Television: For the little monsters.

Kids get all the cool stuff in our backwards mixed-up culture. Despite their relative uselessness in the workforce, their inability to hold a decent conversation, their complete lack of appreciation for me, and their alarming tendency to support the careers of pre-fabricated Disney-produced pop groups, the culture industry of North America continues to waste its most creative, interesting, and wonderful ideas on this completely ungrateful demographic.

Here's two pieces of irrefutable evidence of this disturbing trend.

First, for some historical context, I submit to you: The Hilarious House of Frightenstein This gem was brought to my attention by eagle-eyed Screaming regular cattleworks.

Produced by CHCH Channel 11 in Canada, this children's gag-comedy show ran for an amazing 25 years in Canada and the US. This was all the amazing in that the show was only in production for about a year. The production of HHF sounds like some dada-ist provocation. For nearly 12 months, random skits were shot of various characters doing different funny things. These segments were then spliced together to produce several seasons of the show. This is all the more amazing when you consider that many of the characters to appear on HHF were played by a single man: the excellent Billy Van. The incomparable Vincent Price was also a regular, playing the role he was born to play: himself.

Here's a clip of Price doing the intro the show:



Here's a clip of Van as the Count and his sidekick Igor:



For the full rundown on Frightenstein, you can check out this excellent tribute site.

Jump to today. Ghoul a-Go-Go is a cable access show that is part cheese horror host shtick and part variety show. Vlad, his hunchbacked co-host Creighton, and the Invisible Man (host of the Tiki-Lounge) entertain the kids and host out-there bands like Hasil Adkins and, in the clip below, the 5, 6, 7, 8's.



One of the things I like about Ghoul a-Go-Go is how incompetent a host Vlad is. He's not very fond of children, which, in my humble opinion, makes him the perfect host for a kid's show.

Check out the Ghoul a-Go-Go web site for the skinny on these cool ghouls.

A huzzah for Dave over at Digital Download for hipping me to this show.