WHY BEING A MONSTER KID IN THE OZARKS IS HELL

I'm proud to say I was a monster kid and I STILL AM. As a kid, I read Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and the first record I owned was Monster Mash (It was a bad Peter Pan version, but the cover art was great) and one of my favorite toys was a Colorforms Castle Dracula playset. I wanted to say that because in the Ozarks, being a monster kid is considered a bad thing. In the Ozarks, a "good person" starts off being a St. Louis Cardinals fan at a young age, then grows up to become a Republican. I, of course, had to be different and start off a monster kid and grow up to be a Democrat. I'm a "bad person." Most Ozarkers believe that monster kids grow up to be serial killers.

Admittedly, things were actually better for monster kids when I was younger. Locally, KMTC (Channel 27) ran old horror films til dawn on Friday and Saturday night. Off and on they were hosted by a host named Dr. Dead (The actor who played Dr. Dead was later Sammy B. Goode on KSPR in the 80s). Also, at this time, CBS Late Movie featured many great horror movies.

In 1988, I had the pleasure of working on The Late Night Horror Show with Count Norlock at KSPR (that is a picture of one of the promotional materials above). Sadly, it only lasted one summer. I'm very proud of my work on this TV show, yet I have been in job interviews with local companies and they have insulted me over having this on my resume.

I tried for most of the 90s to try to interest the local TV stations in doing a horror movie show with myself as the host. I was treated with distain and verbal abuse to just the old excuse of "Ozarkers/advertisers don't like that sort of thing."

As far as over-the-air broadcasting goes, there has only been one attempt to do a show of this kind since Count Norlock. I can't remember what it was called, but it was hosted by Kevin and Liz from the Alice 95.5 Morning Show. There is a show on Mediacom public access, The New Uncle Gregory Horror Hour, that can also be viewed on the Internet at the show's website.

As I mentioned, the local media doesn't want to produce a horror movie show. All I can gather on the reason for this attitude is that some of the local ad agencies didn't like the Late Night Horror Show with Count Norlock and they are probably the one who have cultivated this animosity toward the Count Norlock show, people associated with it and horror movie shows in general (I want to note that one of the directors/producers on the Count Norlock show was Joe Bauer, who was responsible for the visual effects on Elf, Get Smart and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer).

To make things even more frustrating, you can't even find a good horror film on local late night TV. All you can find on local TV late at night is this douchebag:

This guy is usually on every channel when I come home late from work. His name is Dean Graziosi and he is the star of the worst made infomercials ever made (Looks like he just points the camera at himself, turns it on and starts talking). He tells people they can make millions in real estate and he will show you how. He is really a scam artist. Why is he on local TV? Because he pays to be on TV.  The same with TriVita and its Nopela, a concoction from cactus berries that makes women cry on camera (At least that is what I got out of the infomercial). TriVita is referred to a Multi-Level Marketing by its sycophantic minions. This is a politically correct term for pyramid scheme. They pay to be on-air so they can rip desperate people off.

The Ozarks Correctness (as opposed to being politically correct which is based in logic-Ozarks Correctness isn't) mongers will tell you this is a good thing.  They will say horror films are evil and children shouldn't stay up late watching them on TV. Also, a redneck told us that he thought horror movie shows are stupid and we always take the opinion of rednecks over someone with a Bachelor of Science in electronic media. They will also tell you that real estate people are better than everyone else and we should worship them, because they make tons of money. They will also tell you that a pyramid scheme shouldn't be illegal because the only people, who think it is a scam are the people who don't work hard enough to be successful at it. They will also say business people shouldn't have to answer to the government or law enforcement. Also, the only people who should have access to local TV and radio are the people who can pay to be on-the-air.

And then, they will say that business people don't want to advertise on horror movies and that adults don't like horror movies. These the same reason the local radio stations won't play Halloween music like they do Christmas music (Since Halloween is over, I'm sure KGBX will start their usual wall-to-wall Christmas music puke-fest. I can make fun of this since I've been banned from working for the local Clear Channel/Bain Capital cluster).

I HATE ADULTS - I'M ASHAMED TO BE ONE!

Of course, an opinion, like this one, is why I'm considered the Super Villain of the Ozarks!!! Mwu-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!


