ON THE AIR: HORROR GIMMICK
IMPORTED TO BOLSTER AGED MOVIES

By Harry MacArthur

There is one quality you can not accuse the boys who provide our TV fare of having in limited quantity. This is resourcefulness. Whatever else they may be, the TV folks are just the men to face up to a situation. They know there are more ways than one to skin a cat. Or a sponsor. Or a viewer.

There is the problem, say, of the elderly movies available to TV, some of which are down-right painful. The simple solution would be to refrain from leasing the tired films in the first place, which would avoid the necessity of firing them into our startled living rooms.

That, in fact, is much too simple and puts no strain on the creative imagination of a TV executive. Anyone could solve the problem that way. The television man knows there is something better, at least from his point of view. So what he does is dream up some gimmick designed to attract more attention than the vintage movies.

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Somebody out in Hollywood came up with a gimmick awhile back. He hired a girl, got her up to look like she had just stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon, named her Vampira and installed her as the mistress of ceremonies for a weekly horror film show.

When she is not snarling over the aged celluloid, Vampira, according to one report, tools about the city in an aged, chauffeur-driven automobile, sneering at the peasants. The peasants out there think she's great stuff.

Vampira's success has not been a secret, of course, and two of our local TV stations now are paying her the most flattering form of tribute. They have borrowed the gimmick.

For a couple of weeks now WNBW has been serving up something called "The Cauldron of Horror" on Friday nights at 11:20 p.m. This is presided over with fitting incantation by a woman known as The Witch, whose name you will not learn here. For all you know she may not be a witch on the other six days of the week.

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Tonight at 9 WTTG will get into the act with someone called The Doldrum, which prompts almost everyone to say, "One of the summer doldrums, no doubt."

Here something called "the switch" has been applied to the Vampira gimmick. WTTG's Doldrum is male. He does the same sort of job though, introducing and performing between the acts of the regular Thursday movie chiller.

Where all this will lead to, no one knows, but a word of caution may be in order. It will be better if hopes are not allowed to soar too high around WNBW and WTTG. The fact that Vampira has been a success in Hollywood and environs does not mean that this is just what saner segments of the population have been awaiting.

Out there the standards are different. Everything is bizarre. Anyone or anything that manages to be more bizarre than the municipal average becomes, therefore, more normal than the abnormal norm. In Hollywood a girl made up as a Charles Addams' vampire is considered a sane business woman making a buck the smart way.

How this Double-Dubuque-on-the-Pacific nonsense will go here is something WNBW and WTTG will soon find out.