During the recent discussion of The Green Slime, much was made of the MST3K connection to local TV programming from days past as well as its modification of the horror host concept.
He brings up his local host, one Dr. Gruesome, a Richmond-based horror host from the ’80s, and recalled…
…his frequent abuse of his lackey Skeeter, which is rather similar to the relationship between Dr. Forrester and Frank.
Well, not every host was reminiscent of MST3K, but they’re all fun to talk about.
When I grew up in the Philadelphia, Dr. Shock was the man, very reminiscent of SCTV’s Count Floyd. As an immature teenager, I dearly loved that the name of his show was “FRIGHT FLICKS” and that the logo of the show, a tombstone with the name of the show on it, was shot at such an oblique angle that the second and third letters of the second word merged together. Think about it.
Tell us about your local host.
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I love love LOVE this topic!
One of the great things about being a Northeast Ohioan is that we’ve had a rich history of horror hosts.
Ghoulardi was well before my time (I was negative 20 years old when he went off the air), but growing up I had Big Chuck & Lil’ John, The Ghoul, Son Of Ghoul, and Superhost.
I remember Superhost from my early formative years, but it was actually well after he went off the air that I became a megafan. Chuck & John, The Ghoul and Son Of Ghoul, though, were BIG parts of my life growing up.
The Ghoul and Son of Ghoul in particular, man, they totally made my weekends. I was and am a huge, huge fan. Heck, SOG still makes up my weekends; he’s been running nonstop since 1986, and actually celebrated his 28th anniversary last Saturday. Fun fact: the channel he’s on is our RTV affiliate. Starting July 5th, we’ll have SOG and MST3K on the same station! This is absolutely mindblowing to me, and something I could have only dreamt of back in the day. After my parents got rid of the cable box and thus my Sci-Fi near the end of summer 1997, my MST3K craving (which has never abated) helped me discover SOG, so I’m absolutely ecstatic that things have turned out the way they have. It feels so symbolic of…something. A moral victory, perhaps? Maybe not, but I’m amped nevertheless.
Big Chuck & Lil’ John ended their movie hosting run in 2007, though they’ve since come back as a 30 minute skits-only show. The Ghoul had Cleveland runs in the 1970’s and 1980’s, though I was watching during his 1998-2003 WBNX run. They later moved him to Sunday nights and ruined his format, but when he was on Friday nights, he was one of the best things on. One of the great thrills of my life was when he opened a package I sent on the air and blew up a terrible movie I included for that exact purpose.
Luckily, I’ve got literally hundreds of recordings of these guys (mostly Ghoul and SOG) so I’m set for life.
Shameless plug time! I’ve been fortunate enough to have interviews with both Son Of Ghoul and Superhost for my blog. Both of them are two of the nicest guys you could ever hope to talk to:
http://neovideohunter.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/an-interview-with-son-of-ghoul/
http://neovideohunter.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/an-interview-with-marty-superhost-sullivan/
In addition to SOG and Chuck & John, there’s also a new host on our local scene: The Daughter Of The Ghoul. Apparently I don’t get any of the channels she’s on, but still, the fact there’s a newbie out there is nothing but a good thing. It’s always nice to see there’s still an interest in this sort of thing, though I shouldn’t be surprised; the huge crowds at every annual Ghoulardifest Convention in Cleveland is proof that there’s an ongoing fandom around these parts.
USA Up! All night with Rhonda Shears, then later on Joe Bob Briggs.
We didn’t have one in Da Moines when I was a kid, but a local station did have one in the 50s/60/, Gravesend Manor.
A friend of mine started a cult movie night at a local bar recently, Doctor Steve’s Monday Movie Madness, and Doctor Who fans will remember the floating Mike Frisbe, host of Sci-Fi Saturday Night.
#49-I watched Sammy Terry and probably saw Squirm presented by him, possibly Kingdom of the Spiders also(which starred William Shatner). I had forgotten about George the spider but thanks to your reference I now remember that bit.
