Obituary: Famous Monsters Founder Forest J. Ackerman
By Steve Biodrowski • December 5, 2008
92-year-old science-fiction fan Forest J. Ackerman – founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland- died last night, just before midnight. Ackerman became famous as the world’s number one fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films; at a time when the genre was considered beneath contempt by the mainstream media, he started the very first magazine devoted to the genre, Famous Monsters, which became famous for offering a cornucopia of rare and amazing still photographs, usually captioned with Ackerman’s infamous bad puns (e.g., a shot of a robot being repaired in FUTURE WORLD was accompanied by this bon mot: “First a Clockwork Orange. Now a Clockwork Lemon,” a joke so weak that Ackerman felt the need to explain that the robot kept malfunctioning).
Fortunately, the silliness became part of the magazine’s charm, and eager monsters kids were thrilled to have a publication that filled with interviews and articles about everything from Dracula to Godzilla.
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I first read Famous Monsters of Filmland as a schoolchild in England. At the time you had to be over 16 to see most Horror and Sci-Fi movies so I was grateful to have a publication which “let me in” to the fantasy world which appealed so strongly to me.
FM was difficult to find as american mags and comics generally arrived in the UK as ballast on ships so tracking down new copies became an obsession in my young life. Particularly when the story about the making of King Kong ran over several issues of FM. I still have those issues all well read now in my own micro version of the Ackermansion.
I was saddenned to hear of Forry’s death as like many others I thought of him as “one of us”.