Look gang, I don’t want this to turn into the “old advertising slide” blog, but I’ve got another, and with the fact that it’s just unrelentingly cool, we’re gonna take another trip to the well. Hey, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.
Of course, in recent months we’ve seen an old Batman television slide, and then a theatrical slide for Ken Maynard’s Lucky Larkin. We’re heading back to the television slide side of things now, but with fall coming upon us fast, and with subject matter that fits solidly with the season, the time is right. The time would be righter if I held off until October, but I ain’t wanna.
Dig this: it’s a slide for some iteration of Creature Features! You know, horror and sci-fi movies! Cool winnins! Presumably from somewhere in the 1970s, when I saw this for sale online, along with two other similarly-vintage slides, and for really, really cheap, I just couldn’t hit “purchase, mang” fast enough. When I first went trolling for old TV slides some time back, this was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I came up empty then, but as the hep cats say, persistence pays off. (Wait, do they say that?) Ironically, I wasn’t even specifically looking for it, I was just killing time on my phone before bed one night; rarely has my goofing off been so fortuitous.
The attractive red-and-blue color scheme, never mind the groovy font (it’s far out, man), points to something that looks definitively 70s to me, but that’s just my gut talking; I suppose it could also hail from the late-60s or even the early-80s. While I wouldn’t rule out the idea of this still slide being used for actual promos, I’m operating under the assumption its purpose was as a commercial-break bumper.
I wish there was some further identifying info contained in the slide; a station ID or a host name or somethin’ would sure be nice. The seller it came from was in the Gilroy, CA area, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the slide itself originally hails from there. And the name Creature Features, that doesn’t help narrow things down at all. That was just a generic, albeit catchy, title used all across the U.S. for decades. Some iterations were horror hosted, some weren’t, but the one thing they (probably) all had in common: stoking the imaginations and fanning the flames of monster fandom for untold numbers of kids. Not that that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, it does, but there was just something special about specifically tuning into the same channel each week for new old creepy content. Late Friday or Saturday nights or Saturday afternoons, those were generally the times you could find this stuff. If you’re like me, boy, the kinds of images and memories this slide evokes are just fantastic, even if you really weren’t there to experience them ‘for real’.
But no, I don’t know when or where this originally came from, and for all I know, some company could have printed these slides up and distributed them all across the country; it may not even be unique to one area. ‘Course, I did consider that this may not be related to a horror/sci-fi movie program at all; it seems unlikely, given the ostensible age of the object, but there is the possibility that it could be related to something *shudder* educational. That possibility fills me with a dread far more tangible than any shlocky movie. Well, okay, I’d take a nature documentary over a Paul Naschy flick, but that’s not saying much.
Ignoring that disturbing notion, I like this thing a whole bunch, and I’d sure like to know more about it. Given the age it hails from (read: most likely pre-home video) and the ubiquity of the title, I wouldn’t even know where to start researching – plus, that logo seen in the slide may not have even been in opening titles or print advertising; there’s the possibility it was strictly a bumper, and as such, tracking it down becomes even harder. SO, all that said, if it rings a bell to you, be a buddy and hit up the comments section!
THE NORTHEAST OHIO VIDEO HUNTER 