I Have Very, Very, Very, Very Bad News

Or

No Pain, No Gaynes

Or

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.