That’s sad news about actor Andrew Koenig, the son of Star Trek‘s Walter Koenig. If you haven’t been following the story, Andrew disappeared on February 14, after visiting friends in Vancouver. His family, friends, and fans initially hoped he was just going off the grid for a while to sort some things out, but as more details have trickled out over the past week, the grim conclusion to this story started to seem both obvious and inevitable: his father received a letter from him in which he sounded “despondent”; he’d recently dropped the lease on his LA apartment and sold or given away a lot of his possessions; he’d also turned down a couple of job offers. And Vancouver was reportedly a place where he’d been happy earlier in his life. So the discovery yesterday that he had committed suicide in one of that city’s parks was not at all unexpected. But I still found it deeply sorrowful.

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Further evidence of that unsettling notion that celebrity deaths always come in threes: the completely out-of-the-blue demise of actress Brittany Murphy yesterday at the age of 32. I wasn’t exactly a fan — I’ve only seen one of her movies that I can recall, and my favorite role of hers was the voice of Hank Hill’s dimwitted-but-sweet trailer-trash niece on the animated TV series King of the Hill — but I always found her likable enough, and pretty in a normal, suburban kind of way. I’ve heard some accounts that she could be difficult to work with, which perhaps explains why she hasn’t had many film roles recently after being touted as the Next Big Thing only a few years ago, but I never got that impression from her in the occasional interviews I saw. Certainly she didn’t come across as one of the no-class, arrogant, boozy-floozy types that comprise Young Hollywood these days.

So far, it appears that her death was natural, if freakishly sudden. The LA Times obit is here, for any who may be interested.

More sad news for genre fans Of a Certain Age: Via SamuraiFrog, I’ve learned that writer, director, production designer, and occasional actor Dan O’Bannon has died at the still-too-young age of 63.

O’Bannon’s biggest claim to fame is, quite correctly, writing the screenplay for the landmark movie Alien, from a story by himself and Ron Shusett. (It was O’Bannon’s disturbing idea to have the monster gestate inside a human host, like certain wasps and other parasitical animals right here on Earth.) But he also had a hand in many other fondly remembered (if not particularly significant) sci-fi and horror films of the ’70s and ’80s. He wrote two of the best sequences in the animated anthology Heavy Metal — “Soft Landing” and “B-17,” both of which I discussed here — as well as John Badham’s super-helicopter movie Blue Thunder, which directly inspired the TV series Airwolf. (O’Bannon, always outspoken and quick to grumble about perceived slights, has long said that Badham dumbed down his highly political screenplay into a simplistic action flick.) He also penned a pair of cult-classic B-movies, both directed by horror icon Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce, about energy-sucking vampires from space, and the 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars. And he directed the horror spoof Return of the Living Dead, which introduced the pitiful cry of “Braaaaaiiiins…” to the zombie mythos.

O’Bannon claimed credit for about two-thirds of the Schwarzenegger-on-Mars flick Total Recall; his story is that co-writer Shusett jettisoned his final act and substituted the ridiculous mess that pissed me off back in 1990 and now just makes me roll my eyes the way you do when your harmlessly senile granny starts rambling about the little man who lives in her pantry. And, for you Lucasfilm fans out there, O’Bannon designed and animated most of the tactical computer displays in the original Star Wars film.

All of those achievements aside, though, my first thought when I heard the news of his passing was of Sergeant Pinback, the lovably hapless buffoon he played in John Carpenter’s first movie, Dark Star.

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I’m a bit chagrined at being a week late with this item, but then I still haven’t written anything for Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, or Patrick Swayze, so what’s a mere seven days for an actor few of my readers will probably recognize? Even so, I’ve gotten very tired of feeling like I’m constantly trying to catch up on things. This blog isn’t really intended to deal in up-to-the-minute news, but I would like to get back to some sense of being current, for my own sanity if nothing else. Maybe in 2010.

In any event, I learned from Evanier last Friday that the actor Gene Barry had died a couple days earlier. My initial reaction was surprise; I hadn’t realized he was even still with us, it’d been so long since I’d seen him in anything. This was followed by a wave of profound sadness, as Barry’s was one of those familiar faces it seems I’ve known my entire life. I don’t recall my exact age the first time I saw the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, in which Barry starred, but I know I was very, very young. It was on the old Big Money Movie show that used to run weekday afternoons on one of my local TV stations, and I think that show was finished by the mid-70s, so I’m going to guess I was around five or six, tops. The movie made a huge, indelible impression on me, and Gene Barry’s performance as Dr. Clayton Forrester was one of the many reasons why.

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Dear Mr. Vernon,

 

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make use write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain… and an athlete… and a basket case… a princess… and a criminal. Does that answer your question?

