Ralph Platz, Bullfighter
April 3rd, 2018
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. 
After our brunch with Caren Kaye, Renny Temple, and Adam Sadowsky (hereafter referred to as the 
My friend David has a subscription to a series of plays put on at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California, and had often remarked to me how he would regularly see an actress who he knew from a couple of Three’s Company episodes. One of them entitled Strangers in the Night from 1982 was a particularly funny and memorable episode, in which Jack Tripper serenades his girlfriend and ends up sending a message to a plump neighbor of hers named Bernice, who then shows up for a date with Jack. In short, Jack ends up making it right and stands up for this woman Bernice, when his actual girlfriend shows up and mocks her. The episode comes to a close when Bernice says the following heartfelt line to Jack: “Thank you for that wonderful lie.”