When I was a kid, WWOR would always air King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young on Thanksgiving and three Godzilla Movies on Friday. While my sister would watch the Parade and my older Brother would watch football, I watched monster movies and to this day, I can’t help but think of giant apes and Skull Island on the holiday.
They stopped airing them a long time ago, one year I tried watching it on DVD but it wasn’t the same, but I still have the memories. Did anyone else watch Kong on Thanksgiving? Channel 9 was an NYC station, did local stations elsewhere do the same thing?
Yes, I have very vivid memories of King Kong on Thanksgiving as well. Baltimore area, also in the late 70s and early 80s. I don’t recall what channel, though.
I did. Son of Kong was the first thing I recall seeing on TV (not on Thanksgiving – it was years before they started doing that), and I was hooked early on. I could watch the “ape trilogy” over and over. And did.
WOR was obviously putting on the ape movies because it was cheap, people watched it, and it gave them something that could compete with the big Parades on the networks.
A decade or so earlier, it was “March of the Wooden Soldiers” every year, probably same station but I didn’t pay much attention to which channel was on.
We always watched King Kong on Thanksgiving evening, had to have been in the 70’s. I grew up in Akron, so it was one of the Cleveland channels, don’t remember which. It wouldn’t have seemed the same on Thanksgiving without the big ape, and my brothers quoting dialogue!
I remember this as well…although no one else in my family seems to. Glad to see I wasn’t imagining it—this would have been in central NJ in the late 70s, maybe into the early 80s, I forget when it stopped.
The name of channel 9’s movie showcase (its theme song the Max Steiner main theme from Gone With the Wind) was “The Million Dollar Movie”–back in an era when a million $$$ in the kitty would enable one to film something more elaborate than, say, a 30-second Coke commercial
In Los Angeles, we got KTLA’s Thanksgiving Day Twilight Zone marathon every year from the late 1970s up until sometime in the early 1990s. Giant monsters would have been awesome.
Didn’t one of the networks try to turn “E.T:The Extraterrestrial” into a Thanksgiving tradition in the late 1980s? Would have made more sense to do it around Halloween, since Halloween trick-or-treating is featured in the movie.
We watched 'em too; late 70s, early 80s. I grew up in Atlanta and our cable provider offered WOR; which my parents loved since they grew up in New York. It was also my introduction to Crazy Eddie and his insane prices. His commercials showed all damn day. Wow! What memories
I thought MOTWS was on WPIX channel 11 but I could be wrong. Let’s see, WPIX had Abbott and Costello, Officer Joe Bolton, Bowery Boys/East Side Kids Sunday mornings and Yankee baseball. WOR had King Kong, Mets baseball and Knicks/Rangers occasionally. Plus “Million Dollar Movie” with the theme from Gone With the Wind. First time I ever say GWTW in the theater in the late 1960s (it wasn’t on TV until the late 1970s but the Elvis Presley biopic that restarted Kurt Russell’s career outdrew Rhett and Scarlett), that music came on and I said "That’s where they got that theme music from. And then George "Superman’ Reeves is in the opening scene).
I think WPIX kicked off the Christmas season on Turkey Day with “Miracle on 34th street” with Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood.
