Russ Tamblyn, Leader of the Jets
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way. From your first cigarette, to your last dyin’ day. And that goes double for Russ Tamblyn, the actor, dancer, and choreographer best known for his role as Riff, the leader of the Jets in the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1961, West Side Story. Tamblyn had appeared at one of the Hollywood Collectors Shows at the Winter Hollywood Show this year along with fellow cast members from that film. But during his appearance at the same show on Saturday, October 9, 2010, he was there as part of the Twin Peaks reunion. In that TV series, he portrayed Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, the eccentric psychiatrist that murder victim Laura Palmer was seeing just before her death. Read the rest of this entry »
Less than two weeks before my trip to California, an Our Gang buff named Brian Fisher contacted me through Facebook and advised me that he had been reading this website and seen my love of the Laurel and Hardy film locations; he himself had located a few locations used in some Little Rascals films by searching street views through Google Earth. Although I had an incredibly busy day ahead, I thought that it would most certainly be worthwhile to check these out during my visit. So Jimmy and I got up extra early and made a stop in Culver City before we headed to Burbank for the Hollywood Show on Saturday, October 9, 2010. 
There are a plethora of great crummy films of the 1980’s that I spent my teenage years gawking over. Coming in near the top of the list was the teenage fantasy sci-fi film Weird Science. With my good friend Eric Hubble, perhaps no other film from this genre was more quotable. So I was understandably more than stoked to get the chance to meet the film’s star Kelly LeBrock, who played the painfully sexy Lisa, the creation of two geeky underdog teen-aged boys (like us), when she was slated to appear at the April 24, 2010, Hollywood Show in Burbank. She was perhaps even the highlight of the show for me. So you can just imagine my disappointment to learn that the thickness around that once-sexy waist had also apparently extended to the inside of her head. 
David Naughton’s most well-recognized contribution to the world of pop culture came from his starring role in the John Landis classic An American Werewolf in London. While this film is in fact a fun classic, there are three other things that David Naughton did, each of which mean more to me than that film. The first is his appearance as recovering alcoholic Dick in a 1991 episode of Seinfeld. Even more so was his starring role in the hideous but beautiful Disney film Midnight Madness, which also starred Michael J. Fox. 
There have been many years in the past that I have gone to Walt Disney World in back-to-back years. And there have even been several during which I visited both Disneyland and Disney World in the same year. But on Friday, September 17, 2010, this became the first year that I visited both Disneyland and Walt Disney World twice in the same year. Regardless of the impressive record-breaking, I just went there again to have fun. Of course, this was the part of our road trip that Ashleigh was looking forward to most of all.