10 Little House on the Prairie Hunks

When I was in high school and college, if I was home on Monday night at all, I was watching a hip sitcom like The Jeffersons or WKRP in Cincinnati, certainly not Little House on the Prairie (1974-83).  But my sister loved it. The historical drama, based on the autobiographical novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, was about a farm family in frontier Minnesota in the 19th century: Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their daughters Laura, Mary, and Carrie. Other relatives come and go, the daughters grow up, and so on.

I always thought it was a family-friendly drama, like a TGIF sitcom, but my research reveals that it was quite angst-ridden, more "what shall we cry about this week?" than humorous anecdotes about one-room schoolhouses and general stores.  Episodes featured drug addiction, leukemia, child abuse, alcoholism, prejudice, diseases, accidents, murder, robbery, and rape, not to mention an ongoing story arc about Mary's blindness and a series finale that has the whole town of Walnut Grove blowing up!

This was the 1970s, when the top songs on the radio were about people and horses dying and the top "sitcom" was about soldiers being blown to bits in the Korean War.  Still, the pain and anguish seems a bit excessive.

With all the sobbing going on, you wouldn't expect much beefcake and buddy bonding, but apparently producer and star Michael Landon went out of his way to appeal to gay men and boys (and maybe heterosexual girls).  Dozens of 1970s musclemen and androgynous teen idol-types crossed the screen to have accidents, lose loved ones, die of diseases, and take their shirts off.  Here are the top candidates.

1. Michael himself, Charles Ingalls, previously Little Joe on Bonanza, with a famous body and bulge.  Where to begin?  He loses family members and friends, loses houses to fires, loses jobs, deals with infinite pain and sorrow, yet still believes that there is a Divine plan behind all the misery (it's actually the writers, wondering "what horrible thing can happen to the Ingalls this week?")    And he has plenty of time to work out.

2. Jonathan Gilbert as Willie Oleson, the spoiled son of the town shopkeepers (his sister Nellie was the snooty, bullying antagonist to the girls).  He is mostly comedic relief, but he helps out during blizzards, fires, and illnesses.

He grew up, but this is the only shirtless shot I could find.

3. Matthew Laborteaux as Albert, an orphan adopted into the Ingalls family.  Subsequently his girlfriend is raped, he takes to stealing, gets an incurable disease, and becomes addicted to morphine.  He should have stayed in the orphanage.

4. His brother Patrick as Andy, one of Laura's friends whose mother is killed and father (played by Merlin Olsen) becomes an alcoholic.












5. Linwood Boomer (love that name) as Adam Kendall, one of Mary's colleagues at the School for the Blind.  They get married and lose their infant son in a fire.  Eventually he gets his sight back and becomes a lawyer.

6. Jason Bateman (seen here as an adult, pouring lemonade onto his crotch) as James Cooper, who loses his parents in an accident (on camera, naturally) and is adopted by the Ingalls family.  Later he is shot during a bank robbery, but healed by a miracle.

7. Stan Ivar (left) as John Carter, whose wife runs the town newspaper.

8. Dean Butler (right) as Almanzo, who marries Laura and is crippled by a stroke.  Then his house is destroyed, his wife gets sick and almost dies, his brother dies of an incurable disease, his infant son dies....

Just another week in Walnut Grove.

9. Steve Tracy as Urkel...um, I mean Percival Isaac Cohen Dalton, who rejects his Jewish heritage and marries Nellie Oleson.  Perhaps she was attracted to his very blatant bulge.  No angst in his plotlines, but the actor himself died of AIDS in 1986.











10. Radames Pera as John Sanderson Edwards, who dates Mary Ingalls before he moves to Chicago to become a newspaper reporter and is murdered.

Whew!  After all that, M*A*S*H sounds like a lighthearted diversion.

"A Whiter Shade of Pale": Existential Angst or Hetero Sex?

I usually hate the expression "It ruined my childhood."  It's usually used by homophobes who discover that someone they admired in childhood is gay.

But a little piece of my childhood died when I discovered the true meaning of "A Whiter Shade of Pale," the iconic 1960s song by Procul Harum.

