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Local Legends presents |
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Local Legends recently found itself in need of a good mortician (don't ask...) but we dug up Grimsley instead. The Grim one himself informed us of not only his very reasonable rates for disposal --ah- graveside services --but told us a bit about how the whole business started in the first place! We were so excited that we hope someday you too will be able to "use his services". However for now we'll just let our dear not-quite-departed Robert Foster a.k.a. Grimsley tell you his life (and death) story in his own grim words below. |
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Robert grew up in
the Old As a child he lived
in a fantasy world, prone to a form of sleepwalking called night terrors.
Completely aware of everything around him, he would be caught in a recurring
nightmare that would resume exactly where he had left off the previous night.
Dreams of flying through his house at night were so convincing he believed
them. |
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Over summer
vacations Robert was left at the Disney Studios while his father locked
himself in to complete scripts he would direct: Davy Crockett and Zorro,
among others. His office was just to one side of Walt's. Robert had free
reign of the lot: the Nautilus submarine and giant squid from 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea, secret plans for some Park, scale models, and drawings for a
Haunted Mansion that seemed to change every day. |
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Walt would be over
for dinner and ask his mother what she thought of this place he was building.
Little Robert made his father ask Walt to put dinosaurs in the park. Without
skipping a beat he picked up the phone and ordered Audio-Animatronics. When
Disney ran into the red, Robert gave his father 13 cents he had saved up to
bring to him. Walt got very emotional when he saw it. His father dragged
him into the theatre to see House of Usher which Grimsley
would host many years later. Going downstairs one morning, he ran into the
actress who was buried alive in the film. Myrna Fahey, was
his sister's best friend. He found Barbara Steele's telephone number and
called, stunned when she very politely invited him to visit but he lost his
nerve. |
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His mother brought
him to the set of Comedy of Terrors
where he met Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Basil Rathbone had fallen asleep in a coffin. Bowing to Boris Karloff,, Robert asked if he
could bring him some tea. "That's quite all right, sonny, I'm just made
up to look old, see? For his twenty-first
birthday his girlfriend wanted him to spend the weekend up north for a
concert. He would have been sitting in her seat when the car went out of
control, killing her exactly as she had described in a childhood nightmare.
Weeks later he was on a lonely stretch of road at night when she appeared,
the first and only time he had actually seen an apparition. Years previous,
they had both sworn who ever died first would come back to the other. |
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He moved into a
house that was completely covered in ivy and vines, even up to the windows.
It was haunted by some presence he could only hear. Footsteps were coming
from his bedroom, and he had lived there alone for years. Not that he ever
wanted to host horror films, he just knew he would
be doing it, even with an incurable, terrifying shyness. A director sensed
his near pathological fear and cast him as the lead in the stage production
of SCROOGE! One night after the
lights came on he saw wheelchairs filled with
children with birth defects. They didn't have hands or arms. They were
applauding with hooks and pinchers. |
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In the early 70s he
was MCing horror stage shows in essentially what
would become the Grimsley costume. Anthony B Cassara, an executive at Channel 5, suggested he host
their Halloween Special, Horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee and Peter
Cushing. Without Tony there never would have been a show. There never would
have been anything. Grimsley's armchair was made
from a prop found on the lot. Many years later he recognized the same piece,
a mirror used in a key scene of The Ten
Commandments. |
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Grimsley comic art.
Roger Holquin, a fantastic artist, was a huge fan
of Grimsley (the very first fan letter he
received), going back to the premiere on Channel 5. He was doing these
sketches while watching the shows. |
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His father had
redirected the character into someone much more nasty
but he died the night before Grimsley was signed
and there must have been some demons at work because Robert had just lost his
best friend, his father, and was doing a dark comedy about death. Before they even
built the set he could see it. Everything had a fallen elegance to it,
cobwebbed remnants of a palace now in ruins. It had become a mortuary. He was
in a sense a doomed romantic, half in love with easeful death. |
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Don Reed, the
Dracula Society and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror were
always there to help. At a personal appearance someone had put bright
balloons all over the stage. Grimsley jumped up and
down, popping all of them, screaming insults and "I am not a bloody
clown!" They loved it. And the series would
not exist were it not for Sue Forrest. She simply would not give up, fiercely
determined to have Grimsley on the air every
Saturday night and she never let anyone say no. Sue wrote some of the best
lines. |
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What Grimsley went after was the exact opposite of a host. He
was an insufferable snob, egotistical, immensely stupid, very accident-prone,
and, oddly enough, dead. Tried to have him fall down and get hurt at least
three times every show. He brought cabbage, tomatoes or cake for the crew.
