Ned Hardy
Get Smarter Everyday
Let’s talk about Jan Smithers. If you know the name at all, it’s because of Bailey Quarters—the introverted, bespectacled brunette on WKRP in Cincinnati who managed to be the brainy underdog and the stealth crush of anyone who preferred liner notes to leather pants. She was the Anti‑Loni, and that contrast was the show’s secret engine.
Before the first human ever slipped the bonds of Earth, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow was launched into the unknown. Her name was Laika. She didn’t volunteer. She didn’t understand the mission. But on November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union placed her aboard Sputnik 2 and sent her hurtling into orbit—not as a passenger, but as a test subject. As proof that life could survive in space. That the final frontier could be breached, not just by machines, but by living, breathing organisms. That the race for the cosmos was real, and winnable.
There are two kinds of people: those who hear “Lisa Eilbacher” and shrug, and those who immediately picture Eddie Murphy cracking jokes in Beverly Hills Cop or Richard Gere sweating through a Navy training montage in An Officer and a Gentleman. If you’re the second type, you might be wondering why she suddenly stopped showing up. For a stretch in the early ’80s, she was everywhere — the kind of actress who felt like she’d be around forever. And then she wasn’t.
Every December, without fail, she returns. Not in the way Mariah Carey does, blasting from retail speakers, but in a quieter, more visual way—appearing in that scene, from that movie, that half the country treats like sacred text. You might not know her name, but you remember the moment: the red swimsuit, the imaginary pool, Clark at the window. Nicolette Scorsese didn’t need a blockbuster career—she had a single fantasy sequence that somehow became immortal.
There was a time when Mimi Craven was one of those people who’d show up in a movie, say two lines, and then leave you wondering: “Wait, who was that? She seemed important.”
For a certain kind of film nerd—the kind who uses the word “auteur” in casual conversation and unironically owns Criterion tote bags—Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film House (Hausu, if you’re really in the know) is the cinematic equivalent of a lucid dream mixed with a soda commercial and a haunted puppet show. And among the film’s unforgettable cast of high school girls with on-the-nose nicknames (like Fantasy, Prof, and Mac), there was one character who managed to both parody and transcend the genre simultaneously: Kung Fu.
[Read more…] about Whatever Happened to Miki Jinbo From ‘House’
There was a time, in the early 2000s, when television didn’t just embrace absurdity—it rubbed suntan lotion all over it and sent it sprinting down the beach in slow motion. That time was called Son of the Beach, and if you were flipping channels late at night on FX, trying to escape from a rerun of Baywatch but still somehow wanting more Baywatch, then you probably stumbled across Kimberly Oja.
[Read more…] about Whatever Happened to Kimberly Oja From ‘Son of the Beach’?
There is a photograph—simple, brutal, and impossible to forget. It shows a heap of wedding bands. Thousands of them. Gold and silver. Some engraved. Some bent. Some still glinting faintly under the light. They were taken from Holocaust victims. Not lost. Not discarded. *Taken.* Stripped from fingers before bodies were marched into gas chambers, before names were erased, before ash was scattered over Europe.
Former TV kids live in a peculiar corner of American memory. We remember them at a specific age and assume the story paused there, like a freeze‑frame ending. Felice Schachter—Nancy Olson from The Facts of Life—is one of those names that still triggers that mental screenshot. But her actual story didn’t pause. It just moved somewhere more interesting.
[Read more…] about Whatever Happened to Felice Schachter From The Facts of Life?
