Tag: Svengoolie horror TV shows

Svengoolie Movie: “The Thing That Couldn’t Die”

The thing about this movie we saw last night on the Svengoolie show, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die,” is that it heads in the wrong direction from the start—with a woman who douses for treasure. Dousing or witching for water or other things employs a special stick or rods to find objects buried underground. I actually saw this many years ago when I worked as a land survey crew member and watched an old guy use dousing rods to find buried water tile lines in a field. I remember one guy in my crew mentioned under his breath that the guy was probably old enough to remember where the tile line was originally buried.

Anyway, this film was released in 1958 and the general idea is that a sorcerer named Gideon Drew was beheaded by Sir Francis Drake 400 years ago. The head was buried in a box and the rest of the body was buried somewhere else. This would ensure that Gideon would suffer for all eternity—as long as nobody used his head to figure out that if you reconnected Drew’s body and his head, he could again commit mayhem.

Jessica is a seemingly empty-headed woman who is really able to find important objects by dousing. She finds the box containing Gideon’s head and a special charm necklace that protects her (at first) from Gideon’s ability to get inside your head.

Gideon possesses the deadhead character Mike because he’s the one who first opens the box. He then kills his controlling buddy, Boyd, who yells his head off, waking up Peggy’s Aunt Flavia, the owner of the land on which the box was found. Aunt Flavia has a head for figures because she runs the dude ranch where all the characters are and realizes that the box contained something valuable, learning later that she could get $5,000 for it from an archaeologist.

Mike drags Boyd’s body around in the woods by the head for a while, eventually dropping it into the hole where the box was originally found, but then gets killed off early in the movie. The actor, Charles Horvath, was ticked off about it and later went on to form the well-known rock band, the Ungrateful Head.

Meanwhile, Linda, who earlier invited Jessica to a square dance who declined because she preferred head banger music, gets hypnotized by Gideon. Linda then puts Gideon in a hatbox, which she gifts to Jessica after Jessica’s wannabe boyfriend, Gordon, takes the charm away from her to get it cleaned up. When Jessica opens the hatbox, Gideon zaps her, causing her to become a bad girl. Linda slaps her boyfriend Hank in the head a couple of times, which leads him to head back to their cabin to tear up his painting of her portrait and get his head bad by drinking whiskey.

Linda, Jessica, and Hank all get pretty drunk, and eventually Jessica decides to witch for the body of Gideon Drew, which she finds and the action starts coming to a head—Gideon’s head that is.

Jessica replaces Gideon’s head on his body. He integrates into the consistency of grayish head cheese and his vocal cords start working. The gang’s all there and Gideon threatens everybody and starts to bully them. Gordon tries to shoot him but bullets don’t work, and he then gets his head on straight, remembering he has the charm necklace. Gordon points it at Gideon, who reacts like Dracula does to a crucifix and almost immediately jumps back into the coffin his body was buried in, where he disintegrates.

Gideon’s spell is broken and a good time was had by all with nothing left to suffer but a mild headache from the whiskey hangover.

The moral of the film’s story is lost in all the interpersonal drama, but it might be that if you’re having trouble with water witching for drain tile lines, you should not lose your head because you can probably find a map of tile line locations in the city engineer’s office.

Remarks on Svengoolie TV Movie Phantom of the Opera 1943 and More

We watched Phantom of the Opera (1943 version) last night. And then, just for good measure, we watched the Phantom of the Opera (1925 silent film) today. We watched the latter on the Internet Archive.

I’ll say one thing, the absence of commercials in the 1925 version is great. Even though I like cornball jokes on Svengoolie, it’s good to have a break from that too sometimes.

We’ve never read the novel by Gaston Leroux but there’s a pretty good Wikipedia article about it. We’ve never seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage version nor the 2004 movie.

That said, we’re struck by the differences between the 1925 and 1943 versions. It’s difficult to develop any sympathy for the Erik the phantom (played by Lon Chaney Sr. in 1925). He’s pretty much a monster from beginning to end. We tend to think that it’s easier to be sympathetic to Erique Claudin (played by Claude Rains in 1943) who has a rough path downhill after losing his job and a place to live early on, inability to sell his concerto or get a date with Christine and so on, after which he starts killing people left and right.

It’s worth pointing out that in Leroux’s book (according to the Wikipedia article), the phantom’s childhood was pretty traumatic because he was born ugly and deformed, which didn’t endear him to his mother. She was simply not good enough, which I think appeals to my training in psychiatry.

