Ok, Mooseheads, today we set the wayback machine for 1975. (Y’know, i’m starting to think maybe I should have called this the “Once upon a time” blog or something like that for all the posts that start “wayback when..”… anyway…)

So, ok, it’s January 1975. In response to rising complaints about the amounts of sex and violence on television, Richard Wiley, the head of the FCC, announced that the three national networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS had all agreed to set aside the first hour of prime-time (from 8-9 on the east coast)for family friendly programming. This “family viewing hour” was to be implemented by the start of the fall 1975 season.

However, according to wikipedia:

many television series suffered from the Family Viewing Hour mandate. All in the Family, which was the runaway top-rated show in the U.S. since 1971, was moved to 9 p.m. on Mondays after five seasons leading the Saturday night lineup. Producer Norman Lear, citing an infringement on creative freedom and on his First Amendment rights, mounted a lawsuit with the support of varying guilds including the WGA, but the case was later dropped…

n 1976, United States circuit court Judge Warren Ferguson declared the Family Viewing Hour null and void, starting with the fall 1977 season. Ferguson stated while the idea was good in theory, the FCC had overstepped its bounds in having it instituted; the FCC privately lobbied the three major networks to adopt the policy instead of holding public hearings on the matter, and Ferguson ruled on those grounds that the Family Viewing Hour had no binding merit. The decree made by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1975 was also overturned, giving stations free rein on what to air in the pre-prime time slots.

So by the end of 1977, the family hour was officially dead. Unofficially, however, even today there are some who think about the first hour of prime-time as a period that should at least try to be family friendly and most networks do seem to hold their harsher shows for later viewing (though how Jay Leno’s upcoming domination of the 10 o’clock eastern time slot on NBC will affect the rest of that network’s nightly programming is yet to be seen.

All of which is background for the short video clip below. As cited above, one of the shows most affected by the family hour restrictions was All In the Family. And typically for the show and it’s creator, they were not quiet about it, composing the following take off on the show’s theme song in response. Though never actually aired, it was performed for the show’s studio audience. And now, they perform it for you…

So a couple of times this week, as we’ve been discussing horror hosts and what they brought to the tv scene, we’ve mentioned the Shock Theater! package, but haven’t really discussed what it was.

Of course, in order to really get an idea of the impact the release of this package had, those of you who aren’t of a certain age (for example, it occurs to me that even for my college-age son, what i’m about to talk about is sort of “once upon a time” material) are going to have to use a bit of imagination to picture. Anyway, we have to go back to a time before dvd’s… before vcr’s even… and before cable… back when tv stations were locally owned and most people only got three or four stations… and when movie producers, rather than making money from selling their back catalog to tv, made it from re-releasing select movies to theaters… so that if you wanted to see something like the 1930’s universal movies you had to wait for the movie companies to decide to re-release them and then hope that your local theater would decide to pick them up. Otherwise, though you might have heard of these movies, the chances of actually seeing them was slim.

Then in 1957, Screen Gems, the TV arm of Columbia Pictures, decided to sell to TV stations a full package of 52 films under the collective title of SHOCK!. These movies included the highly sought after Universal classics, along with… well, let’s call them “lesser classics”, shall we?

Here’s the complete list of the first 52 films released in the Shock! package:

The Black Cat
Calling Dr. Death
The Cat Creeps
Chinatown Squad
Danger Woman
A Dangerous Game
Dead Man’s Eyes
Destination Unknown
Dracula
Dracula’s Daughter
Enemy Agent
Frankenstein
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
The Frozen Ghost
The Great Impersonation
Horror Island
House of Horrors
The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man Returns
The Invisible Ray
The Last Warning
The Mad Doctor of Market Street
The Mad Ghoul
Man Made Monster
The Man Who Cried Wolf
The Mummy
The Mummy’s Ghost
The Mummy’s Hand
The Mummy’s Tomb
Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The Mystery of Marie Roget
Mystery of the White Room
Night Key
Nightmare
Night Monster
Pillow of Death
The Raven
Reported Missing!
Sealed Lips
The Secret of the Blue Room
Secret of the Chateau
She-Wolf of London
Son of Dracula
Son of Frankenstein
The Spider Woman Strikes Back
The Spy Ring
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx
Weird Woman
Werewolf of London
The Witness Vanishes
The Wolf Man