#26 — I grew up in Nebraska and remember Dr. San Guinary well. He became an oddly beloved character, to the point that he made regular appearances on the local muscular dystrophy telethons. The guy who played him (a producer at the TV station that aired the show) died fairly young of cancer in 1988, and one of his sons is working with a group of fans to revive the character for local charity appearances, there are live theater shows, and “Creature Feature” is back on local TV (albeit on a subchannel of the local Fox affiliate). You can’t keep a good ghoul down!
@41
You didn’t need a horror host in Arkansas. You had The Mad Butcher where you could purchase meat.
That commercial was enough to put the fear into Piggly Wiggly.
It terrified Russellville, Morrilton, and Conway….
Living in Santa Barbara as a kid the closest thing I had to a local horror/sci-fi host was Elvira who’s Movie Macabre was based in L.A. I liked her. And I liked her movies. And watching Elvira in her sleek black gowns in no way influenced my formative sexuality.
I seem to remember a Commander USA who hosted Sci-Fri movies and Saturday Groovy Movies.
Later on I enjoyed Joe Bob Briggs Monstervision at TNT before they shafted him with a torrent of films that weren’t good-bad. Just boring-bad. It got to the point where I was fast forwarding through the movie and just watching his host segments. And a funny thing happened. People stopped watching and the show got cancelled. Good one Ted Turner. I still have a few DVD tape transfers of Monstervision broadcasts. Joe Bob used to write a fantastic column of movie reviews and social commentary.
I’d sometimes catch U.S.A. up all night if the movie caught my eye, but I never watched regularly.
If anyone happens to be interested in Virginia-based horror hosts, there was a documentary produced a few years back called Virginia Creepers hosted by Mr. Lobo.
The Chicago area, we had Son of Svengoolie by the time I came around. I was genuinely scared of him as a little kid.
Sampo, you were a naughty, naughty boy!
I can’t remember any real local host in the Denver area – I’m sure KWGN had one at some point – after all, Blinky the Clown lasted for decades.
I did watch a lot of Commander USA’s Groovy Moovies, though. He (and his trusty sidekick Lefty) would show everything from Gamera to The Satanic Rites of Dracula.
I watched the USA Up All Night stuff too. Especially the Troma films like Class of Nuke’em High and the Toxic Avenger. Agree with other posters that Saturday night with Rhonda Shear was preferable to the Gilbert Godfried nights (but, if you can get past his voice, he is actually a pretty sharp improv insult comic a la Don Rickles).
Interesting topic! I remember the host we had in Memphis in the mid 60s was ‘Sivad, the Monster of Ceremonies’. I wasn’t old enough to stay up and watch it on Friday nights which caused more than a few disagreements, but I remember his name because it was ‘Davis’ backwards. A friend told me they would hide during the opening music because it scared them. I could relate, I used to look away during the opening of ‘Outer Limits’.
As an aside, Jackson, MS had a host named ‘Scartisha’.
Growing up in the Bay Area, we had “Creature Features” with Bob Wilkins and later John Stanley. Great show. Now we have “Creepy KOFY Movie Time” with Balrok and No Name, featuring the Cave Girls. KOFY are the call letters for the station. Very low rent, but a lot of fun. Gets rather risque at times, but hey, it’s the new century I guess.
My first post was of necessity written in haste, so I would like to add that while Bob Wilkins’ show had the generic title “Creature Features” (although in fact I like that title, generic or not; and besides, I wasn’t thinking about such things when I was 10), the show was anything but generic, and what I especially liked about Wilkins was his consistently charming, deadpan delivery. He wasn’t a Count-Floyd type (although I hasten to add that I like Count Floyd!); rather, he created a subtle persona, which was mostly him, but not totally him (which is how I tend to perceive Joel on MST3K). He also clearly loved cheesy, bad movies; THAT can’t be faked, and it separates the real hosts from the pretenders.
