Monday, June 18, 2007

End of an era in Cleveland

The era of the movie host has comes to an end in Cleveland: Chuck Schodowski is retiring from WJW-TV after 47 years at the station, which included stints as an engineer and director, but most notably for hosting movies with Bob Wells (Hoolian and Big Chuck) and later with John Rinaldi (Big Chuck and Little John). On Friday, a one-hour retrospective airs on WJW, celebrating the station's movie host past, which included a Friday late-night horror movie hosted by "Ghoulardi", which was created and played by Ernie Anderson, who, of course went on to do voice-overs for ABC and also commercials for Sega video games and voice-over promos for Paramount's Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The series ended its run this past Sunday morning. The program aired at 12:30 a.m., after Talk Show with Spike Feresten. The retrospective airs Friday night at 8 p.m. on WJW.

Big Chuck and Little John, which featured numerous original comedy skits, survived numerous changes at the Cleveland station, from WJW to WJKW-TV back to WJW-TV, an affiliation switch from CBS to Fox in 1994, and ownership changes from Storer to Gillett to New World to Fox.

Last week, Fox announced it was putting WJW and eight other stations up for sale.

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