For being the reigning Hide-n-Seek World Champion, Bigfoot sure isn’t shy when it comes to film and television. Even if we don’t count the Bigfoot erotica (yeah, that’s apparently a thing), there are 100 or more films floating around out there, undoubtedly with more to come. Many of them appear to have a budget that consists of a case of beer, a rented ape costume, and a camera borrowed from some campus A/V department. But there are some highlights worth checking out, even if only for the laughs.
Here are a few classics when it comes to Bigfoot appearances on screen.
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Drama in Arkansas
There’s a theory out there that Bigfoot comes in a variety of species. The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) is about the Fouke Monster, which is sort of the Arkansas Bigfoot. It’s a docudrama, which means it’s a made-up version of an allegedly true story. You know, sort of like reality television.
As the story goes, in 1971 a family in Fouke, Arkansas was attacked by the Fouke Monster, with at least one family member ending up in the hospital. Local reporters with the Texarkana Gazette ran a story about it. This led to a rash of other witnesses coming forward with their own stories about the creature. Eventually, this got the attention of Charles Pierce, who decided to make a movie about it all.
In the film, there are several descriptions and dramatizations of encounters with the creature. It’s supposedly about seven feet tall, covered in hair from head to toe, and has a foul odor. Sounds a lot like a guy I used to work with.
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The Legend of Boggy Creek was an independent release in 1972 and played in theaters throughout Arkansas and Louisiana. By the next year, it was picked up by a distributor, and it hit theaters and drive-ins across the country. Interestingly, despite how many viewers claimed the movie scared the daylights out of them, it has a G-rating.
Production costs ran about $160,000, and it’s made upwards of $25 million. Not a bad ROI at all.
The Bionic Bigfoot
In 1976, during the third season of the hit show Six Million Dollar Man, the titular hero faced a challenge no one could have predicted. Steve Austin, the bionic secret agent, and his handler, Oscar Goldman, are working with earthquake sensors in a mountainous region of California. Two geologists on the crew go missing, and it looks like Bigfoot got them.
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Shortly after that, Bigfoot comes calling at the camp. It gets chased off, with Austin in pursuit. They finally stop and fight, and during the scuffle, Austin yanks Bigfoot’s arm off. To everyone’s surprise, Bigfoot isn’t some sort of evolutionary offshoot, but a robot. Bigfoot grabs the arm and takes off, with Austin again chasing him. They end up inside the mountain, which turns out to be a hidden alien base. They’d built Bigfoot to be their muscle. It attacked the earthquake researchers because they were getting too close to discovering the aliens.
Eventually, Austin and Bigfoot work together to help secure the aliens’ base to keep them safe. Afterward, the aliens return the favor by wiping his memory clean of the entire ordeal.
Bigfoot returns twice more in the series. The first time around, he was played by professional wrestler Andre the Giant. The other two appearances were played by Ted Cassidy, the imposing actor perhaps best known for playing Lurch on The Addams Family.
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Tell you what. Watching Steve Austin battling Bigfoot is something most of us GenX kids will never forget.
Homegrown Tarzan
Likely inspired by the popularity of Bigfoot’s appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man, the Krofft Brothers created Bigfoot and Wildboy for part of The Krofft Supershow that aired on Saturday mornings in 1977.
The backstory for the series was that a young boy had been orphaned in the Pacific Northwest. He was found and raised by Bigfoot. The pair traveled around in the mountains, helping those in need, fighting crime, and battling aliens. Y’know, as you do. Being a show for kids, the villains are typically about as dangerous and intelligent as you’d find on Scooby Doo.
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Wildboy learned Bigfoot’s language, which sounded like some sort of vaguely generic Native American gobbledygook. When he needed his big, hairy companion, he would yell “Bi-yah-bah!” Sort of like his own version of the Tarzan yell.
Bigfoot’s appearance is sort of a cross between caveman, ape, and hippy. I’m pretty sure I saw a guy that looked just like him at a Grateful Dead show back in 1985. We can presume Wildboy taught himself how to fashion clothes from animal hides, given that Bigfoot didn’t wear anything. And Wildboy was something of a misnomer, as he looked like a California surfer in his mid-twenties.
There was a fair amount of Six Million Dollar Man DNA present in the makeup of this show. Bigfoot would run and leap in slow motion, complete with a goofy sound effect. He would leap gorges hundreds of feet across, though this was never actually shown. They usually just recycled the same footage of him jumping up and then landing, with someone else commenting on the distance traveled.
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A kid raised by Bigfoot who then partners with him to solve crimes in the Pacific Northwest sounds far-fetched, I know. But compared to the televised acid trips that many Krofft shows were, it’s pretty tame. Pull up an episode of HR Pufnstuf to see what I mean. Unlike many of their other shows, Bigfoot and Wildboy takes itself seriously. There’s no laugh track, which honestly kind of adds to the overall tongue-in-cheek aspect.
Bigfoot in the ‘Burbs
In 1987, Bigfoot returned to the big screen in a full Hollywood production called Harry and the Hendersons. It starred John Lithgow, Melinda Dillon, Don Ameche, and several others.
The Hendersons are on their way home from a vacation in the Cascade Mountains when their station wagon hits Bigfoot. Believing it’s dead, they decide to strap the body to the top of the car and bring it home. The idea is to use the body to get wealthy and famous. Nothing says family bonding like hawking a dead cryptid, right?
As it turns out, “Harry,” as the family names him, is very much alive. Shenanigans ensue as they try to help Harry get back to his home in the mountains whilst he is being pursued by the police and a Bigfoot hunter.
During its run, it earned about $50 million at the box office. That’s roughly $148 million in today’s dollars, which is nothing to sneeze at. Rick Baker also won an Academy Award for Makeup for this film. That’s right, boys and girls, this is an Oscar-winning film.
With a movie that popular, not to mention profitable, it’s not exactly surprising that they decided to spin it off into a TV show. Harry and the Hendersons, TV edition, debuted in 1991. It had the same basic premise, if not the same faces. The family runs down Bigfoot like he’s a jaywalking pedestrian during rush hour, then straps him to the car and brings him home.
But instead of making his way back to the wilderness, Harry decides to just live with the Hendersons. This leads to all sorts of wacky adventures as the family tries to keep Harry out of sight. By the third season, though, Harry was no longer in hiding and had been revealed to the world. The public loved him, of course. The family’s furniture, though, not so much. The chair budget alone must have been astronomical.
The show ran for 72 episodes across three seasons, ending in 1993.
Other Bigfoot Recommendations
There are tons of other titles you can check out, some hokier than others. Here are just a few.
Bigfoot (2012) – This one is worth watching, if only due to the presence of both Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams, along with a guest appearance by Alice Cooper. It also features the largest Bigfoot I’ve ever seen, which is fun.
Willow Creek (2013) – Directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite, this creepy film follows a couple who find far more than they bargained for when they go into the forest to document Bigfoot.
Exists (2014) – Made by one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project, this is a found-footage film that follows a group of friends as they head off to party at a remote cabin but run afoul of Bigfoot.
