travsd

Boris Karloff Had His Own TV Show — And It Was the Coolest!

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Another post in honor of Boris Karloff’s birthday. 

Amazingly I never heard of this show until recently; they play it on Sunday nights on ME-TV. Thriller was apparently a show cooked up to compete with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and the unthinkably awesome One Step Beyond (although it did precede The Outer Limits). Karloff hosted this horror/ suspense anthology series, which ran two seasons on NBC from 1960 through 1962.  He also acted in about a half dozen episodes. If you think Rod Serling’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s episode intros are delicious, imagine how delectable Karloff’s are, with all the black humor delivered with that rumbling, lisping voice.

For more on the history of show business consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

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And don’t miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

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Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.

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