The death of former child actor Jackie Cooper ( not to be confused with the , somewhat less fortunate as an adult and , infamously , ripped off by his parents Jackie Coogan ) inspires me to start a " Celebrity Deaths - That , Um , Don't Have The Most Obvious Connectuions To Our Beloved Genre , As Those Folks Will Tend To Get A Solo Thread , Admittedly..." omnibus thread .
Directly , Cooper played Perry White in the Salkind/Reeve series of Superman movies , and , as per Wikipedia , about the last thing he did in the directing of episodic TV series that occupied much of his later working years were episodes of the Salkind Superboy series...
Cooper also starred in the CBS series Hennessy ( Probably the subject of a couple Dell FOUR COLOR COMICS issues anyway , wasn't it ????????? ) , enthused over by our Cmdr. Benson , and another B&W-era series , The People's Choice .
In pre-TV days movies with ____ ____ made them something of a team
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I remember Catherine O'Hara best from SCTV, and never saw Beetlejuice. But there's a generation that would remember her best from the first and second Home Alone movies (which I have seen) and another generation that would know her best from Schitt's Creek. There, she created a marvelous character, Moira Rose, matriarch of a once-wealthy family that has all its assets seized for non-payment of back taxes, thanks to being victims of embezzlement and fraud. She well earned her Emmy Award for that show.
RIP Demond Wilson Of course, I remember him as Lamont Sanford in Sanford and Son. I also remember him as Oscar Madison in The New Odd Couple with Ron Glass.
I actually remember The New Odd Couple. It was an interesting experiment, but I think it would have been a LOT better if they had leaned into what made it different with two Black men as the leads. They did not. They even went so far as to recycle scripts from the original TV series.
That kind of lazy thinking is exemplified in this photo. What is wrong with this image? (Yes, that is Ron Glass as Felix Ungar -- the spelling was changed, or maybe it was a misspelling on the door to his photo studio? -- and Demond Wilson as Oscar Madison.)
My wife spotted it right away: Oscar Madison, a sportswriter for a New York newspaper, is wearing a New York Yankees T-shirt with a New York Mets cap.
NO sportswriter for a New York newspaper would wear a New York Yankees T-shirt with a New York Mets cap.
NO New Yorker would wear a New York Yankees T-shirt with a New York Mets cap.
NO New York Yankees fan would wear a New York Yankees T-shirt with a New York Mets cap.
NO New York Mets fan would wear a New York Mets cap with a New York Yankees T-shirt.
Demond Wilson also was in a short-lived sitcom called Baby ... I'm Back!. It had a marvelous cast: Wilson, Denise Nicholas of Room 222; Helen Martin as the old lady grandma that she perfected in 227; and cute kid Kim Fields, future star of The Facts of Life and Living Single. Unfortunately, they were wasted on an odious premise: that Wilson had abandoned wife Nicholas and their two children for so long -- seven years -- that Nicholas had him declared legally dead so she could remarry. He shows up at the wedding -- of course, right at the part where the officiant asks "If anyone one here objects to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace" -- and stops it.
From there, the show is about him trying to win her back, because he's learned his lesson, he's ready to be the man and father he wasn't while he was gone, yadda yadda yadda. Plus, he was hipper than the stiff guy who was going to be her second husband. Just a terrible, terrible idea.
Seeing an article about Demond Wilson’s death yesterday reminded me of how well he played his character on Sanford and Son. Thinking about it, he was a great straight man. He was the only straight man on a series filled with funny characters, not just Redd Foxx. In addition to being THE straight man, he would argue with his “father.” He managed his push-back while still clearly loving Fred Sanford.
I didn’t watch The New Odd Couple but, knowing the original, Oscar Madison didn’t have any funny lines. Felix is the amusing character, and Ron Glass was probably a good fit for that.
I never heard of Baby... I'm Back! until now. Looking at IMDB and Wikipedia, the lead character does abandon his family long enough to be legally dead. I’ve seen a couple of old movies with this premise. The difference is that the (White) husband had reasons he couldn’t overcome that prevented his earlier return. This (Black) husband was fleeing loan sharks. He apparently thought that they were going to kill him for a (ridiculously tiny) $200 loan. Why couldn’t his character have the dignity of being trapped somewhere like the earlier characters? Why is the new husband-to-be, a military officer, “uptight?”
Story Robert Duvall has died at the age of 95.
RIP Lauren Chapin, best known for playing Kathy "Kitten" Anderson on Father Knows Best. Don't suppose many young people know of that show - heck, it was a bit before my time, even. Interestingly, an echo of its memory lives on in an unexpected place - the Springfield of The Simpsons was named after the Springfield of Father Knows Best.
RIP Neil Sedaka Another icon gone.
I subscribe to the basic service of SiriusXM, and lean toward the 60s channel. I hear a lot of Neil Sedaka. I was aware that he was in his 80s and was still performing in many concerts. After I saw a news report of his death, it was noted on SiriusXM that he “didn’t feel good,” went to the hospital and that was that. No long suffering like many others. A good way to go.
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