Individuals who grew up in the Green Bay area during the 1980s or 1990s most likely spent their Saturday late nights with Ned the Dead on either WLUK (Channel 11) or later on WACY (Channel 32).
Ned the Dead is really mild-mannered Steve Brenzel, who many might also know as the voice of Van Vreede’s commercials, which have been on the air for as long as most of Green Bay residents can remember.
A little history is likely needed; when television first came onto the scene, there were far too many hours to fill on the air vs. the number of television programs there were, so Universal and other studios opened up their film vaults and sold their movies to television stations all over the country. The most famous of these is known as the SHOCK THEATER package from Universal, but other studios followed suit, and movies on late-night television became a normal thing. With horror and sci-fi movies often relegated to late-night hours or Saturday afternoons, this led to the emergence of the first horror hosts, friendly, jocular figures who would accompany viewers through the film, making humorous commentary along the way.
Most larger cities had their own hosts who catered to that specific market, and Steve Brenzel was Ned the Dead for Green Bay and the surrounding territories, and soon became a part of Green Bay’s history.
Brenzel would show movies of varying quality while he piped in every commercial break from his makeshift “ticket booth.” He could make fun of the movie, ramble on about some pointless thing he found amusing, or simply talk about the Packers. Running from late 1983 through early 1989 on Channel 11 (WLUK) and then being revived in 1996 and running to 1999 on that same channel, Chiller Theater was a staple of Saturday night viewing. Finding he was not done with Ned the Dead, Brenzel revived the character again on Channel 32 (WACY) in 2005 for another decade.
Brenzel started at the suggestion of the program director of WLUK (Dave Commissar) in 1983. WLUK had bought a huge package of movies to show, and while they loved having Jaws or The Exorcist, they also had lots of movies that they knew no one would watch, such as Spooks Run Wild, Godzilla’s Revenge, House of Long Shadows, and so on. It was decided that to use these movies, they should adopt a style similar to what Vampira had done in the 1950s and have a horror host. Brenzel sums up how he was chosen to be the on-camera face of this endeavor. “Who should we get to do it? Who don’t we have to pay? I was very outgoing, very energetic, and somewhat wild. They thought that I might have what it takes to be bad on television,” Brenzel said.
The landscape of television in general and Green Bay television in particular was a very different place in 1983. WLUK was the NBC affiliate at the time, and they had Saturday Night Live, and all of the other channels simply went off the air after the news. It was a dead zone after midnight, and that is where Brenzel would thrive. “It was an immediate success. People absolutely went crazy. They loved it, and it ended up that it was so goofy you couldn’t go wrong. I could have been like a goat on there as long as I was doing something; it’s static everywhere else,” Brenzel said, looking back on that period with great awe and nostalgia.
Ned the Dead became a cultural touchstone in the area. He was filled with the fun and energy that could only come from a place of sincerity, and that grabbed the local viewers and held on tight. “There was a period in Green Bay when I could go anywhere and not dress as Ned, and people knew that I was. I could literally go into a bar that would not represent my lifestyle like a heavy biker bar, and they’d take one look at me and scream NED!,” Brenzel said.
Other viewers who caught Ned the Dead at a young age were transfixed by him and his rebellious, fun attitude. “It was crazy for me to see at a relatively young age something like this because I didn’t realize there was anything so goodheartedly transgressive out there,” said Pierre Jacque, who grew up with Ned the Dead.
For all of the success that Ned the Dead had, the times were changing, and the aforementioned television landscape was moving away from this kind of local programming. “The death of my kind of entertainment, which is locally produced broadcast entertainment, was killed by infomercials. Once they could sell my two-hour slot for four different infomercials and make far more than they would have made trying to sell my show to like, you know, Jim’s hardware store, it was over,” said Brenzel.
Indeed, it was the late 90s now, and the whole horror host boom was at its endpoint. Brenzel gave up Ned the Dead for a period of years until he landed at Channel 32 in Green Bay, where he revived Ned once again, this time as “Ned the Dead’s Demented Drive In.” Unlike before, when he had cast off movies that no one wanted, now he had mainstream films like The Road Warrior, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Fright Night. However, unlike in the past, the audience appeared to have moved on, and after only a single year, Ned the Dead’s Demented Drive In was discontinued.
Chiller Theater, the real name of the Ned the Dead show, stayed at Channel 32 and became something it never had been before… a full-blown show. Now, Ned had a crew, a floor director, a second camera operator, and even a technical director, along with a co-host, Dr. Moreau. Brenzel said, “Back in the day, everything was recorded ‘as live’. We did not edit the segments after recording them. Over time, the number of cameras increased and the number of crew members varied.”
Brenzel likens his crew to escaped inmates from an asylum, but loves the uniqueness that the crew brought to the show. “There was never a show except for ours, collectively, with all the people I worked with, where we’re cutting to the crew all the time. The crew’s doing nutty stuff. They’re on all the time, and people get to know who the crew is. Keep in mind that taping my show was generally a pain in the butt for the crew. They had to haul out my stupid “spanking plank” and all of the dorky stuff that we used for the show. They were always fun and kind, and they gave me tons of energy. I remember many sassy moments that I cannot share in their full disturbing context,” Brenzel said.
Brenzel believes that he recorded well over 1000 shows in his time as Ned the Dead. In all that time, Brenzel still has not fully realized how much of a part of pop culture he has become. “I can never do justice to describing how cool it was to be Ned the Dead. I still believe that I am the luckiest living human for being given the chance to do it. People were so kind to me and gave me so much love for something that should have been so insignificant. I can honestly say that in all my years, I never dissed a single soul who wanted to interact with Ned. I always made sure that anyone who engaged me as Ned knew that I was grateful for their time and attention,” Brenzel said.
Brenzel, a former writer for the Fourth Estate in the late 1970s and graduate of UWGB, wanted to add the final note about the legacy of Ned the Dead. “All of the things that create the wallpaper that we all see in our lives… it’s all still up on the walls. I’m perfectly happy to know that I made a difference in the lives of a whole bunch of people. Someone who worked at a store that I shopped at, he was in the meat department, one day he said, ‘Ned, I just gotta tell you, you know, my brother, he got sick, and he was dying, and the thing that we did together was to watch your show’ you could take every bit of everything that I ever did in my life and pitch it aside for the chance to do that one time for one human.”
