Thursday, March 3, 2011

He made me who I am today

When I was growing up, a local channel ran Creature Feature on Saturday afternoons. The selection of movies was excellent and--as I can see in retrospect--one of the major influences in my life that still draws me today to Old School stuff. It was on Creature Feature that I first saw the Universal horror movies, Son of Kong, 1950s science fiction movies, and Japanese monster movies.


The show was hosted by Dr. Paul Bearer--who is (or at least was) the longest-running local horror host on television, with a run from 1971 until his death in 1995. If anyone has beaten the record since the good doctor's death, I don't know about it.

Dr. Paul Bearer's schtick was bad puns, but his delivery was perfect for making it all silly fun. His real name was Dick Bennick Sr and he was a talented guy who created a fun and memorable character.


But I'm grateful to Creature Feature mostly for its movie selection. There were a lot of little things in my youth that influenced my outdated pop culture tastes--comic books; paperback reprints of Shadow novels; paperback reprints of Dick Tracy comic strips from the 1940s (featuring memorable villains such as the Brow and Shaky); reprints of the original Conan the Barbarian stories and a few other Robert E. Howard offerings. But Dr. Paul Bearer and a pretty much perfect selection of monster and science fiction films were definitely a factor in shaping me into who I am today.

The world should be grateful. What would you all do without me?


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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 3, 2011 at 10:48 AM

    Son Of Svengoolie has been on the air in Chicago from 1979 & is still broadcasting, however not continuously.

    BTW, yes, the world would be a more boring place with out you.

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  2. Teutonic TerrorApril 15, 2024 at 8:10 PM

    Sounds like a really good guy. One of the tv stations I grew up with had a "creature feature" without a host, but its schedule was irregular, broadcast in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon, and ruthlessly edited to fit only an hour. I probably spent more time in my childhood reading about the great films than actually watching them.

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