SPEAKER_08: 1:11

Hello and welcome to the Lowdown on the Plus Up, a podcast where we look at everyone's favorite theme park attractions, lands, textures, and novelties. We talk in, over, about, and through our week's topic, and then, with literally no concern for practicality, safety, or economic viability, we come up with ways to make them better. My name is Kelly McCubbin, columnist for the theme park website Boardwalk Times, and with me as always is Peter Overstreet, University Professor of Animation and Film History in Northern California.

SPEAKER_04: 1:57

So Pete, what are we talking about today? Well, today we're heading to Buenaparque, California to talk about uh something that has become a staple for this time of year, the when we're recording this. We're almost uh upon that spooky season of Halloween. That's right. Yeah, so in Buenaparque, there is uh uh a wonderful, wonderful event that goes on annually and uh has been doing so for a good many of years, almost as long as I've been alive. Yeah, since 1973, and so that is not scary farm. Not scary farm. Yes, otherwise known as the haunt. Right, yeah. Yeah, so you it some people say one thing, some people say another, and I'm sure that there are schisms within fandom out there that will go, oh man, people who call it the haunt. Those are like people who call San Francisco Frisco.

SPEAKER_08: 2:49

Oh well, but you know, for the first two years it wasn't called Knot Scary Farm. Right.

SPEAKER_04: 2:54

Yeah, so this is this is a special event. It is not a theme park in itself. Yes. And yet it is.

SPEAKER_08: 3:02

Yeah, no, I'm trying to figure out what theme park would Knott's Scary Farm be in.

SPEAKER_04: 3:10

Oh. Yes, it's in Knott's Berry Farm in Buenaporte, California.

SPEAKER_08: 3:16

I think this is the first time we've visited Knotts on the show, isn't it? Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 3:20

Uh and I think this is a great way to actually kind of get started uh in that. Yeah. You and I have actually talked about a couple of different attractions and uh areas that uh we can discuss. Right. But the trick is doing deep dives on this thing without having to just regurgitate what's out there in the in the media.

SPEAKER_08: 3:37

So yeah. So you you you are a haunt guy. You've run many a successful haunt.

SPEAKER_04: 3:44

Oh, yeah. So a little background here. Yeah. Uh I may have mentioned this on the show before, but I've I've been doing haunted houses professionally since I was five years old. Yeah. Yeah, wow. I mean, I made my first gig was uh I was bored. It was the middle of summer, so it was not the time of year. Yeah. Literally five years old in San South San Jose, California. I took two fold-out card tables and I stretched out this dark sheet from my dad's bed over it, and I put some sleeping bags and some other pads underneath it. I think I actually used cushions from the couch and I draped something over it so we wouldn't get motor oil on it or something. Brought out my little Fisher Price record player and I was playing uh thrilling, chilling sounds of a haunted house from Disney Records on it. Yes. But not the classic one that everybody knows with the orange covered. Right. It was in fact a second edition that was only released in 78 or 79, and it was deemed far too scary to be selling to children because it actually has a couple of scenes in it, including like a uh the living dead attacking a grave robber. Whoa. And another one in which uh it's a full-on Jack the Ripper scene. Wow. And it's really intense. Yeah, that seems wholly inappropriate. It's incredibly inappropriate, but I had it because my mom thought it was the original one. Uh-huh. And so I would play that my record player. So the record player was standing on top of the haunted house, and uh, or as I called it, the haunted tunnel. Yes. Badly misspelled tunel. Uh-huh. Haunted tunel. Because you're five, you know, and you're drawing with magic marker. Those really smelly magic markers from the 70s that made you high just by being near them.

SPEAKER_08: 5:25

Tell me you put an umlaut over the you.

SPEAKER_04: 5:28

Please tell me. Maybe, not on purpose, but uh the haunted tunnel. Yeah, it was my it was I see. I was into Verna Herzog even then.

SPEAKER_01: 5:36

He was going to make a haunted tunnel. And he he would play the very thrilling, chilling sounds of the haunted house. That's good stuff.

SPEAKER_04: 5:49

And uh so and I would charge 25 cents to walk through the haunted tunnel. And I had scotch tape like paper decorations for Halloween, and I had a couple of rubber spiders, I had a rubber skeleton, and then I had a Tor Johnson mask. Oh, awesome. Tor Johnson from Plan 9 from Outer Space with the big crack on the forehead. He was like the number one selling mask, apart from any Star Wars character that year. Yeah. It was like Darth Vader, 3 CPO, and Tor Johnson. Like those are the big, the big deal there.

SPEAKER_08: 6:19

Did I think did you just say 3 CPO?

SPEAKER_04: 6:21

I did. And there's a reason for that. We won't talk about that's foreshadowing, folks. So we'll get to that in a minute. But I would wait at the end of the tunnel with my Tor Johnson mask. Oh, my babysitter, Katie Bell, and her her best friend walking around. And this is hot summer South San Jose summer. So it's like 90 degrees out. They're walking around. Like I would do stuff. You ever like take a garden hose, you put it in, you know, on the driveway or something like that, and you float your little green army men down it. Oh, yeah. Like pretending it's oh, it's a torrent river and the Viet Cong are after us. Yeah. I mean, that shows our generation, but I I still do it, but except the enemies have changed.

SPEAKER_08: 6:59

Why? I have a little miniature Marlon Brando that sits at the end staring at me. I swallowed a bug. Yeah, swallow the bug.

SPEAKER_05: 7:08

Did you know that today is the last day of the rest of your life? Yeah, thanks, Marlon. Yeah, okay. Shut up.

SPEAKER_04: 7:15

Yeah. So um, and so Katie Bell and her friend would go through on hands and knees, and I'm playing the record of like, look out, it's uh, you know, like a little kid, look out, there's a monster. Eek, there's a bat in there. Eek, you know, because you're doing your best. It was my very first attempt. Yeah. And then I'm waiting at the end, and so when you part the curtains, I'd be waiting there with my Tor Johnson mask on, and I would go, except when you're five, a Tor Johnson mask is really, really big on your head. Yes. And so when I would lurch forward, it would spin around 180 degrees. And so Katie and her friend would go through and they would just laugh their butts off. Uh-huh. They would like we were and they would start tickling me because I was like a kid that they babysat, and it was like, and they paid me. I got 50 cents. The ice cream man came to our block and I bought a drumstick, and I was super happy.

SPEAKER_08: 8:03

So that was my first haunted venture. And that was the most money you've ever made on one.

SPEAKER_04: 8:09

No. No.

SPEAKER_03: 8:11

I know that's not true.

SPEAKER_04: 8:12

But I have I have professionally, as either an actor, a designer, or director of haunted houses in Northern California for over 40 years. There's a lot of influences. Like you start learning when you've been in the business long enough, you start learning where the origins of this entertainment medium come from.

SPEAKER_08: 8:30

And it's stunning how many of them are right here with this haunt. Yes. A lot. In fact, in fact, I'm looking for you to tell me when I go too far with this. But I think that pretty much any haunt that you see in a theme park now. Yes. This is the origin of that.

SPEAKER_04: 8:50

Yes. That they were the first to really tackle it. They were not the first haunted house. Nope. That honor goes to a British walkthrough in the 1930s. Tell me about that. Uh I don't remember the name of it. Uh-huh. Because we'll go more into depth on haunted houses a later time. Because we'll probably go into this with like a Haunted Mansion episode forthcoming. Yeah. But there was a haunt in Great Britain that was basically a fun house where they decided to add ghosts and a few other things, and it was just actors in this kind of darkened maze. Uh-huh. Um, and it was right next to a helter skelter slide.

SPEAKER_08: 9:27

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_04: 9:28

So very British. Yeah. Very, very British. It was called the, you know, it was like a haunted castle or something like that. Very, you know, very, very simple. It was not anything major, but that was in the 1930s. Wow. So as far as the actual like haunt approach, that's the 1930s. Yeah. It really kicks in uh in the early 70s. Right. There are haunted houses already. They do exist. And most of them are amateur. A lot of them are thrown on by organizations like the YMCA, the JCs. Yeah. There are even churches that are putting on haunted attractions. Right. Uh, mostly as a fundraiser. Yeah. But then you also have the rise of horror hosts.

SPEAKER_08: 10:07

And this and this is all about the dovetail to our main topic here. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04: 10:12

I'm kind of showing these early, I'm doing our deep dive early influences that led to the birth of what we're going to talk about. Yeah. Okay. So the horror host. It started off with a theater package that was sent out by Universal Studios in order to make some extra bucks. It was sent off to almost every single independently owned television station all across America. And you got this great booklet. Yeah. When you opened it up, like on the front, it just said shock. Yeah. And you opened it up, and there was this pop-up of Frankenstein, who, you know, when you open it up, it goes and it lurches out at you. And it was a it's a very simplistic. I've got a PDF of this thing. Yeah. It's very simplistic language, basically saying we have a catalog of 52 movies. Yeah. Pay us a very small fee, a relatively small fee. And you can show these movies as many times as you like all year round. Yeah. You know, you can make it your whole program if you want. And the reason why that was sent out is King Kong, a year or two before the release of the shock theater package, was broadcast to such huge numbers on the Nelson's ratings, that the station said, let's run it again. And so kids who had never seen King Kong in the theaters, they had shown movies before, but not fantastic cinema. Yeah. Like King Kong. Yeah. And it got such huge numbers, they're like, what else we got? Yeah. And so Universal, who was not doing so well at the time uh in the f in the early 50s, you know, they had had a hit with Creature from the Black Lagoon and it came from outer space, but that wasn't enough to sustain an entire studio. So they needed to diversify their income. Their solution was to rent out a catalog of horror and mystery movies. And so their list included classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Mummy.

SPEAKER_08: 11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 11:58

And even some more obscure ones like The Black Cat, uh, The Man, you know, The Man They Could Not Hang, stuff like that. But it also had a lot of really bad movies on there as well. Some that were not so successful. Right. You know, some bad, you know, dark old house, house of mystery kind of movies that weren't all that great. Yeah. Murders in the Black Museum, stuff like that. Just it's okay, it's fine. Yeah. But there were 52 of them. So if all you did was show one a month, you've got your value. Right. But a lot of these stages, well, let's run them five days a week. Yeah. You know, and they needed a way to put it out there. And so no one knows exactly how, but almost simultaneously, as soon as those theater packages started coming in, the shock theater packages started arriving, which were like these huge boxes filled with film canisters of all those movies. They would just go like, here's your prints, run them, yeah, run them through your Moviolo, whatever the broadcast equivalent there has is. These weather broadcasters and newscasters and announcers started dressing up and dracula cate and so forth as a way to break the tension for these movies. And I think it was because of the 50s attitude that this is some of these movies might actually still be considered deviant. Right. Some of them might see like freaks. It still feels that. The island of Dr. Moreau, you know, like the island of lost souls. Yeah. That is a very shocking movie for its time. Uh and so you needed a host to break the tension for the kids and the families who might be watching of saying, Yeah, that's just a movie. You know, that was their way of kind of breaking it up. But there was only a handful of them in that first year on opposite sides of the United States. Yeah. We're talking like 69? No, we're talking 53, 55. Oh, wow. Okay. Early, early. Yeah, early 50 broadcast. So these were live, and there's not a lot of footage of these people because, again, they were live. And most, and the only reason why we have some of the footage is their fans would take their 16 millimeter cameras and aim it at their television so that way they could actually record it. So the footage we have is kind of patchy and gross. Right. But we have a lot of photographs, we have a lot of anecdotes about them.

SPEAKER_03: 14:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 14:19

The first one was down in Los Angeles. It was a woman who was born in Astoria, Oregon. Not in Oregon. She was from Finland originally, but she was raised in uh Astoria, Washington.

SPEAKER_08: 14:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 14:30

Her name was Maya Nurmy, and Maya had moved to Los Angeles. She wanted to be a model. Uh she wanted to do cheesecake and pinup and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And she got dressed up as Morticia Adams at a Halloween party and was spotted by a producer and said, You're perfect. You're what we need.

