Friday, August 7, 2009 This Post Brought to You By Harry Schmerler, Your Singing Ford Dealer

Today's catawampusing about the interwebs has yielded the Museum of Classic Chicago Television. It's a site dedicating to preserving memories of local Chicago television by hosting a variety of clips, most of which were taped off-air by viewers at home. I haven't poked around there too much as yet, but what I have found is pretty interesting.

As most of the clips date after the late 1970's and the VCR revolution, a lot of my childhood favorites aren't represented. You get Gigglesnort Hotel instead of BJ & Dirty Dragon, for example. No Magic Door, no Bert Weinman sponsoring Flash Gordon or The Cisco Kid, just a smidgen of Garfield Goose, and the only Ray Rayner content is from his final show in 1981.

Still, there's plenty of good stuff on hand, like a commercial for the much-desired Mego Magnetic Batman and Robin. They've got some snippets from Channel 44's Monster Rally Theater, but unfortunately not the memorable opening itself. And there's what appears to be all of the host segments from an episode of Screaming Yellow Theater, the original Svengoolie show. It's interesting to see just how much of the current show's schtick originated during the Jerry Bishop era, right down to the cries of "Berwyn"! Although I only watched Screaming Yellow Theater a couple of times when I was very young, I still vividly recall the theme song - Rich Koz kept it for a while after he took over as Sven.

And then there's this:

The opening of WGN's Creature Features, which always scared me worse than any film the program aired. It's actually a recreation done by fans. All of the original openings are lost, which is ironic considering the mascot of the show was from London After Midnight, one of the most sought-after of lost films. The guys who did the recreation have their own fan site dedicated to Creature Features, which features lots of info on the program and audio clips of several show openings.

Despite all this, I still haven't been able to find out the name of the show that featured my first crush. It was a program airing around 1970-72 and featured a young woman dressed up like an elf or Peter Pan while she read from a storybook. I biked to Border's last night to see if The Golden Age of Chicago Children's Television had any info, but no dice. Maybe it was a syndicated or national show. Whoever she is, she's cursed me with a lifelong fascination of pixish women with short haircuts. It's a weakness, I tell ya.