-here" worlds, though Prince doesn't seem to recognize any of the figures he meets on his quest-- Little Bo Peep (Angela "LOST EMPIRE" Aames), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Tommy Tucker, Scheherezade (Nai Bonet), Old King Cole, Peeping Tom, and the Frog Prince. The original version is also supposed to have some erotic schtick with Jack and Jill, but this didn't appear in the version I watched. IMDB lists actors who played the roles of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Little Dutch Boy," but I never spotted either one... Aside from Prince having short and inconsequential encounters with Bo Peep and the Jack-and-Jill couple, almost all the action takes place within a colossal laced-up boot, "The Shoe of Pleasure," which is Fairyland's foremost whorehouse. The woman who lives in this shoe doesn't have any children; I guess she knew what to do. The writers give the Madame Who Lives in a Shoe (Brenda Fogarty) a name culled from a separate nonsense-poem, that of "Gussie Gander." 

THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME #62

Since I'm making up for not having done many villain-crossovers, I'm obliged to state that "Almost Got 'Im," the 1992 episode of BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, is easily the best villain-cross in that series, if not in all Batman cartoons of all time.

"Almost" only has one close rival: "Mayhem is the Music Meister" from BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which I mentioned in GREATEST #43. In any case, that one's less notable for its villain-crossovers than playing Batman off such familiar heroes as Black Canary, Green Arrow and Aquaman.

RAR #77: EVENING STAR

 Following up on RAR #68, here's an extremely minor example of a female chief from a 1957 TOMAHAWK, for a story winsomely entitled, "Revenge of the Girl Chief." But it's such a mediocre story-- involving a young squaw, Evening Star, who takes over leading her tribe when her father is murdered-- that making the daughter into a son would have made no structural difference. I'd like to think that somewhere in the thirty years of the TOMAHAWK feature-- at least in its Revolutionary War setting-- that there was at least one female "Real American" better than this one. But I found this one by chance and am not likely to go looking for a better candidate.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

THE DALTONS' WOMEN is a low budget oater within the "Lash LaRue" series, wherein the whip-wielding hero and his comedy relief contend with the Dalton Gang. However, this very fictionalized version of the Daltons just barely sustains any crossover-vibe. Of the three real-life Daltons, the script uses just the name of Brother Emmett (Tom Tyler), and makes up two other names, Clint and Jess, out of whole cloth.

I think that the "women" are two saloon girls who have a big catfight over their intended beau, though I've already forgotten if that was one of the Daltons or not. The catfight is really the only part of the movie worth seeing.

RAR #76: THE ZAZZTEC INDIANS

 

In FOUR COLOR #51, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig go treasure-hunting on "Happy Pappy Island" and almost get sacrificed by the natives, the Zazztec Indians. Curiously, the first time Bugs sees a native, he calls him a "White Indian," but nothing more is said about this odd classification. This 1944 opus is a pretty good Barks-style adventure, though artist Carl Beuttner probably wasn't directly influenced by Barks, since Barks got started in Disney comics only a couple years before this story, in 1942. The script includes a bit in which Bugs tells Porky that he's going to put one over on the "dumb savages" by pretending his flashlight is big magic, but the "savages" aren't fooled for a moment. However, they still believe in making sacrifices to soothe the local volcano, so Porky has to rescue the rash rabbit.