Not to eat. To throw at him. Two shows were taped every two weeks, followed
by Live News and the poor anchors would just wander in with their mouths
open, staring at the filth (and probably smelling) what Grimsley
had left behind after the taping, the soggy bloodstained cake and sticky
cobwebs that had gotten onto their set. |
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The theme song was
written in one night. He walked into the studio at Warner Brothers Music,
recorded it on the first take, posed for publicity photos with the President,
and went back home to catch up on his sleep. |
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The character was
refined into - suppose refined is not a word that goes into the same sentence
as Grimsley - he wanted an elegantly crass look to
the show though there were some gothic undercurrents. The original opening
had a plastic castle bombarded by bubbles and a flying pig. It was really an
elephant but the trunk was so short it looked like a pig. The audio man put
in pig noises as it flew past the camera. They used the fog machine to create
mist in the background. While reruns aired over the summer, Robert went to |
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Grimsley was the unwilling victim of a
cruel twist of fate, a dead mortician celebrating the very worst of human
nature. (Grimsley very nearly became a kiddie show. A program director at Channel 5 suggested
this idea. The idea of teaching toddlers how to embalm would have been a bit
strange - but then again - this was Hollywood...)The audience seemed to be
Women 18-49, according to the ratings and shares, but there were senior
citizens, small children who stayed up far past bed-time, and many
professionals in the funeral industry. Everyone at |
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Grimsley was very rarely recognized out
of makeup. This even found its way into a Congressional Report in |
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He told them the
show was in 3-D which of course it wasn't and pretended "Everyone else
has their glasses, why didn't you send me the money?" He re-dubbed part
of a movie with his voice for the girl and used a female for the man. He
pompously opened Grimsleyland ... Where You Can
Bury Your Friends and Have Fun at the Same Time. He sold Numbkins,
little furry pets guaranteed to die the first week, a Carwash for Bodies (Hot
Wax is Extra), and Dog Toupees for balding poodles. He played Pink Elephants
on Parade over The Crawling Eye, colourized pink.
One movie had a dwarf with fangs running into the camera and you heard the
Munchkin Song from Wizard of Oz. In |
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There was the Basic
Intelligence Test. Your television set is:
Because of time,
they almost never blocked out a scene. Poor cameramen went absolutely mad but
who needed him to be in the frame all the time? All the scripts had the
camera tight on his face so it was much more intimate and unlike anything
else on television. Grimsley has hazel eyes with
flecks of gold so those close-ups were almost hypnotic. Parents said their
children started watching and could finally see horror films without having
nightmares. Some little girl wrote I'd never seen Grandfather smile. Last
Saturday I heard him laughing all the way down the hall. I walked in and he
had Grimsley on. |
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Care to visit with Grimsley? Just click on
the following links: Grimsley 1 Grimsley 2 Grimsley 3 Grimsley 4 Grimsley 5 You'll need real player to view these
clips. You can download one for free at www.real.com |
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The best shows were
written late at night during long walks with a tape recorder. The character
came to life without any conscious effort and long after he had left Channel
9 the crews spoke of him in hushed tones, almost bowing their heads, he was
told. Grimsley was real. He existed even in death,
and how could you kill him? He was already dead. There was never at any time
a credit on the show to say who played him. The most it ever said was Grimsley Courtesy of Grimsley
Mortuary. |
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Grimsley premiered in 1975, left the
airwaves in 1978 over the syndication split had been changed, encouraged rumours of his own death, and was besieged by telephone
calls from fans who said there was nothing on television Saturday night
anymore. There was this incredible show of loyalty. The next few years - and
his life - were saved by the female fans who kept Grimsley
alive. They will always be remembered with the deepest affection and were the
sole reason he did not destroy himself completely. And then of course after
being off the air one vanished into obscurity. But Bloody Hell. Even after
all those years, Grimsley was going to come back
from the dead, not once but TWICE. |
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They were going to
shoot everything at W. C. Fields's mansion which
surely would have been magic. Sue Forrest and her then-husband Terry Chambers
retaped all of the shows. Grimsley's
television run encompassed Channel 5's Halloween Special, Channel 9's Halloween
Specials, and one show every Saturday night from 1976 to 1978. There were 220
re-taped wrap-arounds (27 new shows) which have as
yet to air and they are out there somewhere. Where is the master? They should
run in cyberspace. So many lifetimes
after the show, someone will be seen wearing a Grimsley
T-Shirt. On Sunset Strip he overheard Grimsley - We
used to watch him all the time. |
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Robert never used a
sequencer with any synthesizer but when he played the keys hard, the music
actually squeaked. Hence, SQUEAKQUENCER. His son Charles who produced the
first four albums came up with the name. All tracks are
recorded live without mixes or overdubs. (Interestingly enough, the first SqueakQuencer albums to arrive on the East Coast had been
sent with props from Grimsley. Purely by accident,
someone had used a box of embalming fluid which had leaked all over the CDs,
a molten mass of runny plastic that smelled of formaldehyde ... unplayable
but, happily, preserved indefinitely.) Music critics compared the music to
Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre "but much
darker" SQUEAKQUENCER is a sound all its own: constantly shifting
timings, dark undercurrents, complex rhythm patterns, interweaving layers of
acoustic and electric guitar. In some of the sessions, he played so hard his
fingers were bleeding. Still shy, he is
absolutely terrified of crowds, but the music will inevitably force him to
play live. He loves his new girlfriend Stephanie Payne (Dark Arts, Puppetina) Truly, Madly, Deeply. |
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Hear Squeakquencer! Download Real Players for free at www.real.com! |
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SQUEAKQUENCER ON CD Night of the Almost Living But Not Quite
Exactly Dead (Grimsley is on the cover, with a
ticket to an amusement park for zombies inside) It's ... (The whole thing glows in the
dark) Mousetronaut (Has rats singing) Frankenstein: Sex Music For Robots
(Special glasses are inside for viewing I Was Eaten by Zombies in the Mall
(Secret zombie device hidden inside) Wanker (The first album in Scent-O-Rama,
with Scratch and Sniff Cards inside) If there is one thing he cannot stand,
it is artists who use gimmicks on their albums. He is presently recording
final tracks for the seventh album. SQUEAKQUENCER will eventually be
available at places like Aron's Records and Amoeba.
Right now they are all at the loft on Anyone wishing to contact Grimsley or obtain a CD may e-mail him at: squeakquencer@yahoo.com |
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return |
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