A wild show that kept the Bay Area up all night

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Bob Wilkins on the set of “Creature Features” at KCRA in Sacramento. Courtesy of Tom WyrschLate one night in January 1971, a 9-year-old August Ragone sat in the dark living room of his childhood home on Alabama Street in the Mission District, transfixed by the man on the tiny black-and-white television screen glowing in front of him. He had an unassuming presence. Wearing a plain business suit and thick glasses, he puffed at an oversized cigar as he leaned back in a yellow rocking chair, a wry grin on his face. Next to him was a small table adorned by a human skull with a candle jutting out of it. A window shrouded in cobwebs loomed over his head. On the wall behind him was a sign with an unforgettable mantra: “Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong!”His name was Bob Wilkins, and he was about to present the Bay Area premiere of “Creature Features” on KTVU’s Channel 2 with a screening of “The Horror of Party Beach,” a wonky ’60s monster movie with a reputation so poor Stephen King once called it “an abysmal little wet fart of a film.”Ragone, who begged his mother to sit through the film with him, was riveted. There was something about Wilkins’ unexpectedly calming, Bob Ross-like persona, the spooky atmosphere of the set, and the funky theme music that was unlike anything he had experienced before. Even more bewildering was what the host said in a droll monotone during his introduction: “Don’t stay up late, it’s not worth it.”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adFor the next 14 years, the Bay Area would do exactly the opposite. Bob Wilkins on the set of “Creature Features.” Courtesy of Tom WyrschAs “Creature Features” exploded in popularity in the regional television market, Wilkins would invite a smorgasbord of special guests and fans to be interviewed on the show. These included Bay Area locals who knitted King Kong-sized sweaters and claimed they were born on Jupiter, and even celebrities like Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in the early years of their “Star Wars” fame.“Creature Features” became the Bay Area’s own wacky kind of “Twilight Zone,” not only exposing a generation of young horror fans to classics like “Night of the Living Dead” and “Bride of Frankenstein” for the first time, but also keeping them in the know on “Godzilla” and “Star Trek” conventions in a pre-internet era. Metallica’s Kirk Hammett tuned in every week, George Lucas wrote in fan mail, and the show broadcast from KTVU’s Oakland studios fostered a legacy of sci-fi and horror fandom in the Bay Area that continues to live on to this day.  AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“I will never forget it, what it was like to watch that first show,” Ragone, now a writer and film historian, said during a recent conversation over Zoom. “All of the kids in my grammar school were jacked. We were dying to know what we would see next.”  ‘You’re better off going to bed’Wilkins was known as the funny guy at work. The only boy of seven children who grew up in the steel mill town of Hammond, Indiana, he served in the Korean War and later moved to Chicago to come up with ad copy for Burgermeister beer, eventually landing at KCRA Channel 3 in Sacramento by the early ’60s. His job was writing and producing television commercials, but co-workers who liked his wisecracking personality were always asking him to throw luncheons and company parties. The station’s program director, Tom Breen, caught wind of this, and it gave him an idea.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adKerwin Matthews and Bob Wilkins on the set of “Creature Features.” Courtesy of Tom WyrschThere had been an existing fervor among TV viewers for older horror movies that were being rebroadcast on independent stations and introduced by a quirky emcee. In the Bay Area, that included shows like KRON-TV’s “Nightmare Theater” presented by the fearsome Terrence, the Bay Area’s first horror host, and “Shock Theater” on San Francisco’s KEMO-TV, hosted by the stately Asmodeus. The trend began in Los Angeles with the legendary Vampira on KABC-TV in the late ’50s, while “Elvira’s Movie Macabre” would go on to become one of the most well-known iterations of the phenomenon. Horror hosts became icons of the late-night airwaves, and would often bump up ratings for television stations as they garnered a cult following and provided entertaining context to dated films that viewers otherwise may have deemed too cheesy. Breen knew KCRA had its own package of decades-old science fiction and horror films collecting dust in storage and encouraged Wilkins to present them during the empty programming slot after the 11 p.m. news. Wilkins shrugged. What did he have to lose?AdvertisementArticle continues below this adBut on the night of his first broadcast, a screening of the hallucinatory Japanese sci-fi “Attack of the Mushroom People,” he wondered what in the world he was going to tell his audience. So he picked up the Windsor cigar that helped him calm his nerves, and decided to be honest with them.  “The show came on at 11 o’clock on Saturday night,” Wilkins told the Chronicle in 1974. “I told whoever was out there, ‘You’re better off going to bed.’ Naturally they stayed up to see if I was right.”Wilkins’ trademark deadpan deeply resonated with audiences. He pretended to fall asleep while the movies were playing, or showed instant replays of the worst scenes. Sometimes, to the outrage of advertisers, he would read the TV listings aloud to persuade people to watch something else. But the host also presented a unique perspective of fandom and pop culture rarely seen on television at the time. He never framed his guests as geeks or outsiders, but instead sought to understand their interests with genuine curiosity and care.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adDavid Del Valle, an author, historian and film commentator who was attending Encina High School in Sacramento at the time, was a die-hard monster kid. When he discovered “Creature Features,” he remembered being struck by Wilkins. He didn’t wear ghoulish makeup or a wave a cape around. He just seemed like he had stumbled onto the show by accident and decided to stay for a while to see what would happen.David Del Valle and Bob Wilkins on “Creature Features.”Courtesy of David Del Valle“He was a broadcast guy and atypical for a horror show; he wasn’t a movie buff,” Del Valle said in a recent interview over Zoom. “He was normal. What he was showing wasn’t, but he became the poster child for the horror community because he showed people that we weren’t all demented Renfields running around in our parents’ basements.” A self-described precocious teenager, Del Valle had recently joined the Count Dracula Society, an organization that was more about honoring horror celebrities than partaking in occult rituals. But Del Valle decided to sell it and ask Wilkins if he would like him to advertise the group as a guest on the show. Wilkins agreed, and from there, Del Valle began to make regular appearances on “Creature Features” as Wilkins asked him to help pick out some of the films, and invited him to come back on as an expert who could describe their value and importance.AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“He could have kept it all laughs and comic relief and never have had any guests that would talk seriously about what was being shown,” said Del Valle. “But he discovered that a lot of the fans were intelligent and articulate and really had points of view.”‘We had no community standards’After a few years of successful screenings, Breen invited Wilkins to join him at KTVU in Oakland’s Jack London Square, with the promise of bringing the show to a wider audience during the primetime 9 p.m. slot. The station was already famous for the puppet-starring children’s after-school special “Charley and Humphrey” and the daytime game show “Dialing for Dollars,” and while Wilkins didn’t know it yet, he was about to become an instant hit in the East Bay. Clockwise from left: A vintage ad for “Creature Features” on KTVU; Bob Wilkins and the “Creature Features” mantra; Bob Wilkins on the set of “Creature Features” at KTVU’s Oakland studios in 1976.Courtesy Of Michael Monahan/August RagoneClockwise from left: A vintage ad for “Creature Features” on KTVU; Bob Wilkins and the “Creature Features” mantra; Bob Wilkins on the set of “Creature Features” at KTVU’s Oakland studios in 1976.Courtesy Of Michael Monahan/August RagoneAdvertisementArticle continues below this adJohn…

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