Recently my children watched the original version of The Fly with my husband via Netflix Watch Now. If you haven't tried that part of their service, you should, it's fabulous and free is always a great deal. Anyway, the girls were not even a little bit creeped out by the movie, it was just cheesy to them. They told a friend, an 11 yr old girl, about it and recommended she watch. Either they weren't clear enough in their description that she should watch the old black and white 1958 version, or she just forgot. Her parents rented the movie for her, and yep you guessed it, she saw the 1986 Jeff Goldblum version. Blech, blech and more blech. I can't even watch that one. Maybe her parents did realize, as we were informed she also watched Anaconda and Lake Placid. Those are enormous gigantic super big and bad snake and crocodile, respectively.
So, my girls were telling my husband and I about the friend's recent entertainment and gradually the conversation changed to us talking about movies that were creepy and gross when we were kids. Both Phil and I grew up in Lakeland, so we have very similar experiences. We were both born in the early 70's, and when we were 10 years old or so, we had tvs with maybe a dozen channels and had to manually turn the dial on the console tv. Although, it may have been right around this time that we had a tv with a clicker. It was a remote, but not at all like the remotes we have now. It was a brick about the size of a blackboard eraser with buttons for volume up and down, channel up and down and power, and each of the buttons made a clicking sound when pushed. When you found a show that was even a little interesting, you'd stick with it, mostly because there wasn't much else to choose from.
We both went immediately to our memories of Saturday afternoons spent watching The Creature Feature show with Dr. Paul Bearer.
As soon as it came up we both started doing impressions of how we remembered his voice (think reallllly old guy who smokes about 8 packs of cigarettes a day) and talking about the various fake commercials he'd made up, the silly songs and visits from Elvira. As you already know, you can find anything on the internet, including Dr. Paul Bearer. There are clips like this one on YouTube.
Here are a couple other videos with clips from several of his shows. Oh how they bring me back to the 70's and 80's.
Clip 1
Clip 3
Clip 4
He would have a little skit at the opening of shock movies. You'd see a couple more during the movie, then one at the end. They didn't last long, but they were so entertaining. Most of the time the movies were B movies, campy for the sake of being campy. If I remember correctly, this is the time when Godzilla movies would show as well. His humor was usually innocent and always silly, but in a fun and not annoying way. My girls were just watching the clips above and were giggling at his bad puns and crazy songs. Who can forget "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"?
You can find online articles about his being the longest running horror movie host and how he came to do what he did. There are Christmas cards that read, It's the Ghoul Tide season. You can find photos of props he used on the show, like Herse's Milk Shockolate and Mr. Badbar candy bars. You can see photos of him with her personal car, a black hearse, which he often drove around the Tampa area like you or I would use our minivan or sedan. You can find out his real name was Dick Bennick, that his creepy look was enhanced by a real glass eye, and that he died in 1995. He was the definition of "a character".
I sometimes think it's a shame that a show like his would likely not succeed now due to the variety of choices in entertainment available to a young kid on a Saturday afternoon.
Until next time, I'll be lurrrrrking for you....
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