I know it might seem strange to some of the young whipper snappers who occasionally read this blog, but when I was growing up we listed to music on these things called records. They had grooves that a needle read and then these electronic components translated those grooves to sound. Crazy, right?
In addition to listening to records, we also read comic books. And why not? They were cheap fun entertainment and you could get four of them for a dollar! Spider-man, Batman, Superman… all my favorite heroes. And they even made comic books based on some of my favorite shows and movies, like Star Trek and Planet of the Apes!
At one point, someone came up with the idea of combining those two things into one – making a comic book that also came with a record inside! What innovation! The record would be a dramatization of the comic book story, and many of them would be newly created just for this “book-and-record” release.
The company who came up with the book-and-record concept was Peter Pan Records, and they created a “Power Records” label to release them under. They put out dozens of titles, featuring popular superheroes and shows such as Star Trek, Space:1999 and Six Million Dollar Man.
Suffice it to say, I bought these things up like crazy. I also had some of the original comics that were adapted, and it was interesting to see how they sometimes edited dialogue to remove references to earlier issues and simplify things for the reader (The Spider-Man “Mark of the Man-Wolf” book-record was an especially heavily edited example).
The dramatizations were reminiscent of radio dramas, and the actors were generally… not that good. This was especially obvious when you would be listening to one of the TV or movie tie-ins, because they sounded NOTHING like the original actors.
But, especially when it came to book-records that adapted specific episodes or films, it was better than nothing. Back then if we wanted to relive those moments, you couldn’t just pop in a videotape (that came later). You had this, the novelization, and that’s it.
You can still buy some of these book-record sets on eBay, and enjoy them the way God intend – with record needle, pops and cracks. Or… through the magic of the Internet, you can watch them on Youtube. Collectors have digitized lots of these Book-record sets, and here’s a sampling: