After Star Wars dominated the box office for virtually the entire last half of the year, it seemed like the things I enjoyed were beginning to catch on. Television became a pretty dominant part of my evenings, once my dad procured a television for us. As I recall, he ordered it on credit through the Fingerhut mail-order catalog. It was a 9-inch panasonic black and white TV, and it was perfect. The TV had the benefit of having a cigarette lighter adapter, so I could actually watch it in the back of the Ford van while we were on the road!
What you have to bear in mind about this time is that we had no cable or satellite dishes in our little town. You got your choice of three stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC, which came in fuzzy half the time because it was a UHF station.
The networks shows that I enjoyed continued, for the most part. The Six Million Dollar Man was limping into its fifth and final season. Its spinoff series, The Bionic Woman, made the move from ABC to NBC. This was weird because they actually had a crossover two-part episode, that started on one network and concluded on another. Wonder Woman, a television show very important to most 12-year-old boys, moved from ABC to CBS for its second season and changed the setting from the 1940s to modern day. Charlie’s Angels actually remained on ABC, but continued with its second season without Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Most of my discerning friends and I regarded Cheryl Ladd as an acceptable substitute, but did not hold a candle to Lynda Carter. This was a topic of long conversation and much debate.
Lucan was a show about a 20-year-old who had been raised by wolves for the first 10 years of his life. No, I’m serious. I loved it, but it was cancelled after only 12 episodes. Logan’s Run made the leap from the big screen to the small screen, which was often done in those days. With a bunch of Star Trek writers behind it, it was also cancelled after one season of 14 episodes. Gregory Harrison played Logan, if you can believe that!
Man from Atlantis, starring Patrick Duffy as an amnesiac water breather with enhanced strength, which had four TV movies beginning in March, began a normal series run in September, but was also cancelled after one 17-episode season. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
The Amazing Spider-Man started with a 90-minute TV movie featuring Nicholas Hammond, who didn’t look a thing like Peter Parker, but it was another superhero show about one that everyone knew. Spider-Man was featured on The Electric Company when I was younger, and this show really didn’t do anything to enhance his image.
I generally liked CHiPs, a show about motorcycle police of the highway patrol in California. I would often watch that one in color at my grandma and grandpa’s house, because Hawaii Five-O came on immediately after it, and that show was my grandma’s favorite.
Perhaps the most important shows to debut in the fall of ’77 were The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. My dad was always out on Saturday nights, and often overnight. You can use your imagination figuring out what he was up to. This was the first time I was left alone to take care of myself. I felt so grown up. The Fingerhut TV had the advantage of being portable, and on Saturday nights, I took it into my tiny bedroom and put it on the floor of my recessed closet, which was about eye-level if I were lying in bed. I would watch The Bionic Woman, then the two new shows. Both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island did their very best to put their female guest stars into swimsuits, and back then, there weren’t the same options for adolescent titillation that there are now. The best we straight boys could hope for was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
At 11:30, after the news, came the best show of all time, Count Zappula’s Horror House. Count Zappula was a sci/fi horror host played by Don Melvoin, a local celebrity who hosted old movies during the day. Along with his dog, Lover, who was renamed Igor (pronounced “eye-gore”) for the Zappula show, Melvoin introduced me to countless classic horror and science fiction movies. Count Zappula became famous for this mishap that happened on his show:
Don Melvoin had been an actor in the late 60s and early 70s, guesting on The High Chaparral, Bonanza, Night Gallery, and a few other shows. He was also Deputy Don in the 1950s AND the 1980s, hosting a kids’ show, but I knew him as Count Zappula.
The problem with watching Count Zappula was that he was up against Saturday Night Live, which was going into its third season, and I did my best to watch both shows at the same time, flipping back and forth between them. I got to see Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin doing Weekend Update, and Steve Martin hosting a number of times and doing the “Wild and Crazy Guys” routine with Aykroyd, and so much more. I was actually relieved when SNL was in reruns because I could devote my full attention to the Count. This show helped cement my pop-culture interests, with classics like Gargoyles, and THEM!, The Blob, and more. I had my generic corn chips and Meijer-brand pop and spent late Saturday nights as I wished.
The same channel showed classic Flash Gordon and Commando Cody serials as a weeknight program at 11 PM called Hot Serial. I can’t even find an image for the show on the Internet, but the intro had a floating bowl of oatmeal hovering on the screen. My dad would watch those with me and reminisce about going to the movies in the 50s when he was a kid. Later, when the serials would be ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was already well-versed in classic movie serials. Watching Radar Men from the Moon, my dad giddily pointed out his hero, Clayton Moore, playing the heavy. Clayton Moore, of course, was the Lone Ranger, whose adventures my dad and I had watched together in reruns on Sunday mornings, before the divorce. It was just another great way that we bonded.