 

Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club

To those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s, John Hughes was a spiritual big brother. Not a father figure with the accompanying implications of authority, because fatherhood was usually represented in his movies as benign indifference, if not outright absenteeism, and authority figures in general were foolish and petty. No, he was our buddy, the cool grown-up guy who was still close enough to us in sensibility, if not actual age, to talk to us about things that mattered without bullshitting us. In a decade filled with dumb movies populated by ersatz teens who were some corporate cigar-chomper’s idea of what we were like, Hughes’ flicks stood out because he knew what teens were really like. Sure, Sixteen Candles is a farcical cartoon, and Sam, Farmer Ted, and Jake Ryan are broad caricatures intended to represent different high school cliques, but they all have a spark of authenticity at their core. They’re all volatile mixtures of bravado and vulnerability. Everyone in the movie is desperate to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. Even the cool kid, Jake, is unsure of his place within his particular clique, and he’s tired of the games he’s forced to play by the cultural stratum in which he exists. They’re all striving to fit in, to gain approval and validation, to experience something genuine instead of just going through the motions. I knew kids just like them; I was a kid just like them. We all were.

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“And that’s the way it is.”

When the late Walter Cronkite said that at the conclusion of each of his broadcasts, people believed him. There was no automatic assumption of partisan bias in the media, and if anyone ever accused him of spinning a story to the advantage of one political cause or another, I’m not aware of it. Of course, things were different in his heyday, the 1960s and ’70s. Newsmen of Cronkite’s generation strove, for the most part, to deliver the impartial facts, and that’s what viewers and readers expected to receive. Not the phony-baloney “balance” of today, when both sides of any debate are given equal credibility and weight, even when one of them is clearly wrong, ignorant, or batshit-crazy. Not reporting that reinforces the viewer’s own ideology and view of the world. But facts, carefully gathered through good old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, research, and vetting. On the rare occasion when Cronkite did offer his personal opinion — as in his well-known 1968 editorial statement that the Vietnam War was unwinnable — he spoke with an authority that was earned from a thorough understanding of the subject. The anchorpeople today are mostly just reading copy written by someone else.

Walter Cronkite was one of a small handful of men I find difficult to describe in any meaningful way beyond saying, “he was a neat guy.” Like Johnny Carson or Ricardo Montalban, two other “neat guys” I grew up instinctively admiring, Cronkite emanated a particular sort of very appealing masculinity. It wasn’t a macho thing. It was based less on physical prowess or good looks than on intelligence, kindness, a sense of fair play, the confidence of one who knows his job and loves doing it well, and above all else, an air of dignity. Just try to imagine Cronkite reading the superficial pap that passes for news today… can you picture him discussing Jon and Kate What’s-Their-Names, or who’s likely to win American Idol? Or hosting one of those sexual-predator entrapment hours or talking day after day about Michael Jackson’s death? Can you hear his voice running down the more tawdry details of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? No? I’m not surprised. His definition of journalism wouldn’t have included that sort of tabloid nonsense.

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Although science fiction was always the chord that resonated most strongly with me during my impressionable youth, I heard plenty of other pop-cultural notes, too. One of those was the TV series Kung Fu, in which David Carradine played a half-Chinese Shaolin monk wandering the American Old West in search of his long-lost brother.

Actually, it’s surprising this show left any kind of mark on me, when I think about it. It ran for only three seasons when I was very young, and I’m certain I couldn’t have seen it often because it wasn’t the sort of thing my dad — who was of course the unquestioned master of the TV in those days — would’ve been interested in. Kung Fu was, quite frankly, a weird show for its time, and Dad has never had much tolerance for weird. An unlikely mash-up of martial-arts films — then still largely unknown to mainstream American audiences — and the more familiar tropes of the Western, the series made extensive use of flashbacks to tell its stories, which often hinged on some bit of Zen philosophy (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof). These elements, combined with highly stylized editing and slow-motion action sequences, lent Kung Fu a somewhat surrealistic quality that was very out of step with the usual cop-and-doctor shows of the early ’70s.

And yet, probably because the show was so different from everything else, I have a powerful memory of sitting on the hearth with a blazing fire at my back, watching Kung Fu on our massive old console TV with the clunky tuner dial. I recall being simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the milky white eyes of blind Master Po (seen in the photo above with Carradine’s character, Kwai Chang Caine). The image of Caine crouched in front of a red-hot brazier, preparing to sear tattoos of a dragon and a tiger into his forearms, stuck in my head for ages before home video finally made it possible for me to see it again. And of course the character of Caine himself — serene, always trying to avoid a fight unless he had no choice, and then using only the minimum amount of force necessary to end it — is virtually archetypal, at least for anyone who was around in the ’70s.

