Pop Futura

In my browsing for all things Futura I came across an early 1960s jazz album by Bernie Green bearing the same name as the Planet Comics heroine from the Golden Age of comic books. While Bernie Green had a prolific career in television as a musical director and spent decades at rather generic task work he was also a surprising musical innovator. Comic book fans may be familiar with his work if not his name for Mad Magazine as the force behind Musically Mad from 1959.

But it was with Futura as part of the RCA Action series that Bernie Green was breaking ground as he helped introduce Space Age Pop to the listening world and gave me what I am going to call the unofficial theme song for the Planet Comics serial.

Often in these kinds of searches for related items the results have little to do with each other and are unconnected. Yet in this incidence there is a nice crossover between the comic book character from the 1940s and a jazz album from 1960s. Futura the musical arrangement is early Space Age Pop and Futura the comic book character is a space lost science heroine. Both entries in their respective genres have the trappings of, yet do not really embody, a science fiction theme and are experiments in what it was imagined the future might be like but would never evolve to exist.

For your listening pleasure here is a link to the title track of Futura, by Bernie Green and his Orchestra (1961).