For 14 years and counting, the Maverick Theater in Fullerton, California has staged a production of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the 1964 sci-fi movie that has a reputation for being… not great. Called “physically painful” by contemporary critics, the bizarre Christmas tale has repeatedly been hailed one of the worst movies ever made. Joel Robinson and his wisecracking robots mocked it in a 1991 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it also appeared in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, the 1978 book that’s considered a bad movie Bible.
Fullerton audiences, however, love Santa in space. According to a 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times, the show routinely sells out in just two days, a metric that astounds even the director and co-writer Brian Newell. “I don’t know how this became a success,” he said. “I had to beg actors to do it. They thought it was a suicide show.”
The unexpected success of the stage show mirrors the legacy of the original film, and so many other “bad” movies like it. Embraced by fans who watch them for the unintentional laughs, these films are often rescued from obscurity or from critical scorn to become beloved communal viewing experiences. Often branded a “cult” interest, bad movies entered the mainstream long ago—people listen to podcasts about them, build traditions around them, and attend sold-out midnight movie screenings to watch them over and over again.
This phenomenon would not have been possible without the influence of an unexpected source: local television. Many all-time best of the worst premiered in the 1950s and 1960s, when television sets were just becoming a fixture in American living rooms. Before that, you only had one shot to see a movie in theaters before it disappeared forever—maybe a second, if a theater near you decided to book it again, sometimes years after the fact. Unless you were a regular moviegoer, there was little opportunity to stumble upon an oddity by accident.
All that changed when early TV channels started looking for ways to pad their programming. As The Dissolve noted, “a breadth of cheap science-fiction and horror pictures produced in the 1950s… found new life courtesy of TV syndication packages.” Since these movies had no-name actors, low production values, and less than sterling reputations, it was relatively easy to acquire the rights to broadcast them on television. Eager to spin these cast-offs into something bigger, local channels turned them into “television events.” Hosts in lab coats or ghoulish make-up would present the films on a Saturday night, on programs with eerie titles like Chiller Theatre (airing on New York’s WPIX) and House of Shock (on New Orleans’ WWL-TV).