FORTY-FOUR years ago, there was a television show called Friday Night Weird with Captain Harold on one of the UHF channels out of Houston. I was dating a girl named Marsha, and we would often watch Weird on Friday night with her family. The show usually had some 1950s science fiction film as its main course.

Those old 1950s movies were notorious for the nuclear accident that transformed some animal or animals to giants. It might be a spider, or a gila monster lizard, or a monitor lizard, or an iguana. It would always be something that might make a girl scream, even if not large.

They’d use a real spider or lizard, of course, but use camera tricks to make it appear gigantic. Even if you knew that, it was still kind of scary thinking about animals getting huge. In an era when we were literally learning about the effects of radioactive fallout, it didn’t seem that crazy to me as a youngster.

MY GIRLFRIEND would make me a root beer or Coke float, with a big chunk of ice cream in it, and that was just about the best drinking I’ve ever done in my life. We would sit there and sneak in a kiss now and then, as her two younger sisters played chaperon, but usually sat on the floor with their eyes kept on the TV, except when they’d look back to catch us kissing. They must have been able to hear the tell-tale breathing that accompanied such young, soulful smooching.

We always enjoyed the Godzilla movies, and there were many of them. Godzilla movies were reliably corny, always having several characters, including Godzilla, who were clearly small men in funny looking, totally unconvincing suits. But no Godzilla movie was complete without the scene where hundreds of Asians run through the streets of a big city, looking terrified as the monster Godzilla came after them. And whatever you do, don’t let Godzilla spit on you. He had some powerful spit.

Every once in a while, Captain Harold would come on to sell something, promote something, do some comedy lines or introduce some other aspect of the show.

THE YEAR was 1965. Batman and Robin were all the rage on prime time television. Songs like Hang On Sloopy dominated the Top 40 radio. Weird was the face of late night weekend television to come. It was cutting edge for its time, the only show on television of its kind on any of the five or six channels we could get in my hometown by use of a tall antenna with a directional component.

Back in the mid 1960s, five network or UHF television stations was what we had available, and of those five channels, only one had a show like Weird with Captain Harold. Watching that show with my girlfriend and her family is a warm memory, enriched, not reduced, by time.

© 2009, Jim “Pappy” Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Jim “Pappy” Moore is a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com