unintended consequences

Last night, I saw a column at Newsarama that infuriated me. It’s been taken offline, so I can’t quote it, but the basic premise was that Wesley Crusher was playing Ted Kord, so Ted Kord was a Redshirt, because Wesley was a Redshirt, so now you know how lame that episode is going to be ha ha ha.

I tried to post a comment on the article, but it wouldn’t let me. Here’s what I wanted to say. It applies not only to this article, but to all the articles that start from the same premise. I’m putting it here because it’s the most successful I’ve ever been in attempting to explain why I’m so fed up with this sort of thing:

Wow, this is so profoundly insulting and so profoundly wrong, I don’t even know where to begin. You know that Wesley Crusher is a fictional character and I’m a professional actor, right? And do you even know what a Redshirt is? They don’t survive more than one episode, and rarely have any dialog. So … yeah, you’re pretty much as wrong as you can be about that.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but this whole thing is based on a premise that couldn’t be more ignorant of my work, Star Trek history, and the work we’ve all done together on Batman: the Brave and the Bold. I am offended on behalf of all of us who worked on Fall of the Blue Beetle, but what I find so personally insulting is your belittling suggestion that any work that I do now – as a 36 year-old actor – should just be discarded and disparaged because of some badly-written episodes and a sometimes-badly-written character that I played two decades ago.

I am not Wesley Crusher, and when someone says, “Wesley Crusher is playing [Some Character], so, you know, go hate [That Character] without even watching him,” it is both unfair and profoundly insulting to me. Imagine having something you’ve worked so hard to create being dismissed out of hand, because of completely unrelated work you did when you were a teenager – work that you had no control over – and you may understand why this is so upsetting to me. This has happened to me for years, and when I read it tonight – especially related to something like Batman, that I’m so proud of, that I know has a big crossover audience – It infuriated me. I’ve been subjected to this same tired line for 15 years, and I’ve really had enough of it. Live in the now, man!

I think we can all agree that Wesley wasn’t always badly-written, but my whole point isn’t to defend Wesley anyway – as I said, people are entitled to their own opinions – but to point out that Wesley is pretend and I am real. Wesley is forever a nerdy teenager, and I am an adult. If you didn’t like Wesley, that’s fine, but just give me a chance to disappoint you on my own merits, now, instead of deciding that my current work is not even worth watching, because of something you didn’t like twenty years ago.

On Twitter, I said: Urge to kill … rising. Someone needs to tell this guy that his “joke” is about 15 years out of date.

Apparently, some very stupid people thought I was suggesting that someone should hurt the guy who wrote the lame post. People: are you serious? Ever watch The Simpsons? Check out Treehouse of Horror V, particularly The Shinning, which gave us such memorable lines as “No TV and no beer make Homer something something …” and “Urge to kill … rising.” A different segment also has one of my favorite moments in Simpsons history, where Homer keeps getting his hand stuck in the toaster, but that’s not really relevant to this post.

Anyway, a lot of people spoke up on my behalf before they yanked the article, which was very kind, and not something I was expecting, but I guess should have been. Not everyone was polite and civil, though, so I also learned something about unintended consequences last night: choose your words carefully, because someone in the 30000 people who follow you on Twitter may be missing a d6 or two in their mental dice bag.

To be absolutely clear about the whole thing, I also said: Final thought before sleepy-time, where I am a viking: “urge to kill…” is a Simpsons reference, not an actual threat. Sheesh.

While I obviously can’t control what people decide to do on their own, I wanted to publicly apologize to the guy who wrote the column, even though he insulted the hell out of me. I didn’t intend to do anything more than speak up on my own behalf, but that’s why they call it unintended consequences.

Now, let us all bask in television’s warm, glowing, warming glow…

holy hole in a donut

Since Friday of last week, I’ve done about eleventy million interviews to support my episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Fall of the Blue Beetle, which airs next friday, January 23, at 8pm on Cartoon Network.

I recorded this episode several months ago, and I haven’t been able to talk about it at all until now, because the only thing studios like more than keeping things secret is keeping things secret.

I think the bulk of the interviews I’ve done will start going online today and tomorrow, but I got official permission yesterday to pretty much say whatever I want, and since I’ve been waiting so long to say this, I’m saying it now: I play Ted Kord, the silver age Blue Beetle.

Yeah, I’m so excited about that, I kinda needed to put it in bold. Just be glad this isn’t MacWrite, where I could have bolded, outlined, underlined, and shadowed it. You know, because in 1985 it made sense to do that with things that were important, like letting people know that this was Wil’s room so KEEP OUT I MEAN IT!

