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I miss the WUAB Prize Movie

C

CC4Life

Guest
I miss spending summers watching horrible prints of classic movies with John Lanigan cracking jokes and giving away worthless prizes ("free housecleaning from Akron Maid Service!") and spinning the wheel and having callers fail to identify the "Channel 43 Star" that it landed on ([the wheel lands on Captain Picard] "Is that Mama from Mama's Family?").

There were a lot of good movies that I saw on the Prize Movie. I'll give them credit, they actually spent money on decent shows instead of sticking to grade-z Roger Corman junk.

I wish WUAB would do an "Old School Week" where they get Lanigan to come back and show some films and pay for Super Host to fly in from his retirement home in Oregon and show some Three Stooges films and also host his old community affairs program.
 
CC4Life said:
I miss spending summers watching horrible prints of classic movies with John Lanigan cracking jokes and giving away worthless prizes ("free housecleaning from Akron Maid Service!") and spinning the wheel and having callers fail to identify the "Channel 43 Star" that it landed on ([the wheel lands on Captain Picard] "Is that Mama from Mama's Family?").

There were a lot of good movies that I saw on the Prize Movie. I'll give them credit, they actually spent money on decent shows instead of sticking to grade-z Roger Corman junk.

I wish WUAB would do an "Old School Week" where they get Lanigan to come back and show some films and pay for Super Host to fly in from his retirement home in Oregon and show some Three Stooges films and also host his old community affairs program.
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I remember somebody not recognizing Lassie when the wheel landed on her.

(Ah the things that stick in your mind even after a quarter century.)
 
I remember when in early '94, Lanigan was doing The Prize Movie in a different set, and showed the late 80's/early 90's logo ruined. A few days, a new set, opening and logo was unveiled.
 
CleveFan said:
I remember when in early '94, Lanigan was doing The Prize Movie in a different set, and showed the late 80's/early 90's logo ruined. A few days, a new set, opening and logo was unveiled.
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What happened was that the Prize Movie was cancelled on Labor Day week '93. That Friday on the last show, Lanigan ripped the set apart, jokingly offering to sell the pieces at a garage sale (this was before E-bay).

The Prize Movie was cancelled to begin with because channel 43 brought in a whole new slate of talk shows for Fall 93.

They all bombed, and 43 quickly scrambled to bring back the Prize Movie. They broadcast from a makeshift set until a new one could get ready.

In the short lived revival, they did away with the wheel and instead the callers automatically won a prize from a mini "Press Your Luck" style board where the lights flashed around, and whatever prize it landed on was what you won.

This format lasted from January-August '94, when 43 put the FINAL nail in the Prize Movie's coffin once and for all.
 
If you haven't noticed.. Local tv is aiming for the younger lazy sit at home viewers who shop at Walmart. We will never see those days again.. Yes the Prize Movie was pure entertainment. Super Host made my Saturday afternoon worth while. Just like radio...Nothing is local anymore.
 
Jim4Rock said:
If you haven't noticed.. Local tv is aiming for the younger lazy sit at home viewers who shop at Walmart. We will never see those days again.. Yes the Prize Movie was pure entertainment. Super Host made my Saturday afternoon worth while. Just like radio...Nothing is local anymore.
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I can kinda see what Jim is getting at.

Outside of the news, the lineups of the 6 big stations in town (3, 5, 8, 19, 43, 55) are all bascially cookie cutter, and can be seen on any station, anywhere.

Even going further, channel 25's line up is mostly in pattern with the PBS national slate, and there are 3 network O&Os that again could be interchangable with other stations around the country (TBN's WDLI-17, Ion's WVPX-23, and Univision's WQHS-61).

Radio wise it's the same.

Virtually all towns have a Clear Channel talker with Beck, Rush, Noory, and/or Hannity. Salem has their conservatalkers all over the country, Just about every city has an ESPN Radio outlet. CBS "Fan" sports talkers are sprouting up everywhere.

The only difference is in radio, there's still a little room for stations to have a "signature" local host (Rizzo, Triv, Lanigan, and Trapper Jack for example are names people automatically think of when those stations are brought up)
 
At least we still have Live on Lakeside, New Day Cleveland and the return of Big Chuck and Lil' John (even though it's not the same version as in the past). There should be a lot more local programming options along with those three.
 
I remember when they showed the depressing 1967 classic "In Cold Blood", which shows intruders murdering, with some detail, members of a family in their own home. Then at the end of the movie, you see disturbing images of the murderers being executed by hanging. Effective use of sound heightens the unsettling feeling that many viewers were left with as the movie ends with the hangings. In the middle of the movie, Lanigan made mention about the dark and depressing nature of "today's movie", which didn't fit well at all with the friviolity of spinning a wheel for prizes.