Needless to say, these pictures were a great hit, and they were swiftly followed up the next year with another 20 films, collectively known as the “Son of Shock”. That package consisted of:

Before I Hang
Behind the Mask
The Black Room
The Boogie Man Will Get You
The Face Behind the Mask
Island of Doomed Men
The Man They Could Not Hang
The Man Who Lived Twice
The Man with Nine Lives
Night of Terror
The Devil Commands
Black Friday
Bride of Frankenstein
Captive Wild Woman
Ghost of Frankenstein
House of Dracula
House of Frankenstein
The Invisible Man’s Revenge
Jungle Captive
The Mummy’s Curse

Anyway, it was the release of these packages that led to the rise of the local horror hosts as stations looked for different ways to capitalise on them. And they were also responsible for kids like myself growing up with such an incredible love for these flicks…

As a matter of fact, I’d say if you’re looking for the moose this weekend you probably need look no farther than the couch, where hopefully i’ll be curled up (perhaps with the papoose) and taking in some good flicks… the only thing that’ll be missing is sir cecil… or someone like him…

le sigh…

So we wrap up our look at horror hosts today by heading to the 80’s and a fellow who actually has a Nashville connection - Joe Bob Briggs. Briggs, aka John Bloom, started out as a reporter and movie reviewer for newspapers before developing the Joe Bob persona, however he eventually went on to host movie both on TNT and the Movie channel. Again, we turn to wikipedia:

Briggs’s persona is that of an unapologetic and unreformed redneck and male chauvinist with an avowed love of the drive-in theatre. He specializes in humorous but appreciative reviews of b-movies and cult films, which he calls drive-in movies (as distinguished from “indoor bullstuff”). In addition to his usual parody of urbane, high-brow movie criticism, his columns characteristically include colorful tales of women-troubles and high-spirited brushes with the law, tales which inevitably conclude with his rush to catch a movie at a local drive-in, usually with female companionship. The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the “high points” of the movie in question, including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with -fu), the number of bodies, number of female breasts bared, and, for gory movies, a “vomit meter”. A typical such concluding paragraph would be, “No dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking. Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Convenience-store dancing. Blindfold aardvarking. Blind-MAN aardvarking. Lesbo Fu. Pool cue-fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Tane McClure. Joe Bob says check it out.” “Aardvarking” is Brigg’s euphemism for Sexual intercourse.

So, without further ado, here is brother Joe Bob giving us his unique take on the movie Phantasm II:

Oh, that Nashvillle connection I mentioned? Simply that John Bloom is a graduate of Vanderbilt University which he attended on a sports-writing scholarship…

OK, that pretty well wraps up our visits with the horror hosts for today. If we didn’t get to your favorite, let us know, and don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll come back to the topic again…

For our next stop on our little terror-train ride through the realms of the horror hosts we go to Pittsburgh and host “Chilly Billy” Cardille. Instead of turning to Wikipedia this time, lets have a personal recollection by Paul Riggie:

Each show opened to the spooky strains of guitarist Al Caiola’s raunchy arrangement of an unforgettable tune called “Experiment in Terror,” from a film score by Pittsburgh’s own Henry Mancini — a haunting melody loaded with sax appeal.

Cardille, usually clad in a dress suit, a tux or a turtleneck sweater, was a rather restrained host at first. However, as the show’s notoriety peaked in the early seventies, he attacked his role with gusto, adding skits, paranormal bits and large doses of good humor.

“Chilly Billy,” as Cardille came to be known, also brought along a bizarre continuing cast of supporting characters: “Norman the Castle Keeper” (Norman Elder), “Stephen the Castle Prankster” (Steven Luncinski), statuesque zombie “Terminal Stare” (Donna Rae), and “Georgette the Fudge Maker” (Bonnie Sue Barney) — not to mention “Skeets Skeltino the Pizza Man,” “Sister Suzie” (Joyce Sterling), “Beauregard C. Beauregard” (Ted James), and occasional celebrity guests like Phyllis Diller, Barbara (Get Smart) Feldon, and wrestler Bruno Sammartino.

During the glory days of the show, Cardille would sometimes show three or more films each show night, challenging the viewer to stay up ever later with the genial host and his friends. Between films he would predict the future, tell horoscopes, and even hawk his own line of tuxedoes!

