How about any of the Sunn Classics “documentaries”. I actually paid $1.25 of my allowance money to see “The Mysterious Monsters” in a theatre. Although, to this day, many people my age vividly remember the scene where the old couple in the cabin opens to door to see Bigfoot standing right on the porch. AAA!!!:eek
I still remember the TV ads for Sunn pictures. A gentle family-friendly trailer (well, all of Sunn’s pictures were G-rated anyway), followed by a hyperactive announcer: “In Search of Noah’s Ark! Starts Friday for three days only in Olean! From Tuesday to Thursday, in Dunkirk! Then next Friday, three days only, in Depew!”
(These are communities in western New York–we’d get these ads from Buffalo stations when I lived in Toronto.)
To be fair to Sunn, they didn’t make just schlocky documentaries–I was surprised to learn that they made the original film of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, which was so successful that it went on to become a TV series–which Sunn also made.