Then came the music--an eerie, bass-driven tune punctuated by shrill, specific guitar notes and accentuated by strings and, perhaps, a harp.
Then the string of black & white images from classic Universal horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy flowed across the screen.
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So began nearly every showing of Creature Features, the weekly WGN horror-movie showcase that stirred the imaginations--and haunted the dreams--of children and adults alike from its premiere on Saturday, September 19, 1970 until May 1976. (The very first and very last movies shown on Creature Features were one and the same: the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi version of Dracula.)
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Regardless of how long the show was actually on the air, it made a deep impression on me and much of my generation growing up in Chicago in the 1970s. It also gave me my first introduction to many of the classics of the genre--in addition to the aforementioned Universal horror classics of the '30s and '40s, Creature Features also ran selections from Warner Bros. (Doctor X), Columbia (The Black Room), 20th Century Fox (The Lodger) and even Japan's Toho Studios (the Americanized version of the original Godzilla and my all-time favorite daikaiju classic, War of the Gargantuas).
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In fact, the other high-profile monster show in Chicago in the 1970s officially started just one day before Creature Features first stalked the airwaves. Well, sort of.
That Friday night, September 18, 1970, WFLD launched their own horror movie showcase, Screaming Yellow Theater. At first, it didn't really have a host--not even a line drawing standing in for a host a la Creature Features. It just had the voice of staff announcer Jerry G. Bishop doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation--appropriate enough, since the first feature that first night was Ghosts on the Loose, an East Side Kids comedy with Lugosi as a menacing guest star.
According to Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie, the very entertaining history of our fair city's horror movie showcases by Ted Okuda and Mark Yurkiw, Bishop continued hosting Screaming Yellow Theater off-screen for several months, maintaining the Lugosi impression while adding smart-ass comments about the movies, which weren't nearly up to the fare over on WGN. There were a few certified classics, like the original Night of the Living Dead and Mario Bava's Black Sunday and some unsung gems like Night Tide (starring a young Dennis Hopper) or The Haunter Strangler (starring an old Boris Karloff), but most of the movies on Screaming Yellow Theater were low-budget, no-star garbage that needed all the help they could get. And come that following summer, boy would they get it.
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For all good things, though, there is an end, and the end for Svengoolie came rather unceremoniously in the first week of September 1973, when the new owners of WFLD decided to save some money (like they were spending a whole lot of cash on the show anyway), cancel Svengoolie and use the horror host they already had on their payroll in Cleveland and Detroit: The Ghoul, successor to Ghoulardi (a.k.a. Ernie Anderson, father of director P.T. Anderson).
I tuned in the next Saturday, fully expecting to be entertained by the green-haired hippy vampire telling corny jokes and making silly puns, only to find a new guy dressed as a gangster and toting a Tommy gun. (Because he was on in Chicago now. And we think gangsters are hilarious.) At least that's how my nine-year-old mind recorded the event. (Remember what I said above about memory.)
Whatever actually happened that night, three things were verifiably clear: Svengoolie was gone. The Ghoul was here. And the Ghoul was just not amusing to me. (Apparently, it wasn't just me. He only stayed on Chicago airwaves for a few months, though he's been on and off the air in Cleveland and Detroit ever since and even has his own website. More power to him.)
Even as good things end, other good things begin. After a few years without either Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater and only a few quieter, hostless shows (one of them ironically named Creature Feature and even more ironically on WFLD, former home of Svengoolie) to feed our need for monster mashes, WFLD changes ownership again--in fact, changed back to the previous ownership, which wanted its own horror host again. That's how they wound up with Son of Svengoolie (a.k.a. Rich Koz) in June 1979. That lasted until 1986, but there was life in the ol' Goolie yet: he rose from the dead on New Year's Eve 1994 and has been showing bad movies (and telling worse jokes) ever since.
So this weekend when the 40th anniversaries of Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater are upon us, raise a pint (of blood) in celebration and watch a bad movie. Something with Bela Lugosi would do just fine.
2 comments:
Creature Features is one of my most cherished childhood memories. My three sibleys, all of them at least seven years older than me, watched the show every week, without me because my mom thought the scarey movies would give me nightmares because around age five I began to refuse to go to bed unless someone sat in the basement bedroom I shared with my brother until I fell asleep. So what did I do while my sibs watched Creature Features upstairs? I sat at the top of the basement stairs and listened to the ghoulish entertainment--scared out of my wits but screwed to the spot. Within a few weeks, Mom relented and allowed me to watch. I've been a horror film addict ever since.
I was going to say this when I first read this wonderful celebration, but I didn't think it would make sense. Does that really matter? Rich Koz and Jerry G. Bishop would appreciate it. "They're dead. Do they have to be blind, too?" Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Tomb of the Blind Dead
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