[narfstar]

I have been searching the copyright sites to see what more Dell Four Colors we can add. Dell did not renew their books but they often ran adaptations. Most movies are out. However, whenever I would do a title search I would find that the TV series comics were not adaptations of the show episodes. Today I found an exception in Circus Boy. The first story was original but the second one was not. So I have to be diligent to make sure TV comics are OK. I doubt there would be any problems with this obscure show but....

[narfstar]

Leave it to Beaver seems to be OK with no matching stories but Casey Jones the stories matched episodes so no can use.

[RickDeckard525]

Valiant used the character Turok to hunt dinosaurs so I'm not sure if you can put the issues with him.

[narfstar]

Any character that went to Gold Key is not PD

[atomickommiecomics]

I have been searching the copyright sites to see what more Dell Four Colors we can add. Dell did not renew their books but they often ran adaptations. Most movies are out. However, whenever I would do a title search I would find that the TV series comics were not adaptations of the show episodes. Today I found an exception in Circus Boy. The first story was original but the second one was not. So I have to be diligent to make sure TV comics are OK. I doubt there would be any problems with this obscure show but....

What about if the episode adapted into comic form was also PD?
Wouldn't that render the comic story PD?

[DennyWilson]

I have been searching the copyright sites to see what more Dell Four Colors we can add. Dell did not renew their books but they often ran adaptations. Most movies are out. However, whenever I would do a title search I would find that the TV series comics were not adaptations of the show episodes. Today I found an exception in Circus Boy. The first story was original but the second one was not. So I have to be diligent to make sure TV comics are OK. I doubt there would be any problems with this obscure show but....

What about if the episode adapted into comic form was also PD?
Wouldn't that render the comic story PD?

That's a good question. Also are we 100% sure comic stories with same titles of episodes are in fact adaptions of episodes? Anyone been checking old videos to make sure?

[narfstar]

I doubt that anyone has gone that far Denny. It is very unlikely that we would have any trouble posting comics from any TV series or movie even if not PD. But we want to be legal even if no one cares.

[crashryan]

In regards to movie and TV adaptations, back when I had my big Dell collection decades ago, I ran across an issue of "Cheyenne" in which the stories were rip-offs (or should I say, uncredited adaptations?) of two classic movies. One was "To Have and Have Not," and if I remember aright the other was "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The plots were adjusted, of course, to insert Cheyenne Bodie into them, but otherwise they followed the originals closely.

This sort of plagiarism was rare in Dell comics. I've tried to find the issue to check my memory, but no one seems to have posted it. It was part of the ongoing "Cheyenne" series, not Four Color.

[DennyWilson]

In regards to movie and TV adaptations, back when I had my big Dell collection decades ago, I ran across an issue of "Cheyenne" in which the stories were rip-offs (or should I say, uncredited adaptations?) of two classic movies. One was "To Have and Have Not," and if I remember aright the other was "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The plots were adjusted, of course, to insert Cheyenne Bodie into them, but otherwise they followed the originals closely.

This sort of plagiarism was rare in Dell comics. I've tried to find the issue to check my memory, but no one seems to have posted it. It was part of the ongoing "Cheyenne" series, not Four Color.

Heck, Warner Brothers did it on their series ALL THE TIME! Taking plots from their Western and Detective Film and adapting them without credit. (or they'd credit them to W.Hermanos - Spanish for Warner Brothers) During writer strikes,or for budget control they'd even take scripts from one series and reuse them on another. (and not just Detective for Detective or Western for Western,either! A Maverick Script was one reworked for a Hawaiian Eye!)

Both those films were from Warners, so they might have been adaptation of episodes that were based on those film elements!

[narfstar]

Interesting I never pay that much attention

[profh0011]

"Warner Brothers did it on their series ALL THE TIME! Taking plots from their Western and Detective Film and adapting them without credit."

I'm reminded of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 2-parter (actually the 2nd story they filmed), "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero".  It was a sci-fi amalgamation of several stories all at once-- "The Guns Of Navarone", "Ice Station Zero" (both Alistair Maclean), with "The Dirty Dozen".  but, it also was a remake of the 2-part 1974 STAR BLAZERS sequence, "Pluto Reflex Gun". If you watch both to compare, it's very clear that the original Japanese version makes 10 TIMES more sense!  (Glen Larson just didn't let that stop him.)

