really hokie and dumb, unfunny, and immature humor from Svengoolie on this show
i mean even kids of 10 years old would be like ok, that's dumb when hearing him say that inane and low intelligent puns he uses on this show.
shareTo appreciate Svengoolie you have to be familiar with tv horror movie hosts of the past seventy years--Vampira, Seymour, Elvira, and even SCTV's Count Floyd. It's all tongue-in-cheek and intentionally corny, and Koz does a great job of continuing the tradition.
shareAre they all as goofy and absurd as Svengoolie?
As I just mentioned in a thread I created, I only today learned about Svengoolie and decided to check the show out tonight on MeTV. It was certainly an interesting experience. I really appreciated the background information on the movie, its production and the cast, but some of the humor is too absurd to be amusing to me.
I think that is the style that survived as a sort of distinct style.
I was lucky enough to live in San Francisco in the '70s and we had Bob Wilkins and then John Stanley as our Horror Hosts for Creature Features. Both were regular guys, though Stanley knew a good deal more about films. They would have to apologize for some of the films but generally they came up with interesting production information (No IMDB in those days) and they did interviews with filmmakers and technical people. There were also contests in which you could write in and get free tickets for some upcoming horror films. I saw The Apes Marathon, Damien: Omen 2, a reissue of the 1931 Jeklyll and Hyde...lots of films--free. I recall at the free showing of The Manitou, John Stanley telling the audience, "If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, keep your mouths shut.".
Overlapping the same period we also had The Ghoul, who introduced all his films as "Ghoul Turkeys" and mocked them between unrelated but generally anarchic skits and goofiness. Fun, in a way, but Wilkins and Stanley are the horror hosts that mattered to me.
Thanks for that story. It's always interesting to hear about things like that.
I've noticed that there's a Creature Features program that runs on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqj7_lh8E9q8pLsJN49JB4w
Is it a continuation of the show you're referring to?
As mentioned, the humor of Svengoolie is not really the kind of thing I go for, but I do appreciate the production and cast information he provides, and just as importantly he actually runs good movies. I like that he focuses on classic films that are actually pretty good and that have notable actors. That's much better than the public domain dreck that most of the other horror hosts that I've found tend to traffic in.
Hmm. That Creature Features does not look familiar and I never heard of it. I note this info from the ABOUT page:
Description
A has-been rock star hosts horror films in his haunted mansion featuring special guests and not-so-special films.
Creature Features airs every Saturday evening at 9pm Pacific Time on KOFY TV20 in the San Francisco Bay Area and on a number of other stations throughout the USA. - Visit www.northbaytv.com/watch for local listing info or to watch online through AppleTV, iOS devices, Android, Roku, Amazon FireTV, and more!
Well, I didn't even know there was a KOFY TV20 these days. Anyway, the old Creature Features was on local independent station KTVU 2, which I see still exists too. There's such a thing as TV? Anyway, I guess it is some sort of lineal descendant of the old Creature Features. share
I have many happy childhood memories of staying up late to watch "monster movies." Sometimes we'd get a classic with Karloff or Lugosi, once it was Godzilla battling the Smog Monster, but often it was some film with a more dubious pedigree.
As a host, Bob Wilkins was the best. He'd openly insult the film he was showing, and sometimes even flip through TV Guide and tell the audience "if you switch to channel 4 you can watch such-and-such instead." I read that initially the advertisers were furious that he was telling people to change the channel, but when Creature Features began putting up better numbers than what the networks were showing, which was unheard of for a small local station, they changed their tune.
I also remember Wilkins dressing like a superhero and hosting the after school time slot as Captain Cosmic, and showing all kinds of Japanese shows from the '60s, which were like even lower-budget versions of Godzilla, if you can imagine such a thing. Of course, as a kid I loved them all, and the next day at school we'd all act out what we saw Ultra Man or Spectreman do the day before. I kind of regret that with the existence of the internet, my own kids will never have that shared, community experience, or the chance to see something like Creature Features in an un-ironic setting.
Regarding your last comment, I think one thing these shows should have in the age of the Internet is an official live chat. The Svengoolie website, for instance, should have a live chat that runs every Saturday night as the show airs.
I also think that, in general, we need more hosted TV. Even beyond the horror/suspense genre, I'd like to see more films where the host breaks in periodically with information about the movie I'm watching.
Ha, well some of us still watch TV. Svengoolie in fact still gets beamed out over the air!
It does sound like, however it happened, this Creature Features show is in some way connected to the show you mentioned, whether some other production company just bought the rights to the name or the original owner is still involved.
I've looked at a few episodes. The production values for the hosted segments are high but sadly the movies are of no interest to me at all.
Svengoolie DOES have a Live Chat, known as Svengoolie's Blog. They often get 1,000 or more posts during the east/central broadcast of the show in North America, and another 800 posts during the west coast broadcast three hours later. See:
https://www.metv.com/svengoolie
They also have a Twitter feed that ranks in the Top 10 each Saturday.