SPEAKER_08: 14:47

And this this Morticia Adams thing was going to come back to bite her later.

SPEAKER_04: 14:52

Yes. Although it wasn't the Morticia Adams from the TV show. She was basing it on the comic strip. Yeah. And she was the first to really do this. So she had the torn dress, she had the long fingernails, the long hair, and I'm talking about Vampira. Vampira, yeah. Vampira. And she would come down this long hallway with this creepy music and walk, and there's fog on the ground. Yeah. And she'd slink towards you, and you suddenly realized she has this incredibly narrow waist, and apparently it was like a 17-inch waist. She held the world's record for the world's smallest waist for the longest, longest time. Yeah. And she always looked, you know, Forrest J. Ackerman used to say I would be amazed to see like her break in half because it looked like she would as she walked. But yeah, so she came out and then she would look right in the camera and scream at the top of her lungs. And then as soon as the scream was over, she would go, Oh, screaming relaxes me so. And she became a phenomenon in a time of fear because this is the height of McCarthyism. Yes. The whack is going on. Yes. Anti-communist movement. Horror comics are getting banned and burned at this time. Right. And here comes this woman down the hallway, basically simulating an orgasm. Because that was how she intended it to be. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and she would languidly talk about the film and you know, I'm going to drink some vampire, you know, cocktail. It'll petrify my nerves. She would hypnotize people through the screen. And she became a phenomenon, not just with guys who were looking at this pretty girl with big knockers, and uh, you know, uh, or and it wasn't just for kids. Suburban moms were getting together late at night, their husbands are out bowling, and they would watch Vampira Together because it was like feminine empowerment. She became a feminist symbol for women who were feeling sexually repressed and societally repressed. Yeah. She's like, I'm now I'm no housewife, and I'm the only non-housewife on television. Right. I'm single, I know it, and I don't care. Yeah. Wow. And she was and she got away with it. She totally got away with it, and she was rewarded for it. Yeah. But but on the other side of the United States, you had another person who was starting this up. He started off as a television actor, played an undertaker in a Western show. Yeah. And he so he had the outfit, and his name was John Zakirl. Yes. And John Zakerl eventually became Roland for Shock Theater.

SPEAKER_02: 17:30

Yes, let me tell you, my friends in uh in Transylvania. What was that, my dear? What? Don't you talk to me that way?

SPEAKER_04: 17:40

And we're going to play with a brain, and he'd break out like a cauliflower and put electrodes into it and shoot sparks into the cauliflower, pretending to be his brain. He would have a jello mold that was full of coconut and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02: 17:51

We've got a giant big amoeba here. We're gonna be watching a movie here that's gonna be called Dracula, the Prince of Darkness, the Evil One, and uh join us today on Shock Theater.

SPEAKER_04: 18:02

And he was live. Yeah. He would he would have people write letters and he'd read the letters, and the kids are like, wow, it's a connection to the communities. Yeah. These creepy people that were safe for kids to like, it was like this way of these hosts to go, horror hosts had been born. And the host's job was to go, like, look, you might get in trouble for staying up late for watching this movie. Right.

SPEAKER_03: 18:22

But let's do it anyway and have some fun while we're doing it.

SPEAKER_04: 18:25

You know, like let's do this. And this this is Zacherly, right? The great Zachary. Yeah. He started off as Roland.

SPEAKER_08: 18:31

Yeah, Roland Trillon shot later. His last name seems so obvious that it should be Zacherly. The fact that he missed it the first time. Right.

SPEAKER_04: 18:40

But Zacherly reached national fame when he became one of the first horror hosts ever in the same year of Vampira getting a featured article in Life magazine. Zacherly, uh about a year later, was featured on the cover of Famous Monsters of Film magazine.

SPEAKER_08: 18:57

Do you know, was Vampira still local at that point? Was she local TV or had she been? She was always local. Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 19:04

The only way that people knew about her internationally or nationally, she made a couple of appearances on a couple, like the Jack Parr show and things like that. She would come out and make a guest appearance.

SPEAKER_08: 19:15

Wow, this is so interesting because the parallels with um the woman we're going to talk about very shortly are so similar. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 19:24

Yeah. She did not Vampira really didn't become popular nationally until after she was fired after about 18 months.

SPEAKER_08: 19:33

Right. And that had to have been late 60s at that point?

SPEAKER_04: 19:38

Mid-50s. Mid-50s. Mid-50s. She did not last long at all. Yeah. But she m left her mark indelibly. And she was replaced by uh oh oh uh what was her name? She was called Voleptuina or something like that. And she showed this other woman was this blonde with big bosoms that would show romance movies.

SPEAKER_08: 19:58

Uh-huh. That's not the same thing.

SPEAKER_04: 20:00

No, it is definitely, it was, it was the complete and that did not last long at all. You know, like some of the guys were tuning in, but all the the housewives and stuff who had been tuning in with their secret vampire parties like, what is this? Yeah. You know, like it was the qu the to them, it was the equivalent of exploring alternative sexuality, not just with the SM and bondage stuff that was always implied with vampira. Right. But it was also the fact that women could feel desire to. There's actually a great biography out there just about Vampira the character. Uh-huh. And then there's one that's written by Sandra Namey about it. It was called Glamour Ghoul. That is more about the actual biographical information about Maya. Right. If you have these two together, it's a very, very fascinating. Yeah. Um, and then you have Zachary going, Zachary lasted on television off and on. He was in Philly, he was in Chicago, he was everywhere for a long, long time. Yeah. He just lasted. But Vampiro is so outspoken. She was one of these people that, you know, managed to rub the misogynistic, you know, TV producers the wrong way one too many times. Right. Out she went. But the horror host had been clearly established as a public phenomenon and it started popping up everywhere. Yeah. And so you have Goulardi in Cleveland. Yeah. You have Graves Ghastly, you have uh so many people. But then there was this actor who kind of started off as a comedian and character actor. He'd be on like Rawhide and Rango and all that kind of stuff. And his name was Larry Vincent. Yes. Great Larry Vincent. And I think he was actually in a couple of Three Stooges movies as a background actor or something. But I think that's right. Yeah. And he he was a working actor and he got a job on the same station, KTLA, in Los Angeles, to basically take over the shock theater package, but he had a completely different style. I mean, obviously he's not going to be this bucksome SM beauty. Yeah. But he dressed in the you know a black suit, this big flowing, you know, opera cape, and this fabulous wide-brim black fedora. Yeah. And he has this kind of almost, you know, he he looks like a mix between Vincent Price and Lee Van Cleef. Yeah. So good. And he he would bash into these movies. Yeah. He would call them absolute garbage to your face. But we're still gonna, you know, he had this very definite way of talking. Yeah. Hello, hello, dummies. Welcome to uh shock theater. And he called himself Sinister Seymour. Sinister Seymour. Sinister Seymour's fright night. He started in 1969 on KTLA. Yeah. And he became an absolute phenomenon. He had a shockmobile or something like that. I forget the name of it. He had a car that was designed by the Barris Corporation, the people behind the Batmobile. Oh, cool. They, you know, they had custom made this van that he could drive around and make personal appearances in and had creepy, you know, coffin lights on it and stuff. It wasn't that fantastic. It was no Batmobile. Oh, right, yeah. But it was designed by the Barris Corporation because it was LA, it was local. And Z and uh not Zachary, sorry, Seymour was so popular. Yeah. He you know, he called his fans fringies. Yeah. Because this is that era, right? You know, 1969. Hello, fringies! Yeah. I'd like to tell you about how much I love this motion picture. Yeah. I'd like to, but it's not my style. We're gonna watch the Neanderthal man. It's a movie about a man named Neanderthal. You know, and he would he had a phone booth on you know, a little phone on his wall. He had this creepy, slimy wall that he would crawl out of. Yeah. Kind of like the Homer Simpson meme where he would just appear through the the muck. Yeah. And he would come out and uh he would introduce the movie, and sometimes he would inter like he would stop the movie, make a joke about it, and just go right back into the movie. You just stop it, and you were just like waiting for him to make a joke. And eventually people started saying, Hey, let's do some live shows. Yeah. And and the live shows where he would just stand off to the side, he would have like a throne off to the side with a microphone, and he would do commentary over the film while you were watching it. Wow. And the fringies loved it. There was it just hit this chord, and it's it's the 60s. This is the time of laughing. This is the time in which people are making fun of the establishment. Yeah. So that kind of cynic humor was very, very popular, and he really hit a chord.

SPEAKER_08: 24:29

And we would be remiss if we did not also mention his assistant who later took over his show, Muna Lisa.

SPEAKER_04: 24:36

Muna Lisa, yes, indeed. The great Muna Lisa. So we'll talk about how she took over because that that's kind of an extension of where we're going. Yeah. So now that you guys know these little origin points of these are the ingredients that make the giant bowl of if you really want to get into Knott's berry farm, parlance, the the the fried chicken, yeah. Yeah, Mrs. Knott's chicken and cornbread and boys and berry jam. Like this is this is all the things that go into making what is going to be not scary farm.

SPEAKER_08: 25:11

So there's some interesting stuff that happens as we move up to 1973. Um, Sinister Seymour's still on the air. Uh I I think up until like a year or so before that, and then Muna Lisa's taken over his show for one reason or another. I'm not sure why. Yeah. But we we come up to 1973. A few interesting things happen in 1973. One, and this will make sense a little bit later, is a DJ who has started to gain some notoriety around the country uh gets a spot in George Lucas' American Graffiti movie. Yes, indeed. At that point, everyone suddenly knows what Wolfman Jack looks like.

SPEAKER_04: 25:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_08: 25:56

And I didn't know this until I was researching for this episode. Did you know that Wolfman Jack got a percentage of American graffiti?

SPEAKER_04: 26:04

That makes a lot of sense. Uh especially since that movie came out. He would mention it almost all the time. That's right. Yeah. He he made a lot of money. Mr. Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack.

SPEAKER_08: 26:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 26:19

That's right, baby. And we'll Wolfman Jack.

SPEAKER_08: 26:22

We'll go a little bit into his biography shortly. That happened in 73. Um, also, Knotts had two really interesting things happen in their park in that same year. Yep. At this point, the Knotts family, mostly the kids, are still pretty much running it, and they and they stay involved until they sell it uh to Cedar Fair in like the 90s. Yes. But they're not involved in the scary farm at all. That's a different team at Knott's.

SPEAKER_04: 26:51

No, they don't they don't want anything to do with it. They're not really that interested. Well, and just to put a pause on this, just to give a quick I mean, there's plenty of information out there, but just so that way you don't have to go searching on Google for this. So Knott's Berry Farm actually was a berry farm. It started off in Buenaparque, California. Um, they had a failed business venture before and they decided to go for it. And uh basically Walter Knott uh was a farmer who was developing different types of berries. And one of which he actually named after a friend of his, Mr. Boysen. That's right. The Boysenberry was invented by Mr. Walter Knott. And grown initially at Knott's berry farm. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's the origin point of it. And uh so they were a roadside fruit stand at first.

SPEAKER_08: 27:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 27:40

Uh you'd go get boysenberries because it was the only place you could get it, and you drive home. Yeah. Or if you're on your way to San Diego or Anaheim or wherever else, another agricultural town of no significance at that point. Yeah. And uh he had been all set up to have this farming venture, and then there was this massive flood that hit that area, and it killed a lot of his crops. So they need to make some extra money. So Mrs. Knott started making chicken and serving it up to people who would come and peep first eating this amazing chicken of Mrs. Knott's. Yeah. And you would start going all the way down from Los and let's go get Mrs. Knott's chicken from and they'd hop in their Model T's and head on down to you can still do it today. Yes. The lines are still around the block. It is infamous.

