Mad Monster Party?

Mad Monster Party? (1967)

It's the silliest party of the year...and you're all invited!

When Dr Frankenstein decides to retire from the monster-making business, he calls an international roster of monsters to a creepy convention to elect his successor. Everyone is there including Dracula, The Werewolf, The Creature, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and many more. But Frankenstein's title is not all that is at stake. The famous doctor has also discovered the secret of total destruction that must not fall into the wrong hands!

Date of release
1967-03-08
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (78)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Music
Director
Jules Bass

Casting

Interesting facts

Mad Monster Party is a 1967 stop-motion animated musical comedy film produced by Rankin/Bass Productions for Embassy Pictures. The film stars the voices of Boris Karloff, Allen Swift, Gale Garnett and Phyllis Diller. It tells the story of a mad scientist who achieves the secret of total destruction. He summons all the monsters to his island home to show it off, while planning to retire as the head of the "Worldwide Organization of Monsters".

Production

The film was created using Rankin/Bass's "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.

Classic monster films were enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the late 1960s, along with more comedy-centered examples, 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. Rumors that Forrest J. Ackerman had a hand in the script have 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 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.

Mad Monster Party? was one of several family-friendly projects Karloff lent his voice to in his final years (including the 1966 television 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 three decades earlier.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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