About Us
Off Beat Cinema began as a diversion from the flood of late night infomercials that seemed to consume the available airwave’s of traditional television’s last frontier: late night television.
Once a haven for insomniacs, second shifters and kids that would sneak back to the tube after their parents were solidly in dreamland, stations all across North America abandoned good old fashioned TV for hucksters hawking cooking utensils, and skin care supplements. These small thinking programmers completely ignored the possibility of a major disaster had someone ordered both items and used the skin care products instead of the cooking utensils.
That all changed on Saturday October 31st in 1993. WKBW-TV (the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, NY) began a seven week experiment that has taken on a life unimagined when the Hungry Ear opened its doors and the station began airing the show on that Halloween night. The show is now syndicated throughout North America through the RTV and TUFF TV networks along with a handful of independent stations from coast to coast.
This is a place where the likes of Boris Karloff could sit with Ed Wood and discuss the transcendence of the ego and how it applies to Moe taking a cream pie to the face or how society’s fears were reflected in films like Godzilla and the Day the Earth Stood Still. This is a comfortable environment where Lauren Bacall could sit in with the Goo Goo Dolls and contemplate the merits of teen rebel movies or whether the advent of sound in movies somehow began to erode our imaginations.
In any event, since that very first Saturday night in 1993 Off Beat Cinema remains true to the mission of showing the movies that must be shown…the good, the bad and the foreign. How far out can you get?