SPEAKER_08: 28:30

Yeah, and and you don't have to go in the theme park to eat at the chicken restaurant.

SPEAKER_04: 28:34

Nope. To this day.

SPEAKER_08: 28:36

Um, but yeah, so the she built the chicken restaurant, it it took off. Um, they just started putting attractions in to give people something to do while they were waiting for their chicken.

SPEAKER_04: 28:47

And a lot of it was really simple stuff, like a mule, a mule train ride, yeah, and then uh you know, panning for gold, which Mr. Walter Knott always put the gold in by hand himself. Yeah, I love this. Until he died. Yeah, which is pretty great.

SPEAKER_08: 29:01

Mr. Knott had a lot of interesting things about his character, but some of them I love. Yeah, some I love, you know. Some of them are like, whoa.

SPEAKER_04: 29:09

But yeah. So and then he eventually like he made enough money where he would he says, I need people, I need to give people something to do while they're waiting for you know Ma's chicken because we're waiting for like an hour and a half for this now. Yeah. So he bought a ghost town. Yeah. Like you do. Yeah. He bought a town and he named it Calico after the actual mining town of Calico. Yeah. And he started having stagecoaches added to it and said stagecoach rides, and westerns were taking off as a popular movie format. So he started adding gunslingers, and it just exploded until it really became an honest to God theme park where they charged a separate admission to get into.

SPEAKER_08: 29:48

And a weird, interesting aside is that later he actually also bought Calico.

unknown: 29:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 29:54

Yeah, the real place. And I think we talked a little bit about this in the Gravity Shack episode because. Both Knotts' version of uh Calico at the theme park and actual Calico had gravity shacks in them.

SPEAKER_04: 30:08

Yes, they did. Yeah, they and yeah. Knotts no longer does. Sadly, its mystery shack no longer exists. Yeah, I think it rotted and had Yeah, it did not do well. I was lucky enough to go into it at least once when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_08: 30:20

But it it but it tie but it's used a lot in these early scary farms. But real quick, let me finish 73. Please. Uh so the Wolfman Jackson in American Graffiti. Yeah. Um, a couple of people that work at Knott's who are sort of high up but are not Knott's family members, George Condos and Martha Boyd, uh, who are instrumental in putting the scary farm together. But before that, they decide to take this little drawn cowboy character that's on a whole bunch of Knott's advertising and turn him into a walk-around theme park character named Whittles.

unknown: 30:57

Ha!

SPEAKER_08: 30:58

Trans Whittles.

SPEAKER_04: 30:59

Hey, everybody. Have you seen pictures of Whittles? No, but I'm I'm pulling out the right now. Whittles is terrifying. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_08: 31:08

The proportions are they're accurate to the drawings, but in real life, they're just like, oh my god, what's wrong with this? Whittles ends up being a disastrous failure. Like kids are crying when they see Whittles. He's this prospector guy, right? He is absolutely the prospector guy. Yep.

SPEAKER_04: 31:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 31:28

But there's a walk-around actual costumed character version of that.

SPEAKER_04: 31:32

Oh. Oh God. Yeah. No, that thing's terrifying.

SPEAKER_08: 31:37

It's awful.

SPEAKER_04: 31:38

Yeah, he's Gabby Hayes. Yes, he is, absolutely. He's absolutely who was a very popular actor at that time. But yeah, Whittles is just terrifying. He's like he's like homeless Santa Claus.

SPEAKER_08: 31:49

Yeah. Yeah. He's the prospector without the charm.

SPEAKER_04: 31:52

It's great. Yeah. I'm standing behind my mule over here, pops.

SPEAKER_08: 31:57

Patty, partner. So that that kind of came and went. It was a huge disaster for Condos and Boyd. Yeah. Also, there's a guy named Bill Hollingshead.

SPEAKER_03: 32:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_08: 32:07

Bill Hollingshead. Yeah, very, very involved in the creation of the scary farm. He is, he's not only famous for his work with knots, and there's quite a bit, but he's also famous for being someone who booked a lot of vintage rock acts. Yes. And a weird thing happened in 1973 at Knotts. He booked the Everly Brothers. Now the Everly Brothers are great. I love the Everly Brothers. But this was a point when they were really falling apart. Yeah. So they do a performance in 1973 at Knotts where Don just gets fed up on stage, smashes his guitar into the ground, and walks off. Leaving Phil to finish the show on his own. Phil Phil tries manfully for a song or two until Hollingshead comes and pulls him off the stage. Oh Lord. The Everly brothers broke up on the not stage that night.

SPEAKER_04: 33:10

Was this in the John Wayne Theater?

SPEAKER_08: 33:13

Might have might have been, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_04: 33:15

What what or what would become the John Wayne Theater? Or was this in the disastrous gypsy camp?

SPEAKER_08: 33:21

Oh, no, I it wasn't in the gypsy camp. Okay. I don't know how long the gypsy camp lasted, but they got rid of it.

SPEAKER_04: 33:29

Yeah, they got rid of it. It is now the Roaring Twenties area. Right. But Gypsy Camp was another bad move by the management of Knott's at the time. Yes. I don't know what the thinking was. They wanted like we want to do a circus, but we also want that element of racism. So let's put it a gypsy camp, right? So it it was not really the hit that they thought it was going to be. So they had this these weird-distracting people from Whittles. What did we care? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_08: 33:59

So this this is what's going on in 1973 in Knott's. Of course, you know, di Disneyland's been around for a while. Disneyland's not doing tremendous business in 73. Eventually, those three people that we've just talked about, and one more guy uh named Greg Salisbury, decide, hey, why don't Oh, I'm sorry, Greg Salisbury and another guy named Wendell Bud Hurlbut.

SPEAKER_02: 34:21

Oh, yes, Bud, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_08: 34:23

He they they decide, hey, what would happen if we just did a spooky thing for like a night for Halloween? Yep. So they so in 1973 they did their first one. They they you know, they basically dressed up some stuff they already had. They they dressed up the Gravity Shack, they dressed up the Calico Mine Train.

SPEAKER_04: 34:44

The story is that they went to every Woolworth in in the area, bought out every possible Halloween decoration they could get their hands on. Yeah. And it it's literally like we're just gonna decorate you like you would decorate your house.

SPEAKER_08: 34:56

Well, and so what's so interesting is is Wendell Herlbutt. Yep. It's just a fun name to say. Uh, this is a guy who was uh one of the main designers for the calico uh mine ride. He was one of the main designers for the Timber Mountain Log Ride. Yeah. Important person in theme park history.

SPEAKER_04: 35:14

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_08: 35:15

So he goes out and buys a gorilla outfit and starts going into the Calico Mine Train ride and leaping out and scaring people. Yep. And they decide at that point that this works. Um, and at this point, and they're like, hey, this is this is a thing. We might be on to something. Yep. And it's important to remember no other theme parks are doing this. There's no universal horror nights, there's no Disney's very not very scary, there's no uh Oogie Boogie mash, of course. But like nobody else is doing this.

SPEAKER_04: 35:51

Right. Nobody's doing this yet. Yeah. And so after the success, they sold out on that night. Yeah. And then they said, let's make this more formal. Right. And there's a statue on the streets of Calico, in you know, in ghost town Calico. Right. And uh they had and that that statue is of a prospector sitting on a bench. It's a fiberglass prospect. Or it's I think it's concrete, actually.

SPEAKER_08: 36:18

I think it is too. I've sat next to it.

SPEAKER_04: 36:19

Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty grotesque. Yes. But um, but it's still fun. It's it's very much of its time. Yeah. But apparently, these organizers of the haunt, all the people that we've mentioned, yeah, had made a proposal to the family saying, let's do this Halloween party, and they were shot down. They were told, absolutely not. This is you know, no pun intended. Absolutely not. We're not doing this, forget it. Yeah. We're Christians, yeah. We're very, very devout Christians. We don't want to, you know, we don't deal with that devil stuff, you know, that kind of stuff. So the group organizers were feeling desperate, and they cornered Walter, the patriarch of it all, yeah, who was not even on the board anymore.

SPEAKER_08: 37:00

No, he was done.

SPEAKER_04: 37:01

He was kind of like the executive producer at this point. Like everybody looked at him like he's the he's the thing. You know, he's the what do you call the figurehead now.

SPEAKER_08: 37:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 37:09

They sat him down on that bench and he said, I hear you've got something going on. What do you tell me about it?

SPEAKER_08: 37:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 37:15

And they pitched it all, pieced it all together, and he said, Okay, here's what we want to do. We want to do this party. We're gonna have celebrities, we want to have like, we want to set up scary monsters and stuff, and make it like a Halloween party. Right. Two or three days. That's it. Last weekend of October. Right. Walter thought about it for a minute, looked around at Calico, looked at his street, and the story goes, he said, I want a party, and I want it here. The cry of the werewolves, right? The werewolf behind me and the coyote. Or this is nuts, there's coyotes, right? Yeah. And he said, I want a party and I want it here, and that's all I gotta say about that. Yeah. He just said, I want this. Yeah. So Walter Knott is responsible for saying, I want the haunt. Let's doing the Halloween party. That's amazing. They threw it on. They they added, you know, they took the stunt actors from the Wild West show and they put them into costumes. Yeah. These guys were used to doing stunts in movies. They got worn out because no one had ever been a haunt actor, like to this level before. Yeah. They, I mean, they were getting hurt. They weren't lasting, but they got all the way through the first two nights. Those two nights were sold out. Yes. They hit a cultural nerve. This is what people of Buenaparque and Southern California wanted and needed. And the haunt that night, that weekend, was born. Yeah. And there was somebody there who's kind of the grandmaster of it all, which was a celebrity in LA. Like, let's add that celebrity. Who could we afford? Well, we could get Legosi. No, we can't, no, he's dead. Yeah. Who else can we get? We could get Christopher Lee. Oh, we can't afford it. We can't afford it. Let's get Sinister Seymour. Yeah, yeah, which was an excellent choice. It was a stroke of genius. So Seymour's on those early posters, and he's looming over. Hello, fringes, welcome to Notchberry Farm. You know, and it was such a big hit. And all he had to do was he was the ghost host of the whole thing. Yeah. And uh he would perform and show bad movies, come out, do his show. Yeah. They do a little bit of magic, do some, you know, some dancing girls come out, that's it. And then everybody else goes off and has a good time in the rest of the haunt. Yeah. And it's this was a separate ticket from your theme park day ticket.

SPEAKER_08: 39:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 39:24

They would kick everybody out of the park, get set up, sell new tickets for evening. Right. Those are the ones that sold out. So we're not talking tickets. They filled the park during the day. Yeah. Then they kicked everybody out. Then they sold twice as many tickets because they sold tickets for the evening and let everybody back in. So when we say sell out, we don't just mean out for the whole day. We're talking twice a day they sold out. So this was a huge financial thing. And it actually almost it literally brought them back into the black in their books. Right. And so the haunt suddenly became this financial staple for Knott's Berry Farm.

SPEAKER_06: 40:05

And and so it's and The Lowdown on the Plus Up is a Boardwalk Times podcast.

SPEAKER_08: 40:24

At Boardwalk Times.net, you'll find some of the most well-considered and insightful writing about the Walt Disney Company, Disney history, and the universe of theme parks available anywhere. Come join us at BoardwalkTimes.net. So that yeah, that first year was except for Sinister Seymour, it was pretty much what have we got? Let's dress it up. Right. It takes off the second year, and I think it's the second year that Sinister Seymour brings Moona Lisa with him. Yep. And they do kind of a bigger show. Um they're also, and I this just cracked me up when I read about it. They were accompanied by the band Hello People. And Hello People is this weird um rock slash mime band. It's like KISS, only quieter. Yes. Which is pleasant in some ways. Rest in peace, ace freely. Yeah, rest in peace, ace freely. Tail on spaceman.

