If you’ve lived in the Kansas City area at any point in the last forty years, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard Roberta Solomon’s voice. She has had a prolific radio, news, and voiceover career, and has long been the sponsorship voice of the Kansas City Chiefs Radio Network. I spoke with her on the phone in July, and when she switched into character and said, “This Chiefs broadcast is brought to you by…” I instantly recognized her.
However, there is one role of Roberta’s that is perhaps even more iconic than that, especially if you were here in the 1980s and liked staying up past your bedtime. From late 1982 to early 1990, Roberta played Crematia Mortem, the “Ghostess with the Mostess” hostess of KSHB-TV 41’s “Creature Feature.” Every week, late at night on Saturday (or Friday, for a while), Crematia and her cohorts would welcome viewers into her spooky mansion’s living room, decorated with spiderwebs, skulls, and half-spent candelabras. She would emerge from her coffin in classic vampy makeup and attire (think Vampira or Morticia Addams), and take a seat in her massive wicker throne while cracking jokes and setting up the night’s film selection. A classic horror or science-fiction film would play, and Crematia would pop back in around the commercial breaks with a little film commentary or other antics.
It’s all from an era of television that seems very distant, quaint, and practically inexplicable to a person only familiar with today’s entertainment landscape, but it’s not at all forgotten. Here’s how it happened.
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“I started out on the radio in Kansas City in 1979,” Roberta told me. She began her showbiz career with a short stint on KCUR 89.3 FM, an NPR station. Soon after, she was hired as the evening announcer working from seven to midnight on KMBR 99.7 FM, which was an old-style easy listening station at the time. While there, she worked across the hall from Walt Bodine – a Kansas City broadcasting legend who was doing the “Walt Bodine Show” on KMBZ 980 AM and was known as “The Dean of Kansas City Radio.”
Rob Forsythe was the Creative Services Manager at KSHB-TV 41, an independent channel that had recently been bought by Scripps-Howard Broadcasting. The channel was mostly airing sitcom reruns, movies, sports, and some local programming. One of their local shows featured Walt traveling around Kansas City and exploring items of interest, and through their work together on that show Walt and Rob had become good friends.
“In early 1982,” Roberta recalled, “Rob dropped by the station one night to hang with Walt, and popped into the KMBR studio to say, ‘Hi.’ At that time, I was completing my degree in Communications Studies at UMKC, and Rob suggested that I come in to audition for ‘All Night Live.’ I had no experience on camera other than what I’d done in my TV classes at UMKC. But just for the sake of the experience, I said yes.”
“All Night Live” was a popular, long-running show on KSHB hosted by Ed “Uncle Ed” Muscare that aired from 10 PM to about 1 AM on weeknights. Each night, Ed (along with his cat, Caffeina) would host his way through a variety of sitcoms and westerns or episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” and then play a movie. He started his show with the All Night Live creed and some jokes and banter, and then came back in around commercial breaks doing running bits or talking to characters (that he voiced) on his “bananaphone” (a plastic banana).
It was low-budget fun, and it was a hit with Kansas City viewers. The show was such a success that KSHB wanted to add in Saturday, expanding it to six nights a week. “But Ed didn’t want to host the show six nights a week,” says Roberta, “so KSHB announced they were going to hold auditions.”
“I decided that since Ed voiced all these oddball characters during the week, I’d carry that theme into the weekend show with a strange little circus of my own,” Roberta explained. “But instead of just voicing them, I’d appear on camera as the characters. One of the characters I created was this Country Western singer named Minnie, modeled vaguely after Dolly Parton. When I went to audition for All Night Live, I showed up at the studio in a big blonde wig dressed as Minnie. The setup was that Minnie was there to audition for a TV talent show, but had inadvertently wandered into the wrong studio. I sat down on the set, looked into the camera, introduced myself, and started babbling about my boyfriend Duane Lee, and the restaurant I worked at ‘that used to be a garage and had this salad bar made out of a hollered-out ’57 Chevy.’ Then I sang a song I wrote about truck drivers, and at the end of the bit, pulled my wig off and said ‘I’m Roberta Solomon, and Minnie is just one of the characters I’ll be playing on Saturday’s “All Night Live.”’ I could hear the TV crew laughing in the booth, and I was absolutely mortified because I thought I’d just made a complete fool out of myself.” However, “The next day, they called to tell me I got the job.”
Starting in March of 1982, Roberta hosted Saturday’s “All Night Live” under the name Sally Roberts. She was using her real name on her radio show, and chose a pseudonym for KSHB just to avoid any potential conflicts. (“Roberta Solomon” was listed as a producer, however.) On “All Night Live” she appeared as many different characters such as her own mother, Minnie, and a roller derby queen named Wheels Butcherelli. She hosted episodes of Tarzan, some sitcoms, and a monster movie each week. Sometimes she took calls from viewers, but other times she would just do any kind of shtick related to the night’s programming. She remembers the show going from about 10:30 or 11 PM until 1:30 or 2 AM.
“After about eight months, the director called me into her office and said, ‘We like the comedy bits you’re doing, but they don’t have anything to do with the movies we’re showing. We’d like to retool the show and turn it into a ‘Creature Feature.’ Would you like to create a new character to host the show?’ I said yes, and decided immediately to call her Crematia. Walt Bodine came up with her last name, Mortem.”
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Horror hosting on television begins with Maila Nurmi’s short-lived but tremendously influential “The Vampira Show” (1954-1955), which only ever aired in the Los Angeles area. Every week, the spooky and sensually severe-looking Vampira would greet viewers from her macabre abode, make some gloomy jokes, and introduce a horror film. Vampira was a hit and she briefly became a huge national celebrity, but unfortunately her show ended after less than a year due to clashes between Nurmi and the station.
