Balladeer’s Blog’s love of Movie Host Shows is no secret. Recently I thanked Mike Pieper from Spooks Hotel (1985-1993, 1999-2000) for providing corrections and clarifications on that neglected Bad Movie Show hosted by Joan Kelley-Cordt as Angie LaBanshee and later as Mrs. Spooks. Mike also provided the details about Spooks Hotel‘s Elmer Awards episodes, shown once annually in 1991, 1992 and 1993.
The awards were named after one of the show’s supporting characters, Elmer the Mummy Bellboy, played by Pieper for the first three years of this program. The Elmer Awards let the Spooks Hotel team “honor” various categories from that season’s Bad Movies.
*** THE 1991 ELMER AWARDS – The awards were presented as the episode’s Host Segments. The Golden Turkey being shown was Bela Lugosi’s anti-classic The Corpse Vanishes. Hosting the Elmer Awards were Joan as Mrs. Spooks, owner of Spooks Hotel, and her seldom-seen husband, mad scientist Dr. Spooks (at left). Elmer himself accepted on behalf of each winner.
MOST RIDICULOUS LOOKING CREATURE: Nominees – The Sea Creature in The Creature from the Haunted Sea … Zontar in Zontar, the Thing from Venus … The Giant Gumby Rock Creatures from Missile to the Moon … The Giant Brian in The Brain from Planet Arous. WINNER: The Sea Creature.
BEST SCREAM: Presenters – Aunt Hagatha and Uncle Charlie (sort of a proto-Seth Rogan type). Nominees – Bubbles Cash in Mars Needs Women … Lenita Lane in The Bat … Margie Dean in The Quatermass Experiment … Peggy Webber in The Screaming Skull … Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls. WINNER: Peggy Webber. Continue reading
THE AUTOMATIC MAID-OF-ALL-WORK. A POSSIBLE TALE OF THE NEAR FUTURE (1893) – Written by female author M.L. Campbell. Obviously, I shortened the title for my blog post headline. Balladeer’s Blog’s look at “ancient” science fiction continues with this 1893 robot story. 
SARTANA: For the record, the Sartana movies starring Gianni Garko as the gambler-gunslinger are my favorites. His personality is a bit lighter than that of my top favorite Spaghetti Western gunslinger –
The Sartana movies start out pretty grounded (for Spaghetti Westerns) but as the franchise goes along the installments grow closer to Robert Conrad’s Wild, Wild West series and our hero’s trick guns almost equal James Bond’s gadgets. Sartana himself stops just short of being a swashbuckler as he boldly tweaks the villains with more and more audacity. 
IF YOU MEET SARTANA … PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH (1968) – Sartana shadows a gold shipment being handled by stagecoach across the desert in one of the most distinctive Spaghetti Western entrances this side of Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. From there, the double-crosses fly like shrapnel among the main characters. 
TEEN TITANS Vol 1 #32 (Apr 1971) 
When they return to their own time period it turns out that Gnarrk’s death caused a butterfly effect and the “present” is now ruled by an evil version of Loren Jupiter called Jupiterius. He rules the world with Lilith’s (on stairs) sorcery, monsters and the evil counterparts of what would have been the other Teen Titans. 
CIMARRON ROSE DUNN – Poco wrote a song about her. She appears in a 1915 Silent Film about Oklahoma Outlaws. She’s often mistakenly believed to be the subject of the 1952 western The Rose of Cimarron. And it’s not even certain if that’s really her in one of the alleged surviving photos of her. Rose Dunn may embody the embellishments that fight with the truth when it comes to various figures from the Old West. 
PART 71 – Some of the Fool Killer’s targets on both sides of the aisle in the May 1914 edition of James Larkin Pearson’s version of the folk figure:
*** Bootleggers who were hurriedly transporting as much whiskey as they could from Virginia into North Carolina, where booze was now illegal. They did this because they could charge much more for liquor in a state where it was officially banned. 
SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE PARTY (1962-1965) was also called simply SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE and PAT’S SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE in the tantalizingly few surviving pieces of information available about this cult Movie Hostess show. SFMP aired Saturday nights at 10:30 (one ad says 10:20) on KMTV in Omaha, Nebraska from September 1962 to the end of summer 1965. 
SCIENCE FICTION PAT – Patricia Jones was a multi-talented woman enrolled at the University of Nebraska. On the side she played guitar, sang and recited beat poetry in Omaha coffee houses of the period. On SFMP Pat wrote her own material and designed various mostly black outfits for herself to wear during her Host Segments.
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