Four men in face paint and leather stood in a California amusement park, acting out a battle with an unseen enemy. This was Kiss, the New York rock band who had spent the years since 1973 turning their concerts into comic-book theater, and on October 28, 1978, NBC aired their first and only feature film, 'Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.' The band had already released a comic book about themselves the year before, part of a plan to become real superheroes. Now they had a $3 million prime-time movie to prove it. The name Kiss came from Paul Stanley, who remembered Peter Criss mentioning his earlier band Lips. For their first show, at the Popcorn Club in Queens on January 30, 1973, the group earned fifty dollars for two sets.
A cartoon studio makes a rock movie
The film was made by Hanna-Barbera, the studio famous for Saturday-morning cartoons, and it showed. Kiss played themselves as superpowered heroes battling a mad inventor inside Magic Mountain. The shoot in May 1978 was rushed, the script was rewritten constantly, and the four musicians were given a crash course in acting just before cameras rolled. The writers had met each member to catch how they talked, but that did not stop the trouble.
Ace Frehley, the Spaceman, read an early draft and found his character had almost no lines, just gestures and sounds. He threatened to quit the project, so the writers added dialogue for him. Even then, Frehley walked off the set several times during filming, arguing with the director. In one scene he abandoned, a stunt double named Alan Oliney stood in for him. Peter Criss, the Catman, made his own exit after filming wrapped, refusing to take part in post-production.
Dubbed voices and one real song
That left Criss's speaking voice in the movie dubbed by actor Michael Bell. The only place the real Peter Criss is heard is a quiet acoustic performance of the ballad 'Beth,' the song that had given Kiss their first top-10 hit in 1976. It is a strange split: the drummer's voice replaced in every scene, then restored for one song. The band's stage show had always mixed fire-breathing, blood-spitting and smoking guitars, but the movie could not decide if these were rock stars or cartoon characters.
The concert scenes were real, at least. On May 19, 1978, Kiss played on the Magic Mountain parking lot for 8,000 fans, with tickets given away by radio station KTNQ. That footage gave the film its energy, but the story around it stayed clumsy. Gene Simmons later compared the whole thing to 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' a science-fiction movie known for its tiny budget. The band's feelings about the film stayed mixed for decades.
What could have killed a lesser group instead became part of the Kiss legend. Fans embraced 'Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park' as a cult curiosity, proof that the band would try anything to sell their superhero image. Kiss had started in a Queens club in 1973 with fewer than ten people watching. Five years later they were on network television, painted like demons and spacemen, fighting a villain in a theme park. The movie was a mess, but the ambition behind it was not. By then the band had already earned 14 platinum albums, three of them multi-platinum. That first fifty-dollar night in Queens had grown into one of the biggest-selling catalogs in American rock.
The film never made Kiss movie stars, and they never tried anything like it again. But the band kept the comic-book idea at the center of everything: four characters, each with a face and a role, Starchild, Demon, Spaceman, Catman. The TV movie was the moment that idea stretched too far and snapped back. It remains the strangest artifact of a band that built its career on being too much.