The 1943 film was pretty comical at times. For example, the two guys competing for Christine’s attention, singer Anatole (played by Nelson Eddy) and Raoul (played by Edgar Barrier) get stuck in doorways and eventually end up going to dinner together instead of one or the other going out with Christine. Their forced politeness with each other in front of Christine is priceless.

On the other hand, the 1925 version is a little more like what you’d expect from a movie on the Svengoolie show—it’s a horror flick, only classier. Lon Chaney’s makeup job makes him look like a proper monster, which made women faint according to some articles. Claude Rains’ makeup is barely suggested on part of his face.

The murders committed by the phantoms in both movies are bloodless, although the comedy in the 1943 version distracts you from what you expect; for example, after the Phantom drops the huge chandelier on the audience. No mangled bodies or gore, move along, nothing to see here. People continue to sing, dance and cavort, possibly hopping over any corpses lying about.

There was mostly dark music in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera film. However, in the 1943 version there was lullaby theme that ran throughout and was even a point of connection between Christine and the ill-fated Erique. Somebody found a full version of it years later, entitled Lullaby of the Bells. The one who posted it mentioned the composer and the performer.

Cataplexy and Catalepsy in the Movie “The Comedy of Terrors”

We watched the Svengoolie TV movie last night, “The Comedy of Terrors.” It was my third time seeing it. I wrote a blog post about it in March 2024 partly because the condition of catalepsy is mentioned. Mr. Black’s butler points out that Mr. Black had periods of catalepsy. Much to my surprise, I didn’t write anything about distinguishing cataplexy and catalepsy, but last night I thought about the differences. I finally found a summary of the plot today on the Svengoolie website and you can see it on Turner Classic Movies. You can still see the movie on the Internet Archive.

You see Mr. Black have his “cataleptic” attack about 39 minutes or so into the film. It appears to be triggered by shocked surprise upon discovering Mr. Gille in his house. A bit later, after the butler fetches the doctor, the first scene is that of Mr. Black’s wide-open eyes, which the doctor closes, at the same time saying that he’s dead. In that same scene you hear the butler asking for confirmation because it’s well known that Mr. Black has had fits of “catalepsy” before. The doctor obliges only to confirm, in his opinion, that Mr. Black is dead. However, he wakes up in the funeral parlor, where he has a fight with Trumbull and Gillie, then suffers another abrupt collapse, one of many that occur, always reciting lines from Shakespeare presaged by asking “What place is this?” often from inside a coffin.

This movie made me think about the clinical differences between catalepsy (specific to catatonia) and cataplexy (specific to narcolepsy). Because I was a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I saw many patients with catatonia. However, I can’t remember ever seeing patients with cataplexy. I had to review them by searching the web. I think the most helpful links are:

Catalepsy: Burrow JP, Spurling BC, Marwaha R. Catatonia. [Updated 2023 May 8]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430842/

Catatonic patients often will be mute and immobile vs purposeless agitation. Waxy flexibility can be one of many features. Catatonia can occur in the context of variety of psychiatric or medical illnesses. They may wake up and talk within minutes if given a Lorazepam challenge test, which is given intravenously. It can look miraculous.

Cataplexy: Mirabile VS, Sharma S. Cataplexy. [Updated 2023 Jun 12]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549782/

Cataplexy occurs in narcolepsy and is the sudden onset of muscle weakness, often precipitated by strong emotions, usually positive but can occur with negative emotions like fear. Eye movements can be normal, and episodes usually resolve within minutes.

Mr. Black’s episodes look like a strange mixture of catalepsy and cataplexy. His episodes are precipitated by fear or anger. Quoting Shakespeare doesn’t occur in either catalepsy or cataplexy.

At the end of the movie, he is impervious to bullets—a feature not seen in either condition.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Crawling Eye”

I saw the movie “The Crawling Eye” last night. Sena gave up after about 15 minutes. It was almost 2 hours into the film before you see any of the giant eyesores—and they were in dire need of Visine treatment.

The movie was made in 1958 and it’s about an alien invasion of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland called Mount Trendelenburg, no wait, that’s an inclined position of a patient on an operating table; it’s actually Mount Trollenberg.

The aliens are giant eyes with pinpoint pupils. The hero, United Nations employee Alan Brooks (played by Forrest Tucker) manages to stab one with a secret weapon called a sty-letto. Brooks is apparently heavily invested in pushing cigarettes and booze on the various other characters, a few of whom for some reason get transformed into zombies, probably because they get so stoned on cognac. Brooks deals with them by blowing his whiskey breath in their faces.

