Among other things, bandleader Neal Hefti is known for the theme song of the mid-1960’s TV show, Batman. Back then, if someone did music for a popular TV show, there had to be an album of music supposedly related to the show. In Hefti’s case, it was an album called “Hefti in Gotham City.”
On that album was a cut called “Gotham City Municipal Swing Band.” That cut was an ersatz marching band tune.
I don’t know how many dozens of copies that album sold, but “Gotham City Municipal Swing Band” was the type of song that would have been used on small-town radio stations as a sport theme or perhaps on a TV station as a kiddie-show theme.
To residence of the San Francisco Bay Area, though, that tune is remembered as the theme of “Creature Features,” KTVU’s weekly horror film show.
The host of that show was Bob Wilkins. Bob Wilkins was not your typical horror movie host. No, he was not Elvira, nor was he Svengooly. He was, well, Bob Wilkins:
Bob would spend some of his on camera time reading the TV Guide listings for Saturday night, asking why you were watching him. He was very droll and had a very dry wit. Those things, along with his ever-present cigar, made him a cult favorite in the Bay Area. From the Neal Hefti theme to Wilkins’s arid sense of humor, Creature Features was a part of that long-ago era.
The summer of 1972 was a special time for me. My oldest brother and his wife were living at home; my other brother was home from college, and I was getting ready to enter my junior year in high school. There were a number of things the three of us would gather around and watch together. Saturday night offered the most memorable programs of them all.
The night would start with Creature Features on channel 2 from Oakland.
Later in the evening, or night, we would watch – thanks to that modern marvel of cable TV – a late night movie on KCRA from Sacramento. That movie was hosted by a guy named Geoff Wong.
Curiously enough, Bob Wilkins used to work for KCRA and hosted a Saturday night movie. When he left, the station showed movies without a host. Their ratings went into the gutter. They asked Wilkins if he might suggest a new host. Wilkins suggested a friend named Geoff Wong. With that, the “Charlie Chan Film Festival was born.
Wong would show old Charlie Chan movies from the ‘30’s and ‘40’s. One week he had as a guest Victor Sen Young. Young, most remembered as playing the cook Hop Sing on the TV show Bonanza, had played Charlie Chan’s number 2 son to Sidney Tolar’s Chan. As I recall, the show was taped on Tuesday. Between the Tuesday taping and the Saturday airing, Young was shot in an attempted plane hijacking when flying out of San Francisco International Airport.
The regular guests on the show, whether they had anything to do with the old movies or not, tended to wear skimpy attire. Wong was especially happy to have Playboy Playmates as guests.
One of the fun parts of the show, though, was that Wong offered a secret decoder ring for 25 or 50 cents. Week after week Wong would give a message in code for people to decode with their rings. Of course, my family didn’t need no stinking ring. We would dutifully take down the secret message every week. We had vowed to crack that secret code no matter how long it took. My mother, who had an intense dislike for TV and would never stay up late to watch an old movie, even joined in the quest for the elusive code. It was a family project. Every Sunday morning we would look at the latest message, add it to the previous messages, and see what we could do. I don’t know how many months it took us to crack the code, but we finally did. We were happy we didn’t send in the money.
A few months later, KCRA added the Sherlock Holmes Film Festival to its Saturday Night programming. That would last until about 2 AM. One summer morning I stayed up until dawn; the first time I ever did so. Somewhere I have a slide of the morning sunrise from my bedroom window taken that morning.
It is hard to believe that this was over forty years ago. Sometimes I feel sorry for young people today who do not have such memory making things. I hope they find some anyway.