Anyway, over the next week, I’ll link to the interviews that I’ve done, where I talk a whole bunch about working on the show, my life-long Batmania, and voice acting in general, but it’s not every day that I get permission to say whatever I want about something that hasn’t aired … so now you know.

more work in progress

This is from the Coming of Age review I've been working on:

Obligatory Technobabble: “With this new extricator, sir, we could eliminate three more bulky machines from cargo space.” – Riker, explaining how, even though Picard says it isn’t possible, there really is room for a Foosball table in the cargo bay.

Ha. See what I did there?

I'm going to be at the Phoenix Comicon next week, and I'm bringing two unreleased TNG reviews to read. I'm not saying which ones, in case I change my mind, but I think Coming of Age may be one of them.

the great wheaton hockey scandal of 1991

My friends at CliqueClack did an interview with Dean Devlin, creator of the sensational new series Leverage. Dean and I played hockey on the same team (with, I’ve just now remembered, Adam Baldwin, also) from around 1989-1991. He was a forward and I was a goalie. One night in Burbank, our team gave up a breakaway near the redline. I saw it happening when the puck was still in the offensive zone, so I was ready.

When the other guy crossed our blue line, I was already way out of the net, near the bottom of the faceoff circle on my left side. I skated backward with him to force him to shoot on my terms. I guess I was near the crease when I saw him pull his stick back way over his head. “Oh good,” I thought, “he’s just going to try to blast it past me. Those shots almost always go wide, or right into my glove.”

The next thing I knew, there was an explosion in the rink, and a bright flash of light before everything went dark. When the lights came back on, I was on my knees, surrounded by a semicircle of skates. I pulled my helmet off, and watched a whole bunch of blood pour down onto the ice.

“Oh, the way it beads up is really neat,” I thought. Then, “Wait. That’s my blood.”

I’d done my job and forced him to take a low-percentage shot that went wide, just like I was supposed to. Unfortunately, it went right over the net and into my skull. My helmet was crushed, and I got to take a trip to the emergency room for something like 36 stitches in my head. I also got whiplash, which was not awesome.

Anyway, in Dean’s interview with CC, this game came up. He said:

“Wil was a dynamite goalie. When he was still shooting Star Trek, we were playing in a game and a puck actually cracked his helmet open and he needed stitches and the producers of Star Trek basically wanted to murder me. ‘You’re letting Wil stand there in front of a net while we’re shooting the series?’” Oh, the scandal.

I miss playing hockey so much. If I could justify the expense, I’d totally buy some new gear (I’ve outgrown my skates and pants, and I’d need a new helmet for obvious reasons) and find one of those leagues for guys who are in their thirties.

It may seem silly, but seventeen years after we played together, hearing that Dean thought I was a dynamite goalie means the world to me. I worked really hard to be a good keeper back in those days, and I was really proud of our team. I had a lot of free time, so I worked out at the rink almost every day, and played pick up games a couple of times a week. That season, I had a great record and a great save percentage. I even got to travel and play in an exhibition game against some members of the 1980 gold medal team in front of a sold out Boston Garden – where I was scored-on and pulled after one shot, which still makes me sad to this day. In my defense, it was Mike Eruzione who made the shot, and it was a two-on-none break. But still, I wish I’d stayed in the game.

Until I read this today, I had no idea the producers bitched Dean out, and it’s amusing to me that they did because I wasn’t even a regular on the series when this happened. In fact, shortly after the injury, I got a call from the Star Trek production office. I was surprised to hear from them, and assumed someone had heard about the accident and wanted to bitch me out about it.

They were actually calling me to tell me that Gene Roddenberry had died.

It’s weird how memories are all woven together, isn’t it?

work in progress …

I should really tell OpenOffice that Stardate is a word, but now it’s kind of amusing to me that it always tells me “UR DOIN IT WRONG!”

Coming of Age is as enjoyable to watch as I remember, even though I haven’t seen it in at least twenty years. In fact, my only real complaint so far (I’ve watched a lot more of it than it would appear from this screenshot) is that my acting is pretty flat and predictable. I make a lot of obvious, weak choices. Of course, I’m not exactly objective about that sort of thing, so maybe I’m being too critical of myself. Also: really bad pre-helmet hairdo. There’s a story behind that, but you’ll have to wait for the book to find out what it is.

Oh, and to anyone who says that Memory Alpha isn’t exhaustively comprehensive, I can only say: flux coordinating sensor.

(Image can be embiggened at Flickr)