Brooks has to be pretty stern to get others to cooperate to a new battle plan against the eyeballs after it becomes clear that dilation drops won’t work. I can’t remember exactly what he barked at them but it was something like, “Keep your eye on the highball!” Maybe it was “Do as your told!”

Brooks also directs them to make bombs, which look like Molotov cocktails, and that was a nice break from drinking the regular cocktails at the hotel bar. Brooks orders them not to fire until they see the whites of their eyes, but by now everybody ignores him. At first, they have a hard time hitting the creatures, I guess because they were eyeballing the distance.

When the crawling eyes get hit with the bombs, they get a severe case of floaters, which makes them realize that they’re now up against something even more irritating than the cigarette smoke Brooks blows at them. Unfortunately for the eyeballs, they left their safety sunglasses on their home planet.

The best part of the movie was the Sven Squad; their jokes were so cornea they saved the day.

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?

Svengoolie Hosts the Film “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”

Last night I watched “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” (released in 1948) for the first (and probably the last) time on Svengoolie. I thought I’d be able to watch it while wearing my new Svengoolie Holiday Sweater that Sena ordered for me, but it arrived too late in the evening for me to make the trip down the street to the mailbox pod. There are not enough street lights down there and who knows, the Wolfman could have jumped me. I got the sweater today and it looks great.

Sena watched a few minutes of the movie and gave up on it. I stuck it out all the way to the end in which you hear the voice of Vincent Price but don’t see him lighting up a smoke because he’s reprising the role of the Invisible Man.

Now for some comments about the movie, for which you can find information on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and many other websites. I’ll admit, Costello playing the part of the hysterical Wilbur got too slap sticky for me. On the other hand, the bits between him and the Wolfman (played by Lon Chaney Jr, who also reprised the role of Larry Talbot) were pretty comical.

Frankly, what I really got a kick out of was Svengoolie’s recurring doodling riddle game, “Too Drawn Out” in which he rapidly sketches a few cartoons which, when you put them together in your mind translates to the name of a character in the film or a cornball joke about it.

Some people missed the Sven Squad in this show and in last week’s show. The Sven Squad includes Gwengoolie, Nostalgiaferatoo, and IMP (Ignatius, Malvolio, Prankenstein). Importantly (or not) I found out from a web search that the film is actually rerun annually (according to Svengoolie’s summary from the 2021 airing of the movie) because it’s the most requested film by fans. Since the Sven Squad was just put together last year, new scenes were not taped for this movie and the one last week, presumably also a rerun by the same assumption.

As an aside, my Svengoolie sweater has all the members of the Sven Squad on it, and it even includes Kerwyn.

At first, I mistakenly got the idea that Lon Chaney, Jr played Larry Talbot but refused to play the Wolfman because it involved slapstick humor. And somehow, I misread the Svengoolie summary about Glenn Strange playing “the Monster”—which of course meant the Frankenstein monster, not the Wolfman.

But I’m not the only one who’s ever thought that because other fans (I got this from the web) mentioned that Chaney didn’t like how the Wolfman was portrayed in clownish stunts in the film. I thought his sober portrayal of Larry Talbot contrasted sharply with Abbott and Costello’s constant screwball acting. Svengoolie pointed out a goof (which I missed) in the film where Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi) has his reflection clearly showing in a mirror. Nobody’s perfect. And that includes me trying to make up a drawing riddle:

Hey it’s supposed to be Svengoolie!

The Svengoolie Movie the Leech Woman and What About the Pineal Gland?

OK, so I watched the Svengoolie movie, “The Leech Woman” a couple of weeks ago and I think I missed the part where the June Talbot was told that the potion containing the pineal gland secretion and powdered flower parts entailed the requirement that the pineal gland secretion should come from a man. You can read the Wikipedia plot summary for background and watch the movie for free on the internet archive.

Leave aside for the moment that the film tries to make you think you can have easy access to the pineal gland through the back of the neck using a sharp point on a ring. Of course it’s deep inside the brain.

What I don’t remember is whether or not June was ever told that the pineal gland secretion has to come from a man in order to reverse aging. It won’t work if it comes from a woman. Aside from devaluing women in general, it was never clear to me that June was ever told that by Malla, the African woman who is over 150 years old but looks like she’s 20 when she gets her shot of pineal and petal.

