Watching monster movies on Saturday afternoons was a pretty big part of my childhood, but I’ve realized that my local TV stations don’t seem to have “Creature Features” (or whatever they were called) anymore.
What happened?
There’s even many new ones that have been made in Japan the past years that could be shown. I’m not sure if I’d watch them today, but I sure liked them as a kid.
Money.
If you note, very few local stations show any old movies any more. A local station makes easier money showing infomercials than old movies.
Yeah, and when I was young and we could only get maybe five channels, you could count on there being four movies starting about 11:30 PM (the NBC affiliate would have Carson). Now the late movie slots are all occupied by infomercials.
Does anyone else remember the Thanksgiving monster marathons? This was early 80s cable, so I’m not sure what station it was, but I’m naggingly reminded of WPIX or WOR out of New York/New Jersey. Godzilla and Gamera movies all day, from morning to evening. I used to love it. Now you never see any of them.
One cee-gar, comin’ up, for jayjay.
WPIX (channel 11 where I caught it, before there was a WB network) for many many years ran a day of King Kong/Giant Ape flicks on Thursday (Thanksgiving Day) and followed with a dessert of Godzilla stompfests all day Friday. It made dealing with my large extended family worthwhile, since there were enough of us under 18 that to turn off the movie marathon guarenteed an armed revolt in the living room, right in the middle of the third helping of turkey.
Part of the reason for this can be laid at the unholy feet of Tristar. They bought up the North American (and possibly European? Don’t know this for sure) distribution rights for everything “G” when they railroaded Godzilla vs. Ferris Bueller into existence.
[sub]No, I didn’t like it a bunch, what gave me away?[/sub]
And there have now been 2 “reboots” of the Godzilla mythos, by Toho. (I’m not counting G.I.N.O. here.)
In 1985ish, they released Godzilla '85, but this time they let Raymond Burr onto the set from the beginning. A small slew of flicks followed, only two others of which were ‘legally’ available in the US, until sometime after the Tristar Godzilla movie, when Tristar finally started letting the newer Toho films into the western market.
AMC (Since when are Hammer and Toho American studios, BTW?) ran most of the new G movies during a hallowe’en Monster Fest a couple years back, which I think was the first broadcast in the US. (At least three, Godzilla '85, Godzilla vs Biollante, and the revamped Godzilla vs. Mothra, were released on VHS before that.)
The other was Godzilla 2000AD, or summat close to that, which was beautiful offhanded Toho slam against Dean and Devlin(the makers of the abysmal Tristar “G” movie), which ended with Godzilla whomping ass on a big flying saucer transformer that turned into an oversized kaiju.
(Huh, you ask? Think, what was Dean and Devlin’s other huge event movie? Think July 4th.)
Incidentally, anyone else remember the NYC ABC afilliate’s Afternoon Movies, ran at 4:30 or 5PM, every weekday? Every so often, and very often it was the weeks of Xmas through New Years, they’d run a themed selection of movies for the week. All the Gamera movies one week, a bunch of bizarre Scifi flicks (including the immortal The Green Slime) the next week…
Good times.
[sub]Oooh, and that weird six or seven fingered hand on the title card of Chiller Theater, on WOR (channel 9), that was nifty, too.[/sub]
Couple other things:
Revtim, the late 80s/early 90s Godzilla movies were a whole buncha fun, if you were at all a fan of the originals.
And by reboot above, I meant that when G85 and later when G2K were released, it was decided that every other Godzilla flick, after the original, had never happened. No Mecha Godzilla, no Megalon, no Destroyah, no Little Godzilla, none of it had really happened, within the storyline.
The reason they used to show “Creature Features” all the time: They were cheap and available. Kids would watch them.
The reason they don’t now: There are too many other cheap things to show that kids will watch. Newer things, at that – reruns of old TV series, syndicated made-for-kids stuff. You don’t see the old Saturday Morning serials I used to watch a lot of, either. And bottom-of-the-barrel drive-in fare like The Cape Canaveral Monsters and Monster from Green Hell have disappeared altogether. At least AMC still runs Godzilla now and then.
IIRC, Raymond Burr still wasn’t in from the beginning – just like in the original, he never appears in any scenes with the main Japanese cast members. His stuff was cut in later. (I went into the theater hoping that tghis would be a “new” and good Godzilla. Then a character opened his mouth and there was that awful lip non-synching again, and I knew we were in Bad Movie country.)
