MONSTER SQUAD MASHES AGAIN! - Dandy Fun House Halloween Special 2023 - episode 35

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Happy Halloween everybody! Let’s see if you remember this one! A young criminology student and inventor takes the night watchman shift at the local wax museum so he can go to school during the day. One of his inventions (a crime computer) accidentally wakes up 3 of the creatures from the Legendary Monsters exhibit bringing them to life along with their memories of past misdeeds! But now they feel guilty about all the people they used to disembowel and wish to make amends! So they team up to fight crime… MONSTER STYLE! In this Halloween 2023 special episode of the Dandy Fun House, get ready to get scary crime-fighting funky with… THE MONSTER SQUAD! Let’s step into the Fun House!
Hello and welcome to the 2023 Halloween Special Edition of the Dandy Fun House video show, podcast and blog! This is where we wolf down the best in retro pop culture, toys and games and all the fun stuff. I’m your host Neil Dandy and in this episode, we’re going to open the coffin lid (start tv show intro) on a Saturday morning tv show from the mid-70s that ran for less than a year but still managed to make it’s bite marks on tv pop culture history and to be Frank… should have gotten more attention than it did. I’m talking about… THE MONSTER SQUAD!
The Monster Squad was a Saturday morning tv series produced by D’Angeleo-Bullock-Allen Productions that aired on NBC from September 11, 1976 to September 3, 1977 and starred a young Fred Grandy who later went on to greater tv pop-culture fame playing the role of Gopher on The LOVE BOAT!
Fred played a criminology student named Walt who took a night watchman job at Fred’s Wax Museum. There wasn’t a whole lot to do hanging out all night in a wax museum, so Walt passed the time tinkering with his invention, the “crime computer” which he kept stashed away inside a stone sarcophagus next to the legendary monsters exhibit.
Well… When Walt plugged his crime computer in for the first time, oscillating vibrations unwittingly brought the wax statues of Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster to life!
Upon their awakening, the monsters found themselves filled with remorse for all the blood sucking, skull crushing and peeing on fire hydrants they were remembering from their past lives and had a desire to right their wrongs with humanity, so they teamed up with Walt and his crime computer to become supermonster crimefighters and take on supervillians all over town.
Not sure what it was about this particular town that attracted all the evil weirdos of crime but I’m guessing they weren’t here in the South where I’m located. Lock and load my friends!
Basically the monsters would go out and fight crime while Gopher err… I mean Walt would hang back in the cushy comforts of the wax museum and monitor everything from the crime computer. Every once in a while Walt would get off his tukus and come help his monster friends in the final climactic battle and rescue them from their screw-ups when he had to.
The Monsters were played by:
Henry Polic II
Henry Polic II as Dracula: Henry’s best known for his portrayal of Jerry Silver on the tv show Webster.
Buck Kartalian
Wolfman or Bruce W. Wolf was played by: character actor Buck Kartalian
and
Michael Lane
Frank N. Stein was played by: an actor named Michael Lane.
Bruce Kartalian (left) and Michael Lane (right) from their wrestling days
SCARY FUN FACT! An interesting note about Buck Kartalian and Michael Lane. They both came from the world of professional wrestling which I’m sure came in handy for the agility needed in action scenes!
MONSTER SUPER POWERS: Franky had superstrength. Wolfie could climb walls and fight like a rabid dog (he also curled up on rugs and had a crush on Lassie) and Drac could… umm… turn into a bat??? Yep that’s pretty much it!
Of course they had their own decked out Monster Van with wall-to-wall carpeting because you know… It was the 70s baby! And they all wore utility belts because… Batman.
Stanley Ralph Ross, Head Writer of The Monster Squad
The show actually looked and felt a lot like the Batman tv series, or maybe the discount store version of the Batman tv series with a lot of the visual and scriptual elements mainly because the creator, Stanley Ralph Ross had been one of the head writers on Batman. But it had almost zero star power.
They did bring in the legndary Catwoman Julie Newmar (meow) for one episode to play the supervillianess, “Ultra Witch.” Her evil plot was to turn the entire world’s milk sour and she used a ray gun to turn the monsters into cardboard cutouts. In the end, she stupidly fires the ray gun into a mirror and turns herself into a cardboard cutout. There’s Darwinism in action for ya!
They also brought in Alice Ghostly, best known as Esmeralda the housekeeper on Bewitched to play a villainess named Queen Bee who c...