Some sad news hit Tuesday night as Chicago legend Jerry G. Bishop, also known as “Svengoolie”, passed on. He was 77.

Media columnist Robert Feder reports that Bishop passed away over the weekend, ABC News alerted us.

He created the Svengoolie character to introduce horror movies in the 1970s. He later moved to San Diego where he got into the restaurant business.

Explains Feder, in 1969, Bishop joined WFLD-Channel 32 ostensibly as a staff announcer. Two years later he transformed his off-camera role as the voice of “Screaming Yellow Theater” into the live persona of a wildly funny and enormously popular horror movie host named Svengoolie. Rich Koz, Bishop’s writer and protege, eventually inherited the role, which he made his own and continues to this day.