In the first draft of this page, I wrote:

     I'm vague on the dates of this show, but certain of     
     the title and time. KGO's 3:30 afteroon movie
     appointed each day of the week it's own specific film
     genre, and Thursday was reserved for CHILLERS FROM
     SCIENCE FICTION.

After 40 years, childhood memories get a bit unreliable, I suppose. Thanks to scoring some mid-1960s TV Guides on eBay, I've been able to confirm that Chillers From Science Fiction was indeed the title of the show, but that it aired on Tuesday afternoons at 5:00 pm or 5:30 pm as part of The Big Show.

The Big Show was an umbrella title for whatever KGO-TV felt like showing in the weekday 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm slot. In late 1962, Tuesdays had Chillers From Science Fiction followed by Bat Masterson, a lineup that lasted until the summer of 1963.

The ads which ran in the week or so before the first broadcast I saw showed clips of a brontosaurus-ish dinosaur crushing cars and radiating concentric circles of light from its forehead - mayhem enough to fire the imagination of a 7 year old! I remember asking my mother "When's Tuesday? Is it Tuesday yet?" over and over again as the week wore on. After what seemed like an even longer wait than the agony before Christmas or Hallowe'en, the sturdily archetypal dinosaur-amuck picture THE GIANT BEHEMOTH became the very first science fiction movie I ever watched. In fact, unless there's some Disney matinee I'm forgetting about, it was the very first movie I ever watched entirely from beginning to end. I was, of course, hooked. It's possible the listing at left is for that very broadcast, but it is from months into the run of the show, and my ailing memory is that THE GIANT BEHEMOTH was the premiere screening of the show, so perhaps this was a repeat. Some future eBay purchase will no doubt clear this up.

Although the show was called Chillers From Science Fiction, in practice - like every other genre show on TV - they never distinguished between science fiction and horror. Over the next few years, I raced home from school every Tuesday to have my subconscious polluted by THE WASP WOMAN, KRONOS, THE INDESTRUCTABLE MAN, CALTIKI THE IMMORTAL MONSTER, GOG, THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, NOT OF THIS EARTH, and so many of the Universal classics that they all ran together in my mind until I rediscovered them a few years later on Shock-It-To-Me Theater and Creature Features.

By the week of May 14, 1966, Tuesday was no longer reserved for science fiction - the 5:00 pm film on Tuesday, May 17 was the musical, HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL? The next day's slot is filled with THE SPIDER, but whether this was promoted as a chiller from science fiction (or anywhere else) is anybody's guess.