There are clips of him on youtube, and there is also a website devoted to him. Sadly, he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in 2009 at the age of 76.
This is a wonderful topic, by the way!
I didn’t have any horror hosts when I was a kid growing up in the 80s in the middle of nowhere Southern Illinois. We only had four antenna TV channels and my family didn’t get a satellite dish until 1994. After that I discovered MST3k on Comedy Central and Joe Bob Briggs’ MonsterVision over on TNT. I guess I was also familiar with Elvira, but I don’t specifically recall ever seeing Movie Macabre, as it was more of a “boys in the 80s were familiar with Elvira” kind of thing.
Later, when I went to college in a slightly bigger town in the middle of nowhere (Carbondale, IL), I discovered Off Beat Cinema (which was only “meh” in my book) and Svengoolie. I currently live in Portland, OR and we got Svengoolie out here every Saturday night (I occasionally check it out) on ME TV. We also had the revived Elvira’s Movie Macabre that played a couple years ago; I watched that too.
–
I’ve been meaning to watch documentary American Scary and this discussion thread has added fuel to that fire. Oh, and look at that, the whole thing is posted over at YouTube: http://youtu.be/Kph0aEnQnPo
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Shout-outs to fictional horror hosts:
Count Floyd from SCTV,
Zombo from The Munsters,
Peter Vincent from Fright Night,
Medusa from TerrorVision,
and
Grandpa Fred from Gremlins 2.
#65: My wife and I did (some of) our graduate work at SIUC — and that was where we discovered MST3K! :-)
@48 Thank you, Hotchka! I knew I wasn’t hallucinating all of that. ;)
Like #30, I remember fondly Saturday Night Dead with Stella “The man eater from Manyunk”. It ran from 1984 to 1990 right after SNL.
@ #66: Ha! Small world. And I see the grad work paid off, PROFESSOR.
Joe Bob Briggs – Monstervision, Last Call, & Drive-in Theater
That man made for the best horror host ever!
I grew up in the California bay area, San Jose to be specific, and saw a bit of Bob Wilkins on Creature Feature as well. However, I was really too young and scaredy to watch CF, but every weekday afternoon I watched Bob Wilkins as Captain Cosmic, with his trusty robot sidekick RD-22. I still have my membership/decoder card somewhere. Captain Cosmic introduced me to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, Ultraman, and a lot of other strange kids shows. Star Wars was the huge thing at the time and he had the kids who played the Jawas on the show, in costume, which I thought was the coolest. My memory could be wrong (or maybe I didn’t get the joke) but I could swear that they promised to air Star Wars in its entirety on the show, 30 seconds at a time.
I do have some memories of Creature Feature, though. On Fridays they would plug what movie was going to be on CF that weekend, usually running the trailer for the movie. Several of those trailers, including The Incredible Melting Man, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, and The Thing With Two Heads gave me nightmares for weeks. Yes, just the trailers. For decades I wondered if I hadn’t just dreamed those movies since I’d never heard mention of them in 20+ years. MST3K confirmed the existence of ICMM and Starz ran TTWTH and TIT-HT, restoring my faith in the faithfulness of my memories. Fortunately, as an adult I didn’t suffer from night terrors after watching them :)
Also, Creature Feature introduced me to Hardware Wars, the very first Star Wars parody. They plugged that it was going to be on CF that weekend and I begged them to let me watch it. To their credit, they got me out of bed that night and let me watch that segment, including an interview with the director of the parody, which was great. I can’t tell you how excited I was last year when I watched Hardware Wars: Director’s Cut on Amazon Prime Video a few months ago and, after the short, they included that interview by Bob Wilkins.
On a related subject, my absolute dream movie for MST3K/RiffTrax/CT to riff on is The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. It stars a very stoned-seeming Bruce Dern, Marilyn from the Munsters, and Casey Kasem. Every time I watch it I can’t help but riff on it myself. I just can’t describe how odd, trippy, bad, and campy it is. It really needs to be seen and riffed!
