Mephisto Pizza

Memories of late night horror hosts. From The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc.:

For some of us, Dick Flanigan - though we never knew his name - was one of the biggest stars in the constellation. For 13 years, from 1969 to 1982, Flanigan hosted a weekly horror movie show that aired at midnight Friday on Channel 15. He dressed up like a monster, called himself "Mr. Mephisto," and let me tell you, he was great. It didn't hurt that the year Flanigan started his show, I became a teenager, his perfect demographic. For a 13-year-old in the pre-PlayStation era, eating delivery pizza and watching midnight monster movies was about as good as it got. The "Inferno" saga actually began in the early 1960s. According to Golembiewski, whom I reached by phone in Milwaukee Monday (he's a mechanical engineer by day), a Marquette theater major named Jack Crowley was working as program manager of WMTV/Channel 15 in Madison in 1963 when he noticed how well stations in other college cities were doing running late night horror programming.