Nevertheless, similar horror hosts began popping up on stations all over the country. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (and some even after that), there were dozens if not hundreds of locally made TV shows broadcast on stations all over the country where a host would introduce a horror or sci-fi movie, sometimes also popping in at the commercial breaks or at the end of the film. The movie selection generally revolved around classic horror (like the Universal monster movies of the 1930s-50s), lesser-known and/or international horror from that same era, 1950s science fiction films, and Japanese “kaiju” films (their classic giant monster movies).
Roberta is originally from the St. Louis area, and doesn’t remember watching any local horror hosts as a kid, but she did regularly enjoy sci-fi movies like “The Day of the Triffids” and “Mothra” on St. Louis’s first UHF channel, KDNL-TV 30. She says that she wasn’t much of a horror fan until she got into her own Creature Feature years as Crematia and wound up watching them every week, however she does remember spending time one summer making audio-only monster movies onto a cassette with a friend.
Rob Forsythe, on the other hand, was a Kansas City native and was more familiar with the local horror host tradition Crematia carried on. He cites Gregory Grave (played by Harvey Brunswick), the host of “Shock!” on KMBC-TV 9, as a particularly great local host. “When I was a little kid in grade school, he was fantastic. He would mug for the camera in the best way possible. Think of Ernie Kovacs, if you know anything about Ernie Kovacs. Gregory Grave could pull that stuff off, and they had a great crew over at Channel 9, and I just loved watching those shows. Even if it was too darn late for me to stay up, I stayed up anyway.”
Grave opened every show with, “Good evening, fright fiends,” and made jokes and sometimes interacted with puppets before introducing the movies. In her book “Television Horror Movie Hosts,” Elena Watson describes Grave as “a zombielike fiend with disheveled hair and large black rings around his eyes.” From what I could find in the Kansas City Star, Brunswick appears to have played the character for about four years from the late 1950s into the early-or-mid-1960s, both on “Shock!” and, later, “Chiller” before eventually moving onto a career in retail at Metcalf South Mall.
Watson’s book also mentions Kansas City’s other earliest horror host, Marilyn the Witch (played by local theater actress Dolores “Dodo” Denny), who hosted “The Witching Hour” on KCMO-TV 5. “Marilyn seems to have been a rather traditional-looking witch caricature, sporting long gray hair, a sharp pointed chin, and a black cape and peaked hat.” From what I could gather, “The Witching Hour” was a five-minute show that played at 12:30 AM following a late-night movie several nights each week. It preceded a five-minute news update and then another movie. “The Witching Hour” appears to have only lasted for a year or a year-and-a-half between 1958 and 1959.
In the mid-1960s, Penny Dreadful (Rose Marie Earp) hosted “Son of Chiller” for a few years on KMBC-TV 9. Roberta mentioned that they actually reached out to Earp during the 1980s to see if she wanted to do a guest appearance on Creature Feature, but she was not interested.
At various points in the 1970s and early 1980s, local viewers looking for something spooky could catch “Murphy’s Monstrous Movies” or “Friday Fright Night” on KCMO-TV 5, hosted respectively by Mike “Murphy” Hervey and Hugh “Hughy the Ghoul” Bowen. Around that same time, the aforementioned Ed Muscare of “All Night Live” would occasionally put on some makeup and become The Creeper, Edmus Scary, or Mr. Mummy on KSHB-TV 41 for a particularly spooky film. Which brings us back to Crematia.
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“On my last night hosting ‘All Night Live’ as Sally Roberts,” Roberta remembers, “I told the audience ‘My time as your host has come to an end. I’ve been let go, and next week you’ll have a new host. I have no idea who she is… I guess they just dug her up somewhere.”
To prepare for the transition into Creature Feature, Roberta and her small team at KSHB-TV 41 took some time to come up with a new logo and some visuals. They went to garage sales and thrift stores with a tiny budget and came back with furniture and décor for the set, including the distinctive wicker chair. Once it was put together, the set took up a small corner of the studio, and although Roberta isn’t completely sure, she thinks it stayed put from week to week and wasn’t taken down or moved much throughout the show’s run. (I liked picturing this little spooky corner of the otherwise normal TV studio just sitting there innocuously on a Wednesday morning.)
Regarding Crematia’s set, for the first few months it did not include her coffin. Then one night Roberta came home and her then-husband told her there was a surprise waiting for her in the living room. She went in to see what it was and found a coffin that he had obtained from a friend, who was the chaplain at the Federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, where they apparently had an extra coffin. They took it over to Channel 41, and the next week the crew chained it up in the corner of the studio, and that was Crematia’s casket, which she came out of for the rest of the show’s run. (Coincidentally, Crematia got a lot of fan mail from Leavenworth over the years.)
Crematia’s look was mostly up to Roberta. “I wanted her to look like she had stepped out of an Edward Gorey drawing,” she says. She bought a long black wig at Wild Woody’s in Independence, a negligee at Macy’s or Kmart, a corset from Frederick’s of Hollywood, and she was set.
One week after Sally Roberts signed off in November of 1982, Creature Feature premiered, beginning a non-stop weekly run that lasted until January of 1990, and introducing Kansas City to Crematia Mortem. Roberta doesn’t remember which film was Crematia’s first, but if old Star TVs from 1982 can be trusted it was either “The Amazing Transparent Man,” “Crypt of the Living Dead,” “Friday the 13th,” “The Wasp Woman,” or “The Death Curse of Tartu.”
