One of the great pleasures watching movies on television used to be the movie host. Aside from making commercials bearable, they used to add funny skits, movie trivia and even pizza eating contests. No matter how bad the movie, or what time a day it was airing you felt an intimacy to the medium that today seems to forget there is a viewer on the other side of the screen.
Here are my three favourites:
1. Bill Kennedy. Kennedy was your frustrated actor/Hollywood insider who seemed to be 'slumming it..' as a movie host. Kennedy was born in Ohio, but after his acting career fizzled, he started hosting 'Bill Kennedy at the Movies" on CKLW-TV (Windsor) and later WKBD-TV in Detroit. He would always have a lit cigarette on the set and weave yarns about the movies being shown. He had bit roles in many films in the 40's and 50's including being the person to set Ingrid Bergman on fire in Joan of Arc. He was honest about the movie being shown and he balanced his encyclopedic knowledge with just enough bitterness about his average career to make him entertaining. He would sometimes take calls from viewers - which seemed to pain him. It was low-key, but you always learned something about the actors or the movies.
2. Hoolihan and Big Chuck. These two appeared on late night movies on Channel 8 (WJW-TV) in Cleveland, Ohio. They would occasionally reference the movie, but were best known for zany skits such as pizza eating contests, spoofs of Ben Casey and anything else politically incorrect. Bob "Hoolian' Wells was the station weatherman and "Big Chuck" was a station engineer. Hard to imagine that happening today. These two were legends in Northern Ohio.
3. Sir Graves Ghastly aka Lawson Deming appeared on Detroit television from 1967 to 1982. He was a native of Cleveland but made his biggest impact on WJBK-TV in Detroit, hosting Saturday afternoon horror movies. His show often started with him pulling a can of film out of a grave - great shtick. He occasionally made prime-time appearances and even did a stint in Washington. His jokes often contained adult material even though his show was packaged for kids. He was taken off the air in 1982 when college football took over Saturday afternoons. Deming died in 2007 at age 94.
Bring back the movie host, I say and the quirkier the better. There isn't a video game today that can compete with these characters. Television needs to go retro for some renewal.
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