SPEAKER_04: 41:41

Yeah, so you had you have got this hello people. Ah. He just showed me a picture of hello people. I'm looking at the picture. It's it's like take Kiss and make and mix it with like a fever dream from Sid and Marty Croft. Yes. Maybe a little Shields and Yarnell. A little bit of Shields and Yarnell. Wow. You pulled that one out of the hat, didn't you? I'm impressed. Mime was such a weird thing. It was such a thing. It was in the late 70s, early 80s. Well, there's everywhere.

SPEAKER_08: 42:10

So there's a few things about the time that we grew up in that are impossible to describe to children today. That's one of them. The prevalence of mime.

SPEAKER_04: 42:21

We had a very serious mime problem. Yes. We had exterminators. They actually sprayed over Los Angeles for the mime population.

SPEAKER_08: 42:29

So there's that. Evil can evil. Can't explain it to kids. Right. But he was cool. Right. And the person we're about to run into, Wolfman Jack.

SPEAKER_03: 42:39

Wolfman Jack, baby.

SPEAKER_08: 42:42

Right here on the radio. So Sinister Seymour didn't make it to the third year because he sadly passed away.

SPEAKER_04: 42:48

Yeah, he passed away of stomach cancer. Yeah. He was bravely performing his stage show almost from his deathbed because he would be taken from the hospital by his friend, driven. They'd put on his costume in the hospital, put him in a wheelchair, wheel him out to the car, pull him in, they'd wheel him into the into the park, and as soon as he was backstage, he would say, I don't want my my fans to see me like this. He would stand up and he'd look really frail and really you see later pictures of him, he looks like a corpse because he's just so suffering from this uh debilitating stomach cancer. But as soon as he stepped out in that audience, he would come alive. He would just become Seymour. Yeah. Oh, Frenchies Radio. And he would perform his guts out. And then he'd sit back down and go back to the hospital, and that's when he died. Wow. He died performing as Seymour. Um they needed a new host.

SPEAKER_08: 43:41

Yep. And so they reached out to a guy who was becoming starting to become pretty famous, partially because of American graffiti. Yep. Um that would be Wolfman Jack.

SPEAKER_04: 43:50

Wolfman Jack. Because the attitude was they had, along with all these performances that we're talking about, they started including the William Morse style of mazes, including in the mystery shack. Uh yes. Yeah. So you would have, and all they did was you had a Phantom of the Opera, you had a Dracula, you had Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein. They pulled out all the classic movie monsters and shoved them in there. I'm sure making Universal very angry.

SPEAKER_08: 44:19

Yeah. Oh, there are rights issues that we are going to bump into very soon.

SPEAKER_04: 44:23

Oh, yes. It gets very vicious.

SPEAKER_08: 44:25

And I and I think what you're talking about is uh in 1977, 10 Chilling Chambers.

SPEAKER_04: 44:30

The Chilling Chambers, which is one of the most famous of the mazes. Well, it was the first one. It was the first, and and it is legendary. It has been recreated several times on earn anniversary shows. Uh there are a couple people who still have artifacts. Yeah. I do want to pause really quick and I want to give a shout out to a friend of mine who uh is a historian of knots and has actually told me a lot of the things that I'm presenting here. Yeah. His name is David Michael Hansen, otherwise known as Uncle Mike.

SPEAKER_08: 44:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 44:59

And um, for those of you who know Knott's Berry Farm, you have probably heard the name Uncle Mike pop up.

SPEAKER_08: 45:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 45:05

Um, Uncle Mike, uh, I met him in one of my haunt endeavors up here in Northern California. Yeah. And I uh we became really good friends. We hung out one time and he showed me this collection of Knotts stuff. Yeah. And he had everything going all the way back from the first haunt. He was that big of a fan. Right. And he was smart enough to bring an intimatic with him into some of these mazes. So there are pictures of him about 11 or 12 or something like that. Yeah. In the chilling chambers with the Phantom of the Opera. So he is one of those few people that actually captured these images that we still use in documentaries. Pictures of the that of Ten Chilling Chambers, especially, is really hard to find. They're very hard to find. And it's and it's because of Uncle Mike that we do that. That's awesome. So thank you, Mike, for getting me started about my fandom of this and my understanding of this. But whenever you look stuff up, including YouTube stuff, a lot of the times it's Uncle Mike taking those pictures of those really.

SPEAKER_08: 45:59

Yeah, because nobody thought to before that. Right.

SPEAKER_04: 46:01

Nobody was cataloging stuff as much. There are some, but Mike was one of them.

SPEAKER_08: 46:05

Before we jump jump too much into um Ten Chilling Chambers, though, I want to do a little Wolfman Jack.

SPEAKER_04: 46:12

Oh, please, no, no, no, no. We have to get into Wolfman Jack. So the reason why I bring it up is because the thinking was we've got Dracula, we've got Frankenstein, and Wolfman Jack. That was the attitude, right? And I think that was Hollingshead who said that. We got to do that. So anyway, that's where we go with this. And so he was called upon to be the new ghost host.

SPEAKER_08: 46:32

Right. And so Wolfman Jack, he's such an interesting character. This is a guy, I believe I believe he grew up in New Jersey. You know, in spite of his persona, he went to school for broadcasting. Yes, he did. Um, and he did some some radio work, and then he discovered where the money in radio was, and that was just south of the border. Uh-huh. And he was one of the big DJs on the X, or one of the several X stations. Zurf AM. Zerf AM, just south of the border. Now, this doesn't really exist as a phenomenon anymore, but the thing that's interesting about the X stations was that because they were just outside of the U.S., they weren't subject to any FCC regulations. So they would goose the power up so high that you could hear these stations from Mexico all across the country.

SPEAKER_04: 47:27

Yes. So to Los Angeles. My father has memories of listening to Wolfman Jack in Burbank, California. Oh shoot, there were people up in New England that would pick these things up sometimes. Oh, yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. And these and these stations had a nickname. They're called Border Blasters. Border Blasters, that's right. Yep.

SPEAKER_08: 47:45

And uh, you know, if you know the if you know the uh Z Z Top song, I heard it on the X, that's what he's talking about, is these stations just south south of the border. 50,000 watts of Boss Soul Power. They tended to play a lot of like RB and sort of chunky classic rock and soul music. It was good stuff. And Wolfman Jack started putting a persona together as he did that. And he was being heard around the country. And interestingly enough, he broadcasted on X stations for a long time. Even though he left Mexico, he would just do his broadcasts on cassette, send them south of the border, and they'd play them.

unknown: 48:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 48:28

Yeah. No, he he was he was a life. Okay, so funny little side story. Yeah. In his later years, he was known for being a little bit heavier and having long hair and kind of the striped beard kind of look. My uncle, my dad's father, Steven Overstreet, for some reason wound up looking like him when they were about the same age. Uh-huh. And one time my uncle, who lived in LA, went into a copy store, like a Kinkos or something like that. Some copies made. Yeah. And the girl behind the counter looks at him and goes, Wow, you look just like Wolfman Jack. Yeah. And my uncle goes, I get that a lot. You know, I hear that a lot. She goes, Well, do you know who I am? I go, and he says, No. I'm Teresa Jack. I'm Wolfman's daughter. You're one of the Wolf kids. Yeah, he's one of the Cubs, you know, one of the Cub Jacks, right? And so, yeah, Teresa Jack actually gave him the stamp of approval, like, you look like my dad. That's awesome. So that's that's hilarious, you know. So, anyway, a little personal notice size. Wolfman was brought on board.

SPEAKER_08: 49:29

Yeah, interesting thing about Wolfman's look is that for a long time nobody knew what he looked like. Nope. I mean, he'd been broadcasting for years south of the border. There's no images. Yeah. Um, even when he came back to like LA and he lived in Burbank for a while, um, nobody knew. And there was there were questions about his ethnicity. Yep. People just didn't know. And so for a while, he would play with that. He hadn't quite worked out the Wolfman look. So he would this sort of it's really sad. He would he would put on like dark makeup and wear an afro. Oh god. And just to keep it weirdly vague.

SPEAKER_04: 50:12

Yeah. It's like he had there's like a little bit of like a Latinx kind of look to him. That's right, yeah. You know, like does is he Mexican? Is he this? Is he that no one quite knew who he was. Yeah. And he's from Brooklyn. Yeah, he's from Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_08: 50:27

And and he he does have a little bit of a darker complexion anyway. Yeah, he does. So he could he could push it, but he was playing with all these personas, and finally he ended up in in the persona that uh we know, which is the the with the kind of blown back but kind of wild hair and the big beard and stuff. And once he was in American graffiti, it was all over. Oh, yeah. And and of course, at the set that same year, he started hosting the Midnight Special.

SPEAKER_04: 50:53

Yes, indeed. You know, showing up with those fabulous, fabulous outfits of himself.

SPEAKER_03: 50:58

That's right, baby. I got my huge red collars in my black velvet outfit, my huge old pompadour haircut.

SPEAKER_04: 51:06

Believe it.

SPEAKER_08: 51:08

So the so the wolfman took over.

SPEAKER_04: 51:10

The wolf man, and yeah, and the wolfman was on the poster wearing his infamous vampire wolfman teeth. I can't say vampire teeth because he's not a vampire, he's a wolf man. Right. So he's got his wolf man teeth. I actually have an eight by ten of him in my collection. Yeah. With it with the full-on teeth and the whole nine yards because I love the wolf man. Oh, yeah. He's a dad was a hot rod cruiser, so I would listen to old cassettes that my dad had recorded on real to reel of Wolfman from his X ERB. And it's like, okay, cool. But he um he would come out on stage and basically hold a disco party. Oh, man. Which made no damn sense as far as Halloween is concerned.

SPEAKER_08: 51:50

There's at least one film of this, and Pete and I have both seen it, and wow.

SPEAKER_04: 51:54

Yes, it is an acid-soaked glitter nightmare. Like people who worked on the movie Phantom of the Paradise probably saw this show and went, that's taking it a little too far. Yeah, right. You know, like that is that is ridiculous. You know, I'll believe Paul Williams in the you know, the the arrow tip collar, but I'm not gonna believe this. You know, like you'd got Wolfman. I mean, Wolfman, God only knows what his his poisons of choice would be, but this is the 70s. Yeah. I'm sure I'm sure even though there was Coke on Main Street, there was snow on the manor horn. Let's put it that way, okay? But he's working the audience. And one of my favorite He's working hard, though. He is. Yeah. Like he and he he's got him because you could hear the cheers, you could hear the people whistling and having a good time. One of my favorite lines is oh man, a lot of good looking people out here in the audience.

SPEAKER_03: 52:48

Yeah. Ain't no ugly people out here. No, no. No, they sent all the ugly people to Disneyland.

SPEAKER_07: 52:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 52:56

So good. So good. So good.

SPEAKER_04: 52:59

And he owns it. And then it gets weirder. Because it's one of these shows.

SPEAKER_08: 53:03

Now there's like there's like pop and lock dancers for a little while. Right. And then and then I I don't know. There's like some solid gold stuff going on.

SPEAKER_04: 53:13

It's a little bit of soul train, a little bit of yeah, it's it's it's crazy sauce. And then because it's 1977. We get into some licensing issues.

SPEAKER_07: 53:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 53:25

And out comes, you know, like somebody said, you know what? Star Wars is a really big hit. Yeah. Let's have the Wolfman have a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader.

SPEAKER_08: 53:37

He's just, he's on stage and he's like, we got some of the stars of Star Wars. Star Wars. Look, right here, we got the Jawas. The Jawas from Star Wars. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_04: 53:50

Yeah, there's like little people in little bathrobes, like walking around with tin foil for the little glowing eyes on.

SPEAKER_08: 53:57

And then like the worst C3PO costume you have ever seen.

SPEAKER_04: 54:01

Well, now remember, it's not C3PO, it's three CPO.

SPEAKER_08: 54:04

CPO.

SPEAKER_07: 54:05

Here he is. Three CPO.

