For a NYC area kid in the 60s it was Officer Joe Bolton on WPIX, Channel 11. I don’t know if Joe was a local news or weather guy or what, but weekday afternoons he hosted a kid show. He was dressed as a cop (duh!) and introduced the segments. I think mainly he showed Three Stooges shorts, but he may have also had Popeye or Felix the Cat or some other animated stuff.
I don’t know why his persona was a cop, either. Maybe a sort of Officer Friendly type. Hey, it’s better than Heroin Dealer Joe Bolton.
He’s still remembered in the NYC area, Ike. Have you heard his name at all?
Ramblin’ Rod! Grew up with him and was on the show in 1982 or so (I was a bit old for it but it was my sister’s birthday).
At some point in the show he would line up all the birthday kids and everyone would sing happy birthday to him. Additionally, all the kids in the seats (probably 50 per show) would get a chance to say their name on camera.
Did he retire or get cancelled?
As for him being grumpy all I can say is “wouldn’t you be?” 30 years surrounded by 4- to 8-year-olds.
kawliga, I’ve posted one or two references to Sheriff John in the past. Only people 35+ will remember him. Try entering Sheriff John on a search engine and find the lyrics to his songs. You won’t be able to get the tunes out of your heads for weeks.
I thought I was the only one who remembered Skip and Woofer! I was a little old for the show, but I thought Skip was funny! I remember his last show saying he was cancelled, and how sad it was.
In L.A., didn’t we also have Engineer Bill, who tried to make us start and stop drinking our milk when he shouted out “red light! green light!” Didn’t work with me. I poured my milk behind the sofa when my mom wasn’t looking. He showed Gumby cartoons, I believe. I think those Gumbies were just the preamble for people to start taking hallucinogenics a few years later . . .
It wasn’t a cartoon show, but I remember a horror show called “Creature Feature.” Its intro before the movie featured a panning shot of little rubber monsters wiggling in a miniature torture chamber. This is where we kept current with Godzilla, giant ant movies and bad science fiction movies.
Davenport, Iowa => Captain Ernies Showboat…when I was in the Cub Scouts, we got to be part of the show…got some free Twinkies (they used to make them here) and Mountain Dew ,mmmmmmmm sugar AND caffeine
Growing up in Pittsburgh we had a couple of different show hosts…The first I remember was the Knish and Rodney Show…but I’ll be damned if I can remember the host…I know he left Pittsburgh and went to California and that was the last I heard of him
We also had a show on Public Television called the Childrens Corner…There was a young lady for a host and puppets that she talked to…Daniel Striped tiger, Henrietta Owl, King Friday the 13th, Grampere…sound familiar? Yes it was Fred Rogers behind the scenes of his show before he went national with Mr Rogers Neighborhood… The young lady who hosted it was Josie Carey
Last but not least was Paul Shannon who introduced us to the Three Stooges… He sometimes put on the fake glasses-nose-mustache combination and was his alter ego Nosmo King. Man we really loved the Stooges in those days.
My wife grew up in Rochester, NY. She says, in the mid-60s, they had The Skipper Sam Show, weekday afternoons. He stood at the ship’s wheel and introduced cartoons.
He also featured talents. Kids would come on and display their talents. A lot of tap dancing, basically.
Also, there was a rumor that Sam had a wooden arm. She says you would spend most of the show trying to figure out which arm it was.
There was also The Chiller, on Saturday afternoons. The host wore some kind of pageboy wig. They must have blue-screened his face out, because she says he had no features. And he had a spooky voice.
Also, on Sunday mornings, at about 6:30 to 8:30, there was The Shh Show. It was designed to entertain kids with old cartoons like Betty Boop and Popeye, but the host always admonished his audience, “Shh, be quiet, let your parents sleep another hour.”
Yes! J.P. Patches was on the CBS station in Seattle until the 1970s, and I fondly remember watching him every day before I went to elementary school. (I lived right next to my school and could watch the entire show.) Before he was dropped by the channel, he was reduced to just a Saturday show. A friend tells me that on his very last show, the irate J.P. took an axe to his set.
IIRC, J.P., a clown, was the mayor of Seattle's city dump. His viewer friends were Patches Pals, and he had a special two way TV in which he could see kids to wish them happy birthday.
There were only two people on the show...this other guy played all the other characters, including the show villain, Boris R. Wart, the second meanest man in the world.
Do any Dopers know anything about JP and his actor friend in real life?
