A character of Ghoulardi, played by disc jockey, voice announcer, and actor Ernie Anderson, was the unsuspecting hosts lately nighttime “Shock Theater” at WJW-TV, Channel 8, in Cleveland, Ohio from 1963 through 1966. “Shock Theater” featured grade-“B” science fiction and horror movies. These are better remembered around its Friday nightperiod time slot.

Anderson was the big band and jazz enthusiast, and WWII U.S. Navy veteran born in Lynn, Massachusetts on November 22, 1923. This irreverent & influential motion picture hikers was strictly hipster, unlike the horror character image. Ghoulardi’s costume was a long lab coat covered with “slogan” buttons, horn-rimmed sunglasses with a missing lens, fake Van Dyke beard and moustache, and various mussy, awkwardly-perched wigs.

In the period of breaks from either a picture, Anderson addressed the camera sleep in a section-Beat, part-ethnic accented comment, peppered by using: “Hey, class action!,” “Stay spew, knif” (“fink”), “Cool it,” “Turn blue” & “Ova deh.” Anderson improvised because of his difficulty memorizing lines. He played the total of novelty & kinky rock and roll tunes, plus jazz & rhythm and blues songs, under his live performance. Furthermore, he got his crew surreally insert futures film clips or even clips of himself into a motion picture he was hosting.

"Shock Theater" drew each the black & white cult audience, who loved Ghoulardi's beatnik costume, the music, & his hip talk, which was a nod to black jazz & R&B artists. Whiten mainstream viewers enjoyed his wide, understated ethnic humor. Ghoulardi spared there are no unhip targets: a denizen of Parma, Ohio and Oxnard, California, bandleader Lawrence Welk and polka music, Cleveland television personalities Mike Douglas and Dorothy Fuldheim, plus more figure. He likewise mocked a films he was hosting. Particularly, Ghoulardi pitilessly jeered Parmthe, Ohio, a working-class suburb, for its ethnic “white socks” sensibility, creating a series of taped skits known as “Parma Place.” He adopted the crow and named it “Oxnard.”

Ghoulardi utilized friends & members of his gifted Channel 8 crew when supporting cast: camera operator “Big Chuck” Schodowski, film editor Bob Soinski & writer Tim Conway (later of Carol Burnett and “Dorf” fame). He was farther assisted by teenaged intern Ron Sweed. Sweed boarded the cross-crosstown bus to try to meet his idol at the survive appearance, clad within the gorilla suit. Anderson invited Sweed onstage; to a crowd’s delight, Sweed stumbled offstage into the audience. This, + a bit of unnanounced gorilla-suited visits to the Channel 8 studios, sealed his place when Anderson’s perfect-h& human and heir apparent.

Channel 8 capitalized in Ghoulardi’s wide audience by owning the comprehensive merchandising program, giving Anderson the percentage. Anderson besides formed “Ghoulardi Centred%-Stars” sports teams, which played when several when 100 charity contests a year, which, reflecting his popularity, ofttimes attracted hundreds to thousands of fans.

Anderson openly battled Channel 8 management. Inside spite of the show’s wide audience, it caring that Ghoulardi was pushing as well numbers of television boundaries as well quickly, & tried to reign in the character.

Anderson would own none of this. He provoked his bosses by detonating disposables actiin numbers & exemplary cars by owning banger & bombs provided by viewers, on air, another time about setting a studio aflame. (“Cool it sustaining a boom-booms.”)

Caused by Tim Conway, world health organization got already left town, & greater career promise, Anderson retired Ghoulardi around 1966 and moved to Los Angeles, California. His project was to work around film & television. Instead, he manufactured the successful career inside voice-over work, including for the ABC TV network ("The Lu-u-uhv Boat").

In the early 1970s, Sweed took over a Ghoulardi character & costume by using Anderson’s blessing & became called moving-picture show carrier “The Ghoul” on an additional channel. Channel 8’s Bob Wells (“Hoolihan a Weatherman”) & “Heavy Chuck” Schodowski took above Ghoulardi’s Friday nighttime moving picture slot when “Hoolihan & Big Chuck,” becoming Anderson’s tamer however familiar successors. Andersin died on February 6, 1997.

Further than Forty years when Ghoulardi signed dispatch, his bequest lives: polka music, whiten socks, chrome lawn ornaments and pinkish plastic flamingoes are a items that manufactured Parma celebrated. Cleveland indigen Drew Carey has paid tribute to Ghoulardi in his television sitcom, as stand the punk-a-billy band The Cramps, by naming their 1990 album Stay Sick. David Thomas, of art rock band Pere Ubu, said that the Muscle spasm* were "so thoroughly co-optive of the Ghoulardi persona that when they first appeared, Clevelanders of the generation were fairly dismissive." Thomas credits Ghoulardi for the "otherness" of a Clevel&/Akron elastic of the late 1970s and early Eighties, including the Spasms, his have Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs, the Electric Eels, and The Mirrors: "We were the Ghoulardi kids." A virtually all literal Ghoulardi child, Anderson's boy, director Paul Thomas Anderson, named his production company "The Ghoulardi Film Company" in his father's honor.