Monthly Archives: August 2009

Old actors from Wikipedia, “Mudd’s Women” edition

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Last batch here.

“Mudd’s Women.” Roger C. Carmel, who played Harry Mudd, “was also the voice of Smokey Bear in fire safety advertisements, as well as Decepticon lieutenant Cyclonus in the popular Transformers animated series.” (update, In comments, Joe S. Walker adds that Carmel also appeared “in one of the worst films of all time, Myra Breckenridge.”)


Of the three women Harry Mudd brings aboard the Enterprise, one was played by Karen Steele, who “reportedly earned her first money by spearing baby sharks in the private cove on the estate of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.” In 1970 she lost her agent because she turned down being a regular on a tv series and instead went on a morale tour of Pacific service hospitals. This was during Vietnam. That year she said, “A lot of people in this town just don’t understand me. … They don’t believe me when I tell them I’d rather spend 17 hours talking to General Westmoreland than exchanging amenities at some Hollywood party.”   

Another, Susan Denberg, was “Playmate of the Month” in the August 1966 issue of Playboy. During the late 1960s she had drug problems: “I became hooked on LSD and marijuana … I needed LSD every day, almost every hour…” I don’t think that’s really possible.

Ted Cassidy, Eddie Paskey … it’s more first season Star Trek actors in Wiki

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Jesus, there’s a lot of this stuff. … Memory Alpha is a bit of a millstone; it’s more than doubled how much I have to read.

Ah well. Last batch here. 

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” … Ted Cassidy. He was huge and odd looking, so he played aliens and monsters (like Lurch in The Addams Family). But he started as a radio personality in Dallas, where he did on-the-scene reporting about JFK’s death: 


On November 22, 1963, shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, Cassidy interviewed several of the witnesses, including two very close witnesses, William and Gayle Newman, after the Newmans had appeared on WFAA-TV, but before they left to go to the Dallas Sheriff’s office (no tape exists of that interview for the radio station did not start recording their broadcasts until about 1:45 PM). He also interviewed the manager of his radio station who was in the Book Depository and saw a man run out of the building shortly after the shooting. The manager offered several times to talk to Dallas police who repeatedly refused to interview him.


In 1978 he voiced the Thing on the cartoon Fantastic Four! And the opening narration for The Incredible Hulk. “He also co-wrote the screenplay of 1973’s The Harrad Experiment, in which he made a brief appearance.” The Harrad Experiment is about a college where all the kids get it on as part of progressive education.

Also from “What Are,” a credit for Eddie Paskey, “a U.S. actor primarily known for his role as ‘Lieutenant Leslie’, a redshirt, on Star Trek, in which he is noted for being the most omnipresent actor with the fewest got i spoken lines during the entire series. He appeared in 57 episodes.”

Paskey got into pictures when he was discovered pumping gas in the Pacific Palisades. He kept working at the station on weekends while doing tv guest spots, then quit show business in the late ’60s and “went into business for himself in Santa Ana, California, [eventually] owning and operating an auto-detailing service called The Air Shop with his wife Judy. He sold the business in 2004. Today, he and Judy, along with their 1955 T-Bird, and are members of Hot Rods Unlimited, a SoCal auto club.“

First Season Wiki: more old Star Trek actors

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All right, I got done with the second season. Because my planning is fucked up, I now start on the first season.
Note:  Just came across a site called Memory Alpha, a wiki devoted to Star Trek. Good design and a lot of info, though the material below is all from regular Wikipedia.

“Charlie X”: Robert Walker Jr. was the son of Jennifer Jones. She left his father for David O. Selznick when Walker was three or so, and a year later she won Best Actress for Song of Bernadette. … The character actor Abraham Sofaer’s wife was named Psyche Angela Christian. 

“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot … Gary Lockwood did a 1968 caper film called They Came to Rob Las Vegas. In 1978 he did a made-for-tv movie called The Incredible Journey of Dr. Meg Laurel. … Sally Kellerman. She wound up as Rodney Dangerfield’s love interest in Back to School (1986). Yikes. … Paul Carr “toured in summer stock with Chico Marx.” His character dies in “Where No Man,” and Wiki says that more or less makes him the first dead redshirt, though none of the uniforms in the episode were actually red. … Paul Fix played the ship doctor but was replaced for the rest of the series by DeForest Kelley. In 1972 the two of them wound up in the same lousy, career-nadir horror film, Night of the Lepus, which was about “giant mutant rabbits” in the Southwest.
“The Naked Time.” There’ an episode of Trapper John, M.D. called “Old Man Liver” and it was written by a bit player in this episode. … The guy who played Amorous Crewman voiced a role in Akira.
“Balance of Terror.” Back in 1932, RKO did a movie called Secrets of the French Police.

More from Wiki about old Star Trek actors

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I’m working my way thru the second season.

In “The Omega Glory” there’s a big lug named Roy Jenson, “remembered by many as the first man beaten up by Caine on the television show Kung Fu (1972).” He also played pro football on the Alouettes, Montreal’s team.


The scientist who creates a mad computer on “The Ultimate Computer” was played by William Marshall, “best known for his title role in the 1972 blaxploitation classic Blacula and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973), and as the ‘King of Cartoons’ on the 1980s television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse beginning with its second season.” But he also did Shakespeare: “His Othello … was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times ‘the best Othello of our time'” That’s pretty good.

