it is so that on a weekend i generally get a number of hours to myself. this is on each morning of both days of a weekend, look you see, or if you will saturday and sunday. why? our cats have clocked that i am the easiest to wake up, and so when they want food at around six in the morning they let me know. usually the remainder of the family, with them being the 75% of my family who you all like a good deal more than you like me (reasonably and understandably) have a preference to sleep until around, say, midday.
what this means is i am, to quote the pet shop boys, left to my own devices somewhat. feeding cats only takes so much time, after all. sometimes i fill the hours with rudimentary housework, such as dishes or laundry. often, though, i rather just sit and have a little think, contemplating matters which strike me as important but seldom feature in the news or similar.
one such matter of consideration recently was the subject of how Vernon Wells evolved as an actor. having recently watched a masterpiece of 90s Vernon Wells cinema, i found myself wondering how it was that he evolved from being the go to actor when a sinister villain in a movie had the major characteristic of being homoerotic (Mad Max 2, and in particular Forbidden Love, also known as Commando), to getting the decidedly heterosexual role of wishing to impregnate Traci Lords in Circuitry Man II Plughead or whatever it was called.
the answer, i quickly decided, was to be found in the underappreciated, hardly known and rarely celebrated work he did as a sort of "character actor", quasi cameo role appearance in certain 1980s television shows. shows of both variable popularity and quality, with a similar sliding scale being in place with regards to how fondly they are remembered.
again, i took to that "internet" thing. i am not sure if you have had a chance to use it yourself as of yet, but if so you may well have found that there is a "search function" on it, which enables you to find some information.
having done one of these "search" things, i found that Vernon Wells had (apparently) done quite a few tv shows. i had absolutely no wish to watch all of his appearances in such, but did select two. they would be The Fall Guy, which i had not seen in ages, and Knight Rider, because of course.
because i had not seen it for ages, i elected to watch the episode of The Fall Guy what (it was claimed) featured Vernon Wells. according to imdb, he was in an episode in the last series (or "season" if American) of it, playing someone called Croyden.
are you familiar with The Fall Guy? yes? then you can skip this paragraph. no? well, then, how do i best describe it. one of America's greatest character actors, Lee Majors, plays someone with the wonderful name of Colt Seavers. essentially the character is a movie stunt man who also works as a bounty hunter, all whilst fending off the lurid attentions of every single woman he meets, for each and every one of them appear to wish to have sexual relations with him immediately.
we are not, regrettably, here to discuss the immense crime fighting and falling out of helicopters skills of Lee Majors, or his impressive sexual prowess. instead, it is the performance of Vernon Wells in this particular episode that we are discussing. make no mistake, the most striking aspect, the most lingering impression one has of his performance is that it does not exist, for he is not in the episode. at all.
that image above is from one of the more memorable aspects of the episode, when Lee Majors (or if you like "Colt") fights a ghost. from what i could work out, it was some sort of Halloween special episode, in which Elvira tried to have sex with Lee Majors ("Colt"). i think it had something to do with a haunted house, too, and various curses being cast.
i thought something was amiss when the name of Vernon Wells did not appear in the credits. oddly and unexpectedly all of the acting members of the Carradine family featured, and they were in the episode for a brief, blink and you will miss it, entirely unnecessary scene. no matter, i watched on hoping that Vernon Wells was appearing in an uncredited cameo sort of way. he did not.
leaving that aside, is it worth watching either this or any (or all) episode(s) of The Fall Guy? should you ask my brother this, the answer would be yes. my answer is that if you quite like the idea of watching him out of The Six Million Dollar Man and was the pilot out of Starflight One catching criminals, falling off of building and horses and refusing to have sex, then absolutely. also, Lee Majors sings (kind of) the theme song.
moving on, then, and Knight Rider. yes, Vernon Wells did actually feature in the episode what imdb said that he was in. rather surprisingly, he played the main villain in the episode, rather than a romantic lead role like what he played in Commando, also known as Forbidden Love.
essentially he plays the same character in Knight Rider as he did in Commando, except for one or two minor differences. basically these differences are that he has a different name, vastly different motivations, has better hair, wears less chain mail, at no point attempts to have sex with a big massive Austrian and drinks tea.
what, precisely, is the motivation of the Vernon Wells character here, and indeed the plot? i fear most of it seemed too complex for my simple mind. either that, or it is particularly ridiculous. as far as i could tell, the Vernon Wells character is selling stolen or counterfeit pharmaceuticals, or something. he is doing so from a well camouflaged tent in the middle of one of them national park things, with absolutely no one around for miles. in his wisdom, Vernon Wells instructs his crew to start a series of fires nearby, thus attracting the authorities to his locale but distracting them too.
of course, for no apparent reason Michael Knight (The Hoff) and his fanny magnet, KITT, are patrolling the area. so they get involved, especially when a young lad gets falsely accused of starting the fires.
the most striking element of this episode of Knight Rider is that once again Vernon Wells has a plot story arc on which a child is pivotal. and, just as was the case in Mad Max 2 and Commando, the climax sees Vernon Wells getting his backside comprehensively kicked by the child. overall, the perhaps the most important aspect of this episode in Knight Rider folklore is that the whole series got cancelled not long after it. much of the success enjoyed by the series hinged on limiting the amount of actual, real and proper actors what appeared in the show so as not to draw attention to the limitations of The Hoff. casting Vernon Wells went against this convention in about as big a way as you can.
and that is just about that, i think. the versatility, maybe even the dynamics, of Vernon Wells are superbly shown in both episodes of both series, with one showing what something is like with him in it and the other showing what something is like when he is not in it. will i be watching more shows that either do or do not feature Vernon Wells? i would expect so, yes. but i would not expect me to comment on all of them.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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