Thriller Bunny
Monday, May 14th, 2018
Beatlemania was a bit before my time, but in the 1980’s the closest thing to it came into the country’s lives around 1983 when Michael Jackson released his album Thriller. Everyone liked it: the kids, the parents, the critics, the industry. In fact, even if Michael Jackson didn’t quite achieve the commercialism heights of the Beatles (at least I don’t recall Michael Jackson wigs in the department stores), the release of his video Thriller was probably as anticipated as the Fab Four starring in the film A Hard Day’s Night. Read the rest of this entry »
There had been several occasions when Tom Holland, director of the memorable and fun 80’s horror flick Fright Night as well as Child’s Play, The Langoliers, and Thinner, and writer of the 1980’s staple Cloak & Dagger, had been scheduled for conventions and had cancelled or not shown up or I had missed him or whatever, and he had been on my radar for a long time as director of that memorable flick. But it wasn’t until I checked out his filmography again while looking forward to (or at least hoping for) his appearance at the Cincinnati HorrorHound on March 24, 2018, that I noticed that he had actually made a cameo appearance in Psycho II as Deputy Norris. In fact, I also discovered that he had actually wrote the thing! 
I’m not sure when the exact moment was, but at some point I decided that to begin expanding my celebrity encounter realm from sitcom starring roles, to guest stars and character actors who appeared in sitcoms. If you took the time to map that out, you’ll not that it exponentially expands the ultimate number of people this would encompass to roughly infinity. If the size of my celebrity pool was a walnut before, it has now expanded into a moon (but not actually taking the time to do this, I’m not sure which moon). This of course makes the hobby more fun, perhaps more obscure (which to me is more fun), and of course, more expensive. This seemed like an appropriate introduction for this particular celebrity, as it encompassed all three of these criteria. 
If you’re an actor that only has one film to your credit on the imdb – even though it was an uncredited role – you can’t really do much better to have it be in a Laurel & Hardy film. In their 1945 film The Bullfighters, my personal favorite of the boys’ later films, they visit a bull farm to look for a bull for Stan to battle, hoping for a ‘blind and contented’ one to fit the bill. The man who runs the farm has a boy named Pancho, who admits he is afraid of the bulls, despite the efforts of Richard K. Muldoon, who is trying to fill Stan with confidence that he will be safe in the ring. Pancho then inexplicably fires off slingshot that knocks off Stan and Ollie’s hats. 
Words can never adequately describe the thrill of meeting an former Our Gang member whom I’ve never met before for the first time. It plays tricks on the mind to realize that a kid who was in such an iconic group of motion pictures, particularly ones that have been solidified in my psyche for the past forty years, is now the very same person standing directly in front of me, now fully grown, in living color, and three dimensional. In the current day there are so few Little Rascals left with us, that it adds an even greater dimension of poignancy.