Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Flash Back- Monsters on TV for Baby Boomers
























































When I was growing up in the 1960's, Saturday at 1:00 after lunch and morning cartoons, meant MONSTER MOVIES with Sir Graves Ghastly. He was a local (channel 2 Detroit, MI.) host for the best monster movies of all time. He was an idol to kids around Michigan, Northwest Ohio and parts of Canada. He was just spooky enough to make it fun and just silly enough to make you smile with his Dracula-wanna-be looks and movie/commercial break antics. He had a segment on his show each week where he would show art that was sent in by kids to the TV channel (to his vampire lair). I always dreamed that my Mom would actually follow through on her many (many, many) promises to send in one of my carefully, painstakingly drawn masterpieces in Crayola!! To no avail. *Sigh*
It didn't matter how many times he repeated the classics. It always made you want to sit through them again with him "watching them along with you"!
There is a wonderful web site for Sir Graves Ghastly. My kids love going to it even though they never saw him host the shows. That was way back in the 1960's!!!!!!!! He always told us to "Turn out the lights...pull down the shade...draw the drapes...curl up in your favorite spot near the telly ..." to watch his monster movie of the day.
Did you have someone on TV in your area where you lived like Sir Graves? What were your favorite monster/spooky movies growing up?
Part of our October here at our house is watching scary movies all month long ( not like Friday the 13th parts 1-99!!, or Nightmare On Elm Street. We're not in to the "chop 'em up" movies). We mostly watch old suspenseful ones or old classics with not so high tech special effects; but we do also watch some of the more modern spooky movies too. Black and white just seems more... purist- sort of speak.
Here is a post I did about Dracula with a link to a super duper Bela Lugosi site.