#71: “Several of those trailers, including The Incredible Melting Man, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, and The Thing With Two Heads gave me nightmares for weeks. Yes, just the trailers.”
I LITERALLY could have written those two sentences, because I experienced exactly the same thing! Indeed, I’ll never forget how incredibly SCARED I felt after watching clips from Night of the Living Dead on his show!
Yours was a great entry — and not just because I identified with it so much.
I remember, years ago, going through the channels and catching “Phantom of the Opry” with Sir Cecil Creep a couple of times on the Nashville Network. I don’t recall too much of it, though. Anyone else see that show?
@Watch-Out-For-Snakes (#65)
Don’t forget the episode of “The Odd Couple” where Oscar runs for city council, and Felix says it’s essential for the campaign that Oscar appear on Igor’s monster movie show. (Oh, and the unseen movie that’s running is “The Mysterious Planet Debbie”, if I remember correctly.)
Well, he’s not my local horror host, but Zacherley has always been my favorite. I have been catching what few snippets from the original show that have been posted on YouTube and, of course, I got his Horrible Horror DVD several years ago. I loved how he slipped himself into the action in the movies he aired. I remember in one of the movies (it might have been House of Dracula) where they are chasing Dracula down the hill and suddenly we see Zach with a pitchfork ready to help the constables destroy Dracula. Gotta love it…
I think the closest thing we really have in California is Elvira, but I always thought she was a little obvious, and (in view of the masters at MST3K), really slow on the uptake in some of the movies she aired. In the original Movie Macabre series, she only made her comments at the commercial breaks so she frequently has to include the particular scene she is commenting about. In the new series, she has a few more popups within the movie, but nothing really special.
Elvira did Manos a year or so ago (playing it like a Masterpiece Theater episode — or maybe it should be Disasterpiece Theater), and all it did was make me want to pop the Rifftrax or MST disc in the machine instead (especially when she kept doing similar jokes to Joel and the bots).
It’s unfortunate for me that my childhood happened to coincide with what was, I believe, the last gasp of the late night horror host, and the local programming era in general. I was born in 1987 and during my childhood in the early 90s, there wasn’t much local programming, and it only decreased as the years went by.
Like other posters, I never had my own local late night horror host. If there was one in the southern Ohio/West Virginia/Kentucky area, I’m guessing he or she retired by the time I arrived on this lovely little earth of ours. The only legit local host of children’s programming I can recall was a beloved fellow, in a wacky suit and hat, by the name of Mr. Cartoon. His show aired on Saturday mornings on the NBC affiliate WSAZ out of Huntington, WV. He had a vaguely dog-like animal sidekick named Beeper (no, not the pre-Tom Servo!) and, you guessed it, he played a lot of old, classic cartoons, as well as telling riddles and providing games for a studio audience of kids.
My memories of his show are pretty fuzzy, admittedly, but I do recall a fondness for it. Mr. Cartoon didn’t have the snarky, edgy persona of late night horror hosts as I recall. He just seemed like a genuine, warm, funny guy. He retired in 1995. I’ve noticed lately, though, that WSAZ still breaks out the old Beeper costume and uses him as a sort of mascot for the network on occasions, and his image is used in some of the network’s logos. It’s nice to see some aspect of the show is still on the air.
I have always a real fondness for that kind of programming…the sets that are obviously sets, whether it be Mister Rogers’ living room or the Satellite of Love, the sense that the host has a kind of camaraderie with the audience (especially an audience of children), and the cozy, “down home” feel of it all. I frequently miss that old local, UHF era, and I wish more shows still aimed for that very non-Hollywood approach. I love the global nature of the internet, but it’s nice to have a local person with a great personality to help you get used to the world outside your home town, whether it be with the gentle nature of a Mr. Cartoon or Mr. Rogers or the snark of a Joel or horror host. I hope that maybe the internet could help create a resurgence in this kind of local, low budget but very fun programming.
