I recently discussed the two Kolchak movies: The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. In those posts I noted that I’d not grown up with Kolchak. My reason for watching them was part of a self-assigned homework project. You see, I’d begun watching the series online. I realized backstory was missing, and, despite what literary critics are fond of saying, I like backstory. After a couple of episodes I decided I needed to see the movies before moving through the rest of the series. As it turns out, you can do the movies without the series or the series without the movie. Regardless, I soldiered on through all twenty episodes. This series was terribly influential for the kinds of things I eventually cottoned onto. Kolchak was formative for the X-Files and many “monster of the week”-formatted series. I felt like a poser having never had watched it. This telinematic experience was good homework.
Originally a television movie produced by Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows fame, the first film was successful enough (very successful, in fact) to cause a second one. The second film also performed well, but instead of a planned third, ABC decided on a weekly series instead. Only twenty episodes were aired and the run was cancelled before all the ordered episodes were filmed, or even scripted. Still, this small franchise had a solid following and led to a number of other successful franchises in its wake. The monsters are definitely fun, but Darren McGavin’s Kolchak does tend to get on your nerves after a while. Even McGavin was reputedly ready to leave the show as things started to get pretty silly near the end—an animated suit of armor, a very cheap humanoid-alligator, and Helen of Troy hardly seemed conventional monsters.
In fact, the Helen episode (“The Youth Killer”), although it had a solid premise, didn’t convince that Helen was a monster. She prays to Hecate to steal the youth of “perfect” young people around Chicago and rejuvenates herself as the twenty-somethings age and die in a matter of minutes. And a Greek cab driver (former Classics teacher) is the one who helps Carl crack the case. Famous for its quirky humor, this one just seemed to have all engines fail. Of course, the series lived on as a cult classic and can be found in a variety of media today. I’m glad to have had this particular homework assignment. Television had a number of influential shows in the seventies, and it feels like coming home to have caught up on one that I initially missed. Even with Cathy Lee Crosby and a monster I just couldn’t buy.
