As we all know, the age of airing movies on broadcast TV (both local and network) is pretty much dead. But when I grew up in the 80s, it was still common for local TV stations to air them. The ones I always saw on my local stations were:
A package of Sherlock Holmes/Charlie Chan/Mr. Moto movies on Saturday afternoons
Blazing Saddles
Blue Collar (Richard Pryor takes on a corrupt union)
Candleshoe (Jodie Foster ends up on a British manor)
Does anyone else remember the movies your local station aired, especially those which the station aired all the time.
Oh yes! Our CBC station, Channel 2, aired all the wonderful old Thirties and Forties movies at 11:00 pm every night. They had stuff like 42nd Street and Dark Victory and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Lots of it comes from Warner Brothers but there were other studios too. Great movies!
Once we got cable, we could watch the New York city stations. Channels 5, 9, and 11 were non-network and ran a lot of movies. I most remember seeing King Kong (a movie I’d been wanting to see for a long time) and It’s a Wonderful Life (in August, one reason I don’t think of it as a Christmas movie; I had read the short story it was based on and wondered how they’d manage to stretch it out into a film).
I actually saw more when I was in college in Schenectady. One local station had a daily movie at 4 pm. I remember there was once a Humphrey Bogart week – viewers voted on Bogart’s top five films and they’d show them all. I don’t think they even counted the ballots; #1 was pretty obvious, and they had to have all the films ready to go long before the balloting began. At most, they’d just have to change the order.
They also had Sherlock Holmes movies on Saturday night.
I grew up in the tri-state area and always got channel 5 (WNEW, later WNYW aka The Fox Network), channel 9 (WWOR) and 11 (WPIX). Channel 9 traditionally showed King Kong once a year, usually on Thanksgiving. It also used to show the Japanese monster movies (though channel 7, WABC, used to also run them on the 4:30 Movie weekday afternoons). Channel 5 used to run the Marx Bros films once or twice each during the summer. They also used to show the classic Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns once or twice a year. I think channel 11 used to run Casablanca once a year.
Oddly when The Deer Hunter premiered on TV it wasn’t on any of the big three networks, but on WWOR. I think the creative people behind it had enough pull that they wanted a venue that would censor it less than the major networks would.
Great stuff on local TV. As a kid there was a Saturday afternoon Jungle Theater where I got to see Tarzan movies. There was a thread on what Oscar Best Pictures you’ve seen and a lot of them were on local TV growing up. The late movies included monster flicks like Godzilla and King Kong. In Philly there was a Saturday afternoon show with Dr, Shock and cheap horror films. In New York there was a channel that showed a late movie, on Sunday night I think, that had a broad mix of Oscar winners/nominations and mediocre forgotten flicks. For movies made before the 70s I’ve seen the vast majority of them on local TV, usually in B&W, and always filled with commercials.
A great deal of my love for Science fiction came from ABC in New York’s 4:30 movie. They were themed each week and it wasn’t always Science Fiction but multiple times year they would have Godzilla Week or Monster Week (often two or three of which would be Gamera movies) and Planet of the Apes week. When I saw that one was coming in the TV Guide, it was exciting! (I was a geek :))
Similarly, when we got cable we got Channel 29 which was a local Philadelphia station (it eventually became a FOX station). Every Saturday afternoon they would play sci fi movies. I remember the opening showed a clip of the monsters from Attack of The The Eye Creatures which to little kid me made them kind of scary (especially the Heart beat sound effect they had) long before they ended up on MST3K.
Also, and I had started a thread on here about this, I associated King Kong with Thanksgiving because every year Channel 9 would show King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young on Thanksgiving and three Godzilla movies on the Friday after. For several years that was what I did those two days.
The loss of local stations really was a loss…it’s not as much fun when you can just look through and pick a movie. You end up not trying as many new things.
Sunday Mornings WPIX 11 always had a Bowery Boys/ East Side kids movie. Also the Penny Singleton “Blondie” movies.
I remember WOR 9 played the Jimmy Cagney biopic of Admiral William Halsey “Gallant Hours” four times one week. Of course their “Million Dollar Movie” used the theme from “Gone With The Wind” so when I finally saw GWTW and heard the overture it was “that’s where Million Dollar Movie got their theme from”!
Channel 5 on Saturday mornings had their “Creature Features”…the Universal Karloff Lugosi films with an occasional Ed Wood. One interesting thing they threw in was the Universal feature of Richard III…“Tower of London” starring Basil Rathbone as the murderous Richard (keeping a collection of dolls representing those who stood before him to the throne). I always wonder if more people are influenced on their opinion of Crookback by that film instead of Shakespeare! They also had the Rathbone-Bruce “Sherlock Holmes” films although they were missing “Hound of Baskervilles” and the second one because of rights issues.
