This is a project I started working on a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t really want to share it with the world until I’d proved the concept to myself. Ten installments later, I think I’ve done that. From here on, I plan to crank out one of these a week. Unless it just turns out nobody’s reading it and/or the people who are reading it don’t think it’s funny. So let me know what you think …
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This week’s W.Y.O.S.T. subject is Vaughn Armstrong. And the answer is a resounding YES, he HAS been in many a Star Trek show. In fact, he holds the record for having played the most different characters on the various Trek shows. He’s appeared 27 times as 11 different characters of 8 different races — 3 Klingons, 2 Cardassians, a Borg, a Romulan, a Vidiian, a Hirogen, a Kreetassan … and even a plain old human. He played 5 different characters on the Voyager series alone, and shares with Jeffrey Combs the distinction of being the only actor to portray 3 characters in the same season of the same show (Enterprise). The only Trek show he never appeared on was The Original Series … but I’m sure it’s only because he was a teenager at the time.
A Vietnam War veteran, Armstrong did a lot of stage acting in his early days, and didn’t actually enter the Hollywood scene until he was 27 years old. The following year (1978), he landed a one-shot role on a Wonder Woman episode, and the next decade would find him on such popular shows as Lou Grant, Matt Houston, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Scarecrow & Mrs. King, and the classic 1984 time travel movie The Philadelphia Experiment.
This week’s W.Y.O.S.T. subject is Brian Thompson. If you ever watched the original Terminator movie, then you’ve seen him. For a few minutes anyway. In one of the opening scenes, he and Bill Paxton play a couple of street punks who go up against a naked cyborg Arnold … and are promptly killed for their clothes. As first roles go, an actor could do far worse — although from the body of work that’s followed since that movie in 1984, one wonders how exactly Brian Thompson has avoided playing the role of a terminator himself over the years. After all, the square-jawed baritone actor has played just about every other kind of imposing bogey man you can think of — two different vampires, two different Klingons, a shape-changing Gotham City supervillain, an alien bounty hunter, an indestructible demon, and even a vengeful Greek Titan.
A child of two teachers, Thompson broke into Hollywood as a Terminator casualty, but has gone on from there to build a career as either a tough guy or an outright bad guy, mostly in sci-fi/fantasy projects. By the time the 80s were over, he had racked up more than 20 appearances in such shows as Moonlighting, Knight Rider, and Falcon Crest, as well as the classic movies Three Amigos, Miracle Mile, and Alien Nation. In 1989, he landed his first Star Trek role, playing a Klingon officer in The Next Generation, and his relationship with the franchise would persist over the years — he appeared in the Generations movie (1994), in Deep Space Nine (1993 & 1996), and even had a recurring role on Enterprise in 2005.
This week’s W.Y.O.S.T. subject is Patricia Tallman. She popped into my head last week, because she was the co-lead alongside Tony Todd in George Romero’s 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, in which she played a considerably updated version of the Barbara character. No longer meek and vulnerable and seemingly catatonic, Tallman’s zombie-killing version of Barbara was an appealing change of pace — a tough 90s echo of Ripley from Aliens and a pre-cursor to Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But it wasn’t until I did an IMDB search that I realized I knew this redheaded actress from some other projects as well.
Patricia Tallman started her acting career on the stage, and didn’t arrive on the Hollywood scene until she landed a role in George Romero’s 1981 movie Knightriders (don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either). The film didn’t do well either critically or at the box office, but it kicked off an ongoing working relationship with Romero and with makeup legend Tom Savini. Over the next decade, she’d work with one or both of the two in various movies and TV shows, including Tales from the Darkside, Creepshow 2, Monkey Shines, and of course, Night of the Living Dead — sometimes as an actress, and sometimes as a stunt woman.
This week’s W.Y.O.S.T. subject is Tony Todd. Warning: If you haven’t seen Tony Todd in at least 5 roles in the past two decades, you’ve probably been in a coma. Consult your doctor. Okay, here’s a hint … he’s friggin CANDYMAN! Which is just one of well over 100 roles he’s played, across the spectrum, from sci-fi to drama to horror to comedy to … whatever Cop Rock is considered.
Tony Todd started his acting career on the stage, then in the 80s, made a name for himself in high-profile movies like Platoon, Bird, Colors, and Lean on Me, as well as one-shot parts on assorted TV shows — Simon & Simon, 21 Jump Street, Kate & Allie, Night Court, MacGyver, and yes … Cop Rock. Then in 1990, he began an ongoing relationship with the sci-fi/horror universe when he played the lead role of Ben in George Romero’s remake of Night of the Living Dead … which is probably the first time he landed on my radar. A hardcore fan of the original movie, I was very happy with the remake, and from that point on, it seemed as if I saw Todd everywhere. After all, at 6’5″ and with that deep distinctive voice, he’s kind of hard to miss.
Sam Miller has written a spot-on examination of the difference between Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica over at mental_floss that any fan of either show MUST read. It may be an idea you’ve heard expressed before, but Miller expresses it so well in this essay that it’s worth revisiting …
Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek
“Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica have wildly different aesthetics and ideologies, and both aspire to very different goals. Fundamentally, it boils down to this: Star Trek is about who we want to be, and Battlestar Galactica is about who we are.”
I have some less profound thoughts about the Star Trek franchise, if you care to read them …
Our first W.Y.O.S.T. subject is one of my favorites, Jeffrey Combs. Who, appropriately enough, is somebody who actually was on a Star Trek show. Several of them actually. In fact, he holds a number of records in that department. He’s had recurring roles in three of the Star Trek shows — Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise — and is one of only a small handful of actors to play seven different characters in the franchise, appearing in ten seasons and 43 episodes overall. What’s more, he’s one of only two actors who have played three different characters in a single season, as well as two unrelated characters in a single episode. All because he originally auditioned for the role of Riker on The Next Generation.
But Combs’ sci-fi resume is definitely not limited to Star Trek shows. A professionally trained actor, up until he moved to Los Angeles in 1980, he pounded the stages doing Shakespeare. To date, he’s clocked in well over 100 movie and TV appearances. My first exposure to him was in 1985, when he played the insane and hilarious Dr. Herbert West in the classic B-movie Re-Animator, which my brother and I videotaped off of cable and must have watched a thousand times. The movie was based on a story by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, and would actually form the first relationship that Combs had with a franchise. He would go on to feature in a handful other Lovecraft-based flicks — From Beyond, Bride of Re-Animator, Lurking Fear, Castle Freak, Beyond Re-Animator, and (coming soon) House of Re-Animator — and even got to play Lovecraft himself once, in 1994’s Necronomicon. Continue reading