Tag Archives: an american werewolf in london

Frightening Funnies: The Son Of Svengoolie ‘Dr. Rābbees’ Commercial!

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Please indulge me for a moment and take a trip down memory lane…….to a wondrous place called the Son Of Svengoolie show from the 80’s!  What???  You don’t know what the Son Of Svengoolie show was???  Well….if you didn’t live near Chicago and if you don’t peruse around Youtube a lot looking up old clips of 80’s horror movie shows, then you probably are clueless.  Let’s just say that the show was a HUGE part of my childhood and Sven is still on the air today on MeTV ( he’s now known as just Svengoolie though).

The point of this particular post is to spotlight a parody that was done on the Son Of Svengoolie show a loooooong time ago, which clearly was poking fun at David Naughton from An American Werewolf In London.  You see, before David was turning all fangy and hairy courtesy of make-up effects master Rick Baker in that classic 1981 movie…..he was peddling Dr. Pepper to the masses!

Amazing.  And I am curious how many of you out there wanted to be a Pepper too.  But anyway, Son Of Svengoolie periodically would do song parodies on his show and yes, he parodied the Dr. Pepper commercial.  Only instead of Dr. Pepper, it was called Dr. Rābbees!  Get it?  Because of the werewolf thing??  And werewolves might have rabies????  Anyway, here’s the clip and hopefully you enjoy it as much as I do for the ridiculousness that it is.  And make sure and watch Svengoolie on MeTV every Saturday!

God Bless Practical EFX: Eddie’s Werewolf Transformation From ‘The Howling’ (1981)

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Quick!  What’s the best werewolf transformation from a horror movie ever? The common knee-jerk answer would be to say An American Werewolf In London.  But another werewolf movie came out in 1981 that in my opinion, topped David Naughton’s iconic lycanthrope metamorphosis.  I’m talking about Joe Dante’s, The Howling, and when Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo) gets his full werewolf on in front of Karen White (Dee Wallace Stone), it’s quite a feast for the practical effect eyes:

That clip was both awesome and depressing at the same time.  Awesome for obvious reasons of course, but depressing because of the fact that practical effects are becoming more and more extinct each day in horror movies.  It’s this scene in The Howling that helped me to talk about it in the same sentence as the classic An American Werewolf In London.  Rick Baker’s work in the latter was outstanding, but Rob Bottin one-upped him in Joe Dante’s film and gave us some special effects that will stand the test of time. Minus the cute Chewbacca looking werewolf version of Dee Wallace Stone in the movie’s final frames of course.

Howling Pom