Watched Dr. Shock every week. Remember his Daughter “Bubbles” ? My parents were driving to Jersey Shore and Dr. Shock pulled up next to them…. driving a Hearse !! :-D We had Cable so got to see a LOT of strange shows from 60’s -70’s from NYC and Philly, when Flyers were eliminated from playoffs, channel 29 pulled in HNIC !
Here in the Baltimore/DC area we had a couple to choose from. As Hotchka mentioned above, the one out of DC, WDCA Channel 20, was “Count Gore De Vol”, and he was the goofy vampire, complete with cardboard castle soundstage. On WBFF, Baltimore we had “The Ghost Host”, he was more of a straight forward, creepy Mad Doctor type, had the phony lab set, but didn’t play it for laughs. And if the weather was right, we could get “Monsterpiece Theater” which I believe was broadcast out of Alexandria, VA. I can’t remember the host’s name, but he was a goofy zombie (I think?).
I didn’t see that this has been mentioned yet, if it has sorry for the duplication, but if you get the channel MEtv, “Svengoolie” currently has a show that runs at 10pm EST. I’ve watched it a few times, and it brings back fond memories of growing up with a Creature Feature.
In Washington, DC, during the ’70s and a good chunk of the ’80s, Count Gore DeVol was the late-night horror host, one or two others from around ’70 having quickly faded. Count Gore’s “Creature Feature” was broadcast out of WDCA, Channel 20, a good old-fashioned cheap-assed independent local UHF station in the KTMA tradition. When Count Gore premiered around 1970 or ’71, I was 14, and right at that age where I was first developing a taste for old horror and sci-fi flicks from the ’30s through early ’60s — and also developing a perverse love for really bad horror and sci-fi from those eras.
Count Gore, as the name indicates, was a vampire character, played by station announcer Dick Dyzel, introducing movies and doing low-level schtick on a cheesy fake castle set. The opening host segment would always involve Count Gore sitting up in a trashy old prop coffin and introducing the movie in the most awesomely stupid fake Bela Lugosi accent ever.
Count Gore DeVol’s “Creature Feature” was finally cancelled in 1988 — ironically, the same year MST3K first aired on KTMA. He’s still a cult hero among several generations of local old-skool horror/psychotronic film fans, and still does appearances “in character” at “B” horror film fests and such.
I have Count Gore to thank for my developing a taste for Lippert, Corman, Gordon, Wood, and the Japanese Canon. Right offhand, I’d say there are at least twenty MST3K episodes — most scattered across the first five seasons — featuring movies I first saw on the Count Gore show when I was in high school. One of the reasons I got to be such a hardcore fan of MST3K in the early seasons was that it seemed as if every other week they were featuring a movie I was intimately familiar with thanks to Count Gore, so it was kind of a trip down memory lane for me.
We didn’t know it at the time, of course, but local TV cut-ups like Count Gore were laying down the mental fertilizer in several generations of teens who’d go on to study drama and media arts and grow up to become comedians and filmmakers and produce stuff like MST3K.
My reaction was the total opposite. In the mid ’60s, when I was maybe 7 or 8, I’d sneak downstairs at midnight to watch the local reruns of Outer Limits. I’d turn out all the lights, tweak the brightness and contrast on the TV, then sit right in the center of the room and be totally digging on the weird close-up of the oscilloscope trace in the screen as the announcer ominously intoned, “…there is nothing wrong with your television set…”
Mike F~
I think what used to bother me was what they THOUGHT they could to to my television set….. :-D
My local horror host was slightly before my time.
The show was called “Nightmare.”
The host was “Gorgon.”
The disturbing thing was that Bob Camfield (Gorgon) played the part completely straight and it scared the bejabbers out of adults and kids alike.
Why can we not have creative local television shows again? What kind of demographic studies ignore the collective and often unique opinions of cities and towns?
Instead, everything has been standardized and vanilla infused, and like a neighborhood street on planet Camazotz in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time,” everything is the same across the country. It’s like seeing the same blue turkey leg over and over in a matrix of steel slots in a food Automat.