“When we first started doing the Creature Feature, the show was taped,” Roberta remembers. “I’d come in on Tuesday afternoon and screen that week’s film on a Moviola. The editors had already cut the film into sections, so I could see what was happening leading up to or after a commercial break. I’d create a general outline of the film and jot down any ideas that popped into mind.”
Then she would sit down with the Creature Feature’s director Steve Fritts and they would map out the show. Rob Forsythe (who I should mention also did the theme song for the show) was generally also in on the planning sessions. The three of them would spend about an hour loosely planning what Crematia was going to do or say around the commercial breaks. Rob said that he remembers a lot of laughing and a lot of coffee drinking during these sessions.
Steve said it was something he looked forward to every week. “Creature Feature was a chance to just have flat out fun with what was going on. And we oddly developed quite a following, which was kind of amazing.”
There were recurring features like Crematia’s Horrorscopes, but mostly it was humorous or light-hearted commentary relating to whatever was going on in the movie at that particular break.
“We had one, for example, where the monster was a crawling hand,” Steve recounted. “So, we got a plastic hand and had a string on it, and it’d be crawling across the set and stuff… and then finally she nailed it to the coffee table so it wouldn’t crawl around. You know, we just tried to work off whatever was going on.”
“Roberta, her character Crematia,” Rob Forsythe said, “would always be a bit confused in regards to what the movie was actually about. She would make assumptions based on the title, or assumptions based on certain scenes, and she would then sort of mistakenly blunder into an associated situation based on the film that they were running.”
In addition to movie-based bits, if there was a holiday coming up or something big going on in the Kansas City area, they would try to work that into the episode. One example of some local humor that Steve remembered came from July of 1983, when George Brett was accused of putting too much pine tar on his bat. That week, Crematia found that she had also put too much pine tar on her bat… of course, her bat was a little different than George’s.
After planning on Tuesdays, and maybe making or preparing some props on Wednesdays, they recorded on Thursdays.
Roberta was still working at the radio station during Creature Feature’s run, but she had switched to the morning show. This meant that on Thursdays she would get to the radio station at 4:30 AM to do the morning and/or the midday show, which took her up until noon. After that, she’d grab some lunch and head to the studio where she usually arrived around 12:30 or 1:00. She took an hour or so to get into costume and do her own makeup in the dressing room, and then the shoot would start around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon and take an hour or more. There were usually six to eight “drop-ins” per movie, and they were all relatively short, but it still took a little time to set up and shoot each one.
There wasn’t a script, so during the shoot Roberta worked off the notes they had prepared on Tuesday. “Roberta was so doggone good at it,” Rob told me with admiration. He said that even when she made a mistake, she would usually breeze right on through it and turn it into something even funnier than the original idea. He said he always had to stand way in the back of the studio in case he started laughing, just so he wouldn’t ruin a take.
While Roberta performed, Steve was in the control room, directing the camera and audio crew in the studio. The crew was usually about five people who had worked on “AM Live” in the morning and then stayed over into the afternoon to work on Creature Feature. Sometimes the entire crew would become involved with the show in some way, coming up with ideas and bits, or, for example, pulling a hand on a string across the set.
“It was a real cooperative effort,” Steve told me. “Everybody really enjoyed doing the show.”
“Roberta was always a crack-up,” said Larry Rempe, who worked on the engineering team during the time of Creature Feature. “It was always a fun show to work on. Steve and Roberta were always so crafty in it. Her Halloween shows were always big, I can remember that.”
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Steve Fritts remembered directing a Halloween special from Epperson House – an allegedly haunted mansion that’s part of UMKC. In it, local celebrities came by to visit Crematia while they were trick-or-treating: Whizzo the Clown (aka Frank Wiziarde), Colonel Billy (aka Bill Dietz, locally famous at the for starring in commercials for Boots Williams Ford and the Rockwood Smorgasbord among others), and even the Marching Cobras (Kansas City’s premiere drill team).
Roberta remembered doing a Halloween special from the Haunted Theater at Worlds of Fun, which included getting the rest of the Mortem family together for – among other things – carving a pumpkin with a chainsaw.
Roberta often tapped some of her radio and theater friends to guest on the show, and for the Worlds of Fun special she invited her good friend Katey McGuckin-Woolam from KYYS 102.1 FM (aka KY102) to play Crematia’s sister Cremora, Steve Bell from KCUR 89.3 FM to play Weird Cousin Henry (“a sort of addled scientist”), and local comedian C. Wayne Owens to play Mom. (Later in the show’s run, Katey’s husband John Woolam would play Mom.) Cremora and Cousin Henry were somewhat regular guests, and Roberta also mentioned that Andy Fogel came on the show several times to play Dr. Pete Moss, a demented inventor.
Katey and Roberta met at King Henry’s Feast, which was an “environmental dinner theater” designed to look like a 16th century English tavern, where there were kings and jesters and wenches. Roberta came in to audition, and Katey and John were so blown away by her performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that they hired her on the spot.
Soon they were good friends, and they both got into radio. At one point, Katey worked a nighttime shift at KY102 at the same time Roberta was working at her radio station, and they would call each other and chat in the down time. Eventually, Roberta became Crematia and occasionally invited Katey on to play her sister Cremora, the “substitute dairy product.”
“I am absolutely terrified of scary movies,” Katey told me. “Have been my whole life.” She could never understand how Roberta could bear to stand in a coffin on her show. Nevertheless, she watched the show every week (“Just like the rest of Kansas City! Wouldn’t miss it! It was hilarious!”), and a couple of times a year, Katey would put on a short wig, makeup, and a costume, and have a blast doing a guest appearance. “It was so much fun! I just can’t tell you how much fun we’d have.”
