Seventy years ago today, Channel 56 — the oldest UHF license in Boston, went on the air August 31, 1953 as WTAO-TV and eventually becoming WLVI-TV56 in 1974.

The station responsible for many of our Saturday afternoons spent indoors in front of the television; as it pertains to the origins of Creature Double Feature reported below, per Wikipedia:

“Beginning in 1972 a station in the Kaiser Broadcasting (later Field Communications) chain, WKBG (Channel 56; WLVI after The Boston Globe sold their share back to Kaiser in 1975) aired its collection of Godzilla movies—one per week at 4 p.m. on Saturday under the title, The 4 O’Clock Movie. They cycled through their collection twice, noticing that the broadcasts were especially popular with youngsters. Then, they started showing the films at midnight, calling it Creature Feature. The ratings became so popular that the show was moved to noon to increase its ratings. However, it was in direct competition with WCVB-TV’s Candlepin Bowling and was moved to the 2 p.m. time slot. Its popularity grew and they tweaked the title to Creature Double Feature and changed its start time to 1 p.m. The show quickly became a staple of the station’s Saturday programming schedule during the 1970s and early-1980s. Although the exact date of the final show is currently unknown, it seems to have petered out sometime in 1983.”