No Longer Rooting for Levar
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
I’m sorry, I just didn’t like him. In Alex Haley’s TV mini-series Roots, he played the central character Kunta Kinte, an African who was stripped away from his homeland and brought to the United States in slavery. He was amazing in the role and to coin a pun, I was rooting for him every step of the way. Later on, Levar Burton was the presenter of the children’s series Reading Rainbow. I’m all about rooting for helping kids read. It was probably when he graduated to the Star Trek series- playing Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation – that he became a jerk. Star Trek tends to do that to actors sometimes. Am I complaining too much? Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t need a whole lot of reasons to go on a road trip, but if I was a bit on the fence about attending the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois, over the weekend of June 11-12, 2011, it was the celebrities that were in attendance that pushed me to the side of going. It turns out that all of the parts of this whole made the entire experience a great one – but nonetheless, five of the highlights of the weekend were the five actors who had appeared in Superman related films or TV shows. I’ll cover the first three of them here. 
My friend Bob – and many others – will tell you that it is my own, dumb fault. That if I wasn’t willing to pay it, I shouldn’t have. But the truth is that I grew up watching the TV show The Incredible Hulk– and I found the ugliness of this green monster both captivating and positively frightening. The actor who portrayed him, Lou Ferrigno, may not be as frightening, but I’m inclined to believe that he’s just as dumb. I already had the autographed photo at right in my collection. Bob had gotten it for me years ago. Ferrigno’s prices on signatures aren’t that outrageous and I have no objection there. It’s the picture with him, man…the picture with him.