Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Monster Squad (1976)

In the mid-70's, NBC was relying more on live-action programming to fill their Saturday morning schedule. A good chunk of those shows were produced by the trio of William D'Angelo, Harvey Bullock, & R. S. Allen, and perhaps the cheesiest of the trio's output was this campy adventure series, Monster Squad, which told the tale of a college student and part-time wax museum employee (Fred Grandy) who secretly used the museum as a headquarters for a trio of wax monsters come to life: Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula (Henry Polic II, ex-When Things Were Rotten), & the Wolf Man. Here's the opening & closing, with a scene from an episode, courtesy of 70sKidVid, uploaded to YouTube:



Grandy, of course, would go on to board The Love Boat the very next season, and went on to a brief career as a congressman from his home state of Iowa. Polic would later host a game show, Double Talk, for ABC, and hasn't been heard from much since. As for the producing team of D'Angelo, Bullock, & Allen, their track record at NBC was, well, horrible. The only one of their series that went past the first season was Run, Joe, Run (1974-76), which was replaced by Monster Squad. After shutting down their studio, the three producers would join Grandy on Love Boat, writing several storylines for that series.

In hindsight, Monster Squad tried to recapture the campy spirit of Batman from a decade earlier, while at the same time trying to mine the supernatural vein broken by Filmation's Ghost Busters in 1975. The production values, though, were even lower than either Filmation or the Kroffts. And that's saying something.

Rating: C.