Thwarting evil geniuses will be a lot less entertaining with the death of John Barry, 77. Barry helped imprint the cool on the James Bond franchise composing and the distinctive Bond theme and producing the scores to 11 films, including From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. Barry also won 5 Academy Awards as composer of Born Free, Dances With Wolves, Out of Africa and The Lion in Winter and a Razzie for The Legend of the Lone Ranger. Non award-winning films on his resume include Chaplin, The Ipcress File, The Quiller Memorandum, Body Heat, Midnight Cowboy and Howard the Duck.
Charlies Callas, the human whoopee cushion, has died at the age of 83. With a career based on bizarre noises and manic faces that give Jim Carrey a quiet dignity by comparison, Callas was a fixture in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s on the talk and variety shows of Merv Griffin, David Frost, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Mike Douglas, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Flip Wilson, Joey Bishop and, until he violated his personal space, Johnny Carson. Callas also played himself emceeing a funeral in Amazon Women on the Moon, brought his cerebral stylings to the films of Mel Brooks, including Dracula: Dead and Loving It, High Anxiety, Silent Movie and History of the World — Part I, and voiced Pete’s Dragon Elliot.
Or I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Tombstone... (Props to Terry) Charlie Louvin, half of one of country’s greatest brother acts, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 83. Louvin on guitar and lead vocals and his brother Ira on mandolin and high tenor harmonies updated the harmony signing of Depression-era performers on ballads born of the Lil’ Abner-esque southern Appalachians to become one of the biggest country hits of the 1950s and earn a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame. They also did a little fiddlin’ in the gospel arena, most notably the album “Satan is Real.” They hit number 1 with “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” in 1956, and cracked the country Top 10 with “When I Stop Dreaming” and “Cash on the Barrelhead” while were headlining a touring revue. On the undercard: Elvis Presley. The group’s popularity foundered in the 1960s, and Ira was killed in a car crash in 1965, presumably after nailing Charlie’s wife and running over his dog. As a solo performer, Louvin had 16 top 40 singles, topped by top 10 “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” then became a star with the Grand Ole Opry. The Louvins inspired two generations worth of country performers, and a tribute record, “Livin’, Lovin’, Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers,” won the Grammy Award for best country album in 2004.
Or If He’s So Fit, Why the Obit? (Kudos to Monty) Jack LaLanne, who showed that one can live a long life if one is willing to give up the things worth living for, has died of tediousness at the age of 96. A typical deeply troubled 15-year-old boy in San Francisco who claimed that sugar and junk food had led him to attempt suicide and to try to burn down the house – and keep in mind this was 1929 junk food that made Charleston Chews look appealing, so he would have been a serial killer if Cheetos and dark chocolate M&M’s had been around – LaLanne had a quarter-life crisis and became obsessed with exercise and nutrition to the exclusion of all other interests. This obsession, combined with Ron Popiel-esque hucksterism, made him the founder of the physical fitness movement, which begot muscle-bound gym rats, which begot the explosion in the use of anabolic steroids, which begot tiny, shriveled testicles, so at least none of these sociopaths can breed. With no medical training, other than chiropractor school, so you know he’s on the level, he opened his first fitness spa with a gym, juice bar and health food store in Oakland in 1936, and as anyone familiar with Al Davis can tell you, nothing good has ever come out of Oakland. Doctors saw through his spiel and realized he was insane, intent on inducing heart attacks and costing people their sex drive, but he scored himself a TV show in 1951, and if it’s on TV, it must be true, and his demonic reign spread. His altruistic interest in health led him to open dozens of fitness studios, which he sold to Bally, invent many of the modern torture devices found in gyms, like leg extension and pulley devices and the Juice Tiger, which blended raw fruits and vegetables while occasionally maiming users, and sold dozens of exercise videos and books, even drawing the elderly and disabled into his web of terror. Along the way, he turned his life into a series of That’s Incredible episodes: at 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat; at 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor. To fuel his mania, he lived by the credo that if it “tastes good, spit it out,” instead relying on hardboiled egg whites, broth, soy milk, raw vegetables and salmon, with his lone luxury being an occasional roast turkey sandwich.