Archetype or no, however, Carradine was never a hero to me in the same way as, say, William Shatner. I never pretended on the playground to be Caine, like I did James T. Kirk. I didn’t follow Carradine’s career, and I honestly know very little about his personal life. But his was one of the familiar celebrity faces I grew up with, and on some basic, purely visceral level, I liked him. I smiled when I encountered him in a B-movie or a television commercial, especially in recent years when he’s been willing to make fun of his enduring connection to Kung Fu. Like his best-known character, Carradine was simply cool.

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It’s probably very bad form to mention this under these circumstances, but I have to be honest: it’s been years since I thought Dom DeLuise — who passed away last week at the age of 75 — was funny. I used to, a long time ago. But somewhere along the line, I guess I just sort of got tired of his brand of bumbling silliness. Probably around the time he was making all those tedious and painfully self-indulgent movies with Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham. Just thinking about his “Captain Chaos” character in The Cannonball Run is enough to make wince. Ugh.

But as I said, there was a time when I thought he was very funny indeed, and that was in the early ’80s when he was one of the few comedic actors who could actually make my dad laugh. Dad’s always been a tough nut to crack when it comes to comedy; it’s not that he has no sense of humor at all, it’s just very, very hard to push his humor buttons. The one thing that seems capable of doing it with any consistency is a good fart joke. A good fart joke — and good ones are surprisingly rare, actually — can reduce my father to helpless, tearful gasping on the floor.

Dom DeLuise gets off a good fart joke — as well as a belch joke and a number of other gags based on general slovenliness — in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, where he played a flatulent, venal, gluttonous, horny, petulant, and incredibly bored Roman Emperor. I knew it was a good joke because Dad insisted on rewinding the film — this wasn’t too long after we discovered the wonders of home video — about a dozen times, until he was, as I described, helpless and gasping on the living room floor with tears rolling down his cheeks. I suspect we probably wore out that particular groove of the RCA videodisc we’d rented from Sharon’s TV and Appliance down the street. Mom and I had stopped laughing on about the fifth viewing, but Dad was having so much fun it seemed churlish to tell him to let the damn thing resume playing.

Looking around the ‘net, I’ve seen many stories about what a nice guy Dom was, and I’m pleased to hear that. He was apparently loved by everyone who was fortunate enough to meet him, and you can’t ask much more of a life than that. Even though I personally outgrew his schtick, I always liked him, and I cherish the memory he gave me of my dad, clicking that rewind button over and over and over, and laughing just as uproariously at Dom breaking wind and scratching himself with the imperial scepter every single time. Thanks for that, Dom…

Even though I watched it faithfully, I was always somewhat frustrated by the TV series Angel. The show had some very cool ideas at the core of it — I especially liked the notion that Los Angeles is full of supernatural beings who go about their business right under the noses of we oblivious humans — but it never really seemed to find its footing, even after five seasons on the air. Sometimes it was like a detective series with monsters instead of criminals, sometimes a variant of Highlander in its focus on immortal angst, sometimes a dark, apocalyptic fantasy about the fast-approaching end of the world, and sometimes it was a satire of all of the above. While Angel‘s parent series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was also a mish-mash of different elements and story types, Buffy gelled into a coherent whole more often than not. By contrast, I never got a clear sense of what the spin-off was actually supposed to be. I kept tuning in, though, because I liked the characters, the thing that keeps me coming back to a lot of shows that really aren’t all that good (and keeps me away from some, arguably, that are; in the final analysis, a big reason why I never warmed to Ron Moore’s Galactica was the fact that I disliked his characters).

Anyhow, one of Angel‘s more memorable characters was a gent named Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, a.k.a. Lorne, a gentle-souled, green-skinned, telepathic demon who owned a karaoke bar and could psychically “read” others when they sang. My understanding is that he was originally intended as a one-episode plot device, but, like so many other secondary characters who go on to steal a show, Lorne proved popular enough that he was brought back for an encore, then became a semi-regular and finally a full cast member with the actor’s name — Andy Hallett — in the opening credits. Andy would appear as Lorne in 76 of Angel‘s 110 episodes.

I was shocked and saddened this morning to learn that Andy Hallett died on Sunday at the far-too-young age of 33. According to a story on NPR, Hallett’s been suffering from congestive heart failure for five years, basically ever since Angel wrapped production. Hallett’s entry on IMDB indicates he appeared in only three other projects, the last of which was a voiceover job in 2005. What a damn shame… even my grandfather, who died young of heart failure and has always kind of been my personal benchmark for these things, made it to 37.