He made his television debut in Virginia dressed as a clown on children’s shows in the greater Richmond area, but ultimately made his name in Hampton Roads.
Jerry F. Harrell, one of the region’s all-time most-cherished performers, died in his sleep at his Norfolk home on Monday. He was 78.
For 50 years, he delighted television audiences with his on-screen persona, the mad scientist known as Doctor Madblood.
Harrell, an amateur magician, invented the character in 1975 with the intention that it’d be part of a single, standalone Halloween TV special. But viewers loved the eccentric doctor too much. One appearance just wouldn’t do. The people wanted more Madblood. The local TV station brass eagerly wanted to please. So the popular demand spawned a TV series, centered on Harrell’s good doctor.
And the character made its creator a regional icon.
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The original show, “Doctor Madblood’s Movie,” aired weekly on WAVY-TV 10 immediately following “Saturday Night Live.” Each episode included the broadcast of a classic horror movie. Many of the flicks could be characterized as B movies.
“Ker-stinkers,” Doctor Madblood would call them.
The films were interspersed with clips of Doctor Madblood acting as a movie-night host and swapping corny jokes with a supporting cast of characters portrayed by Harrell’s friends and colleagues.
Adams, Harrell’s longtime friend and collaborator, played the voice of a mainstay character and Doctor Madblood’s sidekick named, simply, Brain. The roughly soccer ball-sized talking brain, made of gray household cleaning sponges, lived in a fish tank.
“It’s hard to grasp that he’s not here,” Adams said. “He’s still here in our hearts and our minds and our talents he helped us build.”
Hampton Roads radio personality Mike Arlo, another friend and regular contributor to the “Doctor Madblood” series, described Harrell as “so smart, so generous.”
“And you don’t find that a lot in the broadcast; he really was very giving. He helped a lot of people get their start and further their career, including me,” Arlo said. “We did some really funny stuff.
“Yeah, we had a blast.”
Harrell was born July 10, 1947, in Morristown, Tennessee, where his mother worked at the local CBS affiliate WKPT. He spent many hours as a child observing the station’s backstage action. And everyone saw it. The kid gravitated toward cameras.
As he grew up, he learned ventriloquism and performed as the “voice throwing magician” at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee. After graduating high school, he skipped college for the military and enrolled in an intensive, Chinese language program to become an interpreter for Air Force Intelligence. He served in Southeast Asia for four years and sustained an injury — from artillery fire, his family believes — and received a Purple Heart and honorable discharge in 1969.
Back home, he landed a job at his old childhood haunt WKPT as a radio and TV station DJ. He met his first wife, and after several years, their family relocated to Richmond where Harrell worked on air as Bozo the Clown.
“You actually had to go through a school to be officiated as a Bozo back then, and there were only certain people allowed to be Bozos,” Harrell’s son Daniel recalled. “He also was Ronald McDonald for a time — a licensed Ronald McDonald as well.”
The family moved again when Harrell accepted a job in Hampton Roads as a senior producer for WAVY-TV 10 in 1975. That October, Doctor Madblood made his TV debut as host of a Halloween special.
“After it aired, lots of people wrote in saying, ‘That was amazing. Keep going,’” Daniel Harrell recalled.
So it turned into a weekly show and every Saturday opened with its theme, a 1970 pop hit by the band Sugarloaf. Daniel explained: “I can’t tell you the number of people who have said to me, ‘I would fall asleep during “Saturday Night Live” and wake up to “Green-eyed Lady” and that spooky lab music that your dad would play.’”
Daniel Harrell, who followed in his father’s footsteps and is the current director of TV engineering at WHRO Public Media, remembers how in the late 1970s his father’s show was so popular that its local ratings surpassed even “The Johnny Carson Show” and, for a time, was the No. 1 late night show in Hampton Roads.
Jerry Harrell left WAVY in the early 1980s. Taking advantage of the advent of cable TV, he founded his own production company, Video Wizards, creating original content to distribute around the country. He made all sorts of programs, such as aerobatics and fishing shows and, of course, new episodes featuring Doctor Madblood. The character at one point was regularly appearing in upward of 15 East Coast TV markets.
And despite its success, Video Wizards dissolved before 1990. Harrell did a brief stint in the advertising industry before returning to his passion and forming Harrell Productions to produce, direct and write films, commercials and documentaries on topics as diverse as equine therapy and fast-attack submarines. He made educational videos to help organizations such as Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and The March of Dimes.
“Doctor Madblood” content was picked up by local affiliate Fox 33 in the early 1990s before starting to appear on the Hampton Roads channel SKY4. In 2008, the doctor found his final home on WHRO TV.
Jerry Harrell worked at Old Dominion University for more than 20 years and as a senior video producer helped engineer its distance learning programs. He retired in 2024 at age 74.
“He had the ability to just see things that most people wouldn’t even notice,” Daniel Harrell said.
“The world is a sadder place,” friend Adams said.