Sexy Cora, 2010’s sexiest German amateur porn star, has gone tits up at the age of 23 after a heart attack during her 6th boob job. Discovered as a cast member of the 10th season of Big Brother Germany, Cora was grateful for the European approach to health care having been hospitalized in 2009 after trying to go down in history by breaking the world record for the number of fellatios performed in one day. She was trying for 200 men but choked, failing to get past 75, much to the disappointment of the man from the Guinness Book of World Records.
Or Sargent Slaughtered R. Sargent Shriver, the bitch of two generations of California and Massachusetts politicians, has died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 95. The graduate of Yale and Yale Law won a Purple Heart in the Navy, then worked as an editor at Newsweek, where he met Eunice Kennedy. Joe Kennedy then hired him to run Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest commercial building, in Chicago, and after a 7-year courtship, Shriver married Eunice, ceding control of his life to the Kennedys. Although the family thwarted his hopes to run for governor of Illinois in 1960 and VP in 1964 and 1968 to focus on other priorities, brother-in-law Jack let him clothe the world’s unwashed as the founding director of the Peace Corps in 1961. He pissed off the family by sticking with Lyndon Johnson’s administration, as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the lead on Johnson’s war on poverty through programs like Head Start and Job Corps, then as ambassador to France. Somehow being a hippie freak who likes poor people and the French did not endear him to the American people and he had a front row seat to the Richard Nixon ass kicking as the 1972 Democratic VP candidate, having replaced Crazy Tom Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. A 1976 presidential campaign was crushed early by the Carter Charisma Crusade, and he had settled into a retirement as an elder statesman until daughter Maria brought home a huge pile of German sausage that would eventually become the state’s governor. Eager to forget having Arnold Schwarzenegger as a son-in-law, Shriver developed Alzheimer’s Disease, leading Maria to heap on the humiliation with the book “What’s Happening to Grandpa?,” and the documentary, “Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?”
Superman is an orphan, as Susannah York, aka Mrs. Jor-El, has died of cancer at the age of 72. York scored an Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod as Alice, a tramp at a Depression dance marathon, in 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and was the lone true love of Albert Finney’s Tom Jones in the 1963 Oscar winner for Best Film.
Perception is everything. While the passing of Milvina Dean, the last living passenger of the Titanic, was splashed across the headlines, the passing of the last survivor from the Lusitania barely raised a ripple. Audrey-Johnston (née Pearl) was just 3 months old on May 7, 1915 when the British passenger ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Her nursemaid saved her and her brother, and her parents survived, but two sisters were lost, along with 1,196 of the 1,959 people aboard. The US did not respond well to Germany’s approach to naval traffic control, and in its typical approach to foreign policy, entered World War I two years later.
Or Touched by an Angel, indeed (Kudos to Monty) John Carroll Dye, best known (fittingly) as the Angel of Death, has died of a heart attack at the age of 47. In addition to his role as Andrew in the treacle-fest Touched by an Angel, he was one of the losers who got pity medals after losing to South Korea in the finals of some tournament in one of the greatest Taekwondo movies ever, The Best of the Best, co-starring James Earl Jones, Chris Penn and Eric Roberts.
Cookie Gilchrist, the AFL’s version of Jim Brown, has died at the age of 75. Jumping to the Canadian Football League straight out of high school after an attemped illegal signing by Cleveland head coach Paul Brown, Gilchrist starred for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (winning the 1957 Grey Cup), the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Toronto Argonauts before joining the Buffalo Bills of the American Football League in 1962, and was league MVP setting league record 13 TDs and 1,096 rushing yards. The next year he set a pro football record with 243 yards rushing and 5 touchdowns against the Jets, then led them to their first championship in 1964. Between the CFL and AFL, he was an All-Star for 10 consecutive seasons, and he was selected as the fullback on the All-Time All-AFL Team.
