Richard E. Dyszel, known professionally as Dick Dyszel, is an American

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...

personality, known for his television alter-egos Count Gore De Vol and

Captain 20 WDCA (channel 20), branded on-air as Fox 5 Plus, is a television station in Washington, D.C., airing programming from MyNetworkTV. It is owned and operated by Fox Television Stations alongside Fox outlet WTTG (channel 5). WDCA and WTTG share ...

Biography

The

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

native attended

Southern Illinois University Southern Illinois University is a system of public universities in the southern region of the U.S. state of Illinois. Its headquarters is in Carbondale, Illinois. Board of trustees The university is governed by the nine member SIU Board of Tr ...

and graduated with a degree in radio-TV. He became the local

Bozo the Clown Bozo the Clown, sometimes billed as "Bozo, The World's Most Famous Clown", is a clown character created for children's entertainment, widely popular in the second half of the 20th century. He was introduced in the United States in 1946, and to te ...

at WDXR-TV in

Paducah Paducah ( ) is a home rule-class city in and the county seat of McCracken County, Kentucky. The largest city in the Jackson Purchase region, it is located at the confluence of the Tennessee and the Ohio rivers, halfway between St. Louis, Miss ...

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia ...

, before moving on to

WDCA WDCA (channel 20), branded on-air as Fox 5 Plus, is a television station in Washington, D.C., airing programming from MyNetworkTV. It is owned and operated by Fox Television Stations alongside Fox outlet WTTG (channel 5). WDCA and WTTG shar ...

in Washington in 1972. He was a jack of all trades at WDCA, functioning as the station's announcer, as kids' show host

as well as Washington's second Bozo, after

Willard Scott Willard Herman Scott Jr. (March 7, 1934 – September 4, 2021) was an American weather presenter, radio and television personality, actor, narrator, clown, comedian, and author, whose broadcast career spanned 68 years, 65 years with the NBC br ...

had originated the local version of the character. The

horror host A horror host is a person who acts as the host or presenter of a program where horror films and low-budget B movies are shown on television or the Internet. Usually the host assumes a horror-themed persona, often a campy or humorous one. Generall ...

character of Count Gore de Vol (whose name was either a play on author and native Washingtonian

Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, erudition, and patrician manner. Vidal was bisexual, and in his novels and e ...

or the name of a prominent Washington D.C. funeral home, "De Vol") originated as a character called "M.T. Graves" on the Bozo show. He stayed on as the Count until 1987 when the station ceased local production. In 1998, Dyszel presented a weekly show on the Internet at Count Gore.com, featuring Count Gore hosting streaming video of movies and shorts as well as celebrity interviews. In 2005 he returned to the DC area, built a high-definition studio and expanded the role of Count Gore de Vol to include live-hosted horror movies at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland. This series started on February 3, 2013, with the 40th anniversary celebration of his first hosted horror movie on WDCA-TV—''House of Frankenstein''. He owns and operates Sounds Fabulous Entertainment, providing a virtual DJ system named George that he developed for small-venue parties. As Count Gore de Vol, he is a guest at 6 to 10 conventions a year and is closely associated with the Spooky Movie Film Festival, an annual week-long celebration of horror feature films and shorts, which celebrated its tenth year in 2015.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Dyszel, Dick American television personalities Living people Horror hosts 1947 births