Taking Me Back

First, Happy Birthday to the great sovereign nation of Canada, home of my birth, and the place I spent the first 35 years of my life. It may not be perfect but it will always be home.

Second, in response to some questions from regular readers of this website along with my promise to post some non-Celluloid Heroes related updates to BradAbraham.com, I give you this Very Special Canada Day Edition. Now, were this day July 1, 1984 instead of July 1, 2025 and you were to ask eleven year-old me who my favorite author was, I (and I’m sure many kids like me who grew up within the Scarborough District Schools System) would have answered: Gordon Korman

I discovered Korman, specifically his popular in Canada “Bruno and Boots” series, chronicling the (mis)adventures of two teenaged boys attending the prestigious Macdonald Hall – an exclusive private boarding school just north of Toronto on Highway 48.

Over four initial books – This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! (written by Korman in the 7th grade as a middle-school assignment), Go Jump In The Pool!, Beware The Fish!, and The War With Mr. Wizzle (later re-titled The Wizzle War) – Korman spun wild pre-teen/early-teen tales for a very appreciative audience.

The book series was uproariously funny, endlessly inventive while remaining just enough plausibility to feel real. There were no Big Issues or Deeper Messages to be found within the pages of the Macdonald Hall books; just the simple joy of reading a story intended purely to entertain. And entertain they did.

The other reason we all gravitated towards Korman? He was Canadian, like we were Canadian. He grew up in nearby (nearby being in relation to Scarborough-Agincourt) Thornhill Ontario. Now that may not seem a big deal to you but if you were a young Canadian in the late 70s-early 80s you cannot begin to fathom how groundbreaking it was to have a book series so identifiable and recognizable as Canadian.

Having books where kids just like me were the main players was a huge deal. Having references to Toronto and Winnipeg, the Ontario Place Forum, Algonquin Park and so much more was even bigger; a rare thing in Canadian Kid Lit which at the time seemed tethered to either the Prince Edward Island of the early 20th century or the Prairies of the 1930s.

Korman was a GenX author writing for an audience his own age. Characters who inhabited the same worlds we did. His characters grew with him. They grew with us as well. And his characters were fun to hang around with. So much so I always felt disappointed after reading the books to know deep down that Bruno and Boots, stern headmaster Mr. Sturgeon, Macdonald Hall itself, and the girls from neighboring Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School For Young Ladies, were all fiction. But there was enough Canadiana in his books they felt a part of you at the same time; a part of your experience growing up Canadian.

It was also a very specific formula that gravitated me towards Korman’s writing; a formula on display from his first Macdonald Hall book. Bruno is the scheming rebel, Boots the more sober-minded pal. It’s clear that Korman wishes he was Bruno but realizes deep down he’s Boots. I certainly wished I was a Bruno and not a Boots.

This is a formula on display through many of his early works; the wild rebel contrasted with the more sensible type, the two of whom nonetheless remain stalwart friends. It is, on reflection, a model that was prevalent in literature and movies and TV for that matter, best embodied by the relationship between two friends from the northern suburbs of Chicago.

That’s Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago, on the right.

I would even go far to say that Korman’s work was hugely influential on mine as a writer. Not so much for the stories he wrote, but for proving to me and everyone who read his books that we could become storytellers ourselves, despite being Canadian small-town and suburban kids. That we all had a story of our own to tell.

Exhibit A

As for how I discovered Korman, I have to credit the good-old rite of passage for any school-child in Canada and the US for that matter: The Scholastic Book Fair, where you could either purchase (in a pop-up gymnasium shop) or pre-order (through a flyer you brought home to your parents) the books you wanted at a discount. And I think it was after my 4th Grade teacher Mrs. Murray read the first MacDonald Hall book to the class during storytime (interrupted by frequently uproarious bouts of classroom-wide laughter), that I checked off a special set of the Macdonald Hall books in the Scholastic Flyer. A few short weeks passed until the Big Day when everyone’s books arrived.

I tore through the entire Bruno and Boots series multiple times over. I couldn’t get enough of them. Then as now when I discover something new and exciting (to me at any rate) I really go all-in (see my recent obsessions with vinyl records and movie novelizations for proof). And fortunately Korman’s career as an author was just getting started.