The final stamp of approval came when Cardille was invited to play himself in Pittsburgh filmmaker George Romero’s groundbreaking horror classic Night of the Living Dead (1968). In a very effective (but unusually serious) performance, he appears in the film as Channel 11 reporter Bill Cardille, conducting an on-the-spot interview with Chief of Police McClelland about the progress of the zombie hunt.

For more from Paul just click on the link above.

As far as a clip, how about we take a look at Chilly Billy interacting with one of the above-mentioned special guests:

Lest you think that horror hosting is purely the .er life as Maila Nurmi, Vampira was born in 1953 - actually, let’s let ms. Nurmi tell the story herself in this excerpt from American Scary:

wikipedia picks up the story:

On April 30, 1954, KABC-TV aired a preview, Dig Me Later, Vampira, at 11:00 p.m. The Vampira Show premiered on the following night, May 1, 1954. For the first four weeks, the show aired at midnight, moving to 11:00 p.m. on May 29. Ten months later, the series aired at 10:30 p.m., beginning March 5, 1955. Each show opened with Vampira gliding down a dark corridor flooded with dry-ice fog. At the end of her trance-like walk, the camera zoomed in on her face as she let out a piercing scream. She would then introduce (and mock) that evening’s film while reclining barefoot on a skull-encrusted Victorian couch. Her horror-related comedy antics included ghoulish puns such as encouraging viewers to write for epitaphs instead of autographs and talking to her pet spider Rollo. She also ran as a candidate for ‘Night Mayor of Hollywood’ with a platform of “dead issues.” In another publicity stunt, KABC had her cruise around Hollywood in the back of a chauffeur-driven 1932 Packard touring car with the top down, where she sat, as Vampira, holding a black parasol. The show was an immediate hit, and in June 1954 she appeared as Vampira in a horror-themed comedy skit on The Red Skelton Show along with Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney Jr. (Source: FILMFAXplus, April/June 2007). That same week Life magazine ran an article on her, including a photo-spread of her show-opening entrance and scream.

When the series was cancelled in 1955, she retained rights to the character of Vampira and took the show to a competing Los Angeles television station, KHJ-TV. Several episode scripts, and a single promotional kinescope of Nurmi recreating some of her macabre comedy segments, are held by private collectors. Several clips from the rare kinescope are included in the 2006 documentary Vampira: The Movie.

Of course, most of you mooseheads will know Vampira either from the movie Ed Wood, or from Plan 9 from Outer Space. but here she is in all of her glory with the opening of her tv show directly from 1954.

Moving forward in time a bit, we get to Vampira’s spiritual daughter, Elvira. Wikipedia again provides the background:

In the late spring of 1981, five years after Larry Vincent (who starred as host Sinister Seymour of a local Los Angeles weekend horror show called Fright Night) died, show producers began the task of bringing the show back. Deciding to use a female host, producers asked 1950s horror host Maila Nurmi to revive The Vampira Show. Nurmi worked on the project for a short time, but eventually quit when the producers would not hire Lola Falana to play Vampira. The station continued with the project and sent out a casting call. Peterson auditioned against 200 other horror hostess hopefuls, and won the role. Producers left it up to her to create the role’s image. She and best friend Robert Redding came up with the sexy punk/vampire look after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Unable to continue with the Vampira character, the name Elvira was chosen. What followed was Elvira’s Movie Macabre featuring a quick-witted valley-girl type character named Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. With heavily-applied drag queen-style horror make-up and a towering black beehive wig concealing her flame-red hair, the transformation from Cassandra Peterson to the sexy Elvira was so drastic that no one ever recognized her out of costume.

Shortly before the first taping, producers received a cease and desist letter from Nurmi. Besides the similarities in the format and costumes, Elvira’s closing line for each show, wishing her audience “Unpleasant dreams,” was notably similar to Vampira’s closer: “Bad dreams, darlings…” uttered as she walked off down a misty corridor. The court ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that “‘likeness’ means actual representation of another person’s appearance, and not simply close resemblance.” Peterson claimed that Elvira was nothing like Vampira aside from the basic design of the black dress and black hair. Nurmi herself claimed that Vampira’s image was based on Morticia a Charles Addams cartoon character in The New Yorker magazine.

