Every so often (not often enough) WABC would have Monster Movie Week. I would so look forward to that week! I would run home from school in anticipation. One MMW I got home on Monday and turned on channel 7 and there was some boring adult thing on. I was pissed! I came home Tuesday and it was on again! How could they ruin my week? It went on all week and no monster movies. It was the Watergate hearings.
When I was a kid I would watch Gilligan’s Island every afternoon. I was also pissed when the Watergate hearings were on instead.
I remember those! The New Year hadn’t really started unless we’d watched “A Night At The Opera”.
I think WGN used to show the Alistair Sim version of “Scrooge” every Christmas Eve too. No one does any more, so it’s part of our regular holiday DVD schedule, along with “The Lion In Winter” and The Grinch - the real one.
When I was a kid (1970’s Australia) we had two TV channels - A local commercial and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a public channel. The ABC would show mostly BBC productions with some local content and a few US kids shows - Sesame Street etc. We got another channel in 1980 - SBS - another public which was focused on non-English programs. Maybe 5 years later we got two more commercial channels.
ABC had some British sci-fi shows (Dr Who, Blakes 7, UFO) and a lot of British comedy. The commercial channel was more for US - I remember seeing the occasional glimpse of the original *Star Trek *(*The Tholian Web *is one I recall).
The main movie events were always Friday and Saturday nights at 8:30. These were the big ‘blockbuster’ movies that were 6 months to a year out of the cinema (Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Raiders…other stuff of no interest to a teen :D) and Saturday (usually a western or adventure/sci fi/disaster movie - *Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno *or Og help me The Swarm) & Sunday afternoon (musical, comedy or ‘Elvis’ film) around 2:00.
For a while in the 80’s we had Elvira on late Thursday nights showing old sci-fi and horror/Hammer films which were great.
You could guarantee certain movies on at the same time each year. The Sound of Music and Oliver at Christmas, Ben Hur or The 10 Commandments at Easter.
SBS was always the late night channel that you would sneak a look at 'cause they had all the foreign shows (with boobs!)
I still remember being annoyed that the Olympics were on instead of Sesame Street and Playschool for two weeks, looking at the dates that would have been the 1976 Summer Games. Same again in 1978 when a few Popes joined the *Choir Invisible. *Lots of TV coverage that got in the way of my favourite shows before going off to school in the morning 
New Orleans had a wonderful late-night horror picture host, Morgus and his sidekick Chopsley who wore a hood to hide a hideously deformed face. In one station break, Morgus performed plastic surgery to improve Chopsley’s visage, and the camera showed closeups of Morgus tearing apart a broiler chicken.
After showing “Them”, with the giant ants screeching sounds, Morgus hired a sound truck and drove around residential streets at 2-am playing the soundtrack of the invading giant ants, and the police received hundred of calls from terrified residents believing they were about to be eaten by ants.
It also seemed like they showed the James Mason/Pat Boone Journey to the Center of The Earth every other month*!* And because it was too long to show in 90 minutes (with commercials) but not really long enough to show in two parts, when they did run it in two parts anyway they had to rerun the middle 30-40 minutes over again at the beginning of part 2 each time.
I lost count of how many times local stations ran “Predator” during several long, soggy winters.
I’m actually lucky enough to still have a local “creature feature” program airing. Surprisingly scantily clad guest stars, occasionally, too.
Exactly this - I had the same reaction the first time I saw Gone with the Wind also.
TV with no VCR meant that I usually saw chunks of the movies. Channel 5 showed the two great Olsen and Johnson movies Hellzapoppin’ and Crazy Street. (Both with Shemp Howard.)_ When I finally got Hellzapoppin’ on VHS I understood what was going on, more or less, though I was familiar with the musical bit at the end. My mother, who saw it on Broadway, approved of my choices.
Zacherle was on Channel 11 around 1962 or so, stolen from Philadelphia.
The New York Times ran one line reviews of movies in their TV listings page, frequently funny. “Land of the Pharaohs” - it Sphinx.
I remember our CBC station showing “Carry On” movies on Sunday mornings in the early 80s. The incident is still indelibly burned in my memory when I saw a woman’s boobs pop out of her shirt in “Carry On Dick” as a young lad! On Sunday morning broadcast TV!
There was also plenty of Abbott & Costello, Ma & Pa Kettle, Francis the Talking Mule, etc.
Our local PBS station had a weekly movies of that type, with a critic introducing them and talking a bit about them.
