In addition to the rocket launch I mentioned in the last post, there is also sad news on the ‘net today. One of the faces I grew up with, the terrific Tony Randall, has passed away. Randall is best known for playing neat-freak Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple<\/i>, and it’s mostly from this show that I know him. I fondly remember watching TOC with my folks. Randall inhabited the role so successfully that when I saw the original Odd Couple<\/i> film in later years, I had a hard time accepting Jack Lemmon in the role. I recently saw a few re-runs of TOC and was disapppointed to find that they don’t play as well now as I remember them — this is always a problem with seeing something that you loved as a kid, and if you don’t believe me, just try sitting through an episode of Gilligan’s Island<\/i> these days — but Randall was still funny.<\/p>\n
In addition to the rocket launch I mentioned in the last post, there is also sad news on the ‘net today. One of the faces I grew up with, the terrific Tony Randall, has passed away. Randall is best known for playing neat-freak Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple, and it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn addition to TOC, he was also great in a little fantasy film from the 1960s called The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao<\/i>. If I remember my trivia, this movie was produced and\/or directed by the great George Pal and it featured Randall in seven different roles, some of them involving very elaborate make-up. He was skilled enough that each character was utterly distinct from the others. I don’t know if Dr. Lao<\/i> is available on home video these days, but if you run across a copy somewhere, check it out.
\nAlso, if you were a fan of the recent Ewan MacGregor film Down on Love<\/i>, you might want to check out the Rock Hudson-Doris Day flicks that inspired it. Tony Randall — who had a cameo in Down on Love<\/i> that was probably his final film role — appeared in these fluffy little comedies in the same prissy role filled by David Hyde-Pierce in the more recent film.
\nYou won’t have any problem finding an obituary for Tony, but I liked this one<\/a> from The New York Times. It’s fairly long, very comprehensive and admiring. Also worth checking out is Mark Evanier’s reminiscence<\/a> of watching Randall and Jack Klugman rehearse an episode of The Odd Couple<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"