Stay Down

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Naked Gun 4/5: The Smell of Ed Hocken

Former Breath Assure spokesman George Kennedy has found a more permanent cure for his halitosis, succumbing to heart disease at the age of 91. The sturdy character actor spent ample time as both heavy and hero: He was the hired gun in town to off The Sons of Katie Elder and the major at HQ who figures out a way for The Dirty Dozen to prove their merits, even if he did get knocked off an ambulance for is trouble. He hunted down The Boston Strangler and beat the crap out of Cool Hand Luke, a role for which he won the 1967 Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He was Joe Patroni, Mr. Everything when it comes to airplanes, graduating from mechanic in Airport to the VP of Operations who saved the Karen Black-piloted plane in Airport 1975 and the submerged plane in Airport ’77 and then pilot in The Concorde: Airport ’79, where he made the word “again” more disturbing than it’s ever been when he was nailing Bibi Andersson by a roaring fire. The Airport series begat the parody Airplane, and Kennedy was tapped to play McCroskey, but that was the wrong week to turn his back on a steady paycheck and the role went to Lloyd Bridges instead. He was more accommodating the next time the Zucker Brothers came calling and took the role of Ed Hocken, Frank Drebin’s cuckolded partner in the Naked Gun series. He also spent a few seasons in Dallas as Carter McKay, Southfork’s neighboring rancher who stirs up a range war 100 years late as a ruse to force the Ewings to sell an oil-rich parcel in a plot devised by long-time rival Jeremy Wendell, who is caught in the ensuing sting operation, costing him his spot as head of WestStar Oil, a position that is then assumed by McKay. In the final season, JR sets his sights on WestStar, a larger company than his Ewing Oil, and so great a prize he is willing to jeopardize the family company to get it. In the end, McKay outfoxes JR, taking WestStar for himself and turning Ewing Oil over to arch-nemesis Cliff Barnes, which leaves JR considering suicide in some sort of nod to Hays Code-era morals that the bad guy always has to pay. Other roles included walking stereotype – down to the black and white striped shirt – Big Frenchy in a few episodes of McHale’s Navy, Clint Eastwood’s traitorous former partner in The Eiger Sanction (it’s a 40-year-old spoiler, bite me), good guy cop in Earthquake, an avenged shopkeep in Creepshow 2, the bank robber who corrupts John Wayne’s sons in Cahill, US Marshall and for reasons surpassing understanding, host of Saturday Night Live in 1981 episode. 

To Bury an Author

Or 

Go Stop a Watchman

Or

To Bury a Mockingbird 

(Additional accolades for Peter)

Or

Go Set a Catafalque

(Another victory lap for Peter)

Harper Lee, the female JD Salinger in terms of reclusiveness, output and placement on summer reading lists, has died at the age of 89, causing her publisher to cut her remaining contract to 2 more books. Revered for To Kill a Mockingbird, the simplistic story of an ineffective Southern lawyer who loses a case with an obviously innocent client, who ignores a woman being raped and beaten by her father, who has to rely on his adolescent daughter to disrupt a lynch mob, and who is so little regarded by his own daughter that she calls him by his first name and doesn’t know to stand when he exits a courtroom, Lee coasted on undeserved laurels for more than 50 years before her publisher took advantage of her barely lucid state to foist Go Set a Watchman, a sequel in that it came after, but really an underdeveloped first draft of Mockingbird, on an unsuspecting and unwelcoming public. After her one-hit wonder To Kill a Mockingbird was introduced to widespread acclaim and won the Pulitzer in 1960 (and was turned into an Oscar-winning screenplay in 1962), Lee found the attention overwhelming and withdrew from publishing and public life. Or she realized that she barely had enough story for one novel, let alone a second and figured it was better to retire on top. She did help her childhood friend Truman Capote, whose mincing, effeminate, effete, awkward persona was not well-received in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, so he brought Lee along to talk to the locals while he was researching his book about the murder of 4 members of the Clutter family, which would eventually yield the pioneering true crime book In Cold Blood.

Now Found on Boutros Boutros Hill

Or

Boutros Boutros, Boutros? Oh golly.

