Munsters Roundup.
Funny, as I was putting some finishing touches on this post I found an almost identically laid out image in a post from The Skateboarding Hall of Fame. On the left you see a Munsters coloring book published in 1965 0r 1966 depending on the source. While trying to research a post from Skaterock, an image search led me to Skate and Annoy of all places, go figure… and a post made back in 2013 with a link to a now dead web site where I originally found a low res image with no context. Turns out that was a photoshopped image of a Munsters coloring book. A coloring book you can find for purchase occasionally in the usual places that sell vintage items for about $25, as well as a modern day reprint you can buy for $35. You can also buy a poster reprint of a modified version the cover. There’s a collector out there who owns the original 15″x20″ painting. Some of the text is an overlay. What about the picture of Eddie Munster riding a skateboard? Well as early as 2010 you could buy that on a t-shirt, and you still can. But what about a photo reprint? The original seems to be a closely guarded item, because everyone seems to be recycling the same low-res version, sometimes with their own watermarks. When you’re done reading this post, don’t forget to check out the plastic model kit of Eddie on a skateboard.
On the left is a nice, relatively flat version of the cover from a seller on Etsy. It’s a photograph and not scan, parts of the image are out of focus. On the right is an image from Rick Goldschmidt’s blog titled the Enchanted World of Rankin Bass, which is more evenly in focus, but has some of the corners curled up.
On the left below is a reprint of a poster you can buy from Paper Toy Reprints. One thing you may notice is the sort of sloppy photoshop work that creates some artifacts that aren’t present n the original. Who knows, maybe it’s intentional so they can identify the original source.
Speaking of Paper Toy Reprints, here’s the reprinted version of the coloring book you can buy right now. There doesn’t appear to be any skateboarding in the internal pages. The copyright notice on the watermark says it was released in 2017. All rights reserved, although I’m not sure what rights you could possibly have to something like this. Notice that cover art has been altered to remove some of the original publishers identifying marks, as well as being cropped to fit a different aspect ratio that doesn’t match the poster version.
What about that original 15″ x 20″ painted artwork? A website called Uncle Odie’s Collectibles lists the item. However, the links on the thumbnails are no longer valid, as are a great deal of them I tried while traversing the site. Unfortunately, the contact forms on the site no longer work either, so I couldn’t ask for more details. The website appears to have been updated as recently as august of 2024, but the whole thing looks like it was coded by hand which is quite a task for the 7,541 items and 165,497 images in the collection. Yikes! I remember when I was hand coding all the HTML for Skate and Annoy… If you’re reading this Robert Vanderpool (AKA Uncle Odie) send me an email.
Moving on from Grandpa and Herman Munster, here’s the best pic I could find of Eddie riding a skateboard. I sharpened it up as much as I could without making it look worse than the source, and I sipped my own watermark on becasue all the kids are doing it. Still looks better than the pixelated versions all over Redbubble and the other copyright evading merch sites.
