When I was a kid, my dad would creep down into the basement
and unearth his copy of Spook Along with
Zacherley every October 1st, which then served as our household
Halloween carols for the rest of the spooky season. I was born too late to
actually have seen Zach’s act on the classic monster movie showcase “Shock
Theatre” or the Rock & Roll dance party “Disc-O-Teen,” but the record was
all I needed to get him. The photo of
him in frock coat and cadaverous make up on the cover. The silly songs about
the Transylvania P.T.A., a Ring-a-Ding Orangutaun, and the return of Frank and
Drac he crooned in a very un-Rock & Roll bass-baritone. As a devotee of
“The Munsters,” “The Groovie Goolies,” and Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the corny songs resonated with me even
though I never got the chance to see the Cool Ghoul step on screen in the
middle of Dracula’s Daughter to
explain that the burns he got while dragging the Count from a funeral pyre
prevented him from attending a cocktail party in his honor. Since TV archiving
wasn’t super meticulous in the early sixties, I’m still unable to see much
footage of Zacherley in action. Fortunately, there’s The Z Files: Treasures from the Zacherley Archives to provide a bit
of a simulation.
Published last year, Richard Scrivani and Tom Weaver’s book
collects a King-Kong’s ransom of choice artifacts from Zach’s personal
collection. There’s a complete script of his Dracula’s Daughter show (which admittedly doesn’t read as well as
it probably played on screen). There are scripts for three of his WOR-TV shows
(ditto). These are neat, but I really loved the weird miscellany leading up to
these major pieces: a stereotypically hyperbolic juvenile delinquency article
about some kids who broke into a mausoleum to steal a skull for their Zacherley
Club House, the angry letters from “Shock Theatre” viewers who didn’t
appreciate his intrusions on their favorite movies, a letter from the
New Jersey Television Broadcasting Company warning Zach’s cameramen to stop
zooming in on the dancers for “bust” and “fanny” shots, an article about a
Zacherley impersonator who’d been arrested for public drunkenness, and so on
and so on. There’s also a good selection of B&W Zach pics, several of them
displaying sweet-faced John Zacherle without his ghoulish get up. Apparently,
there is also an accompanying DVD in the works, which hopefully will include
whatever surviving footage there is. Until that emerges from the crypt, The Z Files fills the gap well.
