Well…Saturday night at eight o’clock
I know where I’m gonna go…
– The Drifters – Saturday Night at the Movies (1964)
PT-109. That was the movie. It was 1974 and I was nine years old. My Dad agreed to let me stay up and watch the Saturday Night Late Movie because he thought I might learn something from it. He even watched it with me, which was rare enough since he was never a movie guy. He either couldn’t sit still for two hours, or he’d pass smooth out on the couch and start snoring. Not from drinking or anything. After all, the man did work all day. That was my first introduction to the Saturday Night at the Movies concept.
But anyway, I loved that movie. It had everything I liked: action, adventure, a little bit of humor, guys shooting guns, and no kissing. I was into history even then, especially military history. I remember how old I was because two years later I wrote to whichever network showed the Late Movie asking them to run it again. The letter stated that I had seen it “when I was 9 and I think I would understand it better now.” That sounded rather high-minded to me, thus improving my chances for a favorable result. I really just wanted to watch those cool PT boats tooling around the South Pacific.
Old—School TV Movie Night
That may sound odd in today’s market, where we have literally thousands of movies on demand whenever we turn on the boob tube, our computer, or even our phone. We can watch the same movie multiple times if we want. But that’s not how it was until the early 1980s. You could either go see whatever was playing at your local theater or watch what was on TV.
And there were dang-few multiplex cinemas then. There sure weren’t any near me and our downtown theater had one screen. Like most places at the time, we had a drive-in theater, but since my parents weren’t really into movies, and at least one of them would have to drive us and stay there, that was a rare thing indeed. At least until I started driving. HBO and the like were still in the future.
So, Saturday Night at the Movies on network TV was a big deal. Even then, we were limited because, strange as it may sound, you got either three or four channels depending on where you lived. That included PBS. See kids, back in the Stone Age, those of us who lived in the small town of Radford, Virginia got CBS and NBC by way of an antenna. If I switched the box on the back of the TV from “VHF” to “UHF,” I could also get PBS. Cable was a luxury in which my Dad saw no need to invest.
I envied my uptown next-door neighbors, whose cable connection allowed them to get the semi-mythical Channel 13, on which young boys could thrill to the adventures of the Six Million Dollar Man. Channel 13 was, in reality, the ABC network. And that was all a cable subscription bought you in the mid-1970s where I lived. We couldn’t get ABC without cable because the station was too far away to pick up.
I remember being ecstatic when my grandparents got cable and I was able to watch Astronaut-turned-Bionic Secret Agent Steve Austin for the first time. And it didn’t hurt that my Grandfather made the best skillet-popped popcorn you’ve ever had, for which my Grandmother melted real butter in a pan on the stove. Seriously good stuff. But they lived almost an hour away, so it wasn’t an every-week thing.
I think we eventually cabled up in the late Seventies. By that time, cable got us not only Channel 13 but also Channel 5 out of Washington, DC, soon to be followed by Channel 17 out of Atlanta. Channel 17 is now the TBS network. Then, it was just “WTBS 17.” So, we got SIX (!) channels with our cable subscription.
Anyway, most of my movie watching was done on the tube and you took what the networks gave you. Like the Drifters sang;
Saturday Night at the Movies…
Who cares what picture you see?
I wasn’t really that indiscriminate, but I probably watched them more often than not, assuming my Dad hadn’t decided to watch something else. It was his TV, after all. And snoring or not, we weren’t allowed to change the channel from what he decided to have on. He might decide to wake up and re-engage, you know. But he was good-natured about it. Good times.
I was always hoping to catch PT-109 again or something like enough to it. That was where I first encountered Clint Eastwood’s Kelly’s Heroes, one of my all-time favorites. Kelly’s Heroes was to my younger brother what PT-109 was to me.
NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies
Well…there’s Technicolor and Cinemascope
A cast out of Hollywood…
Before 1961, you didn’t really see good quality theatrical movies on TV. The Technicolor and Cinemascope formats didn’t translate to the small screen very well, especially since the vast majority of people didn’t have color sets, which really didn’t become the norm until the late Sixties or early Seventies. Plus, the movie studios just didn’t want their top-shelf products on TV.