    

THE TWO PROHIBITION GANGSTER SHOWS OF THE 50s

A few weeks ago, I had a post about some unsuccessful facsimiles or copycats in the media. I was doing some research for an intended writing project, when I thought to myself, "I left out The Lawless Years." On further checking, The Lawless Years didn't meet my criteria.

I decided to dedicate a post to the two most famous 1950's TV shows about prohibition and gangsters. The Untouchables and The Lawless Years were not a Cosby Show/Charlie and Company type of situation, but more of an Addams Family/Munsters type of situation. Basically it was synchronicity at NBC and ABC.

In January of 1959, The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse on CBS, began airing a two-part adaptation of Oscar Fraley's book about Eliot Ness entitled The Untouchables. It stared Robert Stack as Ness, Neville Brand as Al Capone and was narrated by radio commentator Walter Winchell. The rating were so good that it was turned into a TV series for ABC in October of 1959.

In the meantime, NBC launched The Lawless Years in April of 1959. It stared James Gregory as Barney Ruditsky, who was a police detective in New York during the Prohibition Era. Ruditsky was later a high profile private investigator in Los Angeles. It manage to have one whole season under its belt before The Untouchables debuted as a regular series. The show was based on Ruditsky's unpublished memoirs entitled Angel's Corner.

There are many similarities in the shows. Besides both taking place during Prohibition Era, there are several real life gangsters that were characters on both shows, such as Legs Diamond, Mad Dog Coll, Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter and Dutch Schultz. Both shows tried to capture the look of the past in clothing, vehicles and even photographic effects. The Untouchables tried for a newspaper photo and newsreel feel, where The Lawless Years appears to be shot in a sepia tone (I say "appears" because this may have been done to preserve the quality of the picture by the DVD companies, since the show is in public domain).

The differences include the fact that The Lawless Years was only 30 minutes long and The Untouchables was an hour long show.  The Untouchables seemed to have more graphic violence and sexual innuendo, while The Lawless Years handled things in a typical 50s TV cop show manner. Death and sex happened off-screen in The Lawless Years, while The Untouchables had people being run-over with cars or machine-gunned, while they made noises like they were gagging on their own blood. Sometimes they would fall over dead on their car's steering wheel, causing their horn blast an eerie drone. That was if someone hadn't thrown their dead body out of a moving car. It could be said that giving information to Eliot Ness was the equivalent of wearing a red shirt on Star Trek.

Character wise, Eliot Ness, as played by Robert Stack (top) is a very stern, self-righteous, superhero/lawman figure, while Gregory's Ruditsky (bottom) is sarcastic and almost as much of a thug as the gangsters he is fighting. Ruditsky enters a room full of suspects and just beats up at random. Ness always announces that to suspects that he is a federal agent.

The music of The Lawless Years was a generic Big Band-influenced TV theme of the 50s by a composer named Raoul Kraushaar (Who?). Like the composer, you wouldn't recognize the song if you heard it. On the other hand, The Untouchables had a great threatening, dirge-like march by Nelson Riddle. The Lawless Years filled the rest of the show with stock music cues, The Untouchables punctuated dramatic scenes with a "DOM-DOM-DA-DOM" music cue. This usually meant someone was about to be killed.

The villains on The Lawless Years were often times had Jewish or Irish names and were played by typical photogenic actors. The Untouchables must have purposely looked for actors with odd-shaped heads, pock-marks, warts, pimples and scars. The other thing about the villains, which later came to be a liability, was the fact that they had Italian names and accents. Italian-Americans complained and launched a boycott of the shows sponsors.

To me, the big difference is the narration. The Untouchables had the rapid-fire delivery of radio commentator Walter Winchell. The Lawless Years was narrated by James Gregory in the character of Barney Ruditsky. He would start off the show by showing slides of the villain's mugshots or old pictures of New York in the 1920's. This might have worked fine when the show first aired in 1959, but now it is unintentionally funny. Why? People of my generation remember actor James Gregory as Inspector Lugar on Barney Miller. He was always wasting Barney or anyone that would listen at the 12th Precinct with rambling stories about his early days as a cop during Prohibition.

The Untouchables ran four season and The Lawless Years ran three seasons. Probably because of the controversial aspects of the show, The Untouchables became a phenomenon spawning two movies, a series of novelty records by Dickie Goodman and spawned homages on two other Desilu produced shows ("Lucy the Gun Moll" on the Lucy Show and "A Piece of the Action" on Star Trek), while The Lawless Years was just an also-ran of 50s.