The son of the man who “raised the alarm during the attack on Pearl Harbor” played a proconsul in “Bread and Circuses,” the show’s Roman episode.

In the same episode, the actor who played the oldest and most saintly of the “Followers of the Son” was also author of a book of poems called Forty-Four Scribbles and a Prayer. 

During the ’60s Terri Garr was a bit player in “nine Elvis Presley features. Her first speaking role was a one-line appearance as a damsel in distress in The Monkees film Head written by Jack Nicholson.”


 

Twisted Piece of Crap

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This essay originally ran in the Comics Journal.
__________________________

Metamorpho Year One
Dan Jurgens, Mike Norton, Jesse Delperdang
DC Comics
softcover/color
142 pages/$14.99
9 781401218034

One of the first comics I read was The Brave and the Bold #154, featuring Batman and Metamorpho. Metamorpho had hardly any face time, as it turned out, but his brief appearance made a decided impression. Bob Haney’s plot had the element man wearing jodhpurs and consorting with Turkish drug dealers while spouting supposedly hip but actually dadaesque lines like, “Wowee! Kaman kiddo wasn’t kidding!” Meanwhile, Jim Aparo drew that malleable body from all sorts of bizarre angles — an almost unreadable shot upward through telescoped metal legs; a vertiginous shot from above with Metamorpho’s mouth gaping open as a baddy shoots a flamethrower down his gullet. Both artist and writer were clearly having a blast, and their enthusiasm for the character was infectious. I wanted to read more about him.

I never did though. Oh, I read a fair number of comics featuring Metamorpho, but none of them had anything like the charge of that first meeting. Still, even with my expectations suitably lowered, Metamorpho: Year One is quite, quite bad. Jurgens and Norton switch off on the drawing chores, but neither of them takes any advantage of Metamorpho’s visual potential. Everything looks CGI, with limbs turning into smooth blades or smooth drills — it’s like Metamorpho’s a bottom basement Terminator. Nobody here can even draw mildly successful cheesecake. Sapphire Stagg, the Metamorpho mythos’ gratuitous sex bomb, has the requisite blond hair, big bazoongas, and lack-of-attire, but through the miracle of stiff poses, shaky anatomy, incompetent stylization, and godawful computer coloring, she still ends up looking as sensual as a hunk of plastic.

Dan Jurgens’ story is, if anything, even worse than the art. Rex Mason (the guy who turns into Metamorpho) has all the personality and gumption of a wilted houseplant. The evil Simon Stagg tries to kill him? He gets so mad that he…whines a little. The beautiful Sapphire Stagg doesn’t want him anymore because he’s all, like, ugly now? He gets so mad that he…whines a little. And when the Justice League tricks him into thinking he’s fighting a deadly super-villain and then brags about how clever they were, Metamorpho…tells them how super-heroic they are. Oh, yeah, and then he whines a little. Peter Parker had angst; Metamorpho has querulousness.

Still, I’m not in any position to whine myself, I suppose. To read a comic based on your affection for a character you first encountered 30 years ago is pretty much begging for disappointment. I guess I momentarily forgot that the whole point of super-hero comics these days is to sully the childhood memories of paunchy middle-aged fanboys. At that mission, at least, Metamorpho: Year One succeeds admirably.

Update: I confused Star Sapphire and Sapphire Stagg in the original post. I bet they get that all the time.

Old actors in Wikipedia

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I’m reading Wiki entries on people who have been in old Star Trek episodes.


In “A Piece of the Action,” there’s a guy named Kalo who carries a tommy gun and is ordered around by the big mob boss (who is played by Anthony Caruso). The guy playing Kalo, his name is Lee Delano, studied dance with Martha Graham!

In “A Private Little War,” there’s a witch-temptress played by a woman who later married Zubin Mehta, conductor of the LA Philharmonic. The woman, Nancy Kovack, became a real-life Jackie Collins sort of character, a tv actress who has made it and is now wife of a celebrity jet setter. Kovack is an “ardent and strict” Christian Scientist, known among “Hollywood’s elder generation” for her views. Susan McDougal, a name from the Whitewater affair, worked as Kovack’s personal assistant for a while, and the two of them wound up going at it in court.

The same episode has a big lug in, I think, a white wig, and his name is Tyree. The guy, Michael Witney, who played him married Twiggy in 1977 and dropped dead of a heart attack in 1983.

A burning-eyed 35-ish guy plays the main villain in “Patterns of Force,” the Nazi episode. That was Skip Homeier, and “in 1943 and 1944 he played the role of Emil in the Broadway play Tomorrow the World. Cast as a child indoctrinated into Nazism who is brought to the United States from Germany following the death of his parents.” I never heard of that play. It sounds terrible but so in tune with its era you’d think it would have hit big enough for something of it to stick around in the public memory.

 There’s a John Wayne movie called The High and the Mighty, and a Joan Crawford film called The Damned Don’t Cry. Apparently someone in the Crawford film describes her character as “tough as a seventy-five cent steak.”

Barbara Bouchet played an alien called Kelinda in “By Any Other Name.” In 1970 she moved to Italy and began starring in erotic comedies and erotic thrillers.  “In 1985, she established a production company and started to produce a successful series of keep fit books and videos. In addition, she opened a fitness studio in Rome. … She lives with her family in Rome, where she is a set member of the city’s celebrity social life.“