The band, formed in 1967, has nothing to do with "protocols" or "harems"; it was named after a member's cat.  "A Whiter Shade of Pale," their first recorded song, was written by 20-year old Keith Reid.   In high school, heavy laden with existential angst, I found the mysterious, symbolic lyrics and melancholy organ music resonated with the human condition.  It was about the meaninglessness of life.

But I recently read an interview with Keith Reid  He says it was about a man trying to convince a woman to have sex with him.

Huh?  This evocative, iconic, symbolic, deep song is not about the magic and mystery of life?  It's really just about a stupid hetero hookup?

Next you'll be claiming that there is no Santa Claus.

Ok, how on Earth are these lyrics about sex:

We skipped the light fandango, turning cartwheels around the floor.

I was feeling kind of seasick, but the crowd called out for more.

A fandango is some sort of dance. Obviously a performance going on.

The room was humming harder

As the ceiling flew away

We're no longer in ordinary time.  The ceiling flies away, displaying the night sky and secrets of the universe.

And so it was that later

As the miller told his tale

That her face, at first just ghostly

Turned a whiter shade of pale

Me: Her face is turning pale.  She is a sybil, preparing to prophesy.

Keith:  Her face is turning pale because the Miller's tale is about sex, and she's embarrassed.

She said, 'There is no reason'

And the truth is plain to see

Me: There is no reason.  There is no greater purpose. We live, and then we die, and that's the end.

Keith:  She denies that she is embarrased by the depiction of sex.  Her face didn't turn pale for any particular reason.

One of sixteen vestal virgins

Leaving for the coast.

Me: A vestal virgin is dedicated to the service of a god.  "Leaving for the coast" means that you are giving up.  There are no gods to serve, so there can be no vestal virgins.

Keith: She's part of a tour group.

Although my eyes were open, they might just as well been closed.

Me: He refuses to acknowledge the meaninglessness of life.

Keith:  He refuses to acknowledge that she's not interested, and keeps trying.

That's as far as it usually goes on the radio, but the album contain an additional verse;

She said, "I'm home on shore leave," though in truth we were at sea, so I took her by the looking glass, and forced her to agree.

Me: She's been lying the whole time.  The looking glass is a gateway to another world.  By holding the glass up to her face, he plans to force her to acknowledge that there is a spiritual reality after all.

Keith: He forces her to agree that she is interested in sex.

"You must be the mermaid who took Neptune for a ride."

Me: You are a goddess.  Therefore spiritual reality exists.

Keith: You are a tease.  

But I wandered through my playing cards

And would not let her be

Me: He uses Tarot cards to try to demonstrate the existence of a spiritual realm.

Keith:  They're playing a card game, and he's trying to get with her.

In the rarely played fourth verse, they seal the deal, and go crashing down upon the ocean bed.

Way to ruin my childhood, guys.

The Top 10 Hunks of "Stranger Things," Season 3, Plus Some of the Plot

The tv series Stranger Things, now in its third season, is an homage to 1980s Goonies movies, with monster-fighting kids in stereotypic small-town Indiana. I watched some of the first season, but couldn't figure out what was going on -- it was a mishmash of psychic powers, alternate worlds, missing children, and parents with histrionic backstories.

So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh,  mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.

Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side.  When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in.  The experiment was a failure.  "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.

1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.

A lesbian couple!  Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical.  The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:

2. Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.

Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.

Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.

3. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is at the new mall with his girlfriend Max and another feminine boy, Will (who looks like Mike's brother but isn't).  Finally Mike and El show up, apologizing for being late -- the sex took longer than they expected.

They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:

4. Steve (Joe Keery), the ex-boyfriend of Nancy (Mike's older sister), who works at a horrible ice cream place in the mall.

Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails.  His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)

By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:

5. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), the older  brother of the androgynous Will, who was waiting at the mall with Lucas and Max.

Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.

Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.

Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves.  His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:

6. Will (Noah Schnapp). the androgynous boy who looks like Mike's brother but isn't.  "You'll meet a girl someday, yada yada yada."

 "I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims.  So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.

Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset.  But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season.  Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.

After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:






7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)

There's no answer.  They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone.  Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!

Call back to the first scene.  He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.

