As Frontierado fast approaches – Friday, August 7th this year – Balladeer’s Blog is here with another seasonal post. The Frontierado holiday is about the myth of the old west, not the grinding reality.
SARTANA: For the record, the Sartana movies starring Gianni Garko as the gambler-gunslinger are my favorites. His personality is a bit lighter than that of my top favorite Spaghetti Western gunslinger – Franco Nero in the original 1960s Django and its only official sequel, Django Strikes Again.
In addition, Sartana’s films generally stay away from negative emotions like the original Django carried around with him. Sartana’s world is filled mostly with gunmen as cold-blooded and professional as himself. They deserve to be killed and Sartana recognizes that he deserves it, too, it’s just that he proves harder to kill than his enemies ever do.
The Sartana movies start out pretty grounded (for Spaghetti Westerns) but as the franchise goes along the installments grow closer to Robert Conrad’s Wild, Wild West series and our hero’s trick guns almost equal James Bond’s gadgets. Sartana himself stops just short of being a swashbuckler as he boldly tweaks the villains with more and more audacity.
In this post I will first review the movies in which Gianni Garko played this unusual hero, then George Hilton’s “official” Sartana sequel, then touch on a few of the oddities. Like Django, Sartana inspired many, many “unofficial” sequels – several of which bear the name of the character in the title but not in the actual movie.
IF YOU MEET SARTANA … PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH (1968) – Sartana shadows a gold shipment being handled by stagecoach across the desert in one of the most distinctive Spaghetti Western entrances this side of Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. From there, the double-crosses fly like shrapnel among the main characters.
Lasky (William Berger) and his outlaw gang ultimately succeed in robbing the shipment, but our snuff-sniffing villain slaughters his gang members when betrayal seems to be in the air. The only one he lets live is his buddy Morgan (THE Klaus Kinski) and the pair decide to try adding to their haul by blackmailing the banker and other supposedly “respectable” citizens who wanted the gold stolen. Continue reading
TEEN TITANS Vol 1 #32 (Apr 1971) 
When they return to their own time period it turns out that Gnarrk’s death caused a butterfly effect and the “present” is now ruled by an evil version of Loren Jupiter called Jupiterius. He rules the world with Lilith’s (on stairs) sorcery, monsters and the evil counterparts of what would have been the other Teen Titans. 
CIMARRON ROSE DUNN – Poco wrote a song about her. She appears in a 1915 Silent Film about Oklahoma Outlaws. She’s often mistakenly believed to be the subject of the 1952 western The Rose of Cimarron. And it’s not even certain if that’s really her in one of the alleged surviving photos of her. Rose Dunn may embody the embellishments that fight with the truth when it comes to various figures from the Old West. 
PART 71 – Some of the Fool Killer’s targets on both sides of the aisle in the May 1914 edition of James Larkin Pearson’s version of the folk figure:
*** Bootleggers who were hurriedly transporting as much whiskey as they could from Virginia into North Carolina, where booze was now illegal. They did this because they could charge much more for liquor in a state where it was officially banned. 
SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE PARTY (1962-1965) was also called simply SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE and PAT’S SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE in the tantalizingly few surviving pieces of information available about this cult Movie Hostess show. SFMP aired Saturday nights at 10:30 (one ad says 10:20) on KMTV in Omaha, Nebraska from September 1962 to the end of summer 1965. 
SCIENCE FICTION PAT – Patricia Jones was a multi-talented woman enrolled at the University of Nebraska. On the side she played guitar, sang and recited beat poetry in Omaha coffee houses of the period. On SFMP Pat wrote her own material and designed various mostly black outfits for herself to wear during her Host Segments.
JOHNNY RINGO (1959) – Don Durant starred as the one and only Johnny Ringo, the real-life gunslinger. The fictional setting of this program takes place between Johnny’s original rise to fame during the Mason County War in Texas and his final years in Arizona as part of the Clanton-McLaury Crime Faction led by Curly Bill Brocius. Aaron Spelling was the producer.
PART THREE: When we left off, our hero Ozidi the Younger had just finished slaying the first of his father’s murderers and Ozidi reminded his mentally unfit uncle, King Temugedege, that he is having to take care of the family business that he is incapable of. When all of the killers of Ozidi the Elder have been dealt with, his father’s spirit will be free from the deadlands limbo in which it currently dwells. 
IRISH NELLIE CASHMAN – Nellie Cashman was born Ellen O’Kissane in 1845. Sometime between 185o and 1852 her family moved to Boston, where the ambitious young woman was later working as a bellhop at Boston hotels. During the U.S. Civil War Nellie did some spying for the Union cause, following which she and her family moved to San Francisco in 1866. 
Irish Nellie used part of her growing fortune to finance the Sisters of Saint Anne. When snowstorms trapped dozens of gold seekers in the Cassiar Mountains in a series of avalanches, Irish Nellie heard that Canadian authorities were advising against rescue attempts due to how dangerous the Cassiars were. 
AUD-I-SEE aka AudiSee (1978) – Balladeer’s Blog takes a look at the largely forgotten AudiSee series of audiovisual science fiction stories for adolescents. Each episode is roughly 30 minutes long. The audio element consists of voice actors including a narrator. The visual element consists of an illustrated booklet that came with the AudiSee package. 
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