The Official Adventures of the Phantom & Mandrake the Magician

I'm trying to get caught up from my one week hiatus, so here's another record for you! This one comes from 1967, and I guess I can claim a bit of a Halloween connection here since the Phantom is referred to as "The Ghost Who Walks" and Mandrake (like Trumpy) can do magic things.

My first impression was that these were originally radio shows, but the occasional guitar licks thrown in are definitely 60s flavored. Another interesting thing is two comic strips are reproduced on the back cover, and the Mandrake one shows a date of 2-20. So these stories may have been adapted from stories in the actual comic strips. If any of you are Phantom or Mandrake experts, maybe you can confirm that. Now I hate to disappoint you guys, but the Phantom and Mandrake don't appear together anywhere in these stories, despite what the cover might imply. Each character had his own story to play with here. The common thread here is that both characters were created by Lee Falk.

The narrator on this album is Jackson Beck, and if you don't know the name, you'll definitely know his voice. He did everything from narrating Superman cartoons to voicing Bluto in the Popeye cartoons to being the announcer on the Little Caesar's Pizza commercials!

Enjoy the stories, and if anybody ever pulls a gun on you, do what Mandrake does and tell him, "That's not a gun, it's a can of worms."

Here's the track list (such as it is):

1. The Phantom in "The Astronaut and the Pirates"


2. Mandrake the Magician in "The Return of the Cobra"

Click here or here to download!