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At last, my sad quest ends! That's right: someone has finally put some snippets of footage from "Gigglesnort Hotel" on YouTube. I've checked off-and-on for the last couple years to no avail, and was starting to think that I had imagined the whole thing in some sort of fever dream. Except of course, that others on the web remember this completely weird TV show as well.

"Gigglesnort Hotel" was an undefinably strange childrens TV show that originated from Chicago in the mid-to-late 70's, and was syndicated in other areas of the country. In Milwaukee it was on at 6:30 AM weekdays, and for a couple months in 1978 (I was 11 ) I woke up early to watch it, or rather, let it flow over me. I can't explain what I found interesting about it. It was cheap, the puppets stank, the jokes were terrible, and the sets were made from painted cardboard. And yet, me and a couple of my buddies were briefly obsessed with it. I suppose it may have been one of my first dips into the waters of irony, I don't know.

I'm really glad that the clip has some footage of the character I was most fascinated with: The Talking Blob. The Talking Blob was a lump of clay on a pedestal molded to have hands and a head, and they stuck paper eyes and mouths on him to indicate expressions. He didn't really "talk", either. Rather, he whimpered, moaned and gurgled in an unintelligble fashion. Stranger still, the human host of the show (series creator / madman Bill Jackson) would mold the Blob's features on camera, moving his nose and eyes around as the Blob moaned in apparent agony! This is the stuff of young nightmares.

The clip is an interview with Bill Jackson at some TV awards show interspersed with clips from the show, so you'll have to sit through some crummy stuff to get to the crummy stuff. It's not long, though. Enjoy!


If you want more info on this epoch-shattering TV show (and why wouldn't you?), the website TV Party has a rather in-depth examination on creator Bill Jackson and the show here. If anyone else remembers this masterpiece and found themselves under it's hypnotic spell, feel free to comment.