In the mist-shrouded days before cable and the Web, UHF stations were the sole repository of all the great low-budget TV shows and movies that the “lower 13″ channels disdained: the clunky theatrical serials, monster movies, gumshoe detective thrillers, radioactive mutant alien invasion horror flicks, and — way past your bedtime — the movies that your parents said were only for mommies and daddies who loved each other very, very much.
Partly as a writing exercise, partly as an homage, Paul Lagasse created Channel 37 as a place to re-create the ideal UHF channel of his youth: a place where, by simply turning the dial, readers can once again find the clunky tinfoil robots, rubber-suit monster menaces, spaceships dangling on strings, and quippy jut-jawed heroes battling it out in front of smoke-filled cardboard sets accompanied by really bad Theremin music.
And maybe, if readers stay up late enough, one or two of those mommy-and-daddy movies too.
About the Authors
By day, Paul Lagasse is a freelance writer and editor. Since 2001, his business, Active Voice Writing & Editorial Services, has specialized in providing high quality writing, copyediting, and substantive editing services to clients in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. He’s published two books so far: a YA historical novel, Seeing Through Clouds (Dog Ear Publishing, 2006) and his first full-length foray into science fiction, the novella Invasion of the Orb Men (Channel 37 Publications, 2011). He also blogs opinion and miscellany at Sotto Voce.
Way past his bedtime, Paul is an aspiring SF writer who had the great good fortune of growing up with two great UHF stations nearby. “Although I appreciate and enjoy most forms of SF,” he writes, “thanks to those channels the warmest cockles of my SF-lovin’ heart are devoted to the glorious movie and TV products of the 1950s through the early 1970s.”
Gary Lester is author of Ursula the Yellow, Book One of The Greyrock Chronicles. Someday he’ll get around to writing his “About the Authors” entry.
Why “Channel 37?”
Read this.
Commenting Policy
Adapted with kind permission from Nerdy Feminist
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