Boris Vallejo: Bodybuilder turned Fantasy Artist

During the 1970s, the covers of your Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, Doc Savage, and miscellaneous barbarian hero books were likely to feature a heavily-muscled, naked or nearly-naked muscle-god fighting off monsters, giant snakes, or weird gods, usually with a naked steatopygous lady clinging to his feet (it's really hard to fight that way, but it keyed into the heterosexual fanboy's fantasy of conquest).

If they were comic books, the illustrator was Frank Frazetta.

If they were print novels, the illustrator was Boris Vallejo.

Both started out as bodybuilders, both began their careers in 1954, and moved into the field of fantasy illustration in the 1960s. They are neighbors, in Scranton and Allentown, Pennsylvania.

But the Peruvian-born Vallejo was more naturalistic in his drawings, he used a brighter color palette, lots of gold skies and gleaming muscles, and his work was more erotic -- these barbarian heroes had obvious bulges. .

He drew covers for many paperbacks, as well as posters for such films as Barbarella (1968) and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

Also oil paintings, like this glowing Icarus.

A friend of the gay community, Vallejo drew this poster in 1979 to commemorate the renovation of the famous St. Mark Baths in New York.

His wife, Julie Bell, is also a former bodybuilder and illustrator, who has a similar style, except her women aren't clinging to the legs of muscle gods: they're female bodybuilders and barbarian heroes in their own right. She has illustrated over 100 covers for science fiction novels since the 1990s.

My Mother the Car

I don't know why people think of Jerry Van Dyke as a failure.  Sure, he never reached the Emmy-winning tv-classic status of his older brother Dick, but he's had a 50 year-long career, starting with beach movies in the 1960s (Palm Springs Weekend) and going on to starring roles in at least a dozen tv series, including eight years on Coach (1989-1997) and five years on The Middle (2010-2015).













Besides, he was considerably more attractive than his gawky older brother.

Plus, in spite of his two long-term marriages to women, there's a.bigger gay subtext in his work than you can find in Dick's, such as a starring role on The Judy Garland Show, and the big brother-little brother acts

Maybe because of a few poor decisions, like rejecting the roles of Gilligan on Gilligan's Island and Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show.

The program he chose instead, My Mother the Car, is universally lambasted as ridiculous, although really, was the premise any more far out than Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Mr. Ed, or for that matter, Gilligan's Island.

A man discovers that a car is a reincarnation of his mother (or maybe her ghost is trapped in the car -- it's really not explained in any detail).

Men obsessed with their mothers: 1960s code for gay.

Watching it today, it doesn't seem particularly terrible, for a 1960s sitcom.  The mother thing is kind of creepy, but the main problem is, it's just dull.  Mom doesn't provide the comedic foil that Mr. Ed did, and the main antagonist, an obsessed car collector, isn't chummy enough to provide a gay subtext or evil enough to provide any conflict.