Marveling at the Avenger
Thursday, July 17th, 2014
The Avengers – that is the sci-fi espionage crime drama British TV series that ran throughout the 1960’s, not the Stan Lee Marvel Comics superheroes – is a show I’ve always wanted to explore. So far I’ve made zero effort to do so, but the premise of the show fascinates me, and one day upon retirement after I’ve accomplished all else I’ve set out to do (and watch), I may just get to the surviving episodes of this series. In the meantime, assuming at some point I will be watching and enjoying the show, I’m going to meet any of the main cast with whom I come across. The first one happened on October 27, 2012. Read the rest of this entry »
His resume is pretty amazing at a glance: Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale, Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, Falling in Love, Night and the City, Mad Dog and Glory, Casino, Great Expectations, Analyze This… If you guessed Robert De Niro, you’d be absolutely…WRONG. But clearly there’s a common link in all of these films who goes by that name. However I’m actually referring to an actor named Clem Caserta. 
I’ll be quite honest in confessing that until the movie The Runaways came out in 2010, I had never heard of the namesake band. It’s a little surprising considering that both Lita Ford and Joan Jett got their start in this little girl hard rock band from the late 1970’s. However, I’m not surprised that I don’t remember them from that time period as they never really took off in America, the way some of them did as solo artists. The lead vocalist from the band was Cherie Currie, who joined the group in 1975 at the age of fifteen. 
I never took game shows very seriously, but for one exception. They were moderately entertaining fodder in the 70’s and 80’s, but once we got into the 90’s – with the brief exception of Who Want’s to Be a Millionaire and the occasional tuning into Jeopardy, I mostly steer clear of them. The one big exception was the game show Tic Tac Dough, which for some reason appealed to me so much in the early 1980’s that there was a span of a couple of months that I watched two episodes a night and physically documented how many questions I got right on each episode. 
I must admit that at the time that I met Scott Wilson, I hadn’t yet actually seen the 1967 film In Cold Blood, a disturbing picture based on the novel by Truman Capote. But based on the strength of the fact that he was in it, I decided to put him on my list of autographs to pick up at the HorrorHound event in Cincinnati on March 22, 2013. I was even more pleasantly surprised that amidst all of the overblown photos of Mr. Wilson from his current hit TV series The Walking Dead – a show which I still have never once seen – there was a very iconic photo on his table, one that I had seen time and time again included in the Robert Blake section of the Maltin-Bann book Our Gang: The Life and Times of the Little Rascals.