I’ve looked on the internet for reviews which mention the mistake June makes when she murders her lawyer’s fiancée who is unhappy that June managed to easily seduce him. She’s so unhappy she threatens June with a pistol in a confrontation that gets rather comically violent, resulting a in struggle leading to June stabbing the fiancée in the back of the neck, obviously in an effort to get the priceless pineal juice.

What’s weird about this (other than the obviously ridiculous premise that pineal glands have anything to do with aging or rejuvenation) is that June apparently either forgets or never realized that the pineal stuff has to come from a male to be effective.

What’s even more puzzling is that, before assaulting a woman for the pineal fluid, June had adopted a predatory strategy to pop the pineals of several men, leading you to believe she knew the source had to be a man.

So, is this an example of dementia or stupidity?

Svengoolie Movie: The Tingler!”

We saw the 1959 movie “The Tingler” starring Vincent Price on the Svengoolie show last Saturday. Price plays a prison pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin, who’s trying to scientifically study a parasitic creature called the tingler (tingles up and down your spine means you’re scared right out of your mind!).

It sits on your spine and feeds on fear by clamping down on it, eventually breaking it unless you scream. Then it’ll just let go. However, if you’re mute, scared speechless, or it grabs you by the throat—you’re done. So, the tingler lives on fear, although if you express fear vocally by screaming, you escape it.

OK, so I’m going to spoil the opening scene, which shows a prisoner being dragged to the electric chair, screaming all the way until the executioner throws the switch. When Dr. Chapin does an autopsy, he finds the prisoner’s spine is cracked. He says it wasn’t caused by the electrocution, but by the tingler.

Huh? But the prisoner screamed bloody murder (murder was why he got the death penalty by the way) hardly stopping to take a breath. Shouldn’t that have weakened or killed the tingler? You can find examples of inconsistencies like this in any cheesy movie, but where’s the fun in that?

One web article says the tingler creature was modeled after the velvet worm, which looks pretty creepy. In reality, the velvet worm is harmless to humans, but is a predator of many invertebrates. Just keep telling yourself, “I’m a vertebrate.”

You can watch the full movie on the Internet Archive. The most interesting part of it for me was the use of what was called “acid,” (meaning the hallucinogen LSD) by Dr. Chapin. He wanted to experience and record the actual experience of being scared by the tingler, just to see what it’s like apparently. He mainlines himself with a fairly stiff dose of LSD although I can’t remember how much.

Incidentally, an article in JAMA notes, “Doses of 20μg/kg of body weight are known to have been taken without a lethal outcome.” (Materson BJ, Barrett-Connor E. LSD “Mainlining”: A New Hazard to Health. JAMA. 1967;200(12):1126–1127. doi:10.1001/jama.1967.03120250160025). I don’t know how much Dr. Chapin weighs.

This was about the same time as a lot of people in the U.S. were experimenting with the hallucinogen in various ways, including mainlining it. There are web references to psychiatrists using LSD recreationally (this was when it was legal). Bad trips were and still are common, although there is a growing body of clinical studies that involve using the psychedelics as adjuncts in psychotherapy. It’s not for everybody, although tinglers might have a different opinion.

Anyway, Dr. Chapin has a bad trip, gets really scared of hallucinations and screams. Web articles say that killed his tingler, but I didn’t see it flop out of his mouth.

There you have it. Another really cheesy and fun Svengoolie movie. I’m a vertebrate.

Ahm a Fan of the Svengoolie Movie The Land That Time Forgot

We watched the Svengoolie movie, The Land That Time Forgot last Saturday night. Doug McClure stars as Bowen Tyler. He and others passengers of a ship are taken prisoner by the crew of a German U-Boat (World War I era) which torpedoed the ship.  Officers of the torpedoed ship and Tyler overpower the U-Boat crew. They all end up on the island of Caprona somewhere in the South Atlantic.

The island is crawling with thunder lizards of every kind including diplodocus. The dinosaurs are evolving alongside primitive humans who evolve by migrating north on the island “…instead of by natural selection” according to Wikipedia). Various humans both primitive and modern are casually slain and eaten and the rapidly evolving primitive humans pick off the moderns at random.

Only one primitive doesn’t seem to evolve beyond being a goofy guy named Ahm, who has trouble operating a handsaw and who refers to himself in the third person:

“Ahm out of breath!”

“Ahm goin’ back down

To Kansas soon

Bring back the second cousin

Little Johnny Coocheroo

Ahm a man

Spelled M-A-N

Man

Ohoh, ah-oh…” and so Ahm and so forth.