Welcome to the Village. Hope you guessed my name.
We’re not going to die from pollution, war, asteroid strikes, plagues, or climate change.
We’re going to do ourselves in with conformity. (shaking head)
Tom Servo: Whoa, lighten up there, Gorgon! It’s not all bad.
Crow: Yeah, we still have phone booths, the space shuttle, aluminum TV dinner trays, klackers, Andy Rooney, Cher…. and Jarts lawn darts.
Tom: (beak moves open and closed a few times slowly and silently)
Crow: Well, Cher then.
Tom: We’re doomed! We’re doomed!
Oh, and that was in the Dallas, Fort Worth area of Texas.
Camfield was the most famous for his humorous character host “Icky Twerp” on Slam Bang Theater.
God. TV is so crappy now.
How about a reality show that documents television execs picking out the crap they choose to broadcast, all the way up to and including said reality show?
Crow: He’s going off the rails again.
Tom: It can’t be helped. He’s eaten the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil.
Crow: Applesauce.
“Bill” Camfield. Sorry. It’s late/early.
Ours was Stella, The Maneater From Manayunk. She was a local rip-off of Elvira and her show was on right after Saturday Night Live on the local NBC affiliate. It was called “Saturday Night Dead”. I only saw her show a couple of times: I had to lie in bed and stay awake and hope my parents fell asleep during SNL, then I’d sneak out to the living room to watch it.
Just discovered she has a website: http://maneaterfrommanayunk.com/
American Scary is on YouTube. http://youtu.be/Kph0aEnQnPo
Super Host in Cleveland and Fritz the Night Owl in Columbus were my favs as a kid.
@76 – Mr. Cartoon was required viewing after school when I was a kid. His name was Jules Huffman and he was also the WSAZ weather man on the evening news. I was lucky enough to be on the show once. I fondly remember him as one of the nicest men I ever met. He was so good with a studio full of brats. He is a true local legend in the KY/OH/WV tri-state area. Good times!!
@88 Wow, an actual audience member of Mr. Cartoon! It’s an honor, sir!
I’d forgotten that Jules Huffman was also a weatherman. I’ve seen interviews with him, recorded in the years since his retirement, and and he certainly seemed as nice as you describe him. As much as I love hosts like Joel, Mike, Mister Rogers, and others who have that kind of a warm connection with the audience, I reserve a special admiration for the people who’ve hosted a show with a live studio audience full of kids.
By the way, Jules Huffman actually wasn’t the original Mr. Cartoon. Huffman began in 1969 and went until 1995, but prior to 1969, going back to the ’50s, Mr. Cartoon was a guy named George A. Lewis. Prior to Mr. Cartoon, Lewis also played another WSAZ children’s show host character, Steamboat Bill, who my father has some fond memories of. My mother got to meet Mr. Cartoon, as played by Lewis, during a parade she attended as a kid in the 1960s. According to her, the original Mr. Cartoon was just as wonderful and friendly as the one we grew up with. Good times indeed!
For me it was Chilly Billy Cardille in Pittsburgh on WIIC-tv channel 11.
This was throughout the 1960’s and 70’s. Like mentioned before, he was in Night of the Living Dead as the main news reporter/interviewer. He was a jack of all trades at WIIC, mainly a news anchor/reporter in the 60’s.
He also was the host of Studio Wrestling which was Bruno Sammartino’s own promotion made up of WWWF wrestlers which he partly owned with Vince McMahon Sr., Father of the current owner of the WWE.
My father worked for WIIC-tv in the 60’s and told us a story about how he was in the men’s room and Chilly Billy was in the stall taking a mean dump and was farting long and loud so much my dad had to leave the restroom to keep from laughing out loud. So my family & I always thought of that whenever we would watch him on tv. It was our own family’s little inside joke.
