Confessions of a Gen-X Premium Cable Junkie

By Bob Ignizio

Way back in the stone age – before streaming, before DVDs, before VHS, and before cable – if you didn’t see a movie at the theater when it first came out, you had to hope it would show up on broadcast TV. And when it did, aside from having to deal with commercial breaks, the chances were good that the movie would be edited for television. 

But that began to change in the seventies. That’s when the earliest VCRs hit the market, and pay cable channels like Star Channel and HBO began showing movies uncut. While my memory is fuzzy as to the exact dates, I know my family got both cable and a VCR around 1978 or early 79. And in addition to basic cable, we subscribed to Star Channel, which would eventually be rebranded as The Movie Channel in December of 1979.

Return to the Microverse: Revisiting and reviewing Micronauts Issue 1 (1978)

By Bob Ignizio

Recently, my local comic book shop Carol & John’s Comics came across a stash of seventies and eighties comics. Like multiple copies of random single issues. And they’ve been putting these quirky finds up for sale, and for substantially less than what the Comic Book Price Guide says they're worth.

Regardless of their monetary value or lack thereof, these comics have great nostalgia value for someone my age. In particular, I was pleasantly surprised to see several issues of Marvel’s Micronauts comic among the offerings. I was a huge fan of this series as a kid, but haven't owned a copy of these comics in years. No way could I pass these up.

Ghoul Power: An Interview with Ron Sweed

This interview originally appeared on the old Utter Trash website in November of 2005. Obviously some things have changed since then, notably the recent passing of The Ghoul aka Ron Sweed on April 1st of 2019. Nonetheless I believe this interview is still of interest, and is presented as it originally ran with only a few minor editing tweeks. 

Ron Sweed broke into show business as a teenager, working as an assistant to legendary Cleveland horror host Ghoulardi (aka Ernie Anderson) in the mid sixties. He continued to work behind the scenes for Anderson’s replacements, Hoolihan and Big Chuck, before donning the fright wig and lab coat that had been Anderson’s trademark in 1971. As The Ghoul, Sweed kept Ghoulardi’s legend alive not just in Cleveland, but in Detroit and (briefly) Chicago, as well. His last television stint was on Cleveland's Channel 55 WBNX from 1998 until 2004.

31 Days of Halloween 2018: Scream of the Wolf

[Once again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can pull it off this year.]

The seventies was the golden age for Made For TV movies. Cable and home video were still in their infancy and wouldn’t make much of an impact until the end of the decade. So if audiences wanted to watch movies on TV, they generally watched the (insert name of network and day of the week here) Night Movie. Often these would be Hollywood films edited for television, but with studios not as quick to turn their hits over to TV back then as they are now, you also had a fair number of original feature films made by or for the networks.

One of the biggest producers of made for TV movies was Dan Curtis. Curtis got his start with the gothic horror soap opera ‘Dark Shadows’ before moving on to TV features. Although he eventually produced such prestige programs as ‘The Winds of War’, his specialty remained horror. His best known TV movies in the genre include THE NIGHT STALKER and TRILOGY OF TERROR, but he made several others, including this interesting thriller.

Gimme' That Shoe! - An interview with Marty "Superhost" Sullivan

This interview originally appeared on the old Utter Trash website in August of 2004.

Photo courtesy of Marty Sullivan

Although the opening of the show claimed “mild mannered Henry Bookerstein” was the secret identity of Superhost, in reality it was WUAB channel 43’s newsman, Marty Sullivan, who donned the cape and tights.  For 20 years, “with powers far beyond those of ordinary men”, Superhost was responsible for bringing Saturday afternoon to legions of fans spanning all ages and backgrounds.  It’s thanks to Superhost that I saw my first Godzilla movie, and literally hundreds of horror, science fiction, and fantasy films ranging from the classic to grade z schlock.  In 1993, Marty moved to Oregon, but he still has fond memories of the time he spent as Cleveland’s own super hero. 

Into The Pit: When, for a few crazy years, my high school decided to let kids smoke on campus

By Bob Ignizio

From the 1981 Cuyahoga Falls High School Yearbook

Remember the song “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”, originally performed by Brownsville Station in 1973, and later covered by Motley Crue in 1985? No? You say you’re not some shriveled up old geezer? Way to hurt a guy. Anyway, I assure you whippersnappers the song was popular, and very much based on reality. But I had a somewhat different reality when I attended Cuyahoga Falls High School in the eighties.

For years, Falls High had tried to keep their student body from smoking on campus as you might expect. During lunch breaks, young nicotine addicts could go off school grounds and enjoy their cancer sticks without fear of being hassled (yes, we were allowed to leave school grounds for lunch, something that would never happen today). But if you got a craving during class time, you had to sneak into the bathroom or some other inconspicuous place to get your fix. And of course if you did that, you ran the risk of getting busted.

By 1979, the administration at Falls High had evidently given up, deciding it would just be easier to keep the smoking contained in one small, unsheltered area of the parking lot rather than play whack-a-mole with determined youthful tobacco addicts. And so it was that The Pit was born.