The mad scientist who lost out in auditions to Svengoolie has a plan to steal the host job. He'll create a robot version of Sven to go back in time and stop the horror host from getting hired by MeTV to host his weekly Saturday night movie theater series. First thing the Svenbot must do is prevent Svengoolie's sidekicks Kerwyn, Tombstone and his talking casket Boddy Sorrell from becoming a part of the show. Then with the help of the evil robot, Mr. Mad Scientist will swoop into present day Svengoolie studios and take the hosting job for himself!
Only there's one problem. The Svenbot is so good at hosting the show on it's own, the mechanical menace steals the job from the mad scientist as well! Besides, not needing to pay a robot will help MeTV make a huge profit! Now it's war as the mad scientist must go back in time and stop his Svenbot from changing horror movie theater history or else all TV shows might be hosted by robots that will work for nothing!
The story started off kinda flat. The jokes, much like the ones Svengoolie tells on his show, get lots of groans. But I think the roughness of that opening segment was more because of the medium. Rich Koz, the Sven-miester himself, wrote up the dialogue with story assists by Chris Faulkner and Jim Roche as well as Franco Aureliani. Spreading out a corny opening joke about Godzilla over 2 pages and several panels made for a jest that was just so hard to follow. But once we got into the time travelling portion of the story, things really gelled.
I loved getting to witness the origins of Kerwyn, Tombstone and Boddy Sorrell. It was a nice touch having different artists illustrate those scenes which take place in different time periods. Art Baltazar, along with Jill Thompson and Christopher Jones draw up a trio of distinct eras of Svengoolie history.
There was a follow-up story starring a new member of the Svengoolie family. Nostalgiaferatoo. That tale is supposed to be the character's origin story. But it devolves into a commercial for the Svengoolie show, which if you ask me is what this whole special was in the first place. There's also an informative history about Svengoolie. I would have preferred more space devoted to that than that unnecessary Nostalgiaferatoo 2-pager.
From what I understand, this is the first of 2 Svengoolie comic book specials. I enjoyed this work enough to look forward to the follow-up. Might I just suggest to write the story as a comic and not a TV show. Also, bring Art Baltazar and Franco together. I was excited to have both beloved creators working on this book. It's just not the same not having these two working in tandem as the all-ages comic dynamic duo that they are. Join Rich Koz with Art Baltazar and Franco- that's a team-up I can't wait to see in comics!
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.
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