SPEAKER_04: 54:07

That's how he actually says it. And it's like he gets away with it because it's three CPO. So it's like, okay, that's a that's a cheap rip-off. Like, okay, here's how bad the costume is. The little disc thing, it's a pie plate on the dude's chest. Okay, it's that terrible.

SPEAKER_08: 54:21

And it's like separated, the bottom and the top are separated, so you just see the guy's t-shirt under it.

SPEAKER_04: 54:26

Yeah, it's oh, oh. And then Darth Vader comes out, and the Darth Vader outfit is bad.

SPEAKER_08: 54:32

My favorite thing in that is Darth Vader comes out and threatens the Wolfman, which I wouldn't threaten the Wolfman. No, don't threaten the Wolf. But he threatens the Wolfman. Wolfman Jack like holds his arms out. A couple of people come and rip his costume off of him, and under it, he's just got another like Elvis looking costume with these massive tassels hanging off his arms. And he just says, Does this look like the body of someone who's afraid of you?

SPEAKER_04: 55:02

So wild. Like this is this is high-class entertainment. I mean, you can't look away. No, you can't. Like, that's the problem. You know, like cut to the shot from a clockwork orange. Yeah, right. Pointing, you know, dripping the drops in the eyes.

SPEAKER_05: 55:22

You know, it's don't play Beto with Fifth.

SPEAKER_08: 55:25

And it's actually great. The um the video that you can find of it, I'll I'll put it in the show notes, a link to it. It's on archive.org. But um, the video you can find of it, evidently that day, or he's just making this up. I don't really know. Evidently, uh one of the producers of Star Wars, like Irving Kirshner or something. Yeah. And Carrie Fisher are supposedly in the audience. He's like, look, look, there's uh Irving Kirchner, producer of Star Wars. Let him know you love him. Let him know. And then next to him is Carrie Fisher. She played Princess Um uh uh uh Leah. Princess Leah in Star Wars. Let her know you love her. Wow. And I don't know if they were really there. Maybe they were. Maybe the Wolfman was seeing stuff. He'd been working hard for like an hour. Poor Wolfman.

SPEAKER_04: 56:23

Yeah, it's just like, oh, oh. Oh, I I love that. So he lasted as the mascot. And I love the posters for the haunt because it's Wolfman howling above, all of knots. Oh, so great. And this is also the time in which they had formalized the Monsters College, in which you need to have your you're starting to actually have these mazes. And they have these little areas that were like these vignettes in the ghost town.

SPEAKER_08: 56:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 56:50

Yeah. Yeah. And you look in and oh, there's the Chinese laundry, or here's the bank, over here's the saloon, and they have these doors with kind of chicken wire on them. Yeah. And so there are figures in there. And so they would just dress up the figures as monsters. And and a couple of very clever people, one of whom was in the marketing department, yeah, got dressed up and just stood still. And then when somebody would look in the window, they would go, and they would jump at the bed. And it was a great scare. He did that to one particular woman. Uh-huh. She fainted dead away, as did her kid. They both went boom and they were out. He scared them so much. So he got voted. Oh, they were fine. Oh, good. But they were so scared they fainted. Yeah. And a couple of the marketing people were watching that, going, wow. And then he couldn't get back in because the door had locked. Oh. So his supervisor said, just wander around the street, see what you can do for the rest of the night. Right. He was never in the pop-up again. And thus was born the wandering monsters of the haunt. Because the the haunt actors of the Calico are notorious. The haunt at Scary Farm is very, very unique in the fact that you have wandering monsters. They put fog machines everywhere. Yes. It's like you are locked in this horrible fog. There's a legend that's about that. It's the fog of this witch that takes over the haunt.

SPEAKER_08: 58:09

Yeah, and I want to definitely talk about the hanging. Yes. We'll get to the hanging in a minute. But yeah, so it's interesting because we've got, like in 77 with 10 chilling chambers, we have the first ever freestanding horror maze in a theme park.

SPEAKER_04: 58:23

In a theme park. In a theme park, yes.

SPEAKER_08: 58:25

I understand there's others outside. Yeah. But in a theme park, it's the first time that's ever happened. The walking, wandering scare actors. Yep. First time that's ever happened. Yep. Um, I I also read that they were the ones who developed that skidding across the ground.

SPEAKER_04: 58:41

Sliders. Sliders, yes, thank you. Sliders, yes. Sliders came a little bit later. They were kind of born out of the skateboard culture.

SPEAKER_08: 58:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 58:49

Uh, because this is what you know, you had like at first they were just using their knees, and that first night it were like, don't do that again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 58:55

Well, I know that I know they had learned that if you scare people from below, it's really effective.

SPEAKER_04: 59:01

Especially in the foggy streets of Calico. Right. So for those who don't know what a slider is, a slider is a haunt usually the the monsters of Calico, the street, the street actors, if you are a street actor at Knott's Berry Farm, you have a lot of credit. Yeah. Those are the those are the best of the best actors at Knott's Berry Farm. Uh you have to, there is a hierarchy. You have to work your way up. You have to start as a maze actor. You have to go to haunt college, and you basically learn how to scare, and it's a grueling experience. You get a certificate, and when you're done, you're the first place you're put is in a maze. And so they they have to know can you get scares if you're stuck in one place? Right. Then you became a maze wanderer, in which you're going from scene to scene, and so you get to wander between a couple of scenes. And that usually is year by year. Because they want to know that you're taking it seriously. Yeah. Then after a while, if you play your cards right, you actually graduate to be a street actor. That's the coveted role because you've got the run of the park. Yeah. And you get to have very distinct characters built around you. But around the mid 80s, early 90s, sliders were born. Yeah. And what it is, is they're the n they they consider themselves to be their own beasts. Yeah. But they are street actors who are a lot more athletic. They're usually very young people. And because you have to, because you have to have good knees, you have to have good elbows. Yeah. It's hard work. Yeah. And uh you put big pads on your knees, and you wear steel-toed boots, and you you put together these gloves that usually have washers riveted to the palms, and you run full bore at a guest. And then at a certain point, you fall down onto your knees and you scrape your hands across the ground or your feet across the ground. And because it's the steel on the stone, it shoots these sparks out in the light, and it's terrifying. It's an amazing effect. They have events where they have uh slider acrobatic events now. Yeah, they've gotten so good they do flips, they jump over people off of ramps. They're almost like they've got the same type of notoriety like 1980s BMX bikers and skaters have. Yeah. So they're very definitely uh their own offshoot.

SPEAKER_08: 1:01:15

Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, just as a quick aside about the haunt college, I was reading someone talking about actually trying out for to be a walk-around scare actor. It's very difficult. Yes, it is. A lot of stages, and when you get to the final stage of it, they just put someone in a chair. I don't know if this is still the case, but it was for a while. They put someone in a chair and say, just scare them. They don't give them any information past that. And um, the person in the scare is not going to help. Like they're they're going to try and work against it. And what they're really trying to figure out is if you're going to touch them. Because if you touch that person in the chair, you're out.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:58

You are out. Yeah. Yep, you can't do it. I mean, I do uh a lot of auditions, and a lot of these audition tactics I got from Uncle Mike, who got a hold of training manuals. He never actually worked the haunt until he moved back down to Buena Park. Uh-huh. And he was in his late 40s, and he says, I've never worked it, I'm gonna work it, damn it.

SPEAKER_08: 1:02:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:19

And he's a school teacher. Yeah. And he's like, I don't care, I'm gonna do it. I'm I'm gonna live out my dream. And he got in, and they already knew who he was. Like, oh, it's Uncle Mike. Yeah, yeah. But he he said, Don't treat me nice, give me the whole thing.

SPEAKER_08: 1:02:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:32

And he got in. Wow. Good for him. He did taste one year, and then he was a street actor, and it was like, go, Mike. Yeah. But a lot of those techniques, it's really hard because the one thing you do not want to do is to touch, you know, you have to be able to scare people without laying a finger on them. Right. That's for their safety and for yours. Right. I'm speaking as a haunt actor who has been tased. I have been punched, I have been tackled. Yeah. I have been squirted with God only knows what. I have been urinated on. Oh man. Oh, I've been thrown up on. There's a lot of stuff that has happened to me as a haunt actor. Yeah. So like it's it's tricky.

SPEAKER_08: 1:03:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:08

The less contact you have with your audience, no offense, folks, the better.

SPEAKER_08: 1:03:12

And this and this is why, when we get to it a little later, this is why I have issues with a later thing that Knott's did, which is trapped. Yes. We'll talk about that in just a second. Yeah, but so so we're at the point where around 77, and believe me, folks, we're not going to go year by year. No, no, no, no, no. Once we hit the late 80s, we start getting uninterested.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:33

Not uninterested, but it does tend to start getting into a cycle of this works, we don't need to develop anymore. Really talk about the development of it.

SPEAKER_08: 1:03:41

Well, we you know, we've got 10 chilling chambers coming in in 77. Um, Wolf Wolfman's still there. Um, and in 75, we have the first episode of The Hanging. Uh yes, the infamous hanging. Now, the hanging is interesting. It's especially interesting in its early years. Yeah. Um, what it becomes later, I'm not crazy about. But uh in its early years, the the first year I don't think it's specifically said as it's a witch, but it bec certainly evolves into that they are hanging the the witch of Calico. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a it's it's actually pretty scary. I've seen some films from like 76 or so. And um it's very serious.

SPEAKER_04: 1:04:24

Yeah, they play it like a hammer film. It's like Witchfinder General set in the old west.

SPEAKER_08: 1:04:28

Yes. Yeah, really crazy. And if you haven't seen Witchfinder General, you need to see Witchfinder General. Yeah, it's a good one.

SPEAKER_04: 1:04:34

Um it's Vincent Price, guys. Come on.

SPEAKER_08: 1:04:35

Yeah, it's amazing. So the basically the the shtick is they you know, everyone gathers around this gallows in the center of town. Some people are bringing up this woman that's accused of being a witch. There's there's a little interplay, but it's it's nothing comedic about it to start with. And they put her in the noose and they pull the lever and they hang her, and it's a very effective effect. Yep. And a few seconds later, you hear her voice again. Yep.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:03

Oh over the overspeaker.

SPEAKER_08: 1:05:05

Yeah, over the other overspeakers, and some smoke comes up and a bird flies up. It's indicated that that's her spirit flying away. Yeah. And it flies off and she says, I'll come back for you. And it's it's super effective.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:21

Yeah. It's really effective, it's really creepy. Yeah. Yeah, the hanging, the hangings effects uh have been planned pretty much by the same people forever. Yeah. And uh it wasn't until like the mid-80s, early nineties that the tone shifted. Yes. It starts off with a hangman, and you've got the sheriff of Calico. Yeah. And they will come out and they will introduce who's going to be hanged this time, and they introduce the criminal. Right. And sometimes it's the witch, and it eventually it became this pop culture parody show. Yeah. And if you watch earlier versions, there are plenty of videos of early haunts, some of which that Uncle Mike actually took. Right. And you can actually hear a teenage me laughing next to him. It's the 90s, and I'm standing next to Uncle Mike. But there are a couple of them that are making references to OJ. Uh yeah, real real strange. Some really strange stuff. And also some culturally and racially very insensitive humor uh involved in these shows.

SPEAKER_08: 1:06:24

For a little while it's okay. For a little while, it's like, okay, we've transitioned from this interesting, serious horror thing to something a little funnier because so people have seen it. They've now expanded. You know, this first couple of years, it's a couple of weekends, now they're expanding to a week, now they're expanding to two weeks. So people are coming again and again, so they're trying to add some variety. It's it's it's oh it's okay. Yeah. I watched one from what 1997 that was was not too bad.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:55

It was there's some good ones.

