The First Buffy. And of Course Laura.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Ahem. Once you’ve unpeeled your eyes from the alluring photo of Kristy Swanson at right, we can move on here. Okay. So yeah, Kristy is hot and has posed in Playboy, yada yada yada – but her biggest claim to fame was that she portrayed teenage monster killer Buffy Summers in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie that started it all – and although I own the DVD, I have been in no rush to actually watch it as I know it will not compare to the TV series that later followed. But in my warped world of TV bliss, that’s not all she has done… Read the rest of this entry »
…And believe it or not, there was life before Schneider. Pat Harrington Jr. began his career rather auspiciously with his work in Steve Allen’s comedy troupe, on The Jack Paar Show, and with numerous guest appearances in such shows as Get Smart, F Troop, McHale’s Navy, and The Bing Crosby Show. But today he is best known, by me and the general public, for the role he played as the handyman Schneider on the sitcom One Day at a Time from 1975-1984. In fact, he even won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe award for his work on the show. 
I have never had any real particular affinity for Shannen Doherty. In more recent years, her name has become synonymous with trouble – as she had her issues with cat-fights and drunk driving charges. And somehow through the vixenish characters she has played throughout her career, particularly on Beverly Hills 90210, she has developed a reputation as a real Hollywood bad girl. So it was quite a pleasant surprise to find her so nice and attractive when I got the chance to meet her at the Hollywood Show on July 18, 2009. 
I can’t say that Cindy Pickett has starred in a huge number of successful films or TV series, although soap opera fans would cite her stint on The Guiding Light in the 1970’s as memorable. She has also done many guest starring roles in mostly dramatic TV series such as Magnum P.I., L.A. Law, and Murder She Wrote. But I personally have only seen two of the films in which she starred. The first was a rather crummy Stephen King thriller called Sleepwalkers. The second is one of the all-time great 1980’s films, a little opus called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the long-running TV sitcom Happy Days was one of my favorites, but I certainly liked the show very much. Ironically, it was meant to memorialize the simpler times of the a bygone era known as the 50’s – but to me it represents another era long gone…the 70’s! I didn’t much watch the show during its first run, but I caught the reruns during the 80’s and it made me fondly reminisce about the previous decade. I now own three of the available seasons of the show on DVD and have enjoyed watching them. And even though the show eventually ‘jumped the shark’, I’m hoping that all eleven eventually come out.