Then, one weekend, they decided to run Plan Nine from Outer Space. The critic was absolutely nonplussed. He just didn’t know what to say, and obviously didn’t understand the concept of “so bad it’s good.” OTOH, he didn’t want to say it was terrible. I suspect he was shown it for the first time and had no idea why anyone would want to see it.
I grew up in the DC area in the 1970s. For 14 years, WDCA Channel 20 (A UHF station which has been owned by Paramount, Fox, and God knows who else throughout its existence) had one on-air personality, Dick Dyszel. a.k.a. Count Gor De Vol, a.k.a. Captain 20. He hosted cheesy late-night movies. I used to see him around at science fiction conventions and comedy clubs. A low-budget hero, for sure!
On an unrelated note: A lot of the classic movies I’ve seen, I’ve only seen on TV, in chopped-up form. Casablanca is one of these. One scene that always got cut out–I saw it the last time I watched this on TV–was the scene where Rick falls for a newlywed girl’s sob story and gets her husband to make a big bet on the crooked roulette wheel–which puts Rick on Renault’s bad side, as he had his own nefarious plans for the young bride. It made me wonder what other scenes I never saw.
When the Atlanta Braves games were all on TBS, whenever there was a rain delay in a game, TBS would run an episode of the Andy Griffith Show to fill the time. The Braves once had a relief pitcher who was used with unusual frequency, causing announcer Skip Caray to quip that “he’s made more appearances than Barney Fife”.
If you think that’s crazy, according to a Sports Illustrated article at the time, the start time of a Braves game was changed so one of Ted Turner’s colorized movies could get a prime time airing!
Way back when, some local stations that used to air creepy horror-scifi late at night would play this famously disturbing animation to introduce them.
What’s funny is I grew up with WPIX and I remembered the Hand but would have bet money the voice said “Creature Feature” not “Chiller”.
The local ABC channel had afternoon movies during the week, and the most looked forward to theme was Planet of the Apes week. I have to admit though, that by Wednesday or Thursday the quality of movie and our enthusiasm had waned in proportion.
Family Classics (with Frazier Thomas) I remembered from lots of Sunday afternoons. After I got tired of endless football, I left my dad and brother to go to the little tv in the kitchen to see what old movie was showing that week. I remember an occasional Disney movie, Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Time Machine as standouts.
The various UHF channels had a rotation of kung-fu movies and Creature Feature horror films on Saturdays. The stand-out program is Son of Svengoolie, a pre-MST2K type show with the local host in costume cracking wise before and after commercial breaks.
As awful as these flicks were, they could scare the bejeezus out of us kids. We watched in the basement (where the big TV was) and as a basement it was dark even during the day. We of course watched with the lights turned off. In those pre remote days yous had to get up to turn the TV on or off. For an average scary movie, we could hit the off button, and sprint up the stairs before the monsters could get us. But after truly frightening films, my brother and I gave up an pretense of courage and would leave the TV on, walk up the stairs, turn on the stairway light (switch was only at the top of the stairs), walk back down the stairs, turn off the TV and then salvage what pride we could by only walking briskly back up the stairs.
I grew up in Houston, and a local station used music from Ice Station Zebra for their Million Dollar Movie. I didn’t figure that out until many years later. I’ve since learned that other local stations also used that music.
I’ll never forget, when we finally got cable tv back in the 70’s, I got to see movie classics that I had only previously heard about, or read about. W.C. Fields movies were popular with college students, foreign movies by Fellini and Bergman, Busby Berkely musicals - and the only way to see them was to go to a student screening up at the university. I was overjoyed at last to see Bette Davis movies, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow…we had a local public TV station that showed movie classics every Friday night. One time they showed a Russian-made adaptation of ‘War and Peace’ which was extremely long, dubbed, but just BREATHTAKING to look at. And the silent about Napolean with a triptych of the battle scenes, and Alexandr Nevsky - I was in heaven…previously, we had the movie matinee showing locally (with the Syncopated Clock theme music) but they showed mostly gangster B-movies, an occasional historical movie, mostly dated comedies from the 40’s and 50’s. I loved movies, though. Compared to tv shows of the day, I sought out movies and watched almost anything, with varying levels
of interest…I won’t even get into the Monster Movie Matinee every Saturday afternoon, the Creature Features Saturday nights, and ‘James Blond’ hosted spy movies shown on weekend afternoons for a short time. All of them were great, happy memories.
I used to watch Family Film Festival with Tom Hatten on channel 5 in L.A. every weekend, especially when it was a Hope/Crosby Road picture.