8. That night, Joyce, having rejected Sheriff Hopper's dinner invitation, is eating microwaved lasagna and peas and watching Cheers.  All of a sudden Sean Astin is sitting next to her, laughing at Cheers and asking whether  Sam and Diane (the "will they or won't they" couple) will ever get together.  Apparently this is a metaphor for Joyce, who has been rejecting Sheriff Hopper for quite some time.  But I have no idea what Sean Astin was doing there.

9. Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the older brother of Max (one of Mike's friends, the girl who is dating Caleb) works as a lifeguard, where lots of middle-aged women are lusting after him.

He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike.  Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...."  But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.

On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill.  Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?

That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?

10. To get to 10, I had to go to Episode 2, where Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) shows up, a Russian agent assigned to beat up Sheriff Hopper and otherwise cause mischief.

I don't think I'll be watching.

My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.

How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) and Annoy Every Gay Person in the World

In 2015, the German police burst into the Leipzig home of Max Moritz, and found320 kilos of drugs stored on shelves in his bedroom, plus 13,000 euros in cash and two hard drives detailing the transactions of a drug dealing empire.  The teenager was the biggest drug dealer in Europe, selling online through a website called Shiny Flake.

Sounds like a good story in there, right?  Netflix brought it to the small screen as the short series How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast).  But of course for...um...narrative purposes, the writers had to make a few changes.

1. Instead of booming cultural capital of Leipzig, Moritz Zimmerman lives in Rinseln.  There is no such town in Germany, but it's described as insular, boring, and depressing, where everyone wants to get away.

2. He has a best friend, who happens to be in a wheelchair.

3. He has some family issues.

4. He decides to sell drugs only in order to win the GIRL of his dreams (actually the GIRL who just dumped him). 

That's right, the most cliched, conformist, heterosexist, offensive plotline imaginable.

Hint: gay boys exist, and even heterosexual boys occasionally do things for reasons other than to WIN GIRLS.

Besides, you can't win A GIRL.  They're not prizes in a competition.  If a GIRL is not interested in a social relationship with you, leave her alone.

Who's responsible for this slap in the face of gay people and GIRLS everywhere?

I just ran through it on fast-forward, to see if there might be any beefcake or gay characters to partially redeem the mess.

Beefcake: None.  Nobody unbuttons a button.

Gay characters: No.

Gay subtexts:  Maybe Moritz and his best friend Lenny. 

Maybe.

One episode guide has Lenny  "confiding in a new friend," suggesting some gay-subtext buddy-bonding, but guess what -- the "new friend" is a GIRL.

Well, do the actors at least have a gay connection? .

1. Moritz is played by Maximilian Mundt, otherwise known for a few guest spots on German tv and Tigermilch (2017), about two teenage GIRLS who witness a murder (top photo shows Max and his buddies in another movie ogling a GIRL).

2. Lenny is played by Danilo Kamber, otherwise known for Die Pfferkorns, a long-running series about kids who solve crimes.  Two boys and three GIRLS.

3. Moritz's drug-dealing competitor, Bubba (who thinks of these stupid names?), is played by Bjarne Madel, previously the star of the humorous cop show Tatortreiniger (Crime Scene Cleaner, 2011-2018).  His character is straight, but at least he appears in his underwear.

4. Ruben Brinkman plays another dealer.  In the Dutch drama Feuten (2010-2013), about fraternity hazing, he plays one of the adults.  But at least he takes his shirt off.

5. Daniel Riffert, who The Girl is dating,  is played by Damian Hardung, also seen in the Italian tv series The Name of the Rose alongside John Turturro and Ruper Everett.  Maybe he plays the gay monk.

But he also stars in Das schönste Mädchen der Welt (2018), a retelling of the Cyrano de Bergerac story about a boy trying to win THE GIRL of his dreams.  And his demo reel is about a boy trying to win a Muslim GIRL.

Well, at least there are a lot of beefcake photos of Damian online.

6. Max Von Pufendorf has nothing to do with How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast).  But he popped up when I was searching for "Danilo Kamber" "schwule." 

You could do worse. Like spend more than 5 seconds watching Moritz trying to win The Girl.

"Jinn": Arabic Teen Angst-Horror with a Gay Character

In the Netflix Arabic-language drama Jinn (2019), a group of high school students sets out from Riverdale...um, I mean Amman, Jordan...on a field trip to the ancient archaeological site of Petra.