The Elvira character rapidly gained notoriety with her tight-fitting, low-cut black gown which showed more cleavage than had ever appeared on local Los Angeles television before. The movies featured on Elvira’s Movie Macabre were always B grade (or lower). Elvira reclined on a red Victorian couch, introducing and often interrupting the movie to lampoon the actors, the script, and the bad editing. Adopting the flippant tone of a California valley-girl, she brought a satirical, sarcastic edge to her commentary without ever being crass or mean-spirited. Like a macabre Mae West, she reveled in dropping risque double entendres as well as making frequent jokes about her eye-popping display of cleavage. In an AOL Entertainment News interview, Peterson revealed, “I figured out that Elvira is me when I was a teenager. She’s a spastic girl. I just say what I feel and people seem to enjoy it.” Her campy humor, obvious sex appeal, and good-natured self-mockery endeared her to late-night movie viewers as her popularity soared. At the same time, Elvira was embraced as an icon of the waning 1980s punk movement as well as the emerging Goth subculture.

And here ya go, kiddies, about two and a half minutes of Elvira doing her thing:

Our next stop? Pittsburgh, and Chilly Billy Cardille…

So from Washington D.C. what say we head to Indianapolis where Sammy Terry holds court.

From wikipedia:

Robert (”Bob”) Carter (born 1929) is a television personality who appeared mostly on local television affiliate WTTV in Indianapolis, Indiana, regularly during the 1960s and 1970s, and sporadically after that. Carter is best known for his portrayal of camp horror film host Sammy Terry, which is a play on the word “cemetery.” The format of Carter’s Nightmare Theater usually involved the showing of two films. During the commercial breaks, Carter, as “Sammy Terry,” would engage in camp banter with the audience and his floating rubber spider, “George.” This banter often included some commentary on the films being shown, which included classic films as well as many less-than-stellar productions common to the horror film era of the 1930s through the early 1960s.

When WTTV purchased the [shock theater set of films - for more info see tomorow’s postings], which had been rejected by local CBS affiliate WISH-TV, Carter was chosen as the host of the new program. Carter’s Shock Theater originally included only still photographs punctuated by voice-over narration during the commercial breaks. Over time, the popularity of the voice-overs with viewers and sponsors inspired Carter and his producers to develop the character of “Sammy Terry” as an on-air personality—a cloaked, pale-faced ghoul who rose from his coffin on Friday nights, laughed ominously, introduced and occasionally berated the films, and provided commercial-break entertainment. Renamed Nightmare Theater and with the banter mostly ad-libbed, the show and Carter’s portrayal of “Sammy Terry” won him a large-scale following in the region, which allowed him to be ranked with other horror hosts of the era who operated out of much larger broadcast markets.

During the 1980s, the old shows were rebroadcast at mid-day.

Carter still makes frequent appearances as “Sammy Terry” and remains a popular figure in the central Indiana region.

Here’s a clip of Sammy doing his thing as he introduces the evening’s feature - Die Monster Die:

Find out more about Sammy and check out more clips at his website!

So yesterday we took a look at the American Scary dvd and Nashville’s local horror hosts, so I thought today we’d take a look at other hosts from around the country, past and present.

One of the most popular hosts, and one who definitely wins points notonly for longevity, but for embracing the new digital age is Count Gore de Vol. The Count began broadcasting in the Washington DC area in 1973 as M.T. Graves, and he continues today with his weekly web program Creature Feature where he is hosting new movies even now! (A quick peek shows this week’s movie is Monster From a Prehistoric Planet.)

Here’s a bit more on the count from wikipedia:

Originally named M. T. Graves, the character was played by announcer Dick Dyszel, and originated on the WDCA’s version of the Bozo the Clown program. When the character got a positive reaction, he was given his own program called Creature Feature. The character’s name is either a play on the name of acerbic author Gore Vidal or the name of a prominent Washington D.C. funeral home, “De Vol.” Gore De Vol was the Washington/Baltimore area’s longest running horror host. He returned to DC airwaves for a one-time special, Countdown with the Count, on New Years Eve 1999/2000.

Count Gore De Vol’s contribution to the American horror host tradition is significant in a number of ways. As Washington D.C.’s horror host throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, Gore used the platform to satirize national politics from a local perspective. In the era of Watergate and Iran-Contra, Count Gore took frequent shots at the political folly with an ad lib, shoot-from-the-hip style that led local audiences to feel they were part of an Inside the Beltway private joke even when the subject was high profile.