Ohhh no! Put another candle on my birthday cake, we’re gonna bake a birthday caa-aake! Put another candle on my birthday cake, I’m another year old today! (done as a polka tune.) You’re right, pugluvr, this tune’s with me for the duration.
What memories. Engineer Bill and Red Light Green Light milk drinking. Crusader Rabbit. Felix the Cat. Gumby and Pokey!
Creature Feature strikes a chord, but I mostly remember Chiller (Theater).
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*Originally posted by Mjollnir *
WIS Channel 10 Columbia, SC Mr Knozit
Joe Pinner, a Columbia institution for many, many years–and, the WIS (all together, now) weather guy. His uniform was just another bluish smock. He showed Little Rascals and all sorts of cartoons over the years. Columbia is not exactly snow country in the winter, but Joe is ever optimistic about the chance of our seeing some of the white stuff. I’ve been in restaurants where he was also a customer, and I’ve walked by him on the street. In all cases, even when the person he’s speaking to is right beside him, he uses his incredibly booming “announcer voice” that you can hear thru a soundproof room.
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Damn! I can’t believe somebody beat me to this. I guess Columbia’s got another child on the SDMB.
And Mjollnir ain’t bullsh*ttin’ about that voice. Joe Pinner could get Helen Keller’s attention. Today. From where he is right now.
I don’t need to do that. “Laugh and Be Happy” and “Put Another Candle On My Birthday Cake” are already permanently etched in my memory.
I remember Engineer Bill and the red light, green light routine. I think the object was to drink your milk as fast as possible without choking to death.
Have you been to TVparty.com? They have an entire section devoted to lost L.A. kids shows. Check it out. They’ve got New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia sections as well.
Well, Uke covered Barnaby and his woodland pal, Woodrow pretty well - but they were on in the morning and generally aimed at the Romper Room crowd. (In Cleveland, the RR school teacher was Miss Barbara - “I’m a Romper Room Do-Bee, a Do-Bee All Day Long.” Not that I ever watched it. Much. Where was I? Oh, yes.)
For the more sophisticated set, after school was the time for Captain Penny! He was supposed to be a jolly railroad man - he had the striped outfit, a bandana around his neck and carried a lantern - but he looked a lot like Raymond Massey, so he was actually a little scary. (And now that I think back on it, a “railroad captain” doesn’t seem to make much sense - but it sounded completely reasonable when I was 9.) He showed the usual extremely shortened Stooges and Little Rascals as well as cartoons. Jungle Larry would occasionally make a guest appearance with an alligator, or something, under his arm. (JL was an early Jim Fowler type. I think “Jungle Larry Land” still exists at Cedar Point, an amusement park near Toledo.)
I still remember the Capt.'s sign-off - most of it stolen from Abe Lincoln (who was played by Raymond Massey in a movie - ooooh).
“You can fool some of the people all of the time
and all of the people some of the time - but you can’t fool Mom!”
We didn’t have a host for the kiddie shows locally. However, we did have “Dr. Paul Bearer” who hosted Creature Feature (B-grade horror movies, usually) on Saturday afternoons on WTOG Channel 44 in Tampa/St. Pete. He was very funny. He used to make the most awful puns and jokes and sight-gags–you didn’t know whether to groan out loud or laugh. He was very much a local celebrity and very well liked. He made public appearances in costume to host pageants, judge contests, etc. and drove a hearse. We miss him. We lost him a few years ago…
KTTV Ch. 11 - Los Angeles , middle 80’s
My memory is a little fuzzy on this one, I remember a “cool” grey shaggy puppet hosting. It even had his own show on Saturday mornings of him walking around and playing with the kids in the city. Anyone know what I’m talking about here?
KTTV Ch. 11 - Los Angeles , late 80’s
The kid show host was none other than Bowser from Super Mario Bros.! I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. It was this guy in a foam King Koopa suit and green makeup blabbing on about how he’ll recruit “Little Koopalings” to take over the world. And if you sent in a SASE to them, you get a shirt with a turtle shell on the back and the word “KOOPA” on front. This alone made me ashamed of playing Nintendo.
