SATURDAY LATE NIGHT TV

SATURDAY LATE NIGHT TV

                                                                                  KENNETH E. HALL            JULY 14, 2016            HOUSTON

One neat thing about being a kid in the Sixties and Seventies was staying up late at night on Saturday nights to watch the monster movies! In retrospect, many - maybe even most - of those quirky films were real STINKERS. They were silly, stupid, and definitely low-budget, and more often as not, threw bad acting into the mix. Nevertheless, each and every Saturday, come rain or come shine, I'd tune in to the 10pm news, and as the weatherman was finishing up, I waited in eager suspense — and even dread — to see what terrors were in store tonight.

It could be space invaders, giant insects, ghosts, vampires, mummies, or any of a thousand other outlandish and other-world menaces to mankind that, of course, would happily be eradicated in the final reel.

USUALLY.....

The first movie was almost always a good one, and in my home-town New Orleans, for many years, (I don't remember when it began) we had something even BETTER: We had MORGUS!

ABOVE: DR. MOMUS ALEXANDER MORGUS & ASSISTANT 'CHOPSLEY'  AS THEY APPEARED ON TV IN 1986. HE WAS A CULT PERSONALITY AND HORROR-SHOW HOST FROM SOME TIME IN THE EARLY SIXTIES WELL INTO THE LATTER PART OF THE 20th CENTURY.

At the beginning and at different intervals during the movie, we had this nutty professor-type named Morgus who every week would cook up some cockeyed invention to save the world - and every week wound up by nearly destroying it instead. He had non-verbal a side-kick named Chopsley - dressed up in a draconian executioner's hood, who was supposedly stupid, but wound up by saving Dr. Morgus' skin in the final segment.


[Morgus, like its Fifties West Coast counterpart Vampira, was a very low-budget local production that in most cases was better than the movies it presented. Like Vampira, Morgus had - and still has - a vibrant cult following in his home town of New Orleans.]

Then, after that, came a second feature - one I hardly ever found too interesting. Yep, if such a thing were possible, it was worse than the first movie -  so bad that within about fifteen minutes or so, I would view the presentation through sleepy eyes, and soon enough, I'd nod off, often with the set still on. 

Eventually I'd wake up to see the final scene, and it made me happy that I didn't stay awake to watch it. By then, it was the wee hours of the morning, and there would be an announcement that the TV station was ending its broadcast day. A litany of technical information was given out, as per FCC requirements. This was followed by the national anthem, and then a test pattern with a solid tone. Shortly after that would come a snowy screen with a sort of SHSHSHSH sound. It was only static, and nothing more.

When the set was turned off, a bright, blue-white dot appeared on the very center of the screen, and the dot diminished over perhaps a minute. This was back in the days of analog tube televisions.

I watch science fiction movies still today, and most of them are quite good - especially when seen on a wide movie screen, in color, with great acting, high-resolution digital cinematography, stereophonic Sensuround sound, and computer-generated special effects - sometimes in 3-D!

But there was just something about staying up at night, staring at a tiny 26" black & white TV with monaural sound - it was a feeling and an experience only childhood and adolescence can offer. On those dark nights, we were alone - completely alone - with the TV set --- and who knows what ELSE lurking on the "night's Plutonian shore"?

It was a time when innocence was really innocent  - when we weren't jaded and spoiled by absurdly highly-paid actors, cutting-edge technology, a high level of sophistication - or by just too MUCH.

The Sixties!

It was a great time to be a kid - to do things kids did. It was also a time to be content with what you had. It was a time when TV wasn't 150+ channels on cable - all blaring in dazzling High-Def color glitz with stereophonic sound, and broadcasting twenty-four hours a day - seven days a week ---- forever and ever. It was a time for test patterns and sign-offs announcing that - a LIMIT had been reached ------ that enough ----was enough.

Today there is no one to tell us when we've reached that limit; not even ourselves.


ABOVE: NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE NEWSPAPER CLIPPING OF AND AD FOR A MOVIE, PIRANHA, HOSTED BY MORGUS PRESENTS IN 1986.