Parents Just Don’t Understand: A Somewhat Mundane Tale of Nostalgia Breadcrumbs
This is a recounting of my quick trip through various disremembered interconnected tunnels of our media past, mostly embarrassing with a brief stop past morbid and uncomfortable. Follow along, if you care to.
We’re watching “Cheers” because every night, we watch “Cheers” before sleep, in equal parts Rebecca and Diane. The episode is “Relief Bartender” (1986) and features two child actors in roles small enough to have been named “Child #1” and “Child #2”. You know when you see a rerun or an old movie with a child actor (not a known one, but one that you’d see all over cereal commercials and bit roles in sitcoms) and say out loud to no one, “I remember that kid! He used to be in everything!”? That happened.
“Child #1”, the little boy, was instantly familiar in that Miko Hughes (Kindergarten Cop “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.”) way. Like you’d seen his face everywhere for 5 years, never cared to know his name, and then he disappeared. [Related: remember Charlie Korsmo? Interesting story there.] And I’m no dummy, I have an iPhone, so I look it up, going on what little information I have. But before I can find his name, I’m led to the young child actress Judith Barsi, who played his little sister “Child #2”. I didn’t recognize her at all. Just a little girl in a party dress. But there’s a YouTube clip on Google page 1 that stands out. Something about Judith Barsi In Memoriam. And what’s not fascinating about watching a child star then finding out they’d since passed on? And here’s where it gets weird.
Judith’s parents were Hungarian immigrants who had moved to LA shortly before the birth of their daughter. Over time, as Judith became more successful as an actress, her father grew resentful, paranoid, nuts, and the whole thing culminated in a murder-suicide. Shot little 10-year-old Judith in the head while she slept. Then offed the wife and himself while burning the house down. Creepy.
So once the shivers were gone, I retreated to track down “Child #1” and found his name was, is Edan Gross. Among other things, he voiced the Good Guy doll (of which Chucky was one) in the “Child’s Play” movies, and the actual Corky doll (the real-life version of the Good Guy doll).
And among his long, long list of credits before retiring in 1995, (here he is now on Facebook), he appeared with his slightly older contemporary Joshua John Miller in a Trimark feature nestled in the My-Parents-Are-So-Weird subgenre between “My Stepmother Is an Alien” (1988), “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” (1989) and “Mom and Dad Save the World” (1992), called “And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird” (1991) (see trailer above), the title of which rivals only “What the #$*! Do We (K)now?!” (2004) in its ease of rolling off the tongue and possible cult affiliation. Character of disembodied robot dad ‘Newman’ voiced by Alan Thicke, naturally.
Joshua John Miller, of course, being one of the young stars of one of my favorite movies of all time, Tim Hunter’s “River’s Edge” (1986), based on the true story of a teenager in Milpitas, California who murdered his girlfriend because she made a joke about his dead mother.
Fun fact, when we were all on Myspace, I used to use this provocative Joshua John Miller portrait as my user pic. Some people were fooled, which I take as a high compliment.
