#genderqueer pride

Coming in under the wire on the last day of Pride Month with my annual Pride Flag Creature drawings.  This year I made 50s B-movie monsters created by Paul Blaisdell. I was first introduced to these creatures through episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Blaisdell didn’t have any formal training in prop design, so he improvised his creations using foam rubber, long johns, liquid latex and carved wood. He brought a lot of personality to his monsters and often gave them affectionate nicknames.

This is the titular monster from the 1956 film “The She-Creature” decked out in Nonbinary colors. She’s the prehistoric form of a woman who can recall her past lives under hypnosis and is able to manifest them in the modern world. Blaisdell named the monster “Cuddles”.   One of my favorite details are the teeth/claws in her stomach that Blaisdell called “lunch hooks”.

Next is the creature from 1956’s “It Conquered the World” wearing trans Pride colors. This is a fungus-based entity from Venus that Blaisdell named “Beulah”.

Paul Blaisdell always put a ton of thought into the backgrounds for his monsters. At the time, it was believed that Venus was a hot, humid world like a sweltering jungle. So he imagined Beulah as a giant, semi-mobile fungus that communicated telepathically. She wasn’t supposed to move very much, and would instead spawn little bat-like minions that could latch onto other beings and control them.

This is a Saucer Man from the 1957 “Invasion of the Saucer Men” in Pansexual colors.  Blaisdell made four costumes of the invaders, along with a prop hand that could crawl on its own, aided by an eyeball embedded in its wrist.

Lastly here’s the alien that appears briefly at the end of “The Beast With A Million Eyes” in Genderqueer colors. This was the movie that actually started Blaisdell’s career. The titular Beast is a disembodied being made of pure mental energy. It could possess any living creature and use them as its eyes and ears as it slowly took over Earth, hence the title.  

 However, the director wanted an actual monster to appear in the movie and he hired Blaisdell- who had painted several covers for pulp sci-fi magazines- to create a puppet that would show up at the end. The being, who Blaisdell nammed "Little Hercules" is meant to be an enslaved servant of the disembodied beast, forced to carry out its will. 

Most of my information and references came from “Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker” by Randy Palmer.

Available on my RedBubble: trans pride / nonbinary pride / genderqueer pride / genderfluid pride