The duo usually started with a premise and then mostly ad-libbed their bits. Katey said they regularly had to do multiple takes because they made each other laugh so much, and so every episode she was on had to be shot ahead of time. “You couldn’t do it with the two of us without it being pre-taped.”
Describing Cremora’s character, Katey says, “As my sister [Crematia] always had the upper hand on me. I was the bad egg, and she was, of course, the good egg.”
In 1986, Crematia and company crashed a Halloween party at Longview Farm for a Halloween special. Katey was 9 months pregnant. She remembers sitting around in full makeup and flats for much of the night when they weren’t taping. Then, as they were just finishing up, she turned to John and Roberta and said, “I think I’m going into labor.”
After some brief panic and a mad dash home, the contractions subsided, and they decided not to go to the doctor until the next day. The doctor said that she probably had been in labor, and that it had stopped for some reason but there was no need to worry. Long story short, Katey’s son was born two full weeks later. (I assume that once he realized he wouldn’t be in time to make a surprise guest appearance on the show, her son decided to take a little more time to relax in the womb.)
One surviving piece of the show is the Mortem Family Rap, which was part of the Longview Farm Halloween special.
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“It was a really cool time to be doing TV,” Roberta told me. When Creature Feature started, there were only a handful of stations in the Kansas City area: 4, 5, 9, 19, 41, and (by 1983) 62, and cable was in its infancy. Each station had a different “feel,” and KSHB-TV 41 was definitely “fun.”
To definitively prove that KSHB was fun in the 1980s, I will share a short email (possibly the best work email I’ve ever received) in its entirety. Roberta sent this to me after I interviewed her:
“I also just remembered something really fun. Crematia got to be big buds with a bunch of wrestlers who taped the open to their weekly matches in Kansas City at KSHB right before we taped the Creature Feature. So I’d be in the halls in my costume, and would regularly run into Bulldog Bob Brown, Handsome Harley Race, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Bob Geigel, etc. There was also an FBI program taped once a month at the station, so often the wrestlers and I would hang out in the halls with FBI agents. Good times.”
KSHB was one of the first little channels in the area that wasn’t affiliated with a network. It started in 1970, and was actually called KBMA-TV until Scripps-Howard Broadcasting (“SHB”) bought it in 1977.
“When independent television came along, that opened up more jobs to us new kids coming from college with broadcasting degrees,” Rob Forsythe explained. He started at the channel right out of college, a couple of years before Scripps-Howard bought it. At that time, the station wasn’t union, so he could do whatever there was to do, from editing videotape, to editing audio, to running the camera. “I was so happy to be doing that, just television in general at the time. Our careers paralleled a unique time in television, in that we were not locked into doing news at our station. We got to do content and as long as we kept it clean, we could do just about anything we wanted. And so we made up television as we went along.”
He said that at KSHB, the combination of having access to all of this expensive equipment and becoming well-versed in each aspect of making television allowed the employees to reach a point where they could just enjoy it. “We were having fun, and that was the key to the whole damn thing. What you saw on the air was what we were enjoying in the studio.”
“It was akin to having the internet,” he answered, when I asked what it felt like to have those resources in the 1980s, “but making more of a direct contact with the folks in the Kansas City area – and beyond that because of cable. Channel 41 was on cable all over the Midwest.”
Roberta said that because of cable, KSHB fairly quickly became a kind of “mini-superstation” that went out to more than half a dozen Midwestern states, and she thinks that’s why so many people still remember Crematia.
Humorously enough, she wasn’t even fully aware of the reach at the time. Toward the end of Crematia’s run, she went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa because a television station up there was holding auditions for a horror host, and they brought the familiar Crematia Mortem to town to record a month’s worth of bits as a “guest ghost” while they looked for their own host. She says that that’s when she realized, “There are people watching this [Crematia] in Iowa!”
I was unable to find exact ratings for the show, but Elena Watson’s book said that by the late 1980s, Crematia’s audience was usually around 60,000 people in the Kansas City area alone, not counting the cable viewers. Not bad for a late night spookshow!
Still, while KSHB had equipment and a decent-sized viewership, they weren’t exactly rolling in money, and each production was still a low-budget affair.
“Management was happy because [the show] didn’t cost them very much,” Rob Forsythe laughs. “Lord knows it didn’t cost them very much.”
Roberta said that the low-budget inspired them to get creative. As I mentioned before, Roberta pulled her friends in for guest spots when she wanted other characters on the show. On top of that she got station announcer Paul Murphy to do several off-screen characters such as Man in the Wall, Rasputin (her manservant), and Dweeb (her other manservant). Roberta always made up some backstory explaining why we never saw them, and/or why she’d had to wall them up.
They also often utilized the hilarious and talented staff in the promotions department. Along with Steve and Rob, she remembers Lonnie Dale and Martha Tamblyn as part of the “weird little creative team” that formed to throw ideas around. “As long as it didn’t cost anything, we could do them!”
Roberta explained that advertisers preferred prime time, so late night television on small stations was a special kind of a no man’s land – generally full of reruns and movies. In the 1980s, stations still commonly showed films in prime time, but they had to buy the rights to movies in packages. If you wanted a popular movie for prime time, you often wound up with some not-so-popular films packaged along with them that you would air late at night. Some of the movies might not have seemed that appealing on their own, but if you (inexpensively) threw in a charismatic host to spice up a lackluster film, you created a bit of a different experience for the viewer, and you had a good chance of drawing a few more people in, allowing your station to sell more ad time.