SPEAKER_08: 1:06:56

Yeah. Um, they were specifically trying to do something that was a retro 70s thing in it. And it's ridiculous. You know, there's there again, I unlicensed Star Wars, though in 97 it's amazing they got away with it. Uh there was this, there was like Darth Vader's mother, Madame Evita Vader. Uh I wrote down some notes of like Richard Nixon's in it. Yeah, 1997. Yeah. Uh obviously there's Jason, there's a channel by there's two Batmans. There's like the Adam West Batman fighting the Michael Keaton Batman. Uh Donnie and Marie and Sonny and Cher both get killed by Jason. Uh which is sort of satisfying.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:43

Uh well, there was a tradition for a while. They would get through the show, you'd introduce all the characters, and then Freddie Krueger suddenly makes an appearance and slaughters everybody on stage. Yeah, he becomes the icon of it after a while. Yeah. He becomes the thing. Where it's like, okay, we're at the finale. Here comes Freddie, he's gonna kill everybody.

SPEAKER_08: 1:08:01

Yeah, and this kind of happens here. Like Freddie comes out and fights Wonder Woman and kills her. He kills Barry Manilo. I'm not making this up. Um there's there's a great moment where Donna Summer shows up. 1997. Yeah, and and she's singing Last Dance, and she kills Jason.

SPEAKER_04: 1:08:21

Okay, cool. Yeah. So yeah, so maybe Jason had an idea for a song. Yeah. It's called Crystal Lake. It'll be amazing. Boom! Yeah.

unknown: 1:08:30

I don't know. Stop it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:08:32

Yeah, I mean, there was a one of my favorite hangings. They did this thing where all of the classic 80s slasher monsters come out in the drag queens, because the movie The Silma Queen of the Desert had come out. Oh, that's a good idea. And they do a song called Monsters by Day to YMCA. And and they're all in drag, they all have fishnets and stuff like that. And they're all and all their drag outfits are themed around them. So like Jason has axes, like a whole fan of axes behind him. Michael Myers has blades, and Pinhead comes out, he's got a corset on. It was like I kind of went, okay, that was awesome. You know, and like the the only like all the characters sing, like Freddie Krueger has a line of song, and then leather facing something, Pinhead says something, and out comes Jason, and his only line is I saw one where they did that gag, and it was really funny. It's like Jason, that's all Jason. You know, like okay, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_08: 1:09:27

And and by the way, folks, if you don't think Pete and I work hard on this on this podcast, think of how many hangings we watched just for this. I I watch seven. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:39

I watched seven hangings. That's about where I was too. I'm I'm in two of the videos. Yeah. You can hear my ex-wife in one of them. Yeah. You she's screaming and laughing vociferously in one. And uh it's like, wow, uh, I will not watch that one again.

SPEAKER_08: 1:09:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:54

And no offense to my ex-wife.

SPEAKER_08: 1:09:55

But especially um they I I think that 97 one's kind of the last one where I was like, this is kind of fun. The choreography, choreography is still fast. Yeah. Uh there's some fight scenes that are legitimately good.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:08

Oh, and a lot of stunts. Yeah, a lot of dives off of this huge barn and water towers. Yeah. It's impressive. That is actually quite the and for a while there it really was an impressive show. And to many people, it still is. It's a hanging the hanging at knots is a staple.

SPEAKER_08: 1:10:22

It it is, and they have to do it. I mean, there's no way around it. Though I think uh after that point, as we move into the 2000s, it becomes a little gross. Yeah. Um, it becomes a little like the universal Bill and Ted show where they're just going kind of going for the lowest humor they can possibly go for. I find that it starts to become a little unpleasant after that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:43

I agree. And and this is one of those things where where no matter where you are in the political spectrum, yeah, there are parks, there are theme parks out there that definitely show the owner's political leanings and also the community's political leanings.

SPEAKER_08: 1:10:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:59

When a park tends to be a lot more conservative, and I'm gonna leave it there. Yeah, yeah. Uh there's a lot of great things. I'm not bashing into nuts or conservatism at all, but I'm just saying that for people who are a little bit more liberal-minded and a little bit more socially active as far as activism is concerned, some of the stuff may actually make you cringe. Yeah. And you just have to know that's what you're gonna experience, but you can still enjoy it. Yeah. There is still some enjoyment there for everybody.

SPEAKER_08: 1:11:29

And and it's worth going back and taking a look at some of those early ones because they are legitimately creepy.

SPEAKER_04: 1:11:34

Oh, yeah. Especially those early the witch hanging. The witch actually has become like an opening ceremony. She's brought out, and sometimes she's brought in a huge black carriage or a cage, yeah, and she curses the whole town, and that's when the smoke starts billowing through Streets of Calico. That she's the cue. Yeah. Like she's uh the whole show point of the show is to tell the monsters stop smoking cigarettes and shaking Facebook. It's time to scare. Yeah. You know, here comes the fog, just the witch is cursed. Let's go. Yeah. And it's a great mythology. It is. It's a great mythology. Um, there are some pretty notable mazes. Uh I want to talk about the mazes, if I don't mind. We have the chamber of chills, but we also have uh lots of mazes, and there's a whole um method to the creation of the mazes at not. Yeah. First off, they never ever do themed mazes.

SPEAKER_08: 1:12:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:27

As far as licensed characters. Right, they never pull any property outside. Except for one exception, which starts in 1982. Oh, okay. Because Wolfman Jack is kind of out.

SPEAKER_08: 1:12:40

Yeah, Wolfman Jack's out in 81, I think. Right. Which is when Weird Owl takes over that job. Right. Weird Owl for one year. Two two years, two years. Yeah, then the second year is Weird Owl and Dr. Demento together.

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:55

You know, life doesn't suck.

SPEAKER_08: 1:12:57

Man, that you know, if I had a time machine, I don't need Jesus. I need Weird Owl and Dr. Demento.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:02

Well, it makes you think, like, maybe like I always listen to the Weird Owl 3D album, and I always wonder, like, where did he get the idea to do Nature Trail to Hell? Oh, yeah. And it makes you think, did he write that for Knots? Right. Or was that inspired by Knots?

SPEAKER_08: 1:13:17

Yeah. Right. By the way, quick tip of the hat to Dr. Demento, who did his last ever episode about two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:24

Oh, time to wind down your radio. Yes, time to wind down your radio. It's been wound up for so darn long. Yeah. Oh, I'm gonna miss him. Yeah, me too. I'm gonna miss I I love Dr. Demento. He's one of the reasons I perform doing characters and silly races because of listening to Dr. D on uh Wild Westwood One radio network. Yep, you know.

SPEAKER_08: 1:13:54

Hey everybody, we were so excited about this episode that we talked and talked and talked and ended up having to cut it down for size, but there was some excellent material that we saved and we wanted you to hear anyway. So coming out in a couple of days, uh, just before Halloween, you should get an extra bonus bit of extra material from this episode. Really interesting, uh some of it quite grim, deep dives about haunts and safety violations, and uh really cool stuff like that. So keep your eyes out. There should be another short-ish one coming in a couple of days.

SPEAKER_06: 1:14:31

See you soon, there is a new horror host who appears on KTLA.

SPEAKER_04: 1:14:53

Yeah. And uh her uh she started off as an improv artist. Actually, she was a showgirl in Vegas and a dancer, but eventually she finds herself in Los Angeles trying to make a living, doing in uh improv work with the groundlings.

SPEAKER_08: 1:15:07

With the groundlings, which includes Phil Hartman and Paul Rubens of Pee-Wee Herman fame, and John Paragon, who's going to become very critical in both her and Pee-Wee's career.

SPEAKER_04: 1:15:18

Absolutely. Yeah. And uh she gets a job because Maya Nermi has been conscripted to come back as Vampira. They're gonna revamp the show. Right. Maya had a problem, which is she had serious foot and mouth disease. If she didn't like you, she would badmouth you to no no avail. Yeah. And if she didn't like a situation, she would play the victim. Because you have to understand, by the eighties, she was destitute. Yes. The band, the misfits, were helping her pay rent. Wow. And she's living on Sunset Boulevard or whatever, selling jewelry in a garage, you know. And it was a sad ending for Vampira. But unfortunately, with Maya, she just kind of opened her mouth one too many times and started ticking off the executives. Yeah. So what started off as a we're gonna bring you back, turned into we're gonna have you be kind of like an advisor. Yeah. And we're gonna find somebody that you're gonna train, but you're still it's still gonna be the vampire show. So they started holding auditions. Yeah. Cassandra Peterson went off and auditioned for it. She got the role uh because she had been doing a character in the groundlings, this kind of valley girl kind of character, this bubbly, yeah, kind of goofy valley girl character. And the producers saw that and said, Come in and audition for this. And she did, yeah. They liked her so much, they suddenly realized she's got her own character. She doesn't need to be vampire.

SPEAKER_08: 1:16:42

Yeah. Well, and and I think that Myra Nuri s said no.

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:48

Yeah, she didn't she didn't like her.

SPEAKER_08: 1:16:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:50

She said, absolutely not. They're like, but she's great. She goes, I don't care. So whether it's professional jealousy, you know, here's this young bucksome redhead who's gonna come in and take my act, excuse me. Well, knowing Maya, probably. And she lost out and she was kicked out of the project.

SPEAKER_08: 1:17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:17:07

And Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, was born. And she was not on for a long period of time when it comes to horror hosts.

SPEAKER_08: 1:17:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:17:17

But she made such a mark that within a year she was already making public appearances and cameos in TV shows like Chips.

SPEAKER_08: 1:17:26

Yeah, well, and it's interesting because this is why earlier when we were talking about Vampira, I said there's these fascinating parallels, because El Elvira was on local TV for a couple of years. And then she got on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had her on.

SPEAKER_04: 1:17:42

Yep, with Vincent Price right next to her. Yeah. And I'm very impressed with your neckline.

SPEAKER_08: 1:17:46

Yeah. And and Carson liked her. And and but I mean she wasn't being broadcast outside of the LA area. So that was an interesting thing to have happen.

SPEAKER_04: 1:17:56

And she and what what really kicked off for her was her marketing. Oh, yeah. And I think the thing that really kicked her off, really, as far as her licensing of her image was knots.

SPEAKER_08: 1:18:07

Oh, I think so too. I think it really dovetails with right when she's about to kind of explode as a character across the country. Yeah. And um, she does knots for almost 20 years and then goes away and then does it for a few more again later. I mean, she is the figurehead of Knot Scary Farm. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like she's just she is the image of it. And she, you know, a lot of her character was was developed as as was Pee Wee Herman's character, was developed with the help of John Paragon. Yep. John Paragon, a lot of people will know him as Jombie.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:43

Mecca Leka Hi!

SPEAKER_08: 1:18:44

Mecca Hiho! But he was also very heavily behind the scenes for both of these people. Yes. And uh when she started doing Knotch, she brought John with her, and he performed with her on stage for years and years and years.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:57

Oh, yeah. She would sing, she would dance, she would introduce, she'd do comedy, she would even do a little burlesque dancing in her earlier shows. Yeah. You know, like it was she was a phenomenon.

SPEAKER_08: 1:19:07

You you watch her her shows, like video of her shows compared to video of the Wolfman Jack shows, and the Wolfman Jack things just seems like pure chaos. Her shows are tight, they're like a Vegas show. Yep. She's a good singer. Uh Wolfman Jack is a singer, but she's a good singer. Uh she she knows what she's doing. Yeah, she really does.

SPEAKER_04: 1:19:30

Yeah. And she knows how to pronounce C3PO. C three CPO? Yeah, she knows how to pronounce three CPO. So wouldn't that be great? Like she actually had Wolfman Jack come on as a like a guest star. Yeah. But he's still in the same outfit.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:42

Does this look like the body is being afraid of you?

SPEAKER_04: 1:19:48

No, it actually became pretty great. Actually, his body is like something that's afraid of a sit-up.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:19:53

Sorry. I'm sorry. I think I just wrote a new joke for Cassandra.

SPEAKER_08: 1:19:59

I think you didn't.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:00

You may use that.