The one-two punch of Who is Bugs Potter? and Bugs Potter Live At Nickaninny followed; chronicling the misadventures of madcap teenaged rock-and-roll drummer Bugs Potter of Winnipeg Manitoba and two very different adventures; one while on an isolated camping-trip with his family in the far north, and the other set in Toronto – specifically the Big Bad Downtown Toronto of Queen Street, Ontario Place, the Royal Ontario Museum, and other environs I myself had visited first-hand.

Next came Our Man Weston – a madcap story of a young would-be detective and his harried brother, as they spend a summer working at an exclusive resort in Northern Ontario that just happens to be harboring a very real coterie of actual spies. No Coins, Please, told the story of a twelve year-old con artist running a number of get rich schemes while he and a group of fellow travelers embark on a cross-country tour through the United States.

But the one I enjoyed the most was I Want To Go Home! best described as The Great Escape set at a summer camp.

In short, Gordon Korman ruled my literary world from 1983-1985. And when we moved to North Carolina his books, read and reread over and over, became a lifeline tethering me to the Canada I missed so much that year. Re-reading a Korman Klassic brought a little bit of Canada back to me. Just seeing familiar names and places in print was enough to give me a feeling of home.

Korman moved to the USA, specifically NYC in the early 80s and has called it home ever since. His books thus shifted from Canadian to American settings, and I have to admit that after Don’t Care High, A Semester In The Life of a Garbage Bag, and Son of Interflux, I tapped out. Partially because of the US-centric setting (the books felt, to me, just like so many other US-based books), but also because of that thing that happens where you just start aging out of Middle-Grade fiction (a term that didn’t even exist back in the 1980s).

By 1986 we had moved back to Canada, and I was soon into Stephen King, not Bruno and Boots. The Korman books went on the downstairs bookshelf, then into a cardboard box. I couldn’t quite part with them, but I wasn’t ready to revisit them. They would stick with me for twenty more years, until 2007 when I gifted my entire collection to the daughter of a family friend who was by then the age I was when I discovered Bruno and Boots..

All my Korman books – save for one.

I kept I Want To Go Home! partially because it was my favorite and because, as always, I wanted to keep a small piece of that era of my childhood with me. Also, frankly, because I always thought this “Great Escape at a Summer Camp” had the makings for a great movie (and I did make some attempts to get an adaptation underway but to no avail).

So .. why this revisiting of a 40+ year-old memory? Well, let’s flash forward to this year, 2025, and to myself now the parent of a child approaching his tenth birthday.

I can’t remember the specific circumstances since they were so mundane but I believe it came from an expression of the perennial whine of the 9 year old: “I’m bored”. 

He has always been an avid reader, my son; ever since he was a baby. His first word, after “Mama” and “Dada” was “book”. He accompanied me on my first ever book tour out to California, and has been surrounded by books all his life. My wife and I both read to him constantly and even today he is a voracious reader with literacy skills well beyond his age group’s.

He of course is a fan of the Wimpy Kid and Dog Man and Captain Underpants and Big Nate books, but also was gifted a collection of Judy Blume’s Fudge series which he found uproariously funny and read cover-to-cover multiple times. Like me, when he finds something he likes he really goes all-in. See also his current obsessions with the Jurassic Park movies, Minecraft, and Godzilla..

And so it came to pass on this day of boredom I knew exactly where to go and what to do, pulling that battered, yellowed old copy of I Want To Go Home! off the shelf and handing it to him, telling him it was one of my favorite books when I was his age, and that it was really funny and he should read it. Which he did.

About an hour later the guffaws emanating from his room confirmed he was enjoying himself. And after reading the whole thing over a couple of days he read it again. It has a new home now; on his bookshelf in his bedroom. That dusty old paperback belongs to him now, over hopefully many rereads in years to come.

Our next stop was the local library which thankfully has a good selection of Korman books in the catalog. Scanning the shelves I found the first two Macdonald Hall books, which he borrowed and we both read through, him first then me for a re-read some forty years down the line since first adventuring with Bruno and Boots.