When “Patton” was shown on national TV (CBS) during Christmas week 1972 (perfect movie for the season of peace on earth, good will towards men), the studio had enough pull that they could broadcast most of the obscenities, except for the bit in the opening monologue about shovelling s*** in Louisiana. I recorded it all on two 8 track tapes. They argued the language was essential to Patton’s character.
When I was a kid a local station used to run the “Bowery Boys” movies. And, of course, the local “horror” shows, “Morgus”, and later “The Ghoul”.
Detroit had something similar with a daily show every weekday afternoon called Bill Kennedy at the Movies. I do remember monster week and planet of the apes week being events worthy of planning activities around.
Channels 5, 11 and 13 in the Los Angeles area were a gold mine of old movies when I was growing up. Like others, they were where I got my first exposure to Sci-fi, Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, the Thin Man, the Little Rascals, Laurel & Hardy…the list is endless. Back before remote controls, you tended to watch one channel - you couldn’t channel surf. So you would stay with something that wasn’t that interesting for a lot longer period before getting off your butt to change the channel. A lot of the time you’d get interested in whatever was on and watch it to the end. Unlike today…
My memories of watching old movies on local TV stations are rather mixed. On one hand, you could see numerous classic (and many not-so-classic) films for free. On the other hand, you had to deal with worn-out crappy 16mm prints that made a 20 year old movie look like it was made in the early 1900s. There were also frequent commercial interruptions and the local station’s edits to fit the movie into its time slot and add more commercials. (I once saw an airing of **King Kong **where the idiots running the station decided to cut the climax of Kong’s fight with the airplanes on the top of the Empire State Building to fit in a commercial for a local RV dealer.) Then there was the fact you were pretty much dependent upon when the station decided to run the film. In the pre-VCR days, if you wanted to see a specific movie but were unable to watch it on the day and time the station was airing it, you were SOL. You had to wait another six months or year for it come around on the schedule again.
I have pretty fond memories of falling asleep on the couch next to my dad when he’d let me stay up with him to watch Clint Eastwood’s westerns on local television late on Friday and Saturday nights – I must’ve seen the beginning to A Fistful of Dollars and fallen asleep shortly after “My mistake: four coffins” three or four times.
I remember that! CBC called it “Stardust Theatre,” and every night, there was a classic (and sometimes, not so classic) movie from the 30s and 40s. I remember that when Ronald Reagan was elected US President, they showed a bunch of his old films.
silenus has already addressed the source of LA’s movies on TV. It’s where I developed a love of kung fu movies, often watching them on summer days with my grandmother. There’s one that always sticks out in my mind, though I don’t know the name of it. As far as I can recall, it involved a character that went around throwing what looked like a fancy serving platter around people’s heads, and then pulling a chain that beheaded the person, keeping the head inside the platter.
Ahhhhhh, memories.
How does a thread about local daily broadcasts of movies not mention Dialing for Dollars?
The two “regular” movies I remember: one station had a running gag that it never rained when it aired Picnic, and another aired Abbott & Costello movies every Sunday morning. A couple of stations (one in San Francisco, the other in Sacramento) also aired “Creature Features” on Saturday night; I remember an episode of the local wrestling show where somebody was run into a wall, and it fell over, revealing part of the Creature Features set on the other side.
The Horn Blows at Midnight
The Brain from Planet Arous
King Kong vs. Godzilla
Doctor Who and the Daleks
Superargo vs. Diabolicus
and, of course, Them!
As a kid, it seemed like movies were shown one of 4 times:
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Prime-time. The big 3 networks occasionally would (and still do) show popular movies in prime-time. Of course at that time, this was literally years after they’d been in the theater, and they were edited for TV.
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One of the local VHF stations(KTRK- Channel 13) showed old (as in 5+ years old) movies every afternoon starting at 3:00-3:30 PM as the “Million Dollar Movie”. This is where I saw a LOT of old movies from the 1950s through the early 1980s.
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The local UHF stations tended to show old movies on the weekends- a lot of westerns, science fiction and kung-fu movies that weren’t quite good enough for the afternoon movie on Ch 13. They also showed older movies like Three Stooges and Bowery Boys as well.
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At least one of the VHF stations would show a movie late at night-starting at like 1 am.
I wonder how many different stations had “Million Dollar Movie” and/or “Creature Feature.” I wonder which station started each one?
Was that “Master of the Flying Guillotine?” I remember watching it on Kung Fu Theater, Saturday mornings around 11-12 on KTTV.