It made virtually zero sense in the BG version to describe the entire fleet being "herded" thru a "narrow lane"-- when they're IN SPACE!!!  On SB it made far more sense, as until they were fired upon, they had NO idea there was a weapon on Pluto at all, and they were already heading there to make some repairs.  The shock came when not only were they fired on from the planet's surface, but trying to get out of its range failed because the lazer beams were being bounced AROUND the planet by an entire series of orbitting satellites.  One of the most incredible moments in the entire year-long storyline was when The Yamato, damaged, SANK beneath the waves of the "frozen" sea on the surface of Pluto.  (Of course, it was a spaceship-- but it also had underwater submarine capabilities.)

The American version was a JOKE compared to this.  It actually did work, for the most part, relying entirely on character drama.  Good thing, on technical logic it failed abysmally.  (It's no wonder so many compared the writing on BG to LOST IN SPACE.)

[narfstar]

Are the Star Blazer episodes on youtube?

[profh0011]

I don't know.  I guess you could look.  I taped mine off the local station starting back in November 1979.  You read that right!  I bought my 1st VCR juist to tape that show, which was running M-F at 8:30 AM.  Yeah.  At a time when the only people who could see it were pre-schoolers, unemployed, and retirees.  All the commercials were aimed at pre-schoolers.  It was sickening, and terribly inappropriate.

With the help of a friend at work who also had a VCR, I was able to copy-edit and create versions without the commercials, but the resulting image quality was terrible.  I also managed to edit them together into 4-hour-long "movies" with only the shortest breaks between episodes and no opening and closing credits except at the start and end of each tape.  Each 26-episode serial (1974 and 1978) fit on 2 tapes.

The most challenging bit of editing came near the end of the 2nd storyline, right after Derek RAMMED Desslok's flagship broadside.  Between the end of one episode and the beginning of the next, each had some segments missing, and I had to edit them together-- jumping back-and-forth between both episodes to get all the segments IN SEQUENCE.

Oh, what I could have done with DIGITAL editing equipment back then...



I really wasted 20 years of my life in drafting...

[SuperScrounge]

Narfstar, Star Blazers can be found legally on hulu.com, along with a bunch of other shows old and new.

[narfstar]

Thanks I have a vcr tape of some episodes but would like to see the ones mentioned

[profh0011]

What I really wish, is that when the 3rd season finally made it over here to America, that they would have found a way to get the SAME group of voice actors to do the dubbing as the 1st 2 seasons.  A lot of years had gone by (though only a few had separated the seasons in Japan), and the original U.S. cast apparently had a lot of non-union actors in it.  So instead, they got the guy who did SPEED RACER and many other shows, and he got his regular people.  The visuals and the music were identical, but having every single character speaking in a different vouice was very disconcerting.

Makes me wanna see the show in the original Japanese (which, presumably, had the same actors in all the tv episodes and feature films).

[DennyWilson]

I doubt that anyone has gone that far Denny. It is very unlikely that we would have any trouble posting comics from any TV series or movie even if not PD. But we want to be legal even if no one cares.

Well, the site is already doing this with public domain comics based on films -  Fawcett's Motion Picture Comics - all those films are still Copyrights - and it represents all the major studios. Heck, the PD Spanish "Captain Marvel" comics are adaptations of the serial, still under copyright.

Point is, there's already examples on the site of posting such comics. The comics are derivative works that have fallen into the public domain - regardless of the source. They are not a 100% copy of the film or dialog, stuff is cut,added,rearranged - and adaption.

While not a direct analogy - take  "Rocketship" - it's an edited feature version of the first Buster Crabbe "Flash Gordon" serial/ It's public domain but the serial is not. It's an adaption of the original serial.

[Lee M]

I've just joined up and am learning the ropes here. I happen to have remastered versions of the three Dell Four-Color Mowgli comics - the pages have been descreened and colour and contrast corrected. Two of these titles (Four Color ##487 and 582) are already on this site, unremastered and with slightly smaller page sizes, but the third (#620) does not yet appear to be.

Questions:

• What is the protocol for uploading new versions of existing titles?
• Is there a short cut for copying the Additional Information boxes from the previous versions?
• Is there a method for linking directly between titles such as these featuring the same characters/story?
  

[MarkWarner]

By enlarge we really want just one copy of each issue. This is mainly due to disk space Personally I prefer an original scan (with a slight bit of "cosmetics") to a remastered one. The copyright on the other Mowgli was renewed so we can;t house it here .

The information at the bottom of the page comes from comics.org and is  "automatically" added

Welcome Lee and I hope you have fun here!