SPEAKER_08: 1:20:01

Um, well, she's she's done. I actually saw a quote.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:04

No, she has retired. She does not do Elvira anymore.

SPEAKER_08: 1:20:07

I saw a quote from her just the other day where she where someone asked her about it. And she says, Look, I designed the world's least comfortable costume.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 1:20:16

And she's like, I cannot get in that thing. I can't walk in it anymore.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:20

Yeah, I know. She's in her 70s now. She has settled down. She is very much an icon now.

SPEAKER_08: 1:20:26

Yeah, but very nice lady as far as it's like.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:28

Oh, yeah. I mean, I I've met her once. I met her back in the 90s. Uh my kid Emma desperately wanted her autograph when we went to Midsummer Scream this year. Oh, yeah. Because there was Cassandra, and uh Emma's like, oh my god, it's Elvira! I'll get her autograph. But she was charged like$80 for an autograph. And I kind of went, that's kind of junky. You know, I didn't know it is. It's probably her sole income at this point, though. Kind of is. I mean, I mean, well, she's doing what she always did, which was to sell her brand. Yeah. She is a remarkably savvy business person. Yeah. And so I give Cassandra a lot of credit. Absolutely. And Elvira's a lot of fun. Yes, she was one of those icons of puberty. Uh-huh. You know, you got Adrienne Barbeau and Elvira. Man, I like brunettes, right? Like that's the thing. She really is a savvy business person and a tremendous show presence. She's very talented, very funny.

SPEAKER_08: 1:21:21

She really is. And if the movies that she did are not great, but watching video of her performing at knots, I get it. Yeah. Absolutely funny. Anyway. So I wanted, I think I interrupted you earlier when you were talking about some of the more famous mazes. And I actually wanted to hear your your take on it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:21:38

Okay. So yeah, there's a lot. I mean, the maze design process is the designers and builders, I should actually mention the builders, many of whom are actual like working contractors. Yeah. Some of which will basically take like a three or four month vacation to go work at knots because they love it so much. Yeah. So they just save up their vacation time and they're going to, I'm sorry, I'm going to work the park. But you have a lot of very creative people and they they come up with a story, they come up with a pitch. Right. Here's your theme. And uh then they pitch it at a pitch meeting. They talk about, okay, let's do it. And they give them a heck of a budget and they take over back alleyways. They've now added like special buildings, show buildings where they they can leave some of the stuff up.

SPEAKER_08: 1:22:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:22:22

But sometimes uh I've been in mazes where they've shut down the bumper cars and they use the bumper car. So you're walking on that metal floor of a bumper car uh gazebo and hope to god they don't turn it on. Yeah. Uh or or you're you're underneath roller coasters in the boiler rooms and stuff. Like you cram them into all these different areas. Also the log ride, which is very terrifying. If you're on the log ride at night and the actors pop out at you as you're slaloming down the log ride, yeah, which is really scary.

SPEAKER_08: 1:22:54

Yeah, terrifying.

SPEAKER_04: 1:22:54

Because you're moving it like 30, 40 miles an hour in this thing with a chainsaw going, and you're like, oh god, that'll get me. Yeah. Um, but I've seen I've seen some of the mazes where you've got you know carnivals where it's like a creepy carnival. Uh that's actually an old tradition, actually, at Knott's is Spidora, which is a very old illusion, which is a half woman, half spider illusion. And it's one of the earliest monsters of Knotts. And Spidora was in the chilling chambers, and when they pull the curtains open there, she'd be like, feed me. Yeah. And uh so she pops up every once in a while, still to this day. That's great. Some of the other mazes that they've done wax museums. Uh, there's one that I particularly love to this day. It's called Dominion of the Dead. And it's all black and white. It's a vampire maze. Black, white, and you know, all the grayscales, black and white, and bright, bright red.

SPEAKER_08: 1:23:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:23:46

Hammer film blood red.

SPEAKER_08: 1:23:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 1:23:48

Otherwise known as Kensington Gore for you, hammers. Yes. And it was extraordinary because it's kind of dreamy, very gothic. Yeah. They have like this organ music playing, very Victorian and 18th century attire. And all the vampires, they're beautiful, but they're terrifying at the same time. Yeah. They would have effects like scrim effects, where it looks like this beautiful painting of a woman, and then it becomes this blazing um banquet of the dead where they're ripping apart bodies and they're throwing it to each other while they're drinking blood out of lying goblets, and then it goes right back, and it's right next to you, so it's like and all of a sudden it's gone, and it's the picture again. You're like, whoa, that's terrifying. Yeah. And other things, like there's a gateway that you have to walk through, and it's this big statue looks like a grim reaper with his hands outstretched at you, and then the hands start coming towards you and then wrap around you, and then pull you into the doorway that's underneath the head. Oh, wow. And it's puppets, yeah, like they've got them on rods. It's so simple, but it's really effective. And and uh this was 95 when I saw it. Yeah. So that should tell you how much of a staying power these, these, these haunt mazes have. And I've I've clearly ripped off a couple of them saying, I remember this at Knott's, and it worked for me 20 years ago. I'm gonna put it in my haunt. And also they split up the park into different sections. So you have the ghost town, yeah. Uh, and then you have, um and all you knots listeners, please, please give us notes, but be kind because there's so much to know, yeah, so much to understand. That's huge. You can please leave a comment and please tell us all of the the names and all of the mythology. Yeah. But there's an area that's a little bit more medieval and gothy, and they have a you know, they have creepy pipers playing, and it's all about knights and wizards and stuff. Yeah. They have other wandering areas that are closer to the 1920s area. Yeah. So that way they can theme the wandering monsters in particular ways. Right. But the mazes are almost never, almost never licensed. Yeah. They're never like Universal, all they do it's only like very few exceptions. Like La Yarona, the La Yarona maze at Universal was amazing.

SPEAKER_08: 1:25:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:55

That's not based off of the movie, it was its own thing. So it came out before the film did. And then uh another maze that would later be actually turned into a movie, which was Rob Zombie's The House of a Thousand Corpses. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which he built a maze first, and then he was like, I'd be great to make a movie off of this. Interesting. Let's do that. Yeah. You know, and then you get Captain. Now you've got this last year. I think they actually had, or the year before, they actually had a house of a thousand corpses with Captain Spaulding and all that.

SPEAKER_08: 1:26:21

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:26:22

Knotts makes a point, and this is what makes it so special.

SPEAKER_08: 1:26:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:26:26

Is that they do five to seven mazes. Yeah. And you're walking all over the park at night. They've got creepy music, they've got monsters. You're like, let's go to a maze. Great. Yeah. Go get scared in the maze. That's great. Creepy clown maze, awesome. The werewolf maze. I can't remember if it's called the curse of the werewolf or blood of the moon or something like that, but it's it's a werewolf maze. Yeah. It was set in Knottsbury Farm's Mystery Shack. Yeah. And so the whole point is that you have been cursed and you are becoming a werewolf. So all of those effects are meant to disorient you as if you're transforming into a wolf. That's so great. That was the premise of the story.

SPEAKER_08: 1:27:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:04

It doesn't quite come off, but that was the premise of why the building is tilting and forth.

SPEAKER_08: 1:27:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:09

And they had wolves that are growling down. You have to walk through this little gully and they're growling. You could hear them growling and they're shaking. Yeah. And the red eyes are glaring at you from above. And then you've got people that are half wolf or half boar coming at you. It was really good. And they have like a large werewolf that was like a puppet that attacks you. It was so good, but it was in this nice, tight little space. Yeah. Very short maze, but it was very memorable because the theming just went with the mystery shack. Yeah. So to this day, Knotts really is considered the great granddaddy of them all. And because of them, Universal started doing Universal Studio, you know, studios started doing horror nights. Yeah. And then Disney eventually started catching on maybe we should do something, but let's make it for the kitties. Right. And he got, you know, celebration.

SPEAKER_08: 1:27:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:57

That's good. It's like we'll get the people that aren't going to Knott's. Because all of the ugly people are over here. According to Wolfman Dack.

SPEAKER_08: 1:28:05

Brings me to a couple of the what I will call the dark side of N's knots. Yeah, we should probably cover this for a minute. Well, and and the first one's because you were talking about them decorating the rides.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: 1:28:16

We will certainly do an episode on uh Knott's Berry Tales. Oh, yes. Uh Raleigh Crump's the maybe masterpiece. Yes. A lot of the reason that Knott's Berry Tails went away was because of Knott's Scary Farm. Yeah. Because they kept redecorating it, and the people who were redecorating it didn't understand the ride, and they kept breaking parts of it. And there was no there wasn't a lot of money to go in and fix stuff, or not enough will to go in and fix stuff. And eventually the segment of upper management at Knott's that didn't like Knott's berry tales just said too much of it's broken now, and that's why they shut it down and replaced it with some dinosaur thing.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:01

The time machine dinosaur, yeah, land of dinosaurs, whatever it was, which is in Beverly Hills Cop 3, by the way.

SPEAKER_07: 1:29:06

Oh, neat.

SPEAKER_08: 1:29:07

That's that's one of the sad things is that Knott's Scary Farm did cause Knott's berry tales, the attraction, to go away sooner. Yeah. Um but the other thing that I kind of wanted to talk about was Trapped.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:22

Yeah, let's talk about Trapped.

SPEAKER_08: 1:29:24

Yeah, so Trapped is uh it seems to be from this writer named Jeff Tucker. He had been working at Not Scary Farm for a while. Seems like a totally decent guy. Um not trying to say anything bad about him. He did a lot of great things for Scary Farm. He was a longtime fan of Scary Farm. Cool guy. Yeah. Um so he invented Knott's first ever separate ticketed event within the Scary Farm, which is Trapped. And Trapped starts off kind of as an experience. Extreme horror maze and eventually becomes an extreme horror maze. And it's have have you read much about this? Oh yeah. Yeah, I've heard about it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:30:12

Oh yeah. Someday we'll talk about those, but not with necessarily.

SPEAKER_08: 1:30:19

So he, you know, the first year, you know, it's it's an inside maze, it's a special ticket. You have to go in with a group. It's a little it's it's scary. It gets a little more intense. The actors are allowed to touch you.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:33

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_08: 1:30:34

Which you're already you're dropping a taboo right there. Yep. It's in it's intense. People have to sign a waiver to go through it. A lot of people really liked it. And uh a lot of people thought it was too much. Yeah. So then they go to the second year, uh, trapped the new experiment. This one starts to add more escape room-like puzzles. Right. Which is an interesting idea. And and it's 2013 we're talking about. So it it actually predates the kind of modern rise of the scare of the escape room. Right. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:08

Um trapped lock and key. Well, that's the third one.

SPEAKER_08: 1:31:11

That's the troubling one. Yeah. So so trapped lock and key, it has some great ideas. They sure don't feel like knots ideas to me. There's extreme challenges that you have to go through, including drinking simulated urine. Um there's a thing where you keep running. This is it's clever in some sense, but I don't think in this setting. You keep running into someone who seems to be lost, who's supposed to be another guest. One of the challenges at the end, just towards the end, is that you have to pull a lever and hang that person yourself.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:46

Right.

SPEAKER_08: 1:31:46

And the whole thing climaxes with your entire party getting on a hanging platform, putting nooses around your neck, heads covered up, and the floor drops. This is this is extreme.

SPEAKER_04: 1:32:00

That's a little yeah. Yeah. Especially for knots, you know. Yeah, and there are extreme haunts, and I'm not gonna I've done a couple. Yeah. And they do push your buttons, they push your limits a lot. There are several out there that are too extreme even for me. I mean, I'm if I was in my twenties, I'd probably go do them.

SPEAKER_08: 1:32:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:32:16

But because I'm in my fifties now, I'd be like, mm, I don't necessarily need to be immersed in ice water and then have you know bugs shoved down my throat.