Peter Yates, director of the best car chase not involving the Blues Brothers or the General Lee, has died at the age of 81. Although Steve McQueen didn’t pull double duty as both pursuer and pursuee as he did in the motorcycle chase at the end of The Great Escape, Yates did put one of cinema’s best drivers to work behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang pursing a Dodge Charger through the streets of San Francisco. Yates was nominated for Academy Awards for directing Breaking Away and The Dresser, both tragically car-chase free. Other films included The Deep featuring Jacqueline Bisset in a wet t-shirt and… some other stuff, and Krull, a sci-fi film that can be shown with reels out of order to no detrimental effect.
Juan Piquer Simon, auteur behind the MST3Ked Pod People, aka Los Nuevos Extraterrestres, has died of lung cancer at the age of 74. Telling the story of two aliens that looked like ALF post-unsuccessful rhinoplasty, one of whom does odd tricks while the other is a homicidal maniac, as they interact with a dysfunctional family and crappy band stranded in the woods, Pod People was one of MSTies’ favorite riffs. Other ridiculous films included Slugs, about a town apparently devoid of salt that is overrun by the title beasties; Pieces, about a chainsaw-wielding sociopath killing Boston’s co-eds to form a human jigsaw puzzle while being pursued by Christopher George in the all-dubbed, all-the-time portion of his career. The film ends when the corpse puzzle comes to life and rips off the killers testicles.
Ryne Duren, the only Yankee reliever to have a Hall of Fame second baseman named after him, has died at the age of 81. Between his Coke bottle glasses, drunken escapades and 98-mile per-hour warm-up pitches bouncing off backstops, he kept hitters on edge en route to notching 630 strikeouts in 589 innings, to go along with 392 walks. He led the AL in 1958 with 20 saves for the Yankees, but his drinking precluded any extended success. In 1965 with the Senators, he got rocked while pitching with a hangover, then got drunk again after the game. While driving home, he pulled over, climbed a bridge, and started shouting. After his manager talked him down, he was released and finished in baseball.
Corpses to the Left of Me, Tombstones to the Right
Or He’s Now as Constant as the Minnesota North Stars
Or Right Down the Flatline
Or Its So Hard to Keep This Smile From His Face, But He Looks So Natural Gerry Rafferty had the feeling that something ain’t right, has given up the booze and the one-night stands and now he’ll be getting down the stairs on the shoulders of pallbearers after succumbing to liver and kidney failure at the age of 63. The Scotland-born Rafferty had a father prone to drinking his nights away, and spent many Saturday nights with his mother on avenues like Baker Street to avoid his wrath, which helped color the world view that contributed to hits such as “Stuck in the Middle With You” as lead singer of Stealers Wheel, and “Baker Street” and “Right Down the Line” as a solo artist on City to City. After hitting the Top 10 in the U.S. in 1972, “Stuck in the Middle With You” resurfaced as one of K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Blonde sliced off Officer Nash’s ear. Content to be an interesting 3-hit drunk Irish-Scottish wonder, Rafferty refused to tour in the United States and turned down chances to record with Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. He eventually decided to tempt fate by signing with the European label Hypertension, Cirrhosis being unable to meet his per appearance demand.
Anthropomorphizing Brit kid lit author Dick King-Smith has died at the age of 88. Putting his 20 years as a farmer to use, most of Smith’s 100 titles, totaling more than 15 million books sold worldwide, were about animals, starting in 1979 with The Fox Busters, about chickens taking their revenge on foxes, and most of his 100 titles were about animals. His favorite animal was the pig, and his biggest hit was about a pig acting like a sheepdog: The Sheep Pig, or Babe: The Gallant Pig, as they called it for dimwitted Americans, which led to the James Cromwell opuses Babe and Babe: Pig in the City.
