Sunday, March 4, 2007

Wikipedia Brings Sadness

So I'm browsing Wikipedia the other day, and reminiscing about my glorious youth, when I came across some sad pieces of television-related information. You may already be familiar with what follows, but I was not.

Evidently, Myra Monkhouse (Michelle Thomas), Steve Urkel's polka-playing girlfriend from "Family Matters", passed away in 1998 due to a rare intra-abdominal desmoplastic small round cell tumor. I was uninformed of this passing - this definitely should have been bigger news. I don't run the news, but I'm sure whatever the feature story was that day was not as big a deal as this. 1998? What was that - the Nagano Olympics? Monica Lewinsky? Jesse Ventura? Myra was a key character on a seminal show for my generation - I don't know many people who've seen less than 40 episodes of "Family Matters", even if they think the show is horrendous.


Then, I learned that the original yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang) died in a car accident in 2001. I didn't really watch this show - I was a little too old at the time - it's hard to watch Power Rangers in the day and switch to Seinfeld at night. But I definitely knew of her, since she was an Asian person on television - at the time, the only other Asian people I saw on tv shows were the girl from "Ghostwriter" and the girl from "California Dreams". I never thought about it at the time, but it was in retrospect very convenient that the yellow power ranger was Asian, the black power ranger was black, the alcoholic-Irish-looking long-haired Tim Riggins one was green, etc. Anyways, I don't mean to belittle anyone's death with stupid jokes. Apparently Thuy Trang was not wearing a seatbelt. I like to wear a seatbelt, even in cabs, which people make fun of me for, but I don't see why not. Screw you and your peer pressure.

Lastly, I read (and these appear to be more like rumors) on Wikipedia that Danny, the calm know-it-all Native American from "Hey Dude" (the Nickelodeon show Ben Stiller's wife used to be on) might also be dead. I'm hopeful this is just a rumor though, like when I heard Kel Mitchell ("Good Burger") was dead, or Jaleel White was dead, or that John Basedow ("Fitness Made Simple") had died in a tsunami.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you wear seatbelts in cabs?! pssh, loser...

haha jk.

actually, i've never seen you wear one. are you sure you wear one??

Anonymous said...

for your information, i was in a car accident once (which can definitely be used to make a generalization) I was sitting in the back (along with a friend, 4 total passengers) and I was the one person not wearing a seat belt and the only one to come out unscathed, not even a bruise....i cant believe you wear a seatbelt in the back (pansy)...wow i hope i dont die a horrific death while sitting in the backseat of a car not wearing my seatbelt.