Jason and I went out to breakfast that morning, and sometime before noon I left for the Hyatt Regency O’Hare. After I arrived, I saw the registration line and heard someone call out my name. It was my friends, Don and Bunny (Ron and Angie), and we wasted no time catching up. These two have carried Flashback Weekend VIP passes to all 20+ of these shows and are like royalty here. The show’s organizers, Mike and Mia Kerz, are all about loyalty. Unlike many horror conventions helmed by a company/corporation, this is privately run and helps support their Midway Drive-in in Sterling, Illinois. 

The Svengoolie crew wasn’t set to arrive until 6, so I hoped to get their passes, prepare their private hotel room (set up my fan, get the air going, open the drapes, etc), and possibly get some autographs before they got there. I picked up everyone’s wristbands and then, joined by friends Don, Bunny, Dave, and Brenda, hung out and talked. 

VIP pass carriers get early access to the event, so at 2 p.m. my friends went inside while I searched for “Mayor” Don Johnston. Don’s been mentioned in this blog many times in the past 16 years and used to work for the Crowne Plaza Hotel across the street. They used to be Flashback Weekend’s venue until they moved to the Hyatt. I suspect this may have had something to do with the Crowne hosting the Days of the Dead horror con but can’t confirm. The point is that they moved and took Don with them. As I said, the Kerzs are all about loyalty.

Don’s a long-time friend of Svengoolie and Jim Roche (Sven’s producer) and devotes much of his time at Flashback Weekend seeing to their needs. He was also the man I needed to see to get their room keys, which the Sven crew was graciously allowing me to spend the night in. You have no idea how grateful I was for that. Remember that tornado I mentioned? The flooding also caused the hot water to malfunction, so all I had that week were 30-second, cold showers. I REALLY wanted to get into that room and get cleaned up before the crew’s arrival, but it was not to be. 

Don’s a big guy but flies around events like a bat out of Hell. Pinning him down was like herding cats, and I wasn’t in the mood for it. Worse, every time I’d run into a friend and mentioned I was looking for him, they’d all say, “Who, Don? We just saw him.”  Speaking of friends, I met up with Svengoolie-superfan, Nanette Kier, early on. Nanette is a great lady and very talented – sharing her amazing work with other fans on social media. She and I shared a YouTube discussion on the Mr. C Dives In channel after C2E2 earlier this year (although you can’t see me since I couldn’t get my new laptop’s camera to work).

And speaking of Chris Connolly, he was there too, of course. We’d just met up a few weeks earlier at the Alternate Reality comic book shop to see Brian Bernardoni’s Svengoolie coffin replica and then out for lunch. Chris is a good guy and someone whose opinion I’ve come to respect. It’s great when Svengoolie-centric content creators stick together.

By this time, the dealer room was open to us regular pass holders, and I decided to look for Don in the dealer room. Honestly, I should have titled this post, “Flashback Weekend 2026: The Search for Don Johnston.” The items I brought for signing were packed in my bag and still in the car pending the room opening up, so, despite my ambitions, I didn’t get anything signed on Friday.

I left the dealer room where I finally found Don hanging around a makeshift “Game Show” setup.

 

Don told me to hang tight and then promptly disappeared again. An hour later, he told me to get my stuff and wait for him in the lobby by the hotel registration desk. Once again, Flashback Weekend was sharing space with fans of the much larger National Sports Collector’s Convention taking place at the Donald E. Stephens Center next door. So there I sat for nearly 40 minutes having a conversation with an old jock from Ohio while harboring arsenic thoughts about Don. Incidentally, last year I mentioned how we could barely navigate the Hyatt on Saturday evening due to the sports fans laying out their baseball cards on the floor for trading. This year the hotel nipped all that in the bud. I did catch a couple of people doing some covert trading early the next morning, but it was nothing like last year.

In hindsight, poor Don was working his butt off and had much more important things to do than attend to my needs. Unfortunately, a week of sleep deprivation and overheating had severely compromised my reasoning skills. I’m just thankful to my friend Jason for making the previous couple of days bearable, and to all my pals at Flashback for keeping me upbeat. Otherwise, I’d probably be spending this week writing apologies rather than blogs. 

