Many future hip-hop recording artists were also fans of the Power Records discography, whether they’d enjoyed them when they were kids or just stumbled upon them on crate digging missions. Prince Paul was the first producer to include some of the Power Records magic over a beat when he utilized the 1974 release The Amazing Spider-Man: Bells of Doom!► for Stetsasonic’s 1988 album cut “Musically For The Stetfully Insane” ► — an early peek into the mind of an eccentric musical genius who would later give us De La Soul, The Gravediggaz and Handsome Boy Modelling School. It was also sampled for MF Doom’s “Bells of Doom,” naturally. ►

Prince Paul also adapted the ‘Read-Along-Storybook’ format for the De La Soul Is Dead album, which featured a comic strip that prompted you to turn the page when you heard an audio cue on the record. In 1994, Marvel enlisted KRS-One to record three songs as Big Joe Krash ‎for their Break The Chain comic, which shipped with a cassette soundtracking the pictures (perhaps due to its sticker price of $6.99, sales weren't strong enough to warrant a second issue).

The most memorable use of a Power Records sample on a rap record is surely on “Watch Out Now” ► by The Beatnuts, who grabbed a snippet from Wonder Woman: The Secret of the Magic Tiara► to create an irresistibly catchy hook. “I was never a fan of the comics and all that shit,” says Psycho Les when asked about the connection. “I sit at home and I just listen to records from beginning to end and find little words that could be hooks. That’s what I do. My beats always got little [snippets of] talkin’ on them.” The Geto Boys also made great use of a Power Records sample when they grabbed a snippet of Batman: Stacked Cards► for 1989's “Mind of A Lunatic.” ► “These people are about my age,” comments Rob. “So these guys obviously grew up with them too and they remember them pretty fondly! A Conan sample in the middle of an Eminem record? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!”

Eminem has in fact made it a habit sampling from the Power Records catalog, borrowing bits for his songs “Groundhog Day,” ► Slaughterhouse’s “Get Up” ► and most notably “Rap God.” ► Each pull multiple samples from two primary sources, The Fantastic Four: The Way It Began and Captain America and the Falcon: And the Phoenix Shall Arise. One can surmise that these two particular releases influenced his childhood.

“Spider-Man: Invasion of the Dragon-Men is probably one of my favorites for two reasons,” offers Esoteric. “After hearing it on vinyl way back, my father had me read the book on a tape recorder when I was just learning to read. It’s my son’s favorite too. I’ve converted most of these Power releases to MP3 and we listen to them on road trips, they hold his attention pretty well and makes him ask questions and expand his imagination, and also keep me on my toes for inspiration. As many times as I’ve heard them, you never know when a certain piece of dialogue is going to tie-in to what you’re doing now musically.”

“I think their best one in terms of quality is the Conan record,” suggests Rob. “They did a Conan The Barbarian LP with four stories on it, and there’s one where Conan meets some creepy oogly monster, and to me it’s genuinely frightening. It’s much more intense than something you expect for a children’s record. The guy that plays Conan sounds exactly like I would picture Conan to sound like.”

When asked why the Power Records comic and record packs eventually fell out of favor, Rob offers the following: “There was a company called Mego Toys which had all the licenses that Power Records had, except they made action figures. Like Power Records, they did not pick up Star Wars. Both companies got into the licensing thing in the early 70s, had big hits with all of these sci-fi properties, both of them skipped on Star Wars and both of them went out of business around ‘81, ‘82. They have a very parallel existence.”

Donald Kasen stated that he’s “In the process of cataloging all my stuff: 25,000 recordings and the books with the recordings, going back to the 1930s, getting them and digitizing them. In today’s world it’s converting to CDs, MP3s, and mobile apps.” There are also the ever-present complications of Marvel and D.C. Comics licensing issues. “Part of the fun of Power Records was they had all the characters mixed in,” concludes Rob. “On the inside flaps of all the records they had the Planet of the Apes characters standing next to Superman, and that will never happen again! I’m shocked that nobody at D.C. or Marvel has dug them out and put them out on iTunes. It’s a license to print money.”