There were three movies based on the character named Simon Smud, a super spy who worked for the Federal Reconnaissance Observatory Group (F.R.O.G.). The name of the first film was The Man From F.R.O.G., and if you are familiar with 1960's television shows, you will recall the spy show called "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." So creativity was not that important in our premise.
The second FROG film was Let's Kill Frog, and the third was Firestorm. Basically all the plots were the same, a lot of running and jumping, staged fist fights, and some special effects. Most of them were filmed at Holiday Nursery on South Beach Blvd., but we also went out and did some filming in the neighborhoods, the train station, and other exotic locations.
One time, while filming a chase scene, we came across a forest fire on the side of the road, and while other people were fighting to put it out, we were filming fight scenes with the forest ablaze in the background.
I won't detail the special effects, but I will say that our parents gasped at certain times during the screening of these cinematic wonders. It's amazing the puff of smoke you can simulate when you have a small packet of flour attached to a mouse trap. The trap is tripped, and the handful of flour shoots up into the air.
There were other movies beside the spy movies, a science fiction time travel film where a visitor from the future can't understand the people of today, and an adventure film set in Africa where jungle explorers are unlucky enough to be near a volcano with a meteorite crashes into it. Needless to say, we used a lot of ketchup as a stand-in for lava coming down the side of the volcano.
We also did a lot of "test films" where various special effects were tried out, and those are my favorite. The spy films and science fiction films were, by necessity, "silent films" because this was before video cameras and even sound 8mm film. So whenever I showed those, I had to narrate the action and sometimes provide the sound effects.
