The show will star the band as a group of kids who travel around the galaxy solving mysteries in their super rock and roll spaceship. The first season has already been written and Korean animators are hard at work getting the show ready. Industry insiders tell us that Hillary Duff will provide the voice of Manda Marble, while Casey Kasem, Billy West, and Hank Azaria will provide the voices of Elias, Joe and Mark respectively. Check your local listings for more information.

Above: An exclusive production still from the sixth episode “Manda and the Marbles at Zombie Castle!”

Only a few times in life does one find a perfect album; that collection of songs that gives a voice to the ideas and feelings you have but are unable to articulate, a record that you can’t help but sing along with, a record that you love from start to finish, that stays in your CD player and your head for far longer that it ever probably should.

When I randomly happened to come across Manda and the Marbles’ More Seduction, I found just such an album. Sure, it was just a small release from some band in Ohio, but for me it ranks among my favorite albums of all time. Such a work is not easily followed, and it seems that the Marbles were ready and willing to face that demon down and give it a shot with their 2004 release Angels with Dirty Faces. They seem to have taken the right approach with this new album, which oddly enough shares its name with a 1930s gangster flick that has seemingly fallen into obscurity. Manda and the Marbles obviously did not set out to duplicate the style or substance of More Seduction, but rather moved laterally, forging a new sonic path that veers away from their punk styling and more toward the experimental fronts of New Wave form.

Departing from the simple crunchy chords, thumping bass lines, and helicopter drums of their previous works, the Marbles have blended the keyboards straight into the forefront, letting their punk roots stay in the background. What results is a mixture of pop, punk and New Wave that seems to have been inspired by the same muse that gave rise to Blondie once upon a time.

This time around, the Marbles are more melodic, more haunting, and seemingly more relaxed. With More Seduction the Marbles still had something to prove, to themselves and to their audience, on Angels with Dirty Faces they find themselves free to move on, their street-cred established, liberated to experiment, to slow down, to take a stroll through their full speed. Although Angels with Dirty Faces lacks the production values of More Seduction it is by far a more interesting and complicated album, both sonically and emotionally.

Previously, the Marbles had presented the portrait of a dreamer; someone who sees the world and the pain it brings and is forced to look away to a better and brighter future. Now, the Marbles seems to have woken up from that dream, and Angels with Dirty Faces is definitely a more grown up album. It pours its way past hope, past dreams, to a place where longing for the past and for the future meet; a present tense album full of realism in all its forms from the quirky, funny things in life, to the morose dejection we all feel. The album allows the Marbles to confront their lives on their own terms in a sonically complex and alluring expansion on their previous musical styles.

Angels with Dirty Faces is not a not a move foreword for the Marbles, but a move inward. There are definite standouts from the album: “Simple Things;” a dreamy and powerful confrontation between expectation and reality that Avril Lavign wishes her record company had written for her, “Lipstick;” a fun song about sex, power and how they delicately mix in with life that deserves some serious radio play, “Ode to Rock;” a song that makes you feel guilty for just bobbing your head slightly at Marbles shows, “Let Them Talk:” the natural flipside to “Seduction,”: a show-closer that can’t but make you feel good when you listen to it, and “Seventeen;” the perfect reminiscences of suburban youth, a song that captures that feeling of longing and loss that we all feel every now and then.

Angels with Dirty Faces is not More Seduction. That’s a good thing. Both albums are exactly what they need to be. While departing from their earlier style, Mark, Joe, Mandan and Elias have created a new sound and a new form. Although they’ve taken to experimentation, although they’ve mixed a more prominent New Wave sound into their classic and proven punk rock base, they haven’t lost their honesty and they haven’t lost their ability to put into words what we all feel. Most importantly, they’ve shown that they can mature, that they can change and that they can move on from their roots while all the while they manage to keep their CD in my stereo for weeks at a time.

Manda and the Marbles’ Angels with Dirty Faces may not be the best album ever made, it may not change the world, but the plain and simple fact is that I’ve listened to it every day on my way to and from work ever since I got it. Never underestimate Manda and the Marbles.

And in the State of Ohio, a rag-tag group of rebels was about to start a musical revolution….

