that spoofed all manner of classic B-picture clichés, became an unparalleled hit when it was relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial, unprofitable release. Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural phenomenon, it contributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie. On television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time programming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear. In the 1970s, original feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. While there had been dramatic feature presentations made especially for TV since the beginning of the medium's mass commercialization in the late 1940s, they had by and large not crossed over with the realm of the B movie. In the 1950s, the live television drama—a unique amalgam of cinematic and theatrical elements exemplified by Playhouse 90 (1956–1961)—had predominated. Over the course of the 1960s, there was a transition to prerecorded features; most of those produced by the major networks either aspired to the prestige of major motion pictures (e.g., CBS's 1965 Cinderella) or were intended as pilots for projected series. During this period, AIP produced a number of low-grade genre pictures such as Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966) intended for the first-run TV syndication market. As production of TV movies expanded with the introduction of the ABC Movie of the Week in 1969, soon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original feature presentations, time and financial factors shifted the medium progressively into B-picture territory. In a 1974 Time article, "The New B Movies," Richard Schickel begins by discussing a few recent high-priced TV features, only to argue that "as with the old films, so with TV movies: the quick, deft westerns, mysteries and action melodramas that depend on well-established conventions may in the end exert a larger claim on our attention than their more pretentiously publicized rivals...Convenient to turn on, easy to flick off, movies made for TV approximate the conditions under which all movies used to be chanced by audiences years ago...when at least half the pleasure of movie-going derived precisely from the fact that no sense of cultural occasion was attached to that simple, inexpensive act." While many TV films of the 1970s were action-oriented genre pictures of a type familiar from contemporary cinematic B production, the small screen also saw a revival of