After this, at around 1990, all the FOX stations replaced their local hosts with that annoying “Fox Kids Club” and had overhyped pre-teens hosting the shows. bleh
A rich panoply of hosts on the independent stations:
Sonny Fox hosted Wonderama, a four-hour extravaganza of guests, contests, and cartoons on Sunday mornings on Metromedia WNEW Channel 5. (James Randi, the debunker and magician, was a frequent guest. He was more an escape artist, then.) They also showed episodes of Flash Gordon serials. The theme music was the overture from “The Unsinakable Molly Brown”, although I didn’t learn that until years later. I also didn’t learn until years later that Sonny Fox was involved i the Quiz how scandals of the 1950’s. In the late 1960s Bob McAllister took over as host of Wonderama, and the theme song changed to his rendition of “Kid are People, too” (Wack-a-doo, wack-a doo).Sonny Fox also hosted “Just for Fun”, a kid’s game show on Saturdays. The key image I remember from this was the winners being given a huge stack of games – when they held them in their arms the stack rose well over their heads.
Sandy Becker had a show called “Sandy’s Hour” weekdays on Channel 5. He had a host of characters – Norman Nork, Hambone, etc. He did commercials during the show for a brand of CARROTS! (And I ate them on account of this. T Commercials as a force for Good!)
Claude Kirshner had a cartoon show in which he was the ringmaster, with a puppet sidekick named “Clowny”. They showed really old cartoons and some odd cartoons that seemed to come from another country, with dubbed voices. I suspect that they were Japanese proto-anime. (This was well before Astro-Boy, by the way.)
Channel 11 WPIX had Officer Joe Bolton hosting caroons and the Three Stooges. He also had a liv kids gallery and live guest stars (like the guy who used to play Jimmy Olsen on “Superman”)When the Three Stooges made their comeback in the early sixties one of their movies featured cameos by their TV hosts, like Officer Joe and Sally Starr (from Philadelphia kid’s TV)
Aseymayo: Yipe! I think we should organize a special SDMB meeting of the Cleveland Diaspora…we’d be reminiscing until dawn.
Captain Penny popped into my head at some point yesterday, but I didn’t have time to post anything about him; I remember the big engineer’s cap and the bandana and striped overalls, but I don’t associate a terifying Raymond Masseyish look with him…wasn’t he less tall and less gaunt? And HE had some executive affiliation with the channel, too. Perhaps this is why Cleveland TV was so rich in local kiddie personalities in the 1960s…lots of vice-presidential pederasts.
Jungle Larry! Boy, do I remember HIM! AND his special attraction area at Cedar Point…right between the African boat ride and the slot-car racing. I never noticed before just how ludicrous his name is…Jungle Larry…{snicker}.
All this Northeast Ohio chat sent me over to Amazon.com yesterday, where I ordered a copy of CLEVELAND TV MEMORIES, and of the GHOULARDI book that was published in 1997 just after Ernie Anderson died. I’ll post a book report when they show up.
(And I’ll bet when you were just a little tiny aseymayo, and it was Christmastime, after you’d been to see Santa and the HUGE Christmas tree at Sterling Linder, you headed over to Halle’s seventh floor to visit Mr. Jingaling, right?)
Oh, man, you guys are going to send me completely in Cleveland TV childhood toxic shock . . . I myself am too young to remember Mr. Jingaling, but my mother sure remembered him a lot. She was constantly regaling us as kids with the little song about him and his magic keys. (OK, she grew up in Painesville, not Cleveland, but close enought.) Jungle Larry, though . . . I worked at Cedar Point between my freshman and sophomore college years, and remember the entire Larry family. I think his son pretty much runs the attraction there now.
Phew! Larry worked for Frank Buck and did stuntwork for Johnny Weismuller in the 1930s Tarzan movies! I would have been a LOT more impressed as a kid if I’d known that…I’d assumed he was some bozo from Ashtabula who’d decide to make a buck off the chimps…
In the Philadelphia area (AKA the Delaware Valley) in the 60’s and 70’s (am I really that old?!) there was The Gene London Show on Saturday mornings. I watched it all the time.
I don’t remember much about it (it was a long time ago now), except that there was a lot of emphasis on artistic creativity and expression.
Now that I look back, I think Gene must have been my first crush. Of course I was only 6-7 at the time. I think it later came out that he was/is gay. They’d probably never let him have a kiddie show today. Too bad…
It was this guy in a foam King Koopa suit and green makeup blabbing on about how he’ll recruit “Little Koopalings” to take over the world. And if you sent in a SASE to them, you get a shirt with a turtle shell on the back and the word “KOOPA” on front. This alone made me ashamed of playing Nintendo.