I also found our library has the later Macdonald Hall books – which I haven’t read but you can bet I plan to this summer and am greatly looking forward to catching up with those old friends. And lastly a used-bookstore search unearthed this paperback copy of Our Man Weston, forcing me to ponder the question of whether this deep dive back into Korman’s works was for my son’s benefit or mine.

Korman is still active, still writing, still publishing and very successful at that. I’m told there are even a series of Canadian-produced TV movies based on the Macdonald Hall books that while I have yet to check them out they certainly are on my radar – to a degree. So clear is my mental image of that school and those characters all these years on I’m not sure I want to have those images colored by different interpretations of both. I have my Bruno and Boots and my Macdonald Hall, just as a whole generation of GenX-era Canadians have theirs.

I certainly regret giving those Korman books away now (but at the same time hope my friend’s daughter enjoyed those books and cherished them like I cherished them), seeing how much some of those earlier Canadian books, now long out of print, are fetching in the secondary market; the two Bugs Potter books and No Coins, Please each command upwards of $100 eBay with no plans that I am aware of to reprint them. This is shame as I would love to revisit those as well (and you can be certain I will be scoping out the used bookstores I find my way to over these summer months just in case) but even for me there are limits.* 

You cannot underestimate the power of the right book at the right time in your life. Rereading Korman has been like stepping back in time to a more simple era. Yes that sounds cliched but all clichés, like stereotypes, have a nugget of truth to them. The worlds of 1982-1985 and 2022-2025 are very different but at the same time there is a lot that hasn’t changed. Parents try and do their best for their children and those same children will complain that they’re bored. And sometimes an artifact from your childhood can arrive just in time to entertain your son or daughter and remind you that while we all have to grow up its up to us whether we let ourselves truly grow old.

*Of course if Apple Books or Scholastic or even Korman himself have plans to reissue those Canadian classics of Kid-Lit now would definitely be the time to do it.

Celluloid Heroes: Episode Six

Celluloid Heroes Episode Six is now available for streaming. In this episode I cover two films: Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Richard Donner’s and Richard Lester’s Superman II (1981). Seen three years, two decades, and two cities apart, Supermans (or is it ‘Supermen’?) I and II remain two of my favorite superhero films, and remain the gold standard when it comes to comic book movies. Before superhero films got bogged down in shared universes, TV spinoffs, and mixed-multimedia there was just the story of Clark Kent, played so very memorably by the great Christopher Reeve.

Also making its debut this episode? My new sound-set-up, which you’ll hear in the brief prologue and will make a more formal debut with the next film in the Celluloid Heroes series.

Join me on a journey to the Vancouver British Columbia of 1978 and the Edmonton Alberta of 1981 where we all came to believe a man could fly!

Next month though will see a Very Special Episode as myself and a Very Special Guest take a much different sort of flight back to the Edmonton Alberta of the early 1980s and a much different film about a big scary flying thing:

Celluloid Heroes: Episode Five

Celluloid Heroes Episode Five – The Black Hole – is available for your listening pleasure! Journey with me back to the final Christmas holiday season of the 1970s and the highly anticipated big budgeted space saga of 1979 that *wasn’t* Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I hold a particular fondness for The Black Hole as it was perhaps the first time in my life I can truly recall anticipating a movie. Not in the “that trailer or commercial makes it look fun can we go?” kind of way, and more than a “how many days until The Black Hole comes out?” questioning that I’m sure drove my parents nuts, and made them even warier for the anticipation of next year’s The Empire Strikes Back.

My Black Hole fandom continues to this day, as my movie collectible shelf contains these beautiful Black Hole action figure reproductions of Maximillian, Vincent, and Old Bob:

The Black Hole is not a great movie. But it is one I hold dearly because of the excitement surrounding it (namely my excitement). Every leaked image, every storybook still set my imagination careening into wild directions, aided in part by this episode of The Wonderful World of Disney: Major Effects, which traced the history of movie special effects with an extensive behind the scenes look at The Black Hole:

It was also a nice stop-gap between Star Wars and Empire, aided by toy and book tie-ins. I mean, where else were you able to purchase your very own Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine action figures?

