Well sort of. Let me explain. See back in the 80's when I was growing up There five channels I watched religiously. There was WPIX-11 from New York. Weeknights starting at 11pm they played The Odd Couple, The Honeymooners, Star Trek and then The Twilight Zone. Christmas time they played the yule log all day. There was Channel 45. Which played Robotech and The Real Ghostbusters. WSBK-TV, channel 38 in Boston. They had The Movie Loft. The Movie Loft was great because they played films unedited. For a kid that meant swearing, blood and boobs. Saturday And Sunday mornings they played a block of Three Stooges till noon. Weekday afternoons they had Voltron and Tranzor-Z. WWOR-TV, channel 9 Secaucus, New Jersey. they had Howard Stern's old tv show. Fright Night on Fridays which played all sorts of horror movies. And on Thanksgiving and the day after there was King Kong and Godzilla movies to be had. Plus they played those damn Crazy Eddie ads.
Then there was WXXA-TV, channel 23. Man did I love WXXA. Friday and Saturday nights starting at 12 am there was Theater Bizarre. Theater Bizarre would all kinds of stuff. There was a host of offbeat films that got airtime. Like Gamera,Daimajin, and Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People. Slasher fare like My Bloody Valentine. Heck I remember Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace getting played one weekend. And they played them uncut! Saturday afternoon was a great time for horror films on there to. Stuff like The Thing. Halloween. Swamp Thing. And one of my favorites The Last Dinosaur.
But it had to end. And end it did when in the late 80's 23 became a FOX-affiliated television station. Soon Theater Bizarre and all the great movies were gone. Hell I loved The Simpsons,Werewolf,Married with Children, and the awesome and underrated Get a Life. But spurned on by Fox's success other new networks came into being UPN and The WB. Soon those other channels WPIX-11,WWOR-TV, and WSBK-TV were phased out in this market. Though they are still around just not here. And channel 45 got bought by PBS and eventually disappeared altogether. So in a way Fox coming into being as a network paved the way for the other two channels and doomed all those great channels to becoming affiliated with their respective companies and disappearing in the format that I knew them.
3 comments:
Professor, you've practically lived my own TV watching life! The independent channels from NYC and Boston (and a Worcester channel for a while) were the main reason to have cable as far as I was concerned in those days, and when WXXA came into being, that was just a bonus. So I guess Fox killed my childhood, too. We may have a class-action suit here.
Lol. Glad I'm not the only one who loved those channels. Some weekends I'd leave it on one of those channels all day because their whole line up was cool.
We never had anything like that on my Fox here in San Diego, but I did get plenty of X-men and Spider-man TAS action! The best I remember seeing is Halloween 6 with elements of the Producer's Cut on TV once, but very rarely any good horror
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