“They were all schlocky and I loved every one of them,” Roberta said of the films that were featured on the show, laughing. “The worse the movie was, the better I liked it.”
She particularly liked the Hammer films and the Japanese films they showed, proclaiming “‘Destroy All Monsters’ is the best movie ever made. Because that’s got all of ‘em in it!” She didn’t like the comedic monster movies as much (like the “Abbot and Costello” films where they meet various Universal monsters), because she preferred bringing humor to a movie that was otherwise serious.
However, Roberta had nothing to do with the choosing of the films or the scheduling. She was entirely at the mercy of the programming department. Generally, she would know the film schedule a month or two ahead of time, but other times she didn’t know until she went in the week of filming for her preliminary watch.
As for the Crematia segments, when they weren’t live, they were taped, and the tape cost around $100 per hour, so they usually reused it. This meant that each new Crematia episode taped over an old one. Rob says that the channel did keep some stuff, but a lot of it is trapped on inaccessible formats. These days it’s difficult to find a functioning machine that will play and transfer two-inch or three-quarter-inch tape. Add to that the fact that tapes can be delicate, shedding oxide as they play, and you have a lot of lost media.
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For the first several years, the show aired on Saturday night at 10:30 PM. There were a few occasions where the show aired on a weeknight, and that was usually prompted by Halloween falling in the middle of the week, or the programming department having a special movie they could promote. For example, when “Gorilla at Large” aired, it aired on a Thursday for New Year’s Eve 1987. It was a 3-D film, so it got extra promotion, with 3-D glasses available for audiences to buy at Rax restaurants. I asked Roberta what the quality of the 3-D was like, and she said, “All I know is it gave everybody a headache.”
In January of 1986, KSHB-TV 41 moved Creature Feature to Friday night, making room for a science-fiction film on Saturday.
Roberta explained that during the day, the studios could be rented by outside clients taping commercials and other things like that. “The station wasn’t able to use the studio for commercial clients while I was taping my show, so it was decided that the ‘Creature Feature’ should be moved to Friday night… and carried live.” They renamed the show “Crematia’s Friday Nightmare,” finally giving its star top billing.
“The structure of the show didn’t change much, although we did take phone calls from viewers for a time,” Roberta said. “I didn’t feel any pressure doing the show live because we were so well prepared, but I did feel that we lost some of the ‘magic’ of the show.” She said she felt that doing it live slightly “punctured the weird little world that Crematia lived in and controlled.”
In October of 1986, KSHB became a Fox affiliate. “When we were an independent, we really had to come up with all of our own programming,” Larry Rempe of the KSHB engineering team told me. “We would have to buy or produce it ourselves. Then the Fox network started up, and we were part of the original group of stations that started the Fox network.”
Although Fox had relatively little programming in general and nothing late at night when they started, eventually programming changes caused Crematia to move back to Saturday nights (becoming “Crematia’s Nightmare”), and they started taping it ahead of time again, which Roberta was happy about.
One other thing to note is that in the fall of 1983, KEKR-TV 62 (aka KSMO-TV 62 as of 1991) started up in Kansas City. It looks like they started carrying the nationally syndicated “Elvira’s Movie Macabre” in the same timeslot as Crematia’s “Creature Feature” by the end of that year, and that Elvira eventually followed her to Friday too. Nevertheless, Roberta says that Crematia’s ratings were consistently higher than the competition, in part because KSHB was carried on cable in multiple states.
Steve Fritts confirmed that the ratings were solid, especially when one considered that the show aired on a relatively little station in the middle of the night. “Management and sales were very pleased with us.” Rob Forsythe also mentioned that the show got a lot of support from the sales department, programming, and management, which they greatly appreciated.
“Crematia was also popular in Kansas City because she was local,” Roberta said. “She popped up in appearances all over town, especially around Halloween, and the show’s contests all involved local viewers. Crematia’s fans were loyal. In addition, we decided early on that Crematia would be a ‘family friendly’ host, and I think that helped our ratings because so many families watched the show together.”
“In the minds of a lot of Kansas Citians, that still is a huge part of their childhood,” Katey McGuckin-Woolam told me. She remembers hearing about young fans of the show who would have birthday parties or sleepovers and their parents would let them watch the Creature Feature. “It was comfortable for a mom to let kids watch it. And I think that that’s what made it so popular. Not only with kids but for adults too.”
She went on to say that one of the nice things about the show was that the movies were never very scary, and were generally from a tamer era. “The whole family could watch it, and you knew that your kid would not wake up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder,” she said with a laugh.
“I took that really seriously,” Roberta continued. “We made a decision. We had a number of conversations about this and we made a decision early on that the Creature Feature was going to be family friendly. ‘Family friendly’ wasn’t even really a term then, but we just decided it. I knew that there were a bunch of little kids, and it was so cool because it was moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and big brothers and sisters and babysitters who were sitting down together on a Saturday night to watch this monster movie, and it was a family thing that they did.”
“And some kids were watching alone in their room under the covers, you know. And I always wanted to be the one who reminded them that, ‘It’s not really scary, if you look really hard, you’ll see that the monster ran off behind a bush, and then the next thing, he came out from behind a car!’ You know? So, I would try to point out things that were incongruencies in the film, or why it wasn’t necessarily so scary, or I’d weave tales about the monster. And none of the movies that we played were really scary scary scary.”
“Actually, that was one of the reasons why I decided it was time to end the show because it started to be that horror moved into slasher films, you know, and [films] that were really scary and creepy and awful. And I didn’t like those films. It wasn’t like a creature feature anymore. It was like scary horror. The genre changed. Or a new genre came to be, and it was not something that was going to be easy for little kids to watch.”