If he didn't watch the movie with the audience, then somebody might have told him to mention that, or he saw enough of it to get the idea that this was not one of your run-of-the-mill "Prize Movies".
 
Well, it's worth paying the extra bucks to see the old movies digitally restored and uninterrupted on Turner Classic Movies now. We didn't have that back in the day. But those secondary "retro" stations are doing those Cleveland-style bad horror movies with a local host on the weekends (which I guess is discussed in another thread). I'm guessing those are all current, not replays from 40 years ago, no?
Has any Cleveland station ever brought back recordings of the old movie inserts from, say Houlihan and Big Chuck, just to show them for old times' sake on a holiday weekend, like Thanksgiving or July 4? Seems like those hosted movies was bigger in Cleveland than most other markets. Detroit has a little bit, and seems like every Great Lake city had one "Dialing for Dollars" move slot for awhile.

As a teenager, I used to stay up late at my home in Toledo and point the Genie antenna rotor to the southeast to pick up WJW channel 8. The signal at night was usually viewable, better than during the day, but the amount of snow on the screen varied from week to week. Staying up to watch the sign offs of the various signals I could pick up from as far away as London and Paris Ontario, Buffalo and Pittsburgh gave an otherwise bored kid in Toledo something to stimulate his eventual career in broadcasting. And a respect for what Lake Erie could do to the atmosphere. Furthest TV DX catch was South Florida signals coming in a couple of times in the summer in the early 1970s. That was a hoot.
 
VODood said:
Marty Sullivan aka "Super Host".
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Ah yes...good ol' Supe!

I spent many a Saturday afternoon wasting away perfectly nice days glued to the tube watching the flicks. From noon-4p on Saturdays it was like clockwork...an hour of 3 Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts (and the silentL&H ones at that), then 2 coupla oldie but goodie monster/horror movies.

Of course there were the skits as well...Fat Whitman, Caboose Supe, The Moronic Woman, Convoy, Battleship Ethnica, and the list goes on and on.
 
The Laurel and Hardy "silent ones" you refer to were the lamentable "Laurel and Hardy Laughtoons". These were tiny 3 minutge or less segments from their silent 2-reel comedies which ran about 20 minutes each. Terrible, terrible thin to do as this was not the way these films were meant to be shown. They could only show bits of comic business, because there was no time for the actual story. Laurel and Hardy were masters of the tit-for-tat gag. In one truly despicable example of how these "Laughtoons" were so wrong, they took an otherwise hilarious tit-for-tat sequence and cut it up into separate "Laughtoons", thus totally destroying the comic momentum. Additionally, the tit-for-tat sequence was well integrated into a whole story-line making it way funnier when you understand how and why it got started. Of course there was no time for that, thanks to this obscene butchering. One time, to fill time after some evening movie, WUAB took all of the "Laughtoons" that featured this tit-for-tat sequence and played them back-to-back. You got an idea of how it was built even though every couple of minutes, the action would stop to play the closing credits to the "Laughtoon", and then the opening credits to the next one before you got back to the sequence. You can probably imagine how poorly it actually played on "Super-host" when the first part was shown one week, and you wouldn't see the next part until the following weekend, and that's assuming they would show that next part anyway.
 
vjm said:
VODood said:
Marty Sullivan aka "Super Host".
Click to expand...

Ah yes...good ol' Supe!

I spent many a Saturday afternoon wasting away perfectly nice days glued to the tube watching the flicks. From noon-4p on Saturdays it was like clockwork...an hour of 3 Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts (and the silentL&H ones at that), then 2 coupla oldie but goodie monster/horror movies.

Of course there were the skits as well...Fat Whitman, Caboose Supe, The Moronic Woman, Convoy, Battleship Ethnica, and the list goes on and on.
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the Moronic Woman. Brings back memories.

Miss me some Super Host too.
 
I loved watching the Prize Movie when I was home sick from school. What was the prize movie title that had the kids looking at the tree with a hangman's noose? It was the secret prize movie for a long time? Also I remember a B movie they used to broadcast that had some sorta gun battle with gangs in a warehouse or port area somewhere. Anyone remember the title of that movie?
 
I found the answer in another forum: The Prize Movie clip which is indelibly etched in my mind is with the two boys and the tree. One boy says "Is that the tree?" the other said "yeah" biggest reason I remember is that it ran soooo long. I don't remember what movie it's from, but if I ever see it I will definitely remember the scene. The movie the line "Is that the tree?" came from was called A Man Alone. It was the first mini-clip where the Prize Movie jackpot went above $1000.
 
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