Ahm is very loyal to the moderns, even after he supposedly evolves to the status of the Galoo, who hate the moderns and try to kill them at every opportunity. But Ahm saves Tyler from being snatched up by a pterodactyl—sacrificing his own life, yelling “Ahm a loser and Ahm not what Ahm appear to be,” waving his arms and legs helplessly in the pterodactyl’s bill as it flies off into the great blue yonder.

I couldn’t remember what actor played the evil German who ultimately was responsible for getting the U-Boat destroyed at the end during a volcanic catastrophe. But he was the same guy who was the 4th actor to play the role of Doctor Who’s major archenemy, The Master. Svengoolie revealed that the actor’s name was Anthony Ainley and he played Major Dietz in The Land That Time Forgot.

The reason I bring that up is not just because he looked vaguely familiar to me because I used to watch Doctor Who. I searched the web for his name and the first answer that appeared at the top of the page was the Artificial Intelligence, now called Gemini, (not Google Assistant as Gemini claims), the artist formerly known as Bard), which is crazy wrong: “Doug McClure, an actor known for his cowboy roles, plays one of Dr. Who’s greatest enemies in the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot.”

This is why you should be skeptical of almost everything AI says.

How evolution is affected by migratory patterns is not well explicated in The Land That Time Forgot although it probably does play a role. When somebody invents a time machine, we could just go back and ask Darwin.

Svengoolie Movie Trilogy of Terror!

Last Saturday we watched the movie Trilogy of Terror on the Svengoolie show. Well, we tried anyway. There were a lot of interruptions from severe weather warnings. We didn’t mind them because you ignore them at your peril. It’s hard to forget the 2020 derecho in Iowa, which affected a lot of Iowans, including us.

Trilogy of Terror had some psychiatric aspects to it that reminded me how Hollywood frequently gets it wrong when portraying them in films—but sometimes hits the nail on the head.

Although we missed parts of the first and second parts of the movie, it wasn’t difficult to figure out the psychological angle. Both “Julie” and “Millicent and Therese” made me think of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The male college graduate student was a pretty good example of a predatory guy lacking any conscience and feeling no remorse for his bad behavior against his apparently meek and defenseless teacher, Julie.

But then the tables were turned and it was Julie who was actually the convincing, coldly calculating and remorseless psychopathic serial killer. She kept a scrapbook of the newspaper stories about her many victims.

One of my colleagues wrote the book about ASPD. Dr. Donald Black, MD, is the author of Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy). In it he recounts the story of serial killer John Gacy. He was diagnosed with ASPD at the University of Iowa. He collected a great deal of data about antisocial men and also acknowledges that women can be diagnosed with ASPD. He has also co-edited and published the Textbook of Antisocial Personality Disorder.

The “Millicent and Therese” part of the movie displayed how a woman can be diagnosed with ASPD. This was the character Therese—who was also Millicent, a very strait-laced alter personality, which makes this also a case of what you could call dissociative identity disorder (DID), which may be related to severe trauma. This used to be called multiple personality disorder. What was interesting about this part of the movie was that both identities were being managed somehow by a family physician, not a psychiatrist—which is not at all plausible.

The last part of Trilogy of Terror is “Amelia,” in which Amelia buys a Zuni fetish doll (named “He Who Kills”) which she intends to give to her boyfriend. However, she’s in a hostile, dependent relationship with her mother who controls her and interferes with every aspect of her life. Of course, the doll comes to life and tries to kill her.

The struggle between Amelia and the doll makes me think about her internal struggle with angry and probably murderous feelings about her controlling mother. Amelia finally internalizes the doll’s rage (actually her own) when he emerges from the oven where she shoved him in an apparently futile attempt to burn him to a crisp. What it looks like is that she inhaled the smoke, finally owning her own rage by internalizing the doll’s smoky remains. This transforms her into a vengeful killer (now grinning with the sharp teeth of the doll) who calls her mother to invite her over to her apartment with the obvious plan to cut her to pieces with a large knife.

This is probably not a movie for kids or sensitive adults, which Svengoolie acknowledges several times during the show. This is why I like the segment with Kerwyn, the dad joke telling chicken with teeth who is voiced by Rich Koz, who also plays Svengoolie. Usually during that segment he tells a series of jokes, repeating the lines a couple of times, seemingly in an effort to teach you how to tell dad jokes. There’s also a Kerwyn joke of the week event, in which he tells a joke submitted by a fan. The joke video takes a few seconds to load, so be patient.