The notable exceptions were Walt Disney movies, which we mainly watched on Sunday night’s Wonderful World of Disney, and the annual airings of The Wizard of Oz, which began in November of 1956. That was appointment viewing for us because my Mom loved it, even though the Wicked Witch of the West scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid. I literally thought she would come out of the screen and get me. A boy genius I was not.
But, in 1961, NBC negotiated a deal with 20th Century Fox to show 31 of their films during Saturday Night Prime Time. The series was appropriately titled Saturday Night at the Movies and featured fairly recent theatrical releases. The program had a host who told you what movie you were about to watch and who the main stars were. That same host might tell you your movie would be right back when breaking for a commercial and say something like “And now we return to” whatever movie was on that week. If there was still time left at the end of the slot, the host guided you through previews and perhaps told you what was playing next week. By the late Sixties, that extra time was filled with longer commercial breaks.
NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies debuted on September 23, 1961, with 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire, starring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable. It was presented “In Living Color,” which was a big deal even though most people still had black and white TV sets. I remember seeing the “In Living Color” announcement, featuring the NBC Peacock, well into the Seventies.
Saturday Night at the Movies: A Big Hit
Viewers quickly took to seeing theatrical movies on TV, especially since they were generally relegated to the vault once their run finished. There were a few exceptions, like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, but once they left the cinema circuit, that was it for most. Now, you had at least a decent chance to see a movie you missed or would like to see again.
It wasn’t long before CBS and ABC got in on the action, as well as several more of the big movie studios like MGM and Paramount. That soon led to movies made specifically for television, the first of which, See How They Run, starring John Forsythe and Senta Berger, aired in October of 1964. By 1968, there was at least one prime-time movie on TV every night of the week.
So, what do I care?
Well, maybe you don’t and that’s okay. If you grew up with 120 channels, this may sound weird and overly nostalgic. Heck, it probably is. Now, there’s an instant movie option for anyone who wants it, and I like that as much as anyone. But I still kind of miss the anticipation of seeing what was showing on a given night, often Saturday night, in hopes it was something I would like. Or maybe, just maybe, PT-109.
But I saw many movies I might not have seen otherwise, at least until much later. I grew to love John Wayne because I saw him on TV, not in a cinema. In fact, I’ve never seen The Duke on the big screen. That doesn’t mean I’m not a big fan. Sometimes, if I got lucky with the late movie, I’d catch a “Creature Feature” like the old black and white Godzilla and even King Kong vs. Godzilla. Now THAT was living large. For a 10-year-old boy, anyway.
There was even a resurgence of the 3D Movie craze in the mid to late Seventies that impacted the small screen. I remember the hype surrounding a showing of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The movie was promoted heavily. You could even buy those red and green 3D glasses at local stores participating in the event. I had never seen a 3D movie before, so I was seriously excited.
In the end, it wasn’t all that. There were maybe two or three minor 3D effects in the entire flick. The one I remember is a couple of fish swimming past that stood out from the background. Maybe the 3D just didn’t work right on TV. I liked the movie, but it felt like a flop because of the poor 3D effects. Maybe it was since I don’t recall any other big 3D promotions.
But flops or not, I associate many of those movies with pleasant childhood memories, much as I do certain songs. Or maybe I’m just getting old. Don’t mistake this for a reminiscence about “the good old days.” I’m the first to admit that I wouldn’t want to go back to not having whatever I want to watch right at my fingertips. The only thing I’d change in that regard would be to get rid of the 24-hour “news” channels, but that’s something for another day.
The crap shoot of the Saturday Night Movie lineup meant there was usually something new to find and many of them turned out to be gems. I credit PT-109 and a certain book I read a couple of years later for starting me on the path to becoming a military historian. If not for TV movies, I might have never seen it. The movie was made two years before I was born, after all. But I did, and it struck something in me. Good movies can do that.
Finally, for the record, I didn’t see PT-109 again until I rented it from a video store in 1985. Sometimes little boys’ dreams don’t come true.