On top of that, “as KSHB’s commitment to programming from Fox grew, the show kept getting pushed back later and later. Because of that, the audience started to change. The most delightful thing to me was that so many families had watched the show together, and that wasn’t possible if the show didn’t air until midnight. So, after 8 years, I decided it was time for Crematia to disappear into her coffin. My last show aired in January, 1990.”
——
Toward the end of my conversation with Larry Rempe, I asked him if there was anything else he remembered about the days of Creature Feature. “It had a following,” he told me. “It was a cult following almost.” He paused, then added with fondness: “We had a lot of crazy people watching back then.”
“One year when Scripps-Howard bought us,” Steve Fritts told me, “the Scripps-Howard logo is a lighthouse, and so on St. Patrick’s Day the station made a lighthouse float to go down the parade route. Well, Crematia told all her viewers that whenever the float went by, they should put their hands out in front of them like a lighthouse beam and say, ‘A-ooga!’ And all up and down the parade route people were going ‘a-ooga’ to the big float. So we got a good response!”
“We got a tremendous amount of direct response from the audience,” Rob Forsythe said. “Letters and phone calls and so forth.”
Roberta remembered the show getting tons of fan mail. She tried to respond to as much of it as she could, and read a fan letter on the air almost every week. Sometimes they held contests for viewers to write their own opening to the show, like a scary poem or something along those lines, and the winning entry would become the show’s opening for a month or two before returning to the regular one. They also got a lot of mail when they ran trivia contests, where viewers could answer a question about the night’s movie for a chance to win t-shirts or promotional materials, like Crematia Christmas ornaments. (Speaking of ornaments, there was once a contest where viewers could mail in scary Christmas ornaments they’d made, and the winners’ ornaments were featured on the show.)
Every year around Halloween they had scary story contests where hundreds of kids sent in scary stories they had written and different age groups won different prizes. The grand prize winner got a night on the town with none other than Crematia Mortem.
Roberta said that the contest winner would show up at the station with a parent or guardian, and they would get a tour of the set and maybe tape a promo with Crematia. Then they would go grab dinner at McDonald’s or someplace like that in a rented limo. Next, the limo would take them around to a few of the different haunted houses in downtown Kansas City – longtime haunted house capital of the world – where they got to cut to the front of the line. Roberta/Crematia and her crew didn’t go through every haunted house with the winner, but she remembers going through several. And they didn’t tape it for television, they all just went out and had a fun night.
One winner in particular stuck out in her memory. She said he looked a little like Larry Mondello from “Leave it to Beaver,” and brought his dad and a friend with him. They were driving down Ward Parkway in a limo that had a car phone (a rarity for the time) and a sunroof. The boy called his mom from the car, and – during the call – stood up, stuck his head out of the sunroof, and yelled, “This is the best night of my life!!!”
Another young Crematia fan was not quite as lucky. He was about ten or eleven years old, as Roberta remembers it, and he had created a big papier-mâché monster costume – so big that he was standing on small stilts inside of it. They found out about him somehow, and had him come onto the show as a guest. They premised the whole episode around him, and the bit was going to be that Crematia saw him and fell madly in love with him. During the taping (fortunately this was not a live episode), they began to play swelling romantic music, and the monster started to move toward her. As the boy walked toward Crematia, “somehow his foot got caught on the rug, and he started to fall over, but because he was so big he fell over like in slow-motion. He landed with a thud, this giant thing on the floor. And a big poof of dust came out of his head, and then from inside I hear this little kid going, ‘Can somebody get me out of here, please?’” Roberta laughed with conflicted, sympathetic amusement as she recounted the story. “And he was okay!” she assured me. She doesn’t remember how they modified the episode, but hopefully he still got to participate somehow.
Crematia also made appearances all over the Kansas City area. She went to the Renaissance Festival every year to shoot an episode, and appeared annually at Ward Parkway Shopping Center’s “Trick or Treat Village,” which raised money for a charity. Roberta remembers that kids would show up dressed in their costumes, excited to take pictures with her. She went to schools for Halloween activities, showed up at Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and YMCA events, and even made an appearance at the zoo one time. She never did appearances to sell any products, because she wanted Crematia to maintain an air of mystery and not be popping up everywhere kids looked.
Crematia even performed with a vocal jazz ensemble at UMKC once, singing a couple of songs like “(You Give Me) Fever,” and putting Roberta’s several years of conservatory choral experience to good use.
——
There is also the story of yet another young fan in the Kansas City area, although he didn’t win any prizes from Crematia until much later in life. In the 1980s, David Dastmalchian was growing up in Overland Park with a love of comics, monsters, and a very active imagination. At some point, he saw a commercial for Crematia’s Friday Nightmare, and although his mother wasn’t a huge fan of the idea of him staying up late on a Friday night to watch a creature feature, he knew he couldn’t miss it.
One Friday he waited until everybody else in the house was asleep, then he snuck down to the basement to watch Crematia. He thinks that the first episode he ever saw was Terence Fisher’s 1961 Hammer classic “The Curse of the Werewolf” starring Oliver Reed. It was love at first fright.
“I’ll never forget the excitement that I would get anticipating the evening’s Creature Feature,” he told me. As he described his memory of the show, I could still hear it in his voice. “She had this amazing intro where you’d go into a haunted house and the lightning would strike, and there was this great voiceover, and then she would be in her coffin and she would start in with her bit for the week. And there was always some amazing humor… and she had all these fun characters that she created. Then she would get to the movie, and she really introduced me to the things that would have an important lasting impression on my life.”