SPEAKER_08: 1:32:25

No. No, thank you. No, or or as they they didn't trapped, like you being shoved into a coffin and having it closed on you. I understand there's a place for this sort of thing. I have a problem with it here at Knott's. Oh, yeah. Especially at Knott's. And it only lasted for three years. Thank goodness. Yeah. And the so the the third one, trapped lock, and key, they had a safe word. So you didn't have to sign a waiver in this one, but there was a safe word to get you out. Do you know what it was? Banana. Oh, come on, you can guess it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:32:54

Oh, uh uh oh no, uh uh Whittles. No, very close. Boys and Barry. Oh, boys and berry.

SPEAKER_08: 1:33:01

I like whittles though, but yeah. The tricky thing was was that if you said it, your entire party had to leave.

SPEAKER_04: 1:33:07

Oh God. Yeah. Oh, dude. So that And it was 60 bucks a person. That is a social gun to the head if I ever heard. Yeah, man. It's like if you chicken out, everybody goes. I was like, what? That yeah. That's not fair. Yeah. Well, then don't chicken out. Yeah. You know? Yeah, the the interactive thing, it's kind of interesting. I'll bet you anything. I mean, uh, Universal is now starting to do that kind of thing with these fan nights, which they will recreate certain movies like Back to the Future. They had a whole Dungeons and Dragons thing with a beholder.

SPEAKER_08: 1:33:35

You know, what's funny is we did that whole Star Trek episode, and we didn't mention that Universal fan nights this year had a Star Trek experience.

SPEAKER_04: 1:33:43

Right. Yeah. It's yeah, we were like, oh my god, we forgot that one. Yeah. Yeah. So there's uh there's very definitely a push for the interactivity. I mean, we talk about it constantly here, but in haunts, it's very difficult difficult because with a haunt, it is already inherently interactive. Yes. To push a haunt even further into interactivity, you are running a razor's edge of either danger, liability, or both. And you have to be very, very careful about how you handle it. Yeah. I mean, as a director and as an owner of haunts, um, I've been very lucky, knocking on wood, or at least for Micah covered press board, um, that I've never been sued for some of the gags that we did in our haunt. Yeah. They were very tame compared to some of the things that I have seen some haunts try. Right. Uh, because I'm kind of an old school purist.

SPEAKER_08: 1:34:35

And and you've built up a set of standards for these are the things you can do and these are the things you cannot do.

SPEAKER_04: 1:34:41

Right.

SPEAKER_08: 1:34:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:34:42

Um, now that's to say, I I do have a couple of designs. I have them in like pads of paper that I kind of keep in a little box where I have like I design the whole haunt and I go, someday I'll do this, or maybe I'll hand it off to somebody else. Right. There are a couple in there where I just go, what if I didn't have to worry about those standards anymore? What how far could I push people where people go, Whoa, that was a bit much.

SPEAKER_08: 1:35:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:05

But even then, when I look at what I do, yeah, it ain't close to like some of the extreme haunts that are out there still. Um so yeah, so Knott's to this day has set a precedent for almost every single theme park. Six Flags does it. It's you know, so many people do it. It has kept Knotts Berry Farm in the black. Yeah. And there's a lot of theme parks out there where that is the case. Sometimes there are some Six Flags parks that are still open only because they do Halloween events.

SPEAKER_08: 1:35:33

There's one about 10 minutes away from us, which that is absolutely the case.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:37

Yeah. The Six Flags in Vallejo still stays open because of their Halloween show. Fright nights, yeah. Yeah, they're fright nights. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_08: 1:35:44

Yeah, Universal makes the vast majority of its money during the Halloween season. Yeah. Um, and Universal is a big park, so that's saying something.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:52

Yeah. Yeah. Bring back Castle Dracula, guys.

SPEAKER_08: 1:35:55

Yeah, bring back Castle Dracula. I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:57

Go back to our last episode. That's all about. Anyway. All right. I think we're maybe at that point. We are at that point in our show where we ignore all tenets of safety and economic viability. Although I do want to say safety first in this one.

SPEAKER_08: 1:36:10

Yeah. So we will try and stay safe.

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:13

Yep. So uh whose turn is it to do our plus up this time?

SPEAKER_08: 1:36:18

I have no idea. I can go if you'd like.

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:19

Why don't you go ahead? Okay. You you do your plus up first.

SPEAKER_08: 1:36:22

My mine is pretty simple. Mine is I appreciate that this event has grown and grown and grown. And it is a something of a party. It's a bigger and bigger party. Yeah. But I would like to get a little bit of the seriousness back in. I'm not saying you can't have like fun and laughs and stuff and and mazes. And I and I don't think there's any drawing back of the hanging to to what it was when it started. I think it's it's stuck there. But I would like to see some stuff like l what the hanging used to be. Some serious, scary set pieces that aren't joking. That are really like we're gonna do something and then we're gonna stare you right in the eye while we do it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:13

Yeah, it's a horror movie, but it's live right in front of you.

SPEAKER_08: 1:37:15

Yeah. And not in that sense that you get sometimes with the universal horror mazes where it's like we're just we're gonna go extreme. We're serious, but we're really going over the top. Right. Not that. No. Something where you're you're just taking this horror set piece e even if it's an old style horror set piece, even if it is something like the hanging of a witch or I don't know, some sort of mad scientist thing, whatever. But you're taking it seriously. Sure. Just to just to add some texture back in to not scary farm. I th I'd I'd like to see something like that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:53

I like that. I like that a lot.

SPEAKER_08: 1:37:54

What about you?

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:56

For me, um now that Elvira is no longer working, working as Elvira, um, I think we need uh a rise of a new horror host or a new host edit. I I know a guy.

SPEAKER_08: 1:38:12

Oh, you do? Yeah. Okay. Have you have you met Mr. Hives? Oh god.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38:21

I really didn't know where you were going with this. Really? Seriously? I really didn't. Like, wait, who would be good enough for that? Um I don't think I'd be good enough for it. I mean, I don't I don't have the chest for it.

SPEAKER_08: 1:38:33

I mean Well, you would have to have a different act.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38:39

Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. So this if I were to do this as a plus up, okay. I I do think that someone should kind of bring back that big showmanship attitude that Elvira and Seymour and Wolfman Jack all had. Yeah. Like they'll have their own flavor to it. Yes. But they are definitely like the grand marshal of this. Yeah. So whoever that is, whoever that winds up being, would it be Mr. Hives? I'd I'd audition, give me a shot. Yeah. You know, like for the okay, so for those who don't know, God help me.

SPEAKER_08: 1:39:11

For those of you listening- You've got to get better at self-promotion, Pete.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:15

I'm I am a horror host and I I do live shows that are actually inspired by the works of Seymour and of Zachary. Yeah. In which I make fun of the movies, I recreate the gimmicks of the films, and we show classic old monster movies and we have fun with these screenings. Um, I am going to be launching a YouTube show. Uh we are filming November 14th, finally. Yeah. Got a place to film. We're going to film the first six episodes and we're going to start releasing them on YouTube for fun. Uh, but I do these live shows, and but they are heavily inspired by um um Zacherly and Sinister Seymour, with it's just a touch here and there with the body humor of Elvira. Yeah. Every once in a while an entendre will come through.

SPEAKER_08: 1:39:57

Yeah. And if if you're in the Bay Area, look him up because he's doing live shows these days, and you have to get tickets early, it turns out, because they sell out.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:05

Yeah, we recently did the tingler. Yeah. At uh the Alameda Theater in Alameda, California, and we sold the theater out. Yeah. And there was a Disney blockbuster playing in the big theater, and there's only like six people in the theater. I'm kind of like smiling, going, Yeah, they took a look and they were like, Who do we want?

SPEAKER_08: 1:40:19

Jared Leto? Mr. Hives. Yeah. They went Mr.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:22

Hives. Ah, yes, Mr. Hives. Yeah, Mr. Hives presents not scary pharma.

SPEAKER_08: 1:40:28

I would not say no to that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:29

Yeah, I'm really I think I think it'd be a good gig. It would be I would be all over that gig. Are you kidding me? I mean, that would be fantastic, you know? Because Hives would actually translate over between the the stage show and the hanging, like actually having Hives pop going back and forth between the two shows. I'd be all over that. Oh, it'd be great. Um there's no way they're they're gonna do it. There's no way Mr.

SPEAKER_08: 1:40:55

Hives is gonna do it. I'm gonna go later and look and see if they're auditioning.

SPEAKER_04: 1:41:00

But if they are auditioning, I'd get I'd give it a shot. I'd be all over it. Because I I think the tradition of the host is really important because it gives the show a face and it sets a tone.

SPEAKER_08: 1:41:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:41:12

And it and when you do that, when you have an MC like that who really knows their stuff and you really know the culture of the people who go to these shows, it just makes it all the better for it. So no matter who it is, find someone who's worth their salt. Don't make it Jimmy Kimmel. No, no, no. Don't make it, you know, don't make it a late-night host who's just gonna show up and go, wow, hi everybody, it's spooky and stuff. No, get someone who's a personality.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:41:39

You know, like get a horror guy. Get a somebody who's really a standout horror personality. Yeah. You know, someone who can really own it, doesn't mind being tongue-in-cheek, but also doesn't mind getting really, you know, vicious if they need to be. Yeah. Depending upon the tone of the thing. Get someone who can who can be that character and own it. Yeah. You know, and yeah, okay, I'll submit Mr. Hives. Is that possible? Yeah, man. But you know, but only if there's auditions, and I'll I'll show up. All right. Yeah, give me, give me a call. Knott's Berry Farm. If you're listening, yeah. I'll I will come down all the way down there to audition in person and I will try my best to scare your socks off.

SPEAKER_08: 1:42:18

Yeah, Knots guys, give give us a call. We're sorry about what we said about trapped.

SPEAKER_04: 1:42:24

Actually, you know, one last quick little note. Um, as a as a haunt operator, I've had the honor of actually hanging out with some of the guys who are directors of the haunt. And they're actually some of the greatest dudes to chat with because they know their stuff. Yeah. You can go beyond the, yeah, Halloween is cool, and I like to do a haunt in my yard. Yeah. Like this, these guys are pros. Yeah. They are the best of the best. I mean, that's the thing. Why it scares me to go, like, yeah, it could be Mr. Hives at the show, is because they are looking for the best of the best because they know that this is the oldest institution. Yeah. So they have a reputation to uphold. And their their haunt shows it. Yeah. Their haunt really shows it. Yeah. Yeah. So all right. Well, happy Halloween, everybody. Happy Halloween. And uh so go out there and put on your knee pads if you're a slider. Don't forget, and don't forget to wear your steel-toed shoes. Yeah. And uh, and if not, go watch some Elvira or Vampira or whatever, watch some scary movies, eat some popcorn. Yeah. And uh and check for sprinkler systems. That's and get dressed up as 3 CPO. Or at least a cocaine-laden Wolfman check.

SPEAKER_08: 1:43:36

Go see Mr. Hives and show him that you love him.

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:38

Yeah, Mr. He-Vaze. I like Mr. Heaves.

SPEAKER_08: 1:43:43

All right. On that note, I'm Peter Overstreet. I'm Kelly McGubbin. And you've been listening to The Low Down on the Plus Up. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Lowdown on the Plus Up. If you have, please tell your friends where you found us. And if you haven't, we can pretend this never happened and need not speak of it again. For a lot more thoughts on theme parks and related stuff, check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at Boardwalk Times.net. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I at Lowdown on the Plus Up on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Instagram, and all the other socials. Or you can send us a message directly at comments at lowdown-plus-up.com. We really want to hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. Our theme music is Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy by Kevin McLeod at Incompotech.com. We'll have a new episode out real soon. Why? Because we like you!

SPEAKER_05: 1:45:16

Oh we got a special surprise for you folks today. We have some of the folks from Star Wars with us. Will you please welcome the jumper? One of the superstars of Star Wars! Superbacka!