I even still own my copy of The Black Hole’s comic book adaptation …

Thank-you for tuning in to The Celluloid Heroes Podcast! I’ll be back next month with a look at two movies, both of which made us believe a man could fly:

Celluloid Heroes: Episode Three

The Celluloid Heroes book I have been writing for the last several years has been an all-encompassing, all-engrossing project. The first draft of it clocked in at roughly 180,000 words. The current iteration sits comfortably at 140,000.

But during the winnowing down part of the rewrites, a great deal had to go. Turning these 40-odd films into a narrative non-fiction biography, essentially, of my entire life to date meant chapters I was (and remain) very fond of had to go.

Which brings us to this month’s episode about Battlestar Galactica.

Now you look at the above trailer and go “wait a minute, I thought Celluloid Heroes was about the cinema going experience”. Battlestar Galactica being a TV series would seem to be outside that purview on first glance, being a short-lived yet fondly remembered ABC TV series that aired between 1978 and 1979.

And you’d be right … save for the fact I was one of a relative few who first got to see Battlestar Galactica in a movie theater two months before its television debut.

And months before the toys began to show up:

How is this possible?

Well … the answers are, as always here:

Celluloid Heroes Episode Three is the kickoff to a mini-series-slash-trilogy of episodes I like to call Attack of the Killer B’s in which my focus shifts to three lesser-known, lesser-celebrated sci-fi epics I saw in theaters while living in Vancouver British Columbia between 1978 and 1980. All of them could be considered “B” pictures. All of them also began with the letter B. Sound off in the comments below which have been enabled, unlike last episodes’ posting (sorry about that) about which films you think those other B’s are, and make your predictions as to the remaining films I’ll be covering over this first 12-episode Season (hint: we end the narrative in late 1983 calendar-wise).

And so without further ado here’s a fun selection of images from this month’s episode. Listen on Spotify, Apple, Youtube, and on the Longbox Crusade Podcast Network.

Celluloid Heroes: Episode Two

Well, so far so good.

The Celluloid Heroes Podcast launched last month, January 2025 with two episodes – a Prologue Episode in which I lay out the intentions of this podcast:

And the official first episode, detailing my experience seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Ontario Place Cinesphere in 1982.

Thanks to all of you who liked, listened, and followed the show. Slow and steady wins the race and in the end that’s all that matters to me: that people listen.

And on that note I am pleased to announce that listening is going to become a lot easier as The Celluloid Heroes Podcast is now a part of The Longbox Crusade Podcast Network:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/longbox-crusade/id1118783510

Thanks to Pat, Jarrod, and all the rest at the LBC for inviting Celluloid Heroes and myself to join the team. Through the LBC link you’ll be able to listen to Celluloid Heroes on Apple, YouTube, as well as Spotify. The LBC Network has a wide array of pop culture podcasts spanning the worlds of movies, comic books, and television and I encourage you to check out their other shows

So with that all out of the way, Episode Two of Celluloid Heroes is now live on Spotify, with Apple and Youtube feeds – available through the Longbox Network – arriving February 24th:

And yes, it’s about Star Wars.

If there’s a ground Zero for GenXers and Sci-Fi fantasy fans born after 1970, it has to be George Lucas’s first trip to a galaxy long ago and far far away. But did you know that at its heart Star Wars is a story of coming of age in your suburb, small-town, or relatively tiny neighborhood corner of the world, on teh rpecipice of a much larger place, and how Luke Skywalker’s journey mirrors the journey many of us have or will take in our lives?

You didn’t? Well after listening you will have a much better idea of what I’m speaking. And hey, here’s some video clips to set the scene.

The Original Pre-release Star Wars Trailer:

A compilation of commercials advertising the first wave of Star Wars Action Figures:

Just for fun, a preview of 1978’s legendarily awful Star Wars Holiday Special:

And a preview of next month’s episode:

Wait a second – Battlestar Galactica? A TV show? You said this was all about movies, Brad!

Well, you’re right – I did say this was a podcast about movies. About the theatrical moviegoing experience. And you’d be correct that Galactica does not fit this mold … but for the fact I first saw Battlestar Galactica in a movie theater months before its TV premiere.

But you’ll have to tune in next month for that story.