The Big Show and the 4:30 Movie
The following info was sent to me by Gary
Gerani. Gary is the author of the 1976
book "Fantastic Television".
Thanks Gary for this information.
Channel
7's 4:30 Movie began life as The Big Show in the fall of 1963, at 5pm, running
90 minutes. Looking to compete with
WCBS-TV's phenomenally popular The Early Show and WNBC-TV's long-running Movie
Four, Ch. 7 instigated a most unusual afternoon movie series, driven by
theme. On Mondays, westerns were offered
("Rio Grande" with John Wayne was the very first Big Show/4:30 Movie,
broadcast September 16, 1963). Tuesdays
were dedicated to comedy. And Wednesdays
"Chillers from Science Fiction" were featured, as Ch. 7 had just
bought the AIP black-and-white monster films from the 50's, and hoped to launch
their own late afternoon / early evening version of Channel 11's "Chiller
Theater". The first film presented
(a NY TV debut, as were all these AIPs) was "The Amazing Collosal
Man", telecast on September 18, '63.
A week later, Bert I. Gordon's "The Spider" was shown.
Curiously,
Thursday's Big Show presentation wasn't even a movie: they'd run syndicated
reruns of the TV westerns Laramie and The Rebel. On Fridays, first-run AIP "teen"
movies from the fifties were telecast ("Hot Rod Gang" being the
first).
This
original incarnation of the Big Show lasted a couple of years, enabling young
Famous Monsters of Filmland fans to see "The She Creature", "It
Conquered the World", "Day the World Ended", and other Roger
Corman (or Bert I. Gordon) epics for the very first time.
Then
around '65 or '66, both The Early Show and Movie Four started running at 4:30
pm. Instead of competing head-on with
the other local movies, The Big Show was moved to 6 pm, a 90-minute lead-in to
ABC's network evening schedule. After
about a month or so, the title was changed to The 6 O'Clock Movie.
The
6 O'Clock Movie ran until '67. Finally,
WABC expanded the slot to two hours (unusual for an afternoon movie), brought
back The Big Show title and started running the movie at 4:30 - indeed,
"Strangers When We Meet" was the first film broadcast. But it was under the title The Big Show (they
even used the old animated opening titles from '63), not the 4:30 Movie. That moniker came a short while later.