We didn't watch for the movies. We watched for zacherley. I think it might have been the 1st show where we got the inside jokes.

I had just mentioned him in a conversation a few nights ago about radio back in the day. I'd loved his TV show, "Chiller Theater", in my early teens - and then as the host of a late-night FM radio show in NY in the late 'sixties.

In San Francisco, we had Bob Wikins on "Creature Features," and I never actually saw a Zacherle show, but I was certainly well aware of him. These days (to my knowledge) the only true classic "horror host" we have left is Zvengoolie, and he is actually "Svengoolie II" (Rich Koz) carrying on the legacy of the original (Jerry Bishop, who died in 2013).






At the risk of sounding like a "get off my lawn" old fart, it's probably hard for the current generation to understand the mesmerizing appeal of weekly classic "monster movies" hosted by a weird guy on a TV that only got 3 channels and stopped broadcasts at midnight. We can go to Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and countless other sites and watch what we want, 24/7. But back in the day you set your watch by these guys...Saturday night, watching "Night of the Living Dead" and all of the great black and white Universal films (with the occasional Hammer thrown in), bad TV prints with commercials and comedy bits and we were there, glued to the TV, savoring every single bit of it.

R.I.P. Zacherle.