Kolchak The Night Stalker (1974)

Original Air Date: September 20, 1974
Run Time: 50 minutes

Have you ever stumbled across, as an adult, a TV series or movie you used to watch as a kid? Sometimes it fills you with a sense of nostalgia to re-connect with the scenes you remember seeing while you were growing up, but sometimes the experience can also be a rude awakening: can you believe that this sort of thing actually used to entertain you? What were you thinking? There’s always a chance your experience will end negatively instead of positively when re-discovering something from your past that you used to know and love.

Recently, I was able to catch up, via the magic of DVD collections, with a TV show I watched on the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel during my impressionable years as a young teenager, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” To be clear: when I watched the show in my youth, I was watching it in syndication; the show enjoyed its original short-lived run from 1974-1975, building of the success of two made-for-TV movies about the titular character, Carl Kolchak, a reporter with a penchant for investigating stories of the strange and paranormal. Fortunately for me, my current experience “catching up” with the show was every bit as rewarding as I remember my original viewing experience was.