Creature Features

I feel like Fridays have been nostalgia hour here at Apocrypha lately. This is not entirely intentional. But recently I had occasion to connect with my “inner child” when I was under the weather physically and emotionally. Long story short, once the boyo settled in, he was keen to watch old Godzilla movies. So that’s what “we” did.

It got me thinking about when I was actually young, like kindergarten to elementary school age. On Saturday mornings at 11 a.m. in central Maine, Creature Double Feature came on WLVI Channel 56 out of Boston. My parents could not budge me.

Creature Double Feature continued to be appointment TV until it finally went off the air or I became a teenager with, ahem, other interests. Before that, if it was late morning on Saturday and my parents had errands to run or somebody to visit, good luck. The program had absolute authority over my reality for those couple of hours.

I saw lots of crazy stuff in those early years. Universal monsters, Godzilla and assorted kaiju, Hammer horrors, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, giant irradiated what-have-you. Some flicks I now recognize as fairly decent, while others are patently ridiculous. Many have disappeared from memory, though every once in a while an individual image or scene will surface. There’s one movie in particular I remember only vaguely and still haven’t figured out what the hell it was called.

But the movies themselves were only part of it. There were also the bumpers, station graphics and announcers. The Creature Double Feature title sequence was especially cool because it used Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Toccata,” from their 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery (the one with the awesome H.R. Giger cover), as theme music. ELP, monster movies and Boston UHF are among the architectural ruins of my mindscape.

Horror hosts were also a thing in the ’70s and early ’80s. For much of its run, Creature Double Feature didn’t have one, but at one point Channel 56 brought in Son of Svengoolie from Chicago. I loved the sheer weirdness of a costumed adult inserting himself into the monster-movie ritual with props, jokes, stupid songs, rubber chickens, you name it.

This belonged to a much older American television tradition, going back to Vampira in 1950s Los Angeles. Different cities had their own monster movie custodians with keys to the kingdom of schlock. There was Zacherley in Philadelphia and New York, Ghoulardi in Cleveland, and later Elvira and Svengoolie, whose “son” is apparently still out there doing his thing.

Part of the fun was permission to enjoy crap. My early horror fandom taught me that quality and enjoyment aren’t necessarily synonymous. A rubber monster suit looks like a rubber monster suit even to a seven-year-old, but it’s nonetheless magnificent. The miniature cities may have been made of balsa wood or whatever, but it was still super fun to see a kaiju stomp on them. Even a flying saucer wobbling on a string had its charms.

Creature Double Feature no doubt solidified my obsession with horror and the macabre. I’ve mentioned countless times that I started reading Stephen King at an inappropriate age. The kid glued to Channel 56 was the same one who would rather spend money on a horror magazine or collectible than a G.I. Joe. This aesthetic education clearly stuck. To this day, I have a thing for grotesquerie, camp, practical effects and stuff that doesn’t necessarily earn critical respectability but is nonetheless part of the cultural fabric.

The younger me would probably see today’s on-demand entertainment as an incomprehensible paradise. I can go to Tubi and summon an enormous number of these films in seconds. Before the VCR, if you missed the movie because your parents dragged you antiquing, that was that. On the other hand, if Channel 56 was showing something you didn’t particularly like, tough shit.

But abundance takes away the anticipation, the thrill of surrendering to somebody else’s bizarre programming selections, the regional character and accidental discovery. It also removes the authority conferred on a movie simply because that’s what was on.

I can watch virtually anything now. Yet nothing has quite the same gravitational pull as whatever Channel 56 decided I was meant to be seeing at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

All of which is to say, if it were actually possible to sit beside that kid and watch some monsters, I think we’d recognize one another.