Richard Winters, who single-handedly defeated the Nazis in World War II as commanding officer of Easy Company, the Army unit immortalized in the book and TV series Band of Brothers, has died at the age of 92. Company E of the 101st Airborne parachuted behind enemy lines ahead of the landing on D-Day, with Winters assuming command of the unit that day after his commanding officer was killed. Winters led the 13 members of his scatter squad that he could find and and overtook a battery of howitzers manned by 50 Germans. The company fought in the Battle of the Bulge, liberated a concentration camp and captured Hitler’s private retreat at at Berchtesgaden, Germany, while Winters was promoted to captain and then major along the way. Winters earned his men’s respect and loyalty by leading the unit from in front, putting himself in the same danger his men faced. All told, Winters won the Distinguished Service Cross ribbon, 2 Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, the Presidential Unit Citation ribbon, American Defense Service ribbon, National Defense Service Medal ribbon, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign ribbon, World War II Victory Medal ribbon, Army of Occupation ribbon, Croix de guerre 1939-1945 with palm, French Liberation Medal ribbon, Oorlogskruis with Palm, Belgian WWII Service Medal, Army Good Conduct ribbon, Combat Infantry Badge, and US Army Airborne basic parachutist badge. Winters and his men had held reunions and kept written accounts of their exploits, essentially handing Stephen Ambrose a plethora of material for him to plagiarize, misrepresent and misquote in Band of Brothers.
Or More Dead Than Alive Anne Francis, best remembered as Mama Jo, cranky spinster head of an all-girl charter boat service moored next to Cody and Nick on the first season of Riptide, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 80. She also played Honey West, one of the first female TV detectives who matched her male counterparts with inexplicably well financed high-tech toys, unmatched martial arts skills, and needlessly exotic pets, in this case an ocelot named Bruce. Other gigs included two episodes of The Twilight Zone, as a witch infatuated with James Best, and the other as a mannequin come to live – not sure which is less believable, and was one of Lucy’s mothers-in-law-to-be on Dallas. She also starred in Forbidden Planet, the play William Shakespeare would have written if he had have conceived of a robot and an invisible monster that was the manifestation of the human Id. Francis died less than a month after her Forbidden Planet co-star Leslie Nielsen, who co-starred in Airplane!, which was based in part on The Crowded Sky, which co-starred Francis.
Or Postle-morte (Props to Jason, friend of the program)
Or Heaven can Waite (Additional accolades to amigo Jason)
Or Keyser Soze Ties Up Another Loose End (A collaboration with Monty) Pete Postlethwaite, best remembered as the great white hunter of Tyrannosaurus Rex in The Lost Wold (aka Jurassic Park 2) has died of cancer at the age of 64. The ugly character actor, called the best actor in the world by Steven Spielberg, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 as the Da of a man unjustly accused of terrorism in In the Name of the Father. The next year, he was Keyser Soze’s Man Friday, sort of named Kobayashi, in The Usual Suspects, conveying a creepily bland menace in setting up a deal for $91 million in dope that wasn’t there and left 27 men dead on a pier. He was the ill-fated priest who probably should have left well enough alone in the remake of The Omen, filled Sir Laurence Olivier’s role as slumming classically trained actor in the remake of Clash of the Titans, was a dying corporate baron in Inception, and was a vicious gangster in The Town.
Daisy Doonesbury has failed to live up to her promise to drive into the sea when it was her time, opting for the traditional funeral at about 90 years old. The Widow Doonesbury lived near Tulsa as a symbol of Midwestern values and the gradual decline of America’s family farms. She testified before Congress about farm subsidies in 1985, responding to a vicious line of questioning with “You can't stop me, I'm a Depression-era widow of a World War II veteran living on a family farm,” leading the senator to respond, “I yield to the widow's awesome iconography.” After her health forced her to move in with son Michael in Seattle, she railed against the non-existent death panels of health care reform and burned her Medicare card to protest all government-run programs, despite having accepted farm subsidies for 43 years.
