The Plot Podcast - Episode 8 - Spooky Seventies Saturday Morning TV

The Winter Palace Podcast

The Original Ghostbusters. No, really. Bob Burns, Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker.

To wrap up Hallowe’en Month at When It Was Cool, let’s look at some spooky 1970s Saturday morning TV shows.

First, the original Ghostbusters from 1975. Spencer (Larry Storch), Tracy the Gorilla (Bob Burns) and Kong (Forrest Tucket) are bumbling detectives fighting vampires, monsters, ghosts and the like. There’s a little bit of Borscht Belt comedy, some vaudeville humor and a lot of silly gags. Some famous character actors show up as bad guys like Ted Knight as a ghost, Bernie Kopell as Dr. Frankenstein and Jim Backus as Eric the Red. If you loved F-Troop, you’d probably enjoy Storch and Tucker here.

Then, after the success of Scooby Doo for Hanna Barbera in the early 1970s, there were quite a number of mystery-solving teens with animal sidekicks and we spotlight a couple of them: The Funky Phantom and Goober and the Ghost Chasers.

Kids, when we say popular culture was always better in the old days, just point to some of these and say “Not so fast.”