Napoleon Dynamite
Tuesday, June 9th, 2015
I have a feeling I got off a little bit easy when I got the chance to meet Jon Heder at the Wizard World Comic Con in Louisville, Kentucky on March 28, 2014. Not that paying $40 for his autograph in the normal world, but somehow in Comic Con world, paying ten bucks for the photo op portion seemed perfectly reasonable for this young actor who achieved fame in Napoleon Dynamite, making the second word the most relevant it’s been since the days of Jimmie Walker. Read the rest of this entry »
I remember when I first saw the 1983 documentary Amos ‘n’ Andy: Anatomy of a Controversy, I spotted a very familiar face being interviewed. That was a little bit before my time of actually wondering and considering what had become of those sitcom actors in old TV shows that I would watch. Even though I had already met a handful of Laurel and Hardy co-stars and Our Gang members, I assumed that my brushes with fame would probably end there. Who would have thought that I’d be getting autographs, sometimes actually corresponding, and even more out of the realm of possibility, meeting these television icons. 
As we speak right now, if you were to look on Wikipedia at the “List of Surviving Silent Film Actors,” you would find only 13 confirmed names. This list is of course dynamic, so it is going to change for some readers of this posting, but at the current moment you would find right smack in the middle of this list Lassie Lou Ahern. Lassie appeared in six of the earliest Our Gang comedies in 1923 and 1924, returning for a brief appearance in their 1926 short Thundering Fleas, which also starred Oliver Hardy. 
It’s hard to believe that someone whose career started on the squeaky clean sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet could take so many sharp left turns. Ironically, it’s because of his Ozzie & Harriet connection, in which he played Ricky’s frat brother Fred in 19 episodes between 1956 and 1963, that I was most interested in meeting him. His 1960’s sitcom connection didn’t stop there either, as he also made appearances in The Donna Reed Show, Hazel, and Mister Roberts, not to mention a handful of dramas and westerns. 
When I found out that Larry Drake was going to be at the HorrorHound convention in Indianapolis on September 8, 2013, I was excited to add him to my list because of his ultra-creepy starring role as Robert G. Durant in the Liam Neeson vehicle Darkman. As an added bonus, he had a small part in the original Karate Kid movie as the ‘Yahoo #1 at Beach.’ You might actually recall him as the guy who tells Mr. Miyagi to ‘kindly remove (the bottles) yourself, Mr. Moto” … to which Miyagi karate chops the top half of the bottles off, prompting said yahoo to promptly remove the bottles.