Friday, October 30, 2015

Spooktober: Creature Features (1969)

The following also appears over at The Land of Whatever:
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With Halloween tomorrow, we're wrapping up our look at New York City's troika of horror movie showcases.

Creature Features, which aired on WNEW (now WNYW), launched in 1969, and lasted 4 years before its initial run ended due to ratings woes and competition from WPIX's Chiller Theatre. Cable television, with the introduction of WNEW, WPIX, & WOR to upstate homes, came right at the end of the run. However, WNEW would bring the series back occasionally, but there was just no faith in keeping the product on the air.

I've often associated the classic Universal Monster movies with airings on WOR, but they debuted on WNEW before the rights shifted to their rival in the mid-70's. Of course, the exception to the rule with the Universal Monsters was the crossovers with Abbott & Costello, with WPIX holding the rights to those films.

Lou Steele, who was heard nightly intoning, "It's 10:00. Do you know where your children are?", before The 10 O'Clock News, was also the host of Creature Features as The Creep. Never got to see him, though.

Tapthatt2012 offers up this intro:



No rating.

1 comment:

Scoobyfan1 said...

I know i'm replying to this very belated, but in the past year i've been watching some old Solid Gold episodes on YouTube, and on the same channel as a lot of the Solid Gold episodes, the same person has uploaded several full Creature Features from the late 1960s.

The same person also uploaded several Creature Features from WPIX bringing the show back around 2010 or so(I guess on a temporary basis for Halloween)...

Also, there is still a TV station in the San Francisco Bay Area that produces Creature Features(it's a modern version of a Creature Features that apparently was produced by one of the stations there in the 1960s and 1970s)...

The current Creature Features also puts their episodes on their YouTube channel, and they have been picked by several community cable TV channels(including one run by one of the technical colleges in the Tacoma, WA area, which is how I found out about this particular group).