During our 50th PulpFest, will not only be celebrating “A Half-Century of Pulp Cons” and the ninetieth anniversary of Popular Publications’ “Dime” line of pulp magazines, we’ll also be saluting the centennial of Fiction House, the pulp magazine and comic book publisher that began with Action Stories in late 1921.
After Action Stories, North•West Stories had the longest run of any other Fiction House pulp magazine, running for a total of 202 issues. Debuting in late 1923 as Novelets, it billed itself as “A Magazine of Action.” The title promised “Five Complete Action Novels” and initially offered adventure, western, sea, detective, and northern fiction.
Jack London, a veteran of the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, had popularized fiction of the Far North beginning with his Malemute Kid tales for The Overland Monthly. Inspired by the tremendous popularity of London’s tales of the frozen North and the Klondike poems of Robert W. Service, other writers, including Rex Beach and James Oliver Curwood, developed their own visions of the Far North for the reading public.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Hollywood to latch onto the genre. The tales of London, Beach, and Curwood readily lent themselves to adaptation. Between 1909 and 1922, nearly 200 northern movies were produced by various film studios. Dozens more appeared after the advent of sound, including eight films concerning Sergeant Renfrew of the Royal Mounted, based on Laurie York Erskine’s popular boy’s adventure books.
The pulp and film industries were not the only mediums to notice the mass appeal of the northern story. In 1934, literary agent and promoter Stephen Slesinger approached King Features Syndicate with the idea for a comic strip called King of the Royal Mounted. With popular western writer Zane Grey lending his name to the strip, King of the Royal Mounted debuted as a Sunday feature on February 17, 1935. A daily version was added on March 2, 1936, and ran until March 1955. The character also appeared in comic books and Big Little Books.
In 1939, the parent company of Republic Pictures purchased the film rights to the comic strip. One year later, Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted debuted as a 12-part film serial, with the first segment released on September 20. Starring Allan “Rocky” Lane in the role of Sergeant Dave King, it is considered to be one of Republic’s best chapterplays.
Directed by William Witney and John English, Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted concerns a traitorous mine-owner and a band of outlaws who are smuggling a rare element out of Western Canada to assist an unnamed foreign power in its war effort. It’s up to Sergeant King and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to track down the spies and put an end to their evil plot.
On Thursday, August 4, PulpFest 50 will celebrate the centennial of Fiction House — publisher of North•West Stories — with a showing of the first four chapters of Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted. Chapters 5 – 8 will be shown on Friday, August 5, while the final four chapters will appear on Saturday, August 6. Our films will begin nightly at 11:30 PM.
Accompanying our showing of Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted will be selected animated shorts featuring Jay Ward Productions’ Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties. According to The Big Cartoon Database:
Dudley Do-Right was an inept Canadian Mountie who served under the kind and patient Inspector Fenwick. Do-Right spent most of his time rescuing Fenwick’s daughter, Nell, from the evil clutches of the classic villain Snidely Whiplash. A bizarre love triangle between Nell, Do-Right, and his horse (named Horse) also provided for laughs.
PulpFest 50 will be showing six adventures of Dudley Do-Right, including “Stokey the Bear” and “The Bullet Proof Suit” on August 4; “Canadian Railway Bridge” and “Niagara Falls” on August 5; and “Mother Whiplash’s Log Jam” and “Faithful Dog” on August 6.
Jay Ward Productions, of course, is best known for creating Rocky and Bullwinkle, as well as George of the Jungle, a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. The firm also created and produced the Cap’n Crunch commercials for Quaker Oats.
The general public is welcome to attend our evening programming events. To learn more about our schedule, please click the Programming button at the top of this page.
To enjoy our dealers’ room, join PulpFest 50 by clicking the Registration button at the top of this page. And don’t forget to book a room at the DoubleTree by Hilton Pittsburgh — Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania. They’re going fast!
In 1932, the publication of North•West Stories was suspended, along with most other Fiction House magazines. When North•West Stories returned in 1936, it was a quarterly. Perhaps in a bid to grow its female readership, the magazine was retitled North•West Romances, beginning with its Fall 1937 number. Afterward, all of its fiction was set in the Far North. Its final issue was dated Spring 1953. Our featured image is adapted from Norman Saunders’ cover art for the Fall 1948 issue of the Fiction House pulp magazine.
Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted, a 12-part chapterplay released by Republic Pictures in 1940, starred Allan “Rocky” Lane in the title role. He would return to the role in 1942 in Republic’s King of the Mounties. During the 1960s, Lane served as the voice of Mr. Ed in the CBS television sitcom concerning a talking horse, based on a character in Walter Brooks’ series written for Liberty, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Argosy. The stories appeared between 1937 and 1945.
According to The Art of Jay Ward Productions, Dudley Do-Right was one of three cartoon series proposed by Jay Ward and Alex Anderson when they teamed up in 1948 to produce the first nationally broadcast animated television series, Crusader Rabbit. Ward would revive Dudley thirteen years later with the help of designer Al Shean and writers Chris Hayward and Lloyd Turner. Shean’s version of Do-Right is featured above.
