Vincent Schiavelli - Goodnight, Sweet Prince

R.I.P. Vincent Schiavelli, that guy you know from that movie.
Another giant of Hollywood and TV-wood has fallen. You might recognize him as that bizarre, pug-faced, bug-eyed, enormously tall man who was in every other movie you've ever seen and, while being really sweet, made you feel extremely uncomfortable like he had just escaped from a mental institution.
In fact, he played a mental patient in "One Flew Over A Cuckoo's Nest" - I guess it was the part he was born to play.

Other credits to his name -
-That weird bug-eyed circus freak in that X-Files episode
-The evil weird bug-eyed alien named Paragon who coined the popular catch phrase "Death to all monkey sluts" from the never aired but much sought after "Heat Vision & Jack"



-The angry bug-eyed ghost with a chip on his shoulder from "Ghost". Man, did he freak me out as a kid...

Dude, what's your problem! Just stop kicking beer cans and help Sam touch his wife's pottery one last time.

-That scary bug-eyed organ grinder freak from "Batman Returns". Like many other odd people - some bug-eyed, some not - he found a place where he belonged under the pasty wing of Tim Burton.

-One of three weird bug-eyed freaks in "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension"

and of course:
-Mr. Vargas, that weird bug-eyed science teacher nerd in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," second of course to Mr. Hand. Incidentally, Mr. Hand is played by Ray Walston , the other best unnamed character actor of all time.
He went on to star in "Fast Times: The TV Series", a show way before it's time - at least, before whatever time it was that would have made this show a hit.

Like Ben Stein, he was a staple nerdy teacher in the 80's. Not only did his quirky idiosyncrasies amuse us in both incarnations of "Fast Times", but he was also the math teacher in "Better Off Dead". So this goes to show, just because you're really strange looking doesn't mean you can still put your classical acting training and talent to use in some of the more influential roles of the century.

He also played some classic characters from some of TV-wood's best action flicks, like "Back to Back", which was apparently the sequel to "American Yakuza," so that's something, if you liked the movie "American Yakuza," or like American Yakuza the people. I guess it'd be more if you don't like them, because I think the movie is about kicking their asses. Basically, this movie has a few things going for it, besides the casting of the dearly departed. The plot includes the words Yakuza, Mob, Ex-Cop, battle, gangland, thugs, corrupt (or "corrup" as the imdb.com plot summarizer writes), and wrong-doings. And that only left out about 4 words from the entire plot. Awesome. Not to mention the tag line is "It's time to clean house." Again, AWESOME. This time in caps lock.

And you may recognize him as "that weird bug-eyed weirdo" from about 150 other movies or TV shows like "Night Shift," "White Mama," "M.A.N.T.I.S."(Or Mechanically Augmented Neuro-transmitter Interactive System, as you probably knew), "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch," "Head of the Class" (a personal favorite), "Who's The Boss"(a Media Wave favorite), "Punky Brewster" and "Eerie, Indiana", a short lived X-Files-type show that I actually auditioned for in my formative acting years. Needless to say, I did not get the part otherwise right now I'd be balls rich instead of balls poor, and I wouldn't be unnecessarily mocking the career of a real person who just died. As always, I'm sorry.

He was a great talent (named Best Character Actor by someone during some year... I think?) and he played a lot of people's favorite roles. If those roles were within movies that were actually good ("Back to Back" being the one exception), Media Wave would honor him with a commemorative section like we did for that woman that died a while back, I forget her name, from whats-it-called... you'd know her if you saw her.


-Jordan