I promised a week or two ago to post more about "official" comic book fan clubs but then I got distracted by a bevy of great comic actors dying on us. There will be several more posts beyond this one about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, which Marvel Comics threw at us around the close of 1964. For a buck, you got a membership card (seen here), a button, a welcome letter, some stickers, a button, a memo pad and — best of all — the "Voices of Marvel" plastic record in which Stan Lee and most of those then creating Marvel Comics welcomed you to the club. I'll write about the rest of the kit later but that record was and still is wonderful. One of the first times I interviewed Jack Kirby, I asked him about it…
ME: That record seems so weird. Was it recorded in the office like it sounds?
KIRBY: No, it was in a recording studio. We rehearsed in the office. Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards. He had this script he'd written. He'd written it and rewritten it and rewritten it and as we were recording it, he kept rewriting it. We all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren't rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio, which was over on 55th Street or 56th. I forget where it was. But when lunchtime came, Stan said, "No, no, we're not ready," so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don't know how many takes we did.
ME: On the record, Steve Ditko isn't heard. They say he slipped out the window. I assume he just refused to be part of it.
KIRBY: Steve was much smarter than we were about those things.
ME: Have you listened to the record lately?
KIRBY: No, and if you try and play it for me, you'll be out the window with Ditko.
It was quite a relic of that era in comics. In 1967, they put out a "new, improved" Merry Marvel Marching Society kit with a different pin and a different membership card and other different items…and a different record. This one, alas, didn't feature more Abbott/Costello banter betwixt Lee and Kirby. It just had the theme songs — opening and closing — from the Marvel Super Heroes TV cartoon show that had recently debuted.
As you may have guessed by now, we're going to let you hear both of these classic recordings. Marvelite Maximus Doug Pratt has transferred them to MP3s and he says it's okay if I post links for you all. You can hear the "Voices of Marvel" recording by clicking here…
And you can hear the second record (entitled "Scream Along With Marvel") by clicking here…