r/ClassicTV

Anissa Jones, Johnny Whittaker, Kathy Garver, Brian Keith and Sebastian Cabot

Ball and Vance really showed the beauty and endurance of friendship through their years together on television👯‍♀️🖤

Natalie Schafer, best known as Lovey (Eunice) Howell on Gilligan’s Island, and as a founding member of the Honey Bees;). She had a career spanning 60 years, with many guest starring roles including a two episode arc in Season 3 of The Love Boat. What you may not know is she also wrote one of the stories on Season 2 Episode 16 “Home Sweet Home” and her actual birth year 1900 was not known until her passing in 1991. She was 64 on Gilligan’s Island while Thurston was 51.

Fun bit of trivia: this episode was written by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, and got banned by the show’s own sponsor for being too dark for 1962 primetime. Full story in the comments if anyone’s curious.

I recently interviewed Lou Ferrigno at a Star Trek convention, and what surprised me was just how personal his connection to the original series is.

Ferrigno grew up in Brooklyn dealing with significant hearing and speech difficulties and says he was bullied as a kid, with other children calling him “Deaf Mute” and “Deaf Louie.” Television became an escape, and Star Trek in particular gave him somewhere else to go.

“Being very depressed growing up as a kid, being bullied, Star Trek would escape my imagination, to be free, to be able to give me some excitement,” he told me. “That's why it had such an effect on me.”

Captain Kirk was a big part of that. “I loved Captain Kirk. I loved the way he conducted himself. I wanted to be like him. He's on the ship commanding, and especially his personality.”

There's something pretty remarkable about what happened next. The bullied kid watching Kirk in Brooklyn grew up to become the Incredible Hulk — and eventually became friends with William Shatner.

Ferrigno told me they'd had dinner together just a couple of weeks before our conversation, and while Kirk was his hero as a kid, today it's Shatner himself he admires.

“I'm amazed at his work ethic, his motivation,” Ferrigno said. “He never really takes lapses of time off. He's always doing something to better himself. It's amazing, because I learned so much from him. He has incredible wisdom.”

What I found most interesting was that Ferrigno sees Star Trek fandom and superhero fandom in much the same way: both give people a world they can escape into and characters they can connect with. “You want to be in space. You wish you could be in space. You could fantasize, you could think about the story and you want to be with those people.... That connection never leaves you.” Sixty years later, that certainly seems to have been true for him.

You can read the full interview at https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/celebrities/lou-ferrigno-on-how-star-trek-gave-him-hope-and-inspired-his-life