Here's is complete television airing of the 1960 Roger Corman film The Little Shop of Horrors on Cleveland, OH's Fox affiliate WJW, commonly known under the Fox 8 branding.
The film aired as a part of The Big Chuck and Lil' John Show, hosted by local horror hosts Big Chuck and Lil’ John on the evening of March 6, morning of March 7, 2004 at midnight. (Dating is based on the segment focusing on Dick Goddard's Almanac for Northeast Ohio 2004 and the February 29, 2004 edition of The Akron Beacon Journal).
Produced under the title The Passionate People Eater, the film was infamously shot in just two days with a budget of around $30,000 according to Corman (though other sourced estimate the budget to be between $22,000 and $100,000), with sets remaining from his previous film A Bucket of Blood. Though Comran originally wanted to develop a story about a private investigator, screenwriter Griffin wanted to write a horror-themed comedy. Though not impressed with the box office performance of A Bucket of Blood, Corman eventually relented and the two began to work.
According to Corman, "We ended up at a place where Sally Kellerman (before she became a star) was working as a waitress, and as Chuck and I vied with each other, trying to top each other’s sardonic or subversive ideas, appealing to Sally as a referee, she sat down at the table with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together." [Roger Corman, "Wild Imagination: Charles B. Griffith 1930-2007", LA Weekly 17 October 2007]
After Griffin's first screenplay for the project "Cardula" (a Dracula-themed story involving a vampire music critic) was rejected by Corman, he wrote a screenplay under the title "Gluttony." According to Griffin, the script was about "a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn’t do that though because of the code at the time. So I said, 'How about a man-eating plant?', and Roger said, 'Okay.' By that time, we were both drunk." [Graham, Aaron W. "Little Shop of Genres: An interview with Charles B. Griffith". Senses of Cinema.]
Jackie Joseph later recalled "at first they told me it was a detective movie; then, while I was flying back [to make the movie], I think they wrote a whole new movie, more in the horror genre. I think over a weekend they rewrote it." [Tom Weaveer, Jackie Joseph interview, B Monster]
Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's musical adaptation, shortened to simply Little Shop of Horrors, would open off-Broadway in 1982 and would be adapted into its own film in 1986, which has gone on to become a cult film itself.