David, of course, would grow up to become an actor, starring in huge films such as “The Dark Knight,” “Prisoners,” “Ant-Man,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Bird Box,” as well as the upcoming “Dune” and “The Suicide Squad.” He’s also written and starred in two films: “Animals” and “All Creatures Here Below” (both available to watch on Kanopy, which you can access with your Johnson County Library card). He said that Crematia’s show was his first exposure to some of the actors and performances that were most formative for him – his “first and lifelong acting heroes” – such as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and William Marshall.
“She had this great sense of humor that took the fear away when I was getting scared,” David says. “She just had this way of capturing my imagination and my fancy, and she made me laugh and scared me and she was someone I could count on every Friday night.”
He pointed out that what Crematia did (and what other horror hosts did and do) for the movies was in the tradition of the old EC horror comics like “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Vault of Horror,” and “The Haunt of Fear,” which each had a host (the Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper, and the Old Witch, respectively) guiding you through the comic’s pages. “They added a level of humor and ghastliness to this scary story that we were going to all experience together,” he says. “There was this sense of communal viewership.”
Looking back on it, he says he feels like Crematia was popular, but not fully mainstream, particularly in the Bible Belt of the 1980s. However, in the years after Crematia’s show had ended, he realized that some of his friends had also been fans.
I suspect none of them were quite as big of fans as he was though. After all, he told me that when he was deepest in the throes of his Crematia madness he had made haunted houses in his basement and put on little shows that were inspired by her. “I have a lot of great memories, but Crematia’s way up at the top. I mean, you’ve got your Worlds of Fun, you’ve got your Oceans of Fun, you’ve got your Royals games…”
He entered the Halloween scary story contest every year, pouring everything he had into his submissions with the hope that Crematia would read his story on air. (Author’s Note: He very nearly correctly remembered the mailing address for KSHB when I was talking with him more than 30 years after the fact. If that’s not evidence of determination, I don’t know what is.) He never won, but the encouragement to write certainly paid off in other ways.
Many years later, some time in the mid-2010s, David finally connected with Roberta through the Crematia Mortem Facebook page.
“Are you the actor?” she asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Oh! I saw you in the movie ‘Prisoners,’ and you scared the daylights out of me!”
(I found it perfect that he had finally been able to pay her back for all the times she’d scared him.)
As they talked, Roberta learned of his many attempts to win the short story contest. A short while later, a manilla envelope landed in David’s mailbox. It was a Crematia prize package featuring a headshot, a t-shirt, and a beautiful letter.
“That eleven-year-old kid in me was jumping all over the house with excitement,” he said. He keeps the headshot on his writing desk, framed.
And just what kind of stuff does David write (other than movies, of course)? Well, that Crematia-obsessed eleven-year-old kid who used to regularly ride his bike over to Clint’s Comics in Metcalf South Shopping Center was always thinking about monsters, and at some point he came up with the idea of a horror host who used their job as a kind of cover for their actual duty: Fighting and protecting the world from monsters. That seed of an idea germinated in his imagination for years, until around the time he reached out to Roberta.
Once they connected, the project moved to the front of his mind, and – long story short – “Count Crowley: Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter” issue number one came out in October of 2019. This June, Dark Horse Comics put out a trade paperback collection of the first four issues which you can get at the library or Amazon.
“How perfect that with this character,” he gratefully marvels, “I can take both visual and comedic inspiration from one of my earliest heroes: Crematia Mortem.” He sends Roberta his scripts for the comic, and the newest issues of it when he gets them. David hopes to continue the comic, and dreams that maybe someday he could have a promotional event at the haunted houses in Kansas City with Roberta, possibly convincing her to put on the costume one last time.
——
“I don’t have one bad memory from that show,” Roberta says. “It was just a joy from beginning to end. It was the most delightful thing I ever did in my life. And the thing that is so amazing is – I can’t believe it, you know – the show went off the air in 1990, and people still reach out to me about her, about that character. And what an honor, you know? To have that impact on kids, and have people still remember something you created so long ago.”
Roberta did Creature Feature/Crematia’s Friday Nightmare/Crematia’s Nightmare every single week for about eight years. If she took a vacation, they would just tape that episode further in advance. At points during the show’s run, Roberta was also KSHB’s station announcer, voiced a news program called “The 41 Express,” and produced a short public service series called Project Literacy, which was a joint effort with the Kansas City Star to help adults learn to read. All this while doing a morning radio every day, doing a ton of freelance voice work, and founding a talent agency in Kansas City.
After Creature Feature, Roberta continued doing morning radio until 1994, when she put a recording studio in her home and turned her voiceover work into a full-time job. She’s done lots of local commercial and corporate projects, and is now the voice of about thirty television and radio stations around the country. She’s done promos for every major television network, and did a lot of work last year with Jimmy Kimmel Live and the Late Late Show With James Corden. She’s done documentaries for NatGeo, ESPN, and Animal Planet, and even some movie trailers. She was also in the cast of Right Between the Ears on Kansas Public Radio for about twenty years.
Locally she can still be heard as the voice of KCPT-TV 19, and as the sponsorship voice of the Kansas City Chiefs Radio Network.
Roberta is everywhere. Crematia, on the other hand, has only been seen in public once since the end of her show, appearing at a horror film festival in Wichita in 2007. In 2012, she was inducted into Horrorhound Magazine’s “TV Horror Host Hall of Fame.” One can’t help but wonder what dreadful shenanigans she’s getting up to in her free time, and if she’ll ever pop up again somewhere.
As for the other key players, Katey McGuckin-Woolam worked at KY102 through most of the 1980s, before hopping over to Oldies 95 where she did a morning show with Dick Wilson until 2005. When that station was sold, she started her own company called P1 Learning, which trains radio and television personnel.