Count Gore’s Creature Feature also embraced the sexual revolution of the 1970s and his guests for the show included several Penthouse pets. Though he never had an official sidekick, he frequently employed the talents of writer and actress Eleanor Herman in the role of Countess von Stauffenberger. The two played off each other with a series of romantic near misses and sexual innuendos that made the show a success even when many horror hosts were losing their shows in the wake of the original Saturday Night Live.

Gore’s iconoclastic style surfaced in a number of other ways. He was the first host in America to broadcast an unedited version of Night of the Living Dead. He also secretly began transmitting his own show in stereo a week before his station officially made the announcement, making Creature Feature Washington’s first stereo broadcast.

After a five year hiatus from the air, Count Gore returned to WDCA 20 in 1984 and a second wave of popularity kept the show a local fixture until new owners canceled all local programing in 1987. In 1998, Count Gore De Vol became the first horror host to present a weekly show on the Internet, featuring streaming video of movies and shorts hosted by The Count, and interviews with celebrities. Other hosts from around the country also contribute to the program, providing reviews, contests, and other “strange and evil creations.” There are also several regular features on the site, from movie and book reviews to monster model building and horror inspired music and video games.

Here’s a quick look at the count being interviewed by an obviously quite enthusiastic fan:

I highly encourage you to check out the count’s website and the web program…

Ok, so I mentioned the Sir Cecil was my favorite of the Nashville hosts. Unfortunately, from what I have been able to find out, very little actual Creature Feature footage has managed to survive the years. However, we are in luck. The clip below lasts about 7 minutes and shows basically all of the Sir Cecil footage for one episode. I’m not sure what the movie is (it doesn’t really matter, like I said, after awhile the hosts often were as much the focal point of the show as the movie they were showing) nor the original airdate, but I think you can definitely see the personality and charm of the character even in just these few minutes.

BtW, two things: first, if anyone else has footage of Sir Cecil or knows where it can be found, give yer friendly moose a shout. Second, a big 25 points to the first person to leave a comment in the comments section naming the “special guest star” at the end of the above clip…

Finally, mention was made in the Nashville hosts segment of the wonderful opening that was created for Sir Cecil’s later turn as “The Phantom of the Opry”, and I suppose we’d be remiss not to share it with you. So, from 1985, when TNN was still “The Nashville Network”, here’s The Phantom of the Opry:

“So,” I hear my Nashville-based mooseheads asking, “did we have any local horror hosts?”

Well, it just so happens that, in answer to that, the American Scary dvd includes a deleted sequence which touches on all three of our Nashville hosts: Dr Lucifer, Sir Cecil Creape (my own personal favorite from my childhood), and Dr. Gangrene, who is still currently active, though he seems to be doing more personal appearances nowadays than actual movie hosting.

Have a look:

(btw, your loyal moose is proud to note that he still owns not only his own “ghoul patrol” badge, but also a paper cutout face mask of sir cecil…)

(oh, and for those of you in other parts of the country, don’t worry, tomorrow we’ll take a look at hosts in other areas)

Here’s one for loyal moosehead RW:

Ok, so we put Jason back into his proper millieu, bit it looks like a number of our stories today actually involve other characters escaping theirs. Of course, most readers under a certain age will only know The Three Stooges from seeing their shorts on TV. However most of those shorts were actually first shot to be shown in theaters before the main feature. Therefore, when a proposal was made in 1949 for a weekly series starring the three numbskulls, it actually was a new and different idea. Could they sustain the hilarity on a weekly basis? Would the audience go for it? What exactly would the premise of the show be?

Mark Evanier provides some insight:

In 1949, The Three Stooges did a pilot for a weekly TV series that was to be called either The Three Stooges Show or Jerks of All Trades. The premise was that each week, they’d screw up in a different profession, which seems like a stretch to me. I mean, the Stooges being incompetent? Come on.

The pilot was done live in front of an audience and then the kinescope was shopped around to buyers. (Do I need to explain what a kinescope was? Basically, it was a way to record a live TV show in the days before tape. They’d point a 16mm camera at a TV monitor and film the show off the screen.)

There were no takers for the Stooges’ project, which seems odd. In ‘49, most of television was a lot worse than this. Take a look and see what you think. It runs a little less than twenty minutes.

Now, I’ll admit I’m not the biggest Stooges fan, but considering how popular they have been through the years, I agree with Mr. E that this seems kind of a no-brainer. Ah, well there’s definitely no accounting for the tastes and judgement of TV programmers and this just goes to show that that’s not a recent devlopment…