(Props to Peter)

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the 6th Greatest Sounding Word James Earl Jones could say, has died of complications of a broken hip at the age of 93. The Egyptian diplomat was the grandson of an assassinated Prime Minister, and while World War II raged, he was able to graduate from Cairo University, then secured his PhD in international law from the University of Paris. After working with various international organizations, he returned to serve Anwar El Sadat and helped broker the piece with Israel that allowed Egypt to stop getting its ass kicked, but did get his boss killed. He was elected as Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1991, where he oversaw such golden moments in global politics as the frenzied dissolution of Yugoslavia, the continuing civil war in Angola and the genocide in Rwanda that left more than 800,000 dead while the world shrugged. As Egypt’s Foreign Minister in 1990, Boutros-Ghali had sent $26 million in arms to the Hutu regime as they were preparing for their ethnic cleansing, so I guess he did a little more than shrug. He also ordered a helicopter attack on a meeting among Somalia clansmen who were trying to arrange peace and rein in warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The attack ended the peace initiative and united the clansmen against the US, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized in Blackhawk Down. Despite this sterling resume, the US vetoed his bid for a second 5 years at the helm, ignoring worldwide support and Boutros-Ghali became the 1st one-term UN Secretary-General in history. Still, he provided Ali G's best interview ever and produced Jerry Seinfeld's go-to phrase when his friend's paramours walk around topless. 

I Have Very, Very, Very, Very Bad News

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No Pain, No Gaynes

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Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gaynes

(Merit for Monty)

Or

Police Academy 86: Lassard Under Ground!

(Kudos to Phil)

George Gaynes, best remembered as the Mission Director in Marooned, or as MSTies know it, Space Travelers, has died at the age of 98. Gaynes was so old that when he was born in Finland, that country was still a Duchy within the Russian Empire. A regular in Broadway musical comedies of the 1940s and ‘50s, Gaynes worked mostly in obscurity before becoming an overnight sensation in the early 1980s, first as the affable but incompetent Eric Lassard, goldfish-loving Commandant of the Police Academy series, where the most subversive gag of the franchise was stripping this distinguished gentleman of his dignity for a blow job joke. Gaynes contrasted this lovable dope with his role as lovably cranky photographer Henry Warnimont who takes in a mix-matched sock-wearing homeless urchin named Punky Brewster. Other roles include being the only person to ever find Dustin Hoffman attractive in Tootsie, and the inexplicable role of a mob boss on General Hospital, while behind the camera, he directed the final episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Recused

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Dissenting In Pine Bin

(Deserved decoration for Don)

Or

Argle Bargled

(Meritorious mention for Mike B)

Antonin Scalia’s lifelong quest to keep the United States bound to the whims of slave-owning men in powdered wigs and breeches who sought to cure disease with bleeding and conflicts with guns that could fire 3 shots a minute (including ample reloading time in between), has ended with his death from “natural causes” while “alone” at a West Texas resort at the age of 79. Scalia was lauded for his entertainingly written opinions, if you consider unfettered access to guns and extremely fettered access to your own body entertaining. After DOMA was overturned, he suggested that the Supreme Court had no more right to determine gays were a minority deserving protection than it would for pederasts. He called the Voting Rights Act the "perpetuation of racial entitlement.” He was a darling among conservatives, who claim to abhor activist judges, yet celebrated his attempts to overturn Miranda v. Arizona and Roe v. Wade. Scalia’s originalist leanings also led him to argue against Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the government’s responsibility to provide indigent defendants with lawyers, and Brown v. Board of Education, as there was no intent in the 14th Amendment to desegregate schools. Ironically for this man of Constitutional purity, the battle over who will name his successor has already started in purely political terms, as Republicans have apparently found a hidden clause in Article 2 "[the president] shall nominate ... Judges of the supreme Court…” unless in an election year with an opposition Congress, ignoring the 17 judges previously nominated in election years, most recently President Reagan’s appointment of Anthony Kennedy. 

Until Next Time, This Was Bob Elliott

Or

Had a Life

Bob Elliott, best remembered for being ashamed of his son Chris in the TV series Get a Life, in the movie Cabin Boy, and in life, has died of throat cancer at the age of 92. The long-time comedian started in radio, pairing with Ray Goulding in the late 1940s in Boston, peppering their programming with fake ads like Monongahela Metal Foundry - “Steel ingots cast with the housewife in mind” and Einbinder Flypaper - “The flypaper you’ve gradually grown to trust over the course of three generations.” Radio was the YouTube of its day, and Bob and Ray parlayed their success in local radio into national radio broadcasts and then their own TV show, bringing their deadpan satire and cast of inept reporters, dimwitted anchors and blowhard sports announcers to ever broadening audiences. They later starred in several sketch comedy specials as well as two Broadway shows. Elliott also appeared as a bank guard in Quick Change, and had other supporting roles on TV and in movies, but spent most of his time cleaning up after Chris.