By the time I finally got the room, Jim texted they were almost at the hotel. I alerted Don and zoomed back downstairs. I stepped outside to the vendor lot, and Svengoolie’s director, Chris Faulkner, pulled in moments later, followed by the rest of the crew, who had the arduous task of navigating the Lollapalooza music festival traffic to get here. As a side note, in 2027 Flashback Weekend is scheduled for June 25th instead of their customary late July/early August dates, so hopefully that means no longer having to contend with Lollapalooza or any sports conventions.

It was nice seeing Rich Koz/Svengoolie again. He and Jim had just attended San Diego Comic Con the weekend before, and I was concerned about him pushing things. Chris and the technical crew immediately went out to shoot B-roll while Don and I escorted Svengoolie up to the room so he could rest up for his scheduled photo op. While I don’t really need to be present during Sven’s photo ops, if they allow me to observe, I do enjoy it. Last year I got to stand next to Robert Englund for a bit there, and that was pretty cool. 

Svengoolie was appearing both Friday and Saturday, and his biggest responsibility on Friday was hosting “The Live Horror Talk Show to Die For!” I believe Mike Kerz came up with this idea a few years back and, honestly, I think it’s been working really well. Basically, Svengoolie adopts the role of a late-night talk show host while his special guests sit in the chairs next to him and answer questions. This year, the guests were David Arquette from the Scream films and David Naughton from An American Werewolf in London (1981).

Don took us through the private catacombs of the Hyatt to a back entrance that opened to the panel room stage. David Naughton was already there waiting, and he and Svengoolie conversed a bit. 

Meanwhile, the long table used for panels was being replaced with a desk and chairs. A Halloween II discussion had just ended, and the actors exited through the same door we were standing in. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Dick Warlock (Michael Myers in the film) greeted Sven warmly, and they had a brief discussion. He’d been interviewed by Sven a couple of years ago. 

The biggest reaction came from Pamela Susan Shoop (nurse Karen). As soon as she saw him, she gave him a big hug and told him how much she loved the show. Both Shoop and her mother, actress Julie Bishop, have had films presented by Svengoolie, and Shoop told him how much she appreciated his discussing her mother and their relationship while providing film facts on his show. 

It wasn’t long before Svengoolie awaited his introduction, which I filmed behind the scenes. After Svengoolie got onstage, the rest of us entered and walked straight to the back of the room. 

David Naughton was the first guest, and it went really well. I met Naughton in 2011 and told him about Svengoolie and his “Dr. Rabees” parody that I’d grown up with. Naughton’s musical “I’m a Pepper” Dr. Pepper commercials were very popular in the early’80s. Svengoolie (back then called “Son of Svengoolie”) mashed it with Naughton’s werewolf transformation in An American Werewolf in London. I remember taping this segment back in the day on one of those large cassette recorders and playing it for my friends in grade school. When I met Naughton some thirty years later, I had him sign something for Svengoolie, and Sven, in turn, gave my blog and me a blurb in his newsletter. This was about a year and a half before we became friends and he’d bring me behind the scenes with him. 

I was surprised that after fifteen years, he remembered this and actually mentioned that earlier meeting with Naughton. He then proceeded to play the segment for him live during the show. The indirect mention and seeing Naughton watch that old Dr. Rabees commercial “live” was not only surreal but the highlight of this show as a lifelong Rich Koz fan. 

David Arquette was an even more animated guest than Naughton. I have to say that of all the Flashback Weekend “Talk Shows,” this year was the absolute best, and that’s saying a lot considering how great the others were. 

After the show, we all rested in the room and discussed how everything went. Needless to say, everyone was extremely pleased. The crew left their equipment, and Svengoolie entrusted me with the care of his official rubber chicken. Jim joked about me putting it on eBay as soon as they left. 

I walked with the crew back to their cars, agreeing to meet them at this same spot the next day around noon. By the time they drove off, I was so overtired I was starting to see “double.” Knowing my friends would want to meet up for drinks, I set my phone to “Do Not Disturb.” I took a twenty-minute hot shower and crashed. I put my head on the pillow around 9:45 pm and opened my eyes sometime after 8.

When I turned my phone alerts back on, I saw that sometime during my slumber my apartment’s power had finally been restored. Refreshed and in a much better frame of mind, I was ready for Day Two of Flashback Weekend.

Coming Up…the Costume Contest goes off the rails!

~Dave