Steve Fritts worked at KSHB for over 40 years, from 1976 to 2018, and is now retired. Larry Rempe just retired from the station this year, a few days after I spoke with him. And Rob Forsythe left KSHB around the time Creature Feature ended and went independent (although he often returned to use the studio). He has spent many years making commercials and non-televised productions for companies, and is now “mostly retired.” He continued to visit his good friend Walt Bodine regularly up until Walt passed away, and would often bring him much-appreciated chocolate milkshakes from Winstead’s.
Finally, there’s Crematia’s coffin. Its exact whereabouts are unknown, and it’s probably safe to say that it’s no longer intact. But after the Creature Feature ended, it remained in the studio for many years. In 1994 KSHB switched from a Fox affiliate to an NBC affiliate, and they brought Tom Brokaw in to do a special event where he anchored the nightly news from the KSHB studio. That night Roberta was heading to dinner with her mother, and as they passed by the studio she wondered aloud if Tom Brokaw knew there was a casket behind his set. (Legend has it that he never found out about the coffin, but he did complain of hearing some vile fiend of the night cackling in the distance on her way to dinner with her mother.)
“It’s totally amazing to me that people still remember Crematia with such fondness,” Roberta says with gratitude. “I regularly hear from fans who grew up watching the show that Crematia was a huge and delightful presence in their lives. It’s kind of like the thing that wouldn’t die…”
——
I’d like to thank everybody that participated in interviews for this history of Creature Feature/Crematia’s Friday Nightmare/Crematia’s Nightmare. The contributions of Roberta Solomon, Katey McGuckin-Woolam, Steve Fritts, Rob Forsythe, Larry Rempe, and David Dastmalchian were extremely appreciated, and I had a blast talking with everybody.
If you have a Creature Feature story or memory you’d like to share, leave us a comment here on the blog or shoot me an email at kellerm@jocolibrary.org.
For more on Crematia, visit her website , Facebook page, or Roberta’s YouTube channel, which has a few more clips from the show.
If you’re interested in a Crematia shirt of your very own, Fear What You Wear offers two types of Crematia shirts that are very close to the promotional shirts the channel gave out in the 1980s, reimagined for today by Bradley Beard.
Thank you for reading!
-Mike Keller, Johnson County Library
JoCoHistory Blog 
This is a FB “Note” I made a few years back about KC area television in the 1980s, seemed like a good fit for your blog to share…hope someone enjoys it.
Reflections of Society in Television OR A bunch of old crap I remember.
Colonel Billy car commercials: They did these commercials wearing a barrel and presumably nothing underneath. Totally over the top local yokel stuff but 25 years later I still remember the commercials and what they were selling. That’s impressive.
Friday Fright Night: This aired on Channel 5 and was sponsored by Ray Adams Toyota. His commercials were equally well known. Friday Fight Night aired double and triple features of old horror movies and I rarely missed an episode from age 10 until it went off the air. Well known was the introduction featuring the creepy skull and voice over.
Creature Feature: This came on Saturday Nights on Channel 41 and featured a lot of the same content as Friday Fright Night. Old horror movies that spanned a couple of decades and included everything from Dracula/The Fly/Frankenstein to late 70s eco-terror like Day of the Animals, Frogs, and any number of movies featuring animals killing people as a reflection of the growing environmental consciousness. My favorite was Night of the Lupus featuring giant killer bunny rabbits.
Science Fiction Theatre: This aired on one of the network stations on Saturday mornings, usually around 11 in the morning right after the kids cartoon morning line-up was wrapping up. I distinctly remember the opening music and watching “The Blob” one morning. This wasn’t a consistent airing of programs I don’t think but may have just popped up t o fill in a scheduling block.
All Night Live: This was also featured on Channel 41 and aired on the weeknights and featured a host named Uncle Ed. They did local interest stuff and played late night syndicated reruns: Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Get Smart…those are the ones that stand out. I watched this in the summer and me and my sister would spend hours calling the station trying to get on the program. We may have even done it once, I can’t remember.
AM Live: Again, channel 41 morning programming that I watched in the summer time. They went through a number of hosts and when they weren’t doing local news pieces or interviewing politicians, business types, etc. they aired syndicated reruns. This is why I grew up on Leave it to Beaver, My Three Sons (which I despised), I Love Lucy, One Day at a Time, Alice, and a lot of others.
Saturday Night Westerns: this also aired on channel 41 for a number of years, the opening montage for the programming was the music from “My Name is Nobody.” My dad rarely missed this thought I despised it. Besides not being a Western fan (then) they tended to air a lot of the same movies. I probably saw High Plains Drifter a hundred times before I understood it. Now I wish we had a channel that played old Westerns on Saturday nights…
All Star Wrestling: This aired early Sunday mornings and hearkens back to a much different era in professional wrestling (don’t laugh). Totally remember getting up and watching local stars like Bulldog Bob Brown, Rufus R. Jones, Porkchop Cash, the Baton Twins and Mr. Pogo. This was back when Kansas City still have a healthy regional promotion that was affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance. This was the closing days of that era before the WWF really established a national foothold and regional promotions dried up.
Hope you’ve enjoyed my nostalgic look back at local programming. Would love to hear your own memories…
Tremendous, thank you. I was just trying to remember our local Creature Feature and managed to find this wonderful entry. I saw a lot of good movies there and on Friday Fright Night. It’s amazing what broadcaster could get up to in these time slots where you might find creature features, wrestling, or music videos. Some of the funnest television ever.