Voluptua

           

            I spent a lot of time on Saturday reading Diana Wynne Jones’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”. A young woman is transformed into a crone by an angry witch and so she leaves home. She encounters the “evil” Wizard Howl’s moving castle and takes shelter there. It turns out the castle exists in several places at once and is controlled by a fire demon that is controlled by the wizard, who doesn’t seem to be evil at all but just strives for survival to maintain the reputation that he is.

            That evening, since I’d been cooped up all day, I took a bike ride. There were nice smells of cooking floating around Korea Town. Personally I think that name was ill chosen. It doesn’t roll off the tongue or into the ear as nicely as “Chinatown” because it has one too many syllables. I think it would sound better to call it “Little Korea”. I rode to Yonge and then back down to Queen, along which there was a lot of annoying Saturday night sudden stops and parkings of the cars in front of me.

            I watched an episode of Commander Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe entitled “The Hydrogen Hurricane”, which again had nothing really to do with the story. The Universal Ruler’s henchmen were exploding the hydrogen pockets that are apparently in the core of the Moon, thus causing it to be propelled closer to the earth. Four such explosions would cause the Moon to hit the Earth. It’s an odd type of invasion and conquest if one just destroys the place that one wants to conquer. The overall plan of the ruler seems to change from episode to episode. A couple of the battle scenes were clearly taken from two episodes before. There are only two women that ever appear in this show. The main female character is Cody’s assistant, Joan, but the ruler has an unnamed gorgeous and voluptuous blonde assistant. She always wears the same long, form fitting white dress and has her hair up in a style reminiscent of the way old Hollywood movies portrayed elegant women’s coiffures of ancient Greece or Rome, though I think that in both of those cultures, elaborate braiding was the thing. She never spoke until this episode and it was only one line, but just enough to show that she couldn’t act. But even when a lot of these beauties are bad actresses, there’s something more to them than a pretty face. I saw that her name on the credits was Gloria Pall and I did a search. She was an aircraft mechanic during World War II. In 1945 she was working in a USO office on the 56^th floor of the Empire State Building when a US bomber crashed into the 79^th floor. In 1954 she stormed into producer’s office of a California television station called KABC and demanded to be made into a TV star. She developed a television show called “Voluptua” in which she would play a character of that name that was meant to be a Marilyn Monroesque love goddess. The idea was to cash in on the popularity of horror hostess, Vampira, by creating an opposite themed character known as “Voluptua”. She would enter the set by seductively descending a stairway to a round bed where she would sit and address the viewer as if she was on a date with them and had brought them home to her place. She would also undress and change clothes behind a screen so that her body could be seen in silhouette. That had Christian and PTA groups shouting “obscenity!” until the show was cancelled after seven weeks. She later became a successful Hollywood real estate agent and also wrote books about Hollywood. She died at the end of 2012.