We Found Hillhurst Mansion and Zoom Comics!
We’ve been teasing this for what feels like forever but we finally did it, we went to Hillhurst! The Bros (and friends) packed up our bags and Beetle Blasted all the way to sunny California last week on a road trip for the ages!
Tuesday morning we embarked from our accommodations to the fabled filming locations of Hillhurst, Zoom Comics (Main Street Charterville), and the Charterville Train Depot. Located in Fillmore, California and tucked away in a beautiful hillside orchard lies the haunted Hillhurst house herself. Battered, beaten, and bout to fall over, the house still stands out even from the road. Sadly she has been coated in a fair amount of graffiti as well as the usual grime and dust (most notably a coincidentally well placed “Fuck You Wolf” tagging the front door). There is now a sturdy chain-link fence surrounding the house, likely both for safety and to prevent further vandalism. Wear and tear aside it was still Flabbulous to stand in front of that iconic house and look back at the rows of citrus trees where the Beetle Battle Base once rose and Magnavore and Crustacean Jet Fighters once strafed the landscape.
Roughly 20 minutes from the site of Hillhurst (an hour by bike ride, of course we checked!) we found the quiet town of Santa Paula. This quaint West Coast town is home to many of the Charterville locations used for Beetle AV footage, Jet Fighter attacks, and iconic episodes like Curse of the Shadowborg and the final battle with Borgslayer! Turning onto Mainstreet you'll immediately spot a recognizable tile façade above a glass windowed business. None other than the former location of Zoom Comics itself, now a quirky boutique with mannequins that definitely didn’t look like they’d hunt us down if we looked at them wrong. The front of the building is almost entirely remodeled, losing the black and white tile for the raw brick underneath and sadly not a comic cover or cardboard cutout in sight. Much of the surrounding architecture is 100% pure nostalgia fuel even today. The old theater where the Magnavores once interrupted Nosferatu is now boarded up but covered with a mural depicting moviegoers and a ticket seller.
Just down the street from Zoom Comics we stumbled into the location of one of our favorite episodes, Locomotion Commotion! The train depot, now a Chamber of Commerce and Community Art Gallery (both closed during our visit), is in amazing condition and appears to be a historic site being actively preserved by the community. We swore we could hear the crowd cheering for Nano as she returned from the karate tournament still! Garganturat was nowhere to be seen but we know he’s off Mousin Around somewhere nearby.
If you want to hear a more detailed recap remember to tune into next weeks episode featuring our most illusive Bro, Aaron! You can also watch the recordings of Cam’s live streams at each location on our Instagram or Facebook. Don’t forget you can get your very own Zoom Comics shirt or other merch at http://tee.pub/lic/godpunk to keep the nostalgia flowing!