grillmeister

Just in time for Halloween! The late night live action/horror movie thriller Nightmare was KTVT Channel 11’s (Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX) contribution towards frightening kids and adults alike. Bill Camfield, of Slam Bang Theatre fame, starred as Gorgon, the master of an evil black & white celluloid domain. As the show began, the camera would zoom [...]

It’s hard to believe its now been 40 years since the Apollo 11 mission delivered human beings to another world. As a kid growing up in the suburban Patio Culture, the exploits of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were considered to be the stuff of legend. Looking back, it continues to be so.
The [...]

Back by popular demand and just in time for Memorial Day cookouts…Oscar and Angus!

And now for a bit of Khristmas Kitsch…

For 50 years NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) has been protecting North American airspace from enemy attack, and for most of those years they have been tracking the Christmas Eve movements of none other than Santa Claus. Growing up in the 1960’s meant the Cold War was pretty much a hypothetical concept since “duck and cover” drills and bomb shelters were products of the 1950’s. Even a thing as scary as the Cold War didn’t put a dent into the typical Patio kid’s Christmas expectations (a true Christmas spirt will evolve later). We all had a faint idea that the F-102 interceptors at the local air base were there to keep the bay guys away, but other than that, we fully expected Santa Claus to made his journey through the world’s airspaces unimpeded. After all, fighter escorts from the North American Air Defense Command guaranteed his passage to the United States! I remember checking up on Santa’s Christmas Eve progress by watching the NORAD Tracks Santa black and white film clips on TV. Usually a very serious airman with black rimmed glasses would be shown carefully monitoring a radar screen while reporting Santa’s position to his commander who would then scramble jets to escort him into North America. Hopefully, the Soviets wouldn’t shoot down our hero in red…after all, I had a new banana seat bike riding on his safe arrival!
Black and white film clips have since given way to the computer animated, internet driven wonder we see today, and the excitement is even greater. Now you can track the Big Man yourself on Christmas Eve at http://www.noradsanta.org

Not retro, but strange nonetheless!

“Numbers Stations”, byproducts of the Cold War, were cryptic coded numerical messages that would appear on various short wave frequencies then abruptly end. It is believed that these mysterious messages were intended for field agents of various world intelligence services during the Cold War era. Although super power tensions have eased somewhat in the 21st century, numbers stations still operate out of Latin America and Cuba. Whatever their purpose, numbers stations make for an eerie, yet realistic, opportunity for Halloween fun! Listen…

You love that machine? He's dedicated to keeping me happy...

An Ed Wood classic. Zombies, aliens, and Bella Lugosi!

B-movie action at its best! I actually saw this movie in the theater thinking to my nine year old self “Cool special effects! Don’t touch those monsters! Wow, that lady’s space dress is tight!”. Actually, I can’t really remember seeing any slime; the title must refer to some type of alien racial slur. After all of these years it’s the theme song that sticks in my mind….Green Sliiimmme….

Long before the Dark Knight roamed Gotham City, Adam West fought the Joker without a body sculpted bat suit...just polyester. It seems he had a tool for every kind of job...the Bob Vila of comic book crimefighters! The show had a
visual style that I've not appreciated until today (note the slanted camera angle when the bad guys come on the screen). While the TV show was great, the first Batman movie was better! Kids were literally rioting outside the Texas Theater in downtown Sherman, Texas trying to get

An Irwin Allen time travel thriller! Two scientists get trapped in a top-secret time travel experiment and are thrown all over the space-time continuum. Just when our heros would get the historical situation under control the folks back at the lab would monkey around with the controls and shoot them off into another time and place. Many kids played Time Tunnel by pretending to fly around through the ozone and come crashing down into another time/dimension.

An Irwin Allen classic, Land of the Giants centers around the Earth ship Spindrift that is sucked into a time/space vortex only to return back to the Earth...a GIANT EARTH! The series which ran from 1968 to 1970, was mainly about how the ships' valiant crew and passengers dealt with a world of giant tormentors...the most perfect and believable story premise for a kid! In the series, the characters had to deal with a hostile, authoritarian world and survive to find their way back home. Similiarly in a world

The beating of the jungle drums was the signal for kids to get in front of the TV for another Clutch Cargo adventure! Clutch, and his pals Spinner and Paddlefoot, were always traveling to the edges of human understanding to deal with some trivial matter. They always had access to the coolest "Space Age" equipment and vehicles leading me to believe they must have had a DoD size budget! The most memorable feature of this
cartoon were the mouths of the characters. Human-like lips were strangely superimposed o

The one that started it all. James T. Kirk didn't worry much about Political Correctness...he had a job to do. Actually I didn't get to see much of the original Star Trek during it's prime time network run (remember dads controlled the TV so it was usually Bonanza for us). I picked it up later during syndication like most people. There were two distinct popular culture genres for boys in the 1950's and 1960's. The 50's tended to focus on the past (cowboys and Indians, Davy Crockett, etc.), and the 60's focu

The evil forces of C.H.U.M.P. (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan) didn't stand a chance against Agent Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp! Good thing P.E.T.A. wasn't around then or the world would be under C.H.U.M.P.'s hegemony right now! Lancelot Link and his lovely assistant, Marta Hari, worked for A.P.E. (The Agency to Prevent Evil) under the direction of Darwin their chief. Yep, you guessed it...Link was a simian version of "Get Smart" and probably the farthest the 1960's international spy genre

Get Smart is proof that not all spy shows of the time were drama. Maxwell Smart, Agent 89, could be successful against the evil forces of C.H.A.O.S. (an analogy for Communism) while being totally inept. With the help of the lovely Agent 99, Smart actually pulled off a bumbling kind of cool, not to be seen again until Austin Powers. Kid interest was always aroused by the cool secret spy gadgets. Smart had access to such things as the Cone of Silence, shoe phones, a multi-door security labyrinth for a headqua

Felix the Cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat.
You'll laugh so much your sides will ache,
Your heart'll go piddy-pat,
All for Felix,
the wonderful cat.

Felix was a pretty laid back kind of cat, that is until his neighbors the Professor and Rock Bottom started scheming. Sometimes the Master Cylinder (who lived on Mars) would get into the action as well. No problem for Felix. He would just reach into his yellow bag of tricks and viola--what ever
was needed to take care of the bad guys was there! He also had

Television's answer to the Beatles. The "Pre-Fab Four" cruised around in the customized jalopy looking for adventure and hijinks. The rather light plot lines would be interspersed with live music concert footage. As goofy as this show seems today, I can remember when KDSX-AM radio (Sherman-Denison, TX) was inundated with calls from eager pre-teen Monkees fans to play their latest hit. On a Saturday it wouldn't be uncommon for the old kitchen wall radio to play "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone" and "I'm a Believ