NYC's Unlikeliest Thanksgiving Tradition: A TV Marathon Of King Kong And Godzilla Movies

If you were living in the New York City metro area during the late 1970s and early 1980s, you may recall a delightfully peculiar tradition that occurred during the Thanksgiving holiday season: the movie marathons broadcast on a local television station that featured films related to King Kong and Godzilla.

What Happened: WOR-TV Channel 9 was an independent station owned by RKO General, the holding company for the noncore businesses of the General Tire and Rubber Company. General Tire acquired RKO Pictures in 1955 from Howard Hughes for $25 million, which included the studio's library of classic films.

During this time, the company also expanded into broadcasting with the ownership of local radio and television stations, including WOR-TV. RKO General kept the rights to the old RKO films for broadcast on its stations, and these included three science-fiction epics involving oversized apes: “King Kong” (1933), its sequel “Son of Kong” (1933) and the Oscar-winning “Mighty Joe Young” (1949).

In 1976, WOR-TV decided to air "Son of Kong" and "Mighty Joe Young" along with the 1962 Universal-International release "King Kong vs. Godzilla" in a six-hour marathon broadcast starting at 1 p.m. "King Kong," which had been a staple of WOR-TV's programming for years, was not included because RKO General had an interest in the Dino De Laurentiis big-screen remake that was due to hit theaters the following month.

The big gorilla broadcast event was a huge hit in the ratings and WOR-TV repeated the formula in 1977 with the three RKO films on Thanksgiving while adding a second movie marathon for the day after Thanksgiving featuring Godzilla movies from Japan’s Toho Studio. This formula became an annual New York-area Thanksgiving tradition under the banner “Holiday Film Festival,” concluding in 1985 when WOR-TV lost the rights to the RKO films.

Why It Happened: While none of these monster movies had any content connection to Thanksgiving, the station shrewdly realizing it had a captive audience of kids who were off from school and eager to watch all-day monster movie broadcasts — not to mention their parents, who preferred an XL-sized gorilla on the Empire State Building to college football. Local retailers PlayWorld and Crazy Eddie advertised heavily during these broadcasts, which brought them a rush of holiday shoppers who were cued to their bargains via these movie marathons.

Several film industry figures who lived in the New York City metro area during this period have fond memories of this unlikely tradition.

“They are sort of perfect all-family entertaining,” recalled Stephen Whitty, two-time chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle and author of “The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia.

“They were just funny enough, scary enough, campy enough for everyone in the house to be able to find something to like.”

Whitty added that the memory of these broadcasts has stayed with him, noting that “every Thanksgiving I re-create it, loading in the DVDs.”

Paul Scrabo, filmmaker and film historian, defined these annual movie marathons as the forerunner of today’s binge watching.

“In a way, Baby Boomers had their own streaming or Netflix NFLX,” he said.

And for horror film actor-writer-podcaster Bill Cassinelli, the monster movies were the opening salvo for the holiday season television programming.

“It would be the countdown to my most favorite Christmas movie of all-time, Laurel and Hardy in ‘March of the Wooden Soldiers,’” he said. “It was indeed a special time, growing up in New York in the '70s and '80s.”

Photos: The 1962 film "King Kong vs. Godzilla" (top) and the WOR-TV advertisement for its monster movies (center) courtesy of Cinema Crazed.