Here in the Dayton, OH area, we had a gentleman by the name of Dr. Creep. He was a local legend, who would show old-time B horror movies on the local ABC (and later NBC) affiliate, along with bumpers, breaks, and skits in between. Grown men were known to turn into starstruck fanboys when they would meet him in later life. He hosted Shock Theater on Saturday nights and afternoons from the early 70s to the mid 80s, but I was a little too young to have appreciated him. There was also a New Shock Theater revival, that ran from the late 90s to the mid 2000s as well. He sadly passed away in January 2011, but ask anyone from the area in their late 30s or older, and they’ll usually know of him. He has a Facebook, run by his fans, friends, and associates; a Wikipedia page; but the drcreep.com website has been discontinued.
I realize I’m late to this thread but if anyone is still out there…
Here’s my question. We are reviewing K05 elsewhere on this site this week and again the old reframe of “not enough riffing” comes up this week specifically but often about KTMA in general. On the other side of the coin we have this thread celebrating the many, many great local horror hosts out there. None of them do much in movie riffing now and they certaintly didn’t do much of it at all in 1988 when MST was debuting on KTMA. Yet we sat through those movies anyway but view the sparse riffing on KTMA as a slog. I’m curious. Why is that? At it’s core Joel was nothing more than yet another local horror host who quickly went on to evolve the concept.
@ Dan in WI – I think a lot of that might have to do with what MST3K evolved into and thus what we’ve come to expect from it; it became such a smart, well-written show that maybe it seems ‘off’ when the riffing isn’t up to the same heights that it achieved in S2/S3 and beyond? That would be my guess, at least. I know where you’re coming from though, and I certainly remember the movies themselves, bad as they were, being a big part of my interest when I was first discovering the show. In addition to Mike & The Bots making me bust up with laughter, of course. Maybe the KTMAs as they originally aired were given a sort of “pass” (for lack of a better description) by local residents precisely because the riffing was just an added bit of an entertainment along with the feature and not the main focus yet? Those shows, at least earlier on in the season, were more in tune with a typical horror hosted show (if there is/was such a thing as a “typical” horror hosted show) from a comedic standpoint, I guess.
That said, not all hosts ran their movies ‘straight.’ Here in Northeast Ohio, Ghoulardi would occasionally add sound effects and even superimpose himself into the movies, and that tradition continued with The Ghoul and continueS with Son Of Ghoul. Trust me, when it comes to The Ghoul and SOG, some of those movies didn’t have just a few sound bytes added, either; they could be HEAVILY tampered with.
In Central Illinois we had “Tales Of Terror” Friday nights on WAND (channel 17, the area’s ABC affiliate from Decatur) during the mid-to-late ’70s, hosted by “Doctor Terror” who was played by Mike Cheever. They ran all the old AIP Vincent Price flicks, and a couple odd films come to mind: “Equinox” and “Dracula Vs. Frankenstein.” I think “Equinox” would have been marvelous fodder for MST3K.
Cleveland’s Big Chuck wrote an autobiography a few years ago (“Big Chuck!: My Favorite Stories from 47 Years on Cleveland TV “) which is great fun and insight of local television production from the 1960s on. He started on Ernie Anderson’s Ghoulardi show, which evolved into Houlihan & Big Chuck, then Big Chuck & Lil’ John, which had to been one of the longest running movie host shows ever… I highly recommend this book… http://www.amazon.com/Big-Chuck-Favorite-Stories-Cleveland/dp/1598510568/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403899670&sr=8-1&keywords=chuck+schodowski and the legacy of the show continues on the web :http://www.bigchuckandliljohn.com
“Good evening…..and welcome to Nightmare.” Sammy Terry, WTTV Indianapolis. Some have mentioned Sammy and his spider George above. Sammy was cool. He would show up and do segments of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon in the late 60’s, early 70’s. Sammy showed the classics – The Mummy, Frankenstein, Wolfman – as well as the “B” films.
This is a topic that’s close to my heart… Thank you! Where are your
contact details though?