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10-31-365: Halloween/Horror Lifestyle - By Tom G

Monster Memories: WWOR's Holiday Film Festival
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When I was a child my family had a tradition of traveling to Watertown, New York to visit relatives for Thanksgiving. We'd stay at a dairy farm owned by my mother's cousins and have the Thanksgiving feast at my great aunt's home. Thanks to this tradition I always associate Thanksgiving with the smell of hay, the birth of baby cows (a calf always seemed to be born during our stay), milk fresh from the cow and movies featuring giant apes. Wait, what was that... giant apes? Yes, giant apes. My childhood spanned the 1970s and 1980s. Back then WWOR-TV had a tradition of showing a Thanksgiving marathon of giant monster films, particularly those featuring King Kong. Under the name Holiday Film Festival, the channel would typically show Mighty Joe Young, King Kong and Son of Kong on Thanksgiving afternoon. For a kid who had no interest in watching football and a complete obsession with monsters, this was a godsend. Blissed out on turkey, stuffing, and my grandmother's plum ketchup I would would hang out with my brother and cousins in the playroom, watching giant apes and dinosaurs on a small black and white television while the grownups gathered around a color TV in another room to watch a football game and talk their boring grownup talk. WWOR's Holday Film Festival ran from 1976 until 1985. My family's tradition of visiting the Watertown relatives ran out only a year prior to WWOR's movie festival ending. It wasn't until recently that I found out the story behind the Holiday Film Festival. In the later years of its run, the festival extended to the day after Thanksgiving, usually including an assortment of Godzilla films. Apparently, I never caught the second day of the festival due to my family usually being on the road back home on Friday afternoons. It also wasn't until recently that I discovered that the WWOR Holiday Film Festival wasn't just limited to the broadcast area around Watertown. WWOR reached Ohio and New Jersey as well as New York. The association between King Kong and turkey dinners was not limited to me! There are a number of blogs, message board posts, web pages, YouTube videos and even a Wikipedia entry devoted to WWOR's long-past Thanksgiving tradition. You can always count on the Internet to feed your nostalgia! For my part, I have tried to keep the tradition alive with my own family since 2005. That year, thanks to the release of Peter Jackson's remake, a collector's tin DVD set featuring King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young was released just days before Thanksgiving. It was a coincidence, but I took it as a sign that it was time to bring back the giant ape movie marathon. We've played with the tradition a bit over the years, showing other classic films in place of Mighty Joe Young and Son of Kong. My daughter's increased ability to communicate (she was a newborn in 2005) and preference for Godzilla movies has led to Japan's kaiju creations becoming a regular part of our Thanksgiving. Click here for the Wikipedia entry about WWOR's Holiday Film Festival. Click here for DVD Drive-In's Web page about the festival.
Filed under: Movies	November 26, 2010, 1:50 am | Permalink | 1 Comments
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warblers Mar 05 2013, 03:55 AM UTC thanks for sharing us your experience. I am glad to catch idea from your article. I use relax and entertainment on http://www.friv4.info | http://www.friv3.co
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