What the hell is a Mazeppa?

With the last blog, you might have wondered what the hell "The Uncanny Film Festival & Camp Meeting, starring the incredible Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi!" actually is.  Well, it's a great OLD program that used to run in Tulsa back in the 70s.  My friend, and Tulsa pop culture aficionado, Wilhelm Murg, treated me to an episode during my most recent visit. Gailard Sartain, an actor, comic, and artist, is the host and his cast of crazy characters preceded the Saturday night horror movie.  As the TulsaTVmemories site describes it, Mazeppa is a "show [which] consisted of 45 minutes of loosely-written material and unpredictable happenings during the breaks in "uncanny" films---horror movies" (TulsaTVmemories).  See this website for more info regarding Mazeppa:  http://tulsatvmemories.com/mazeppa.html

What is so exciting (or interesting) about watching Mazeppa?  Well, one, the show includes a character named "Teddy Jack Eddy" who is the very young (and still completely crazy) Gary Busey.  Still you're wondering why this show is important... 

Well, it isn't EXCEPT that we no longer have anything like this on current broadcast TV. The 70s was about experimentation.  I know that I experimented my fair share with a lot of things, but I digress...

TV watching was at a nationwide peak, and midnight movies were often preceded by local characters performing a variety of skits and such.  Elvira, Mistress of the Dark got her start in the early 80s after a series of late-night hosts like Vampira or Sinister Seymour fizzled out against the corporate-ization of TV programming.  

Even in the pop culture-desolate flatlands of Houston where I grew up, we had the midnight movie host.  My horror host for weekly thrills and chills was an unassuming, balding, mustached man named Harold Gunn, aka "Count Harold," aka "Captain Harold." 

Count Harold used to host Boo Theater every Friday night on Channel 26 (before it became Fox 26) during the 1970's, His assistant was "The Dummy Mummy." I still remember the opening. Great black light paintings of a frightened man who speaks in a creepy echo box voice effect, "Oh-No! It's happening again!" Then in a series of dsssolves into artwork he would rip off his face and reveal his grinning skull underneath. When the last frame froze, the fleshy skull with one eye would intone... "Boo Theatre...it's an EYE-Ball!!"

Now my monster memories of my childhood sometimes run together and mix with other things, but I remember the thrill of trying to stay up late and watch so many great films like Assignment Terror, Frankenstein meets the Wolfman and Attack of the Mushroom People on Boo Theatre... 

 

Gunn also used to have a local talk show during the daytime on Channel 26, The Harold Gunn show. In the 1980's, Harold Gunn returned as Captain Harold...hosting Captain Harold's Theater of the Sky on NBC affiliate KPRC TV, Channel 2. This was a great, local hosted show that showed all kinds of movies, not just horror. Captain Harold, wearing an old WW II air force uniform and sunglasses, hosted movies from his bunker with his two assistants. Throughout the 1980's it was Captain Harold on Saturday night and then the nationally syndicated Elvira's Movie Macabre for me. 

I never gave up movie watching, even in grad school.  Now, I have Netflix and Hulu and YouTube, but it just isn't the same.  Watching those old movies with their odd and eccentric hosts was as good as it gets.  That moment is lost, and nothing we have today can replace the TV-oddness and experimental-70s-shows which kids like me hungered for amidst the milk toast of Houston (or Tulsa) as a city-kid-surburban-lifestyle-hatin'-brat.  

Here is a link to Wilhelm Murg's interview with Gailard Sartain:  http://tulsatvmemories.com/mazmurg.html