Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
TV Horror Host: Son of Svengoolie
By bohus
In the heady days of local TV programming, countless UHF channels in the U.S. showed 1950's monster movies. More ambitious stations added a host to help the audience thumb their noses at the schlockier films. In Chicago we're lucky to still have a station dedicated to local TV production, and our horror host has been on TV for more than 25 years.
Svengoolie started out in the early 70's as a beatnik character played by Jerry G. Bishop (Bishop is currently a radio personality in California). After a few years Bishop passed the Sven torch to Rich Koz who carried the show into the 80's winning several Chicago Emmy Awards. Not content to simply host the films, Svengoolie pens parody songs about each film, satirical commercials, and constant references to my home town of Berwyn.
Local TV production dried up, but Koz's Svengoolie returned to TV in the 90's on another station and has been going ever since. Koz is among the last of the all-in-one TV talents. Along with his Sven team, he writes, performs, sings... the way that all local TV talent had to be ready to wear multiple hats back in the UHF wilderness. The TV landscape used to be dotted with local shows (I was part of two shows myself as a boy) right alongside network fare, but now local TV is rare indeed.
I miss the local shows that I grew up with, and it's sad knowing that those times will never return. For this reason I'm really glad that we still have a few good ghouls like Sven around. Oh, and for those of you wondering which of us in the picture above is the horror host, I'm the one in the red shirt.