It would be a fateful night. The year was 1997, the month was August, the day was Tuesday, the hour was 8, and so on. The place was Phil’s Roller-Rama in Columbus, Ohio (“the Buckeye State”). Manda Marble, the master bass-player, had just won second place in the free-style figure roller skating competition and was celebrating with 7-Up and nacho-styled corn chips at the snack bar. It was then that the rink’s stage lights went up…the Trucker Hat Banjo Five was about to step up to the microphone.

The Trucker Hat Banjo Five had started the previous summer and had electrified the Columbus music scene with their unique mix of bluegrass, hiphop, funk, punk, oi, jazz, and Bavarian chamber music. Although they were both ground-breaking and innovative, internal problems threatened the band’s stability, and as would prove fortunate, their show at Phil’s Roller-Rama was to prove their last.

The Trucker Hat Banjo Five’s First and Only Album
(Courtesy of Creamed Corn Records)

Accordion player Mark Slak and Rhythm-Violinist Joe A. Damage, left without a band to call their own, joined up with the young Marble to form a new band. The trio took their name from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, forming up as:

Manda and the “Not see him since? Sir, sir, that cannot be:
But were I not the better part made mercy,
I should not seek an absent argument
Of my revenge, thou present. But look to it:
Find out thy brother, wheresoe’er he is;
Seek him with candle; bring him dead or living
Within this twelvemonth, or turn thou no more
To seek a living in our territory.
Thy lands and all things that thou dost call thine
Worth seizure do we seize into our hands,
Till thou canst quit thee by thy brothers mouth
Of what we think against thee”’s

Eventually it was decided that it would cost far too much to put this name on a t-shirt, and that it would be darn near impossible to put the band’s name on a legible button. The name would be dropped in early October, just before the band’s first show at the Day n’ Niter 24 Hour Laundromat and Pancake House in downtown Columbus.

Columbus, Ohio: The Garden City

It was on that chilly autumn night that the world first witnessed Manda and the Marbles. Unfortunately for the band, they had been so busy choosing a new name that they had neglected to write a single song. The audience didn’t seem to mind, since Mark Slak’s hair was so nice to look at. Eventually this slight deficiency was solved, as was the issue of Joe A. Damage’s terrible narcolepsy affliction which had ruined several of the band’s earliest shows. When Manda Marble finally got around to purchasing a bass for herself, the band was ready to hit the big time in a big way.

Within a few months of getting together, Manda and the Marbles launched their first attack on the vulnerable music scene, with the release of Rock’s Not Dead, a septology of pure sonic force and driving power. So amazing was Rock’s Not Dead, that scientists working for the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) chose the song “Louise” as the Official Song of the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan. When the spacecraft reached Saturn in July of 2004, speakers built into the probe blasted the Manda and the Marbles’s song throughout the Solar System. It was not heard, however, since sound cannot travel in a vacuum.

The past few years have seen remarkable and amazing things for the world’s most amazing musical combo. The Marbles’ continue their creation of fine music, putting out the albums Seduction, More Seduction, and Angels with Dirty Faces. The Marbles even managed to increased their numbers, and their musical prowess by 33.3 (repeating) percent in 2004, when keyboard player Elias donned the Sacred Gilded Daisy Chain of Cleveland and was officially inducted into the Order of the Marbles.

Throughout the past five deci-decades, Manda and the Marbles have forged for themselves not only a place in the music world, but a place for themselves in the pages of history. They have performed before Kings, Queens, Viceroys, Presidents, Arch-Bishops and Chairpersons of the Board. People across eight continents and five hundred countries have rocked out to their music. Their sounds have been featured in such hit films as “Beach Party Massacre,” “Typeset Titan: The Johannes Gutenberg Story,” and “Don Quixote 3000.” Former President Jimmy Carter has declared Manda and the Marbles “…the best hope for peace in the Middle East.”

James Robard Carter: A President

And, most recently, they were honored at The Slick Spot in Meridian Mississippi when drag queen Ida Bomb performed “Dangerous” on stage in a Manda-impersonation that witnesses could only describe as “…breathtaking…”

Ida Bomb: A Slick Spot Favorite

Without a doubt, the future will be bright for these shining stars….