This is the honest and true answer! I was a local affiliate program director, so I know! There’s also network sports to contend with. And most stations now run movie packages that are filled with barter advertising (commercials that have been sold by the suppliers of the movies), so no money changes hands for the films. These movies are generally more recent films with a general audience appeal. The old monster movies are generally not available in this kind of deal; the station would need to shell out cash for these kinds of movies. . . and that simply isn’t done any more!
England flooded the market with lousy ‘psyhcological horror’ movies that didn’t feed into kids attention spams. Monster movies became rarer and rarer. Soon after, Kung-Fu theater fell.
The diversification of cable TV prolly has something to do with it, too. Hell, my kids will sit and watch Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network all day if you let them. How does a local affiliate station compete with that?
And I mourn the loss of late night movies. Infomercials have killed them. Does anyone actually sit up and WATCH these wretched things?
The VCR was the final downfall.
You can see these films anytime, now.
So, get yourselves down to the local Used Video Store, & recruit your own Godzilla library on the cheap. Don’t worry about tape quality—these thing don’t look terriffic when brand new! 
Besides, once you’ve seen enough episodes of Roseanne and Jerry Springer, what’s the point?
I remember them! And on Sunday mornings WCCO always had either 3 Stooges or Ma and Pa Kettle.
Alas, no more.
For a while another channel had “Kung Fu Theater” with REALLY bad 70’s voice over films, but then they switched to a seriously hokey Terror Theater thing with idiots attempting to act humorously frightening between scenes. Blech.
I hate weekend tele.
Channel 45 in the Twin Cities shows “Horror Incorporated” every weekend–Saturday afternoons and I think on Fridays late/early morning 9depends on perspective).
In between the movie bits, they have locally produced clips of comedy. Well, it at least tries to be comedy. The crime is the hiding of my friend Sasha (as 13) in what looks to be a Hefty bag and purple tights.
Anyway, it’s Godzilla month all December long!
Starting in the late 70s, KTLA in Los Angeles would play a 24-hour Twilight Zone marathon every Thanksgiving. That was better than the turkey!
Skeezix said:
The 4:30 Movie.
Science Fiction Week always seemed to include Angry Red Planet and The Fly.
Being the prey of giant spiders (or rat-bat-spider-things) still gives me the willies.
Anymore?? The local WB station stopped playing them close to 20 years ago. It was a real shame too, since I spent many Saturday afternoons as a preschooler watching the Creature Double Features with Daddy and Grampy. Monster movies are a great thing for an impressionable little girl to watch:p 'course I watched every episode of the A-Team and Knight Rider with my dad too, so maybe he just had strange ideas about what’s family tv.
Yeah! Creature Double Feature on Channel 56 in Boston!
I grew up watching this stuff on the NYC stations – WPIX channel 11 had Chiller Theater, which showed bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, like Black Sleep, Voodoo Island, Attack of the 50-foot Woman and the classically bad Plan 9 from Outer Space. Their initial opening sequence was a montage of scenes from a lot of their usual flicks. Later on they replaced it with an animated six-fingered hand reaching from a pool of blood while a gritty voice said “Chillllllllll- errrrrr!”. CT was a lot more fun after horror host Zacherley (John Zacherle) came on board and started splicing himself into the middle of these flicks in a proto-MST3K way.
WOR channel 9 carried Supernatural Theater, which inexplicably featured shots from Forbidden Planet in its opening montage. ST ran some truly strange stuff, including Carnival of Souls and The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. WOR also had Million Dollar Movie, the theme for which was taken from Gone with the Wind. To this day I associate that music not with Tara and the Civil War, but with King Kong. MDM used to run a brief clip from the film before it ran, as a teaser. They used to show King Kong, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young, The Giant Behemoth, The Crawling Eye and others. WOR also ran the Thanksgiving-Day Marathon of Ape movies – King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young.
WNEW, Channel 5 out of New York, had Creature Feature, which ran old Universal movies (like Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein and newer ones like The Monster that Challenged the World (which they seemed to show ALL THE TIME).
WABC, the ABC affiliate, had The Big Show, which later morphed into The 4:30 Movie. They had offerings of highly variable quality. They might show low-budget fare like The Killer Shrews or From Hell it Came (a priceless film about a man re-incarnated as a walking, evil tree. Kinda like Fangorn’s evil cousin.). But they also showed Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and non-genre films, like The Agony and the Ecstacy. Every now and then they’d show a theme week “It’s Godzilla Week on the 4:30 Movie!”
I miss this stuff. Where else are you going to see losers like **The Cape Canaveral Monsters, Monsters from Green Hell, Beyond the Time Barrier, Robot Monster, Creation of the Humanoids, The Magnetic Monster, ** and The Vampire Bat?