🔗 - Steve:
Growing up on Creature Double Feature on Sat afternoons and now a @Svengoolie fan means I’m well acquainted with Godzilla lore. This is by far the best version. Real story, good emotional impact.
I finally got to watch Godzilla Minus One last weekend. Steve is right—it is fantastic, easily the best Godzilla films since the 1954 original.
Beyond that, though, his post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding late-night TV horror hosts.
Being in the general vicinity of Chicago growing up, I was tangentially aware of Svengoolie. His show was not syndicated to Indianapolis market, though, so I never got to watch it.
Instead, we had Sammy Terry’s Nightmare Theater every Saturday night on Channel 4:
Like all of these guys, the jokes were terrible, the sets were shoddy, and the movies were dreadful. But as a kid, I loved all of it.
The nostalgia aside, what I find particularly interesting about hosts like Sammy Terry and Svengoolie is how much of a product of a very specific time they were. I guess guys like that would have YouTube channels now, but even the idea of late-night movies (or Saturday afternoon, or the Channel 13 3:30 Movie) is completely alien in a world of streaming, on-demand media.
As bad as most of movies he featured were, Sammy’s show was one of my only opportunities to watch monster movies. They were cheap and dumb but watching them—by myself or with friends—late at night added that extra layer of creepiness that somehow made up for the silliness. I don’t want to make too much out of it but I really do feel like it is an experience you just can’t find anymore.