1. Veronica...um, I mean Mira (Salma Malhas), who has just broken up with bad boy Reggie...um, I mean Nasser (Mohammed Nizar)

2. Good girl Betty...um, I mean Layla (Ban Halaweh), who is dating Fahed (Yasser al Hadi)

Ok, I'll stop with the Archie references.

3. The frizzy-haired know-it-all Hassan (Zaid Zoubi), who happens to be Mira's cousin.

4. The bullied good-boy Yassin (Sultan Alkhail, left)

5. The bellgerant drug-dealer Tareq (Abdelrazzaq Tarkas)

6. Tareq's gay-coded sidekick/boyfriend Omar (Mohammed Hindieh, left, the one in pink)

At Petra, Tareq, Omar, and Nasser beat up Yassin, who runs away and falls into a pit.   He is rescued by the mysterious Vera (Aysha Shahaltough).

That night, amid the sexual shenanigans, someone throws Tareq off a cliff to his death.  Guess who?

Later, a mysterious boy in an old-fashioned Bedouin costume comes through Mira's window.  His name is Kerasquoixian, Keras for short (Hamzeh Okab, top photo).







Keras has come from the other realm to warn Mira that she and her friends are in deadly danger: an evil jinn has been unleashed, with a murderous hatred of all humans.  They must find its summoner (the person who called it from the other realm) to push it back, or other jinn will be released, and everyone will die.

At a memorial service for Tareq, Nasser  pulls out a knife, says "We don't belong in this world," and slits his throat.

Two of the three bullies who harassed Yassir.  Do you have any idea who the jinn and its summoner are?

Meanwhile, Hassan returns to Petra to look for clues about the jinn.

Omar, investigating on his own, discovers that Keras looks like a missing Bedouin boy named Hosny. Was this all the insane ramblings of a deluded boy?

There are some game changers, some "Wow, I never thought that you were a jinn!" moments, and a pleasant cliff-hanging ending.

Heterosexism: The jinn and the summoner are always male-female, and jinn always wants to "unite" with the summoner so they can "be together forever."  Sounds like a heterosexual union to me.

On the other hand, Mira and Keras don't seem to be attracted to each other.

Beefcake: No.  Yassir takes his shirt off while he's in the pit.

Gay references:  No.  This is the Middle East.  What did you expect?

Gay subtexts:  Omar is quite obviously gay, in love with Tareq, and then he buddy-bonds with Keras.

Jordanian scenery:  A lot of Petra, not much Amman.

Side note: How secular is Jordan?  No hijabs anywhere in the city.

My grade: A-.

"All-American": Beach Hunks Who Play Football

This Netflix icon is obviously meant to draw the attention of gay men to the tv series, with a shirtless hunk gazing at another shirtless hunk with homoromantic ardour.  But I've been burned by Netflix bait-and-switch before, and besides, I don't know what an "all-American" is (some sort of hamburger?).  So it's on to wikipedia.

All-American is based on the life of Spencer Paysinger, who I never heard of.  Spencer James (Daniel Ezra, the black guy in the top photo) is "star wide receiver at Crenshaw High School who transfers to Beverly Hills High to play football, but is switched to playing Quarterback."

So he isn't playing football anymore, he is demoted to another game called Quarterback?  But I always thought that Quarterback was a player type.  And not a humiliating demotion, an honor:  "He's the star quarterback, swoon."

The wikipedia page is all mixed up, but I think I got the basic plot: South Crenshaw is the Hood, and Beverly Hills is the ritzy neighborhood where Will goes to live with his Uncle Phil and Cousin Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

This South Crenshaw, a portmanteau of South L.A. and Crenshaw, is a hotbed of gang violence. Spencer leaves behind:
1. His mother (Karimah Westbrook)

2. His father (Chad L. Coleman,  left), the football coach at Crenshaw High.

3. His younger brother Dillon (Jalyn Hall), who wants to play football but is stuck with degrading basketball instead (now it's basketball that's degrading?)

4. His bff Coop (Bre-Z), a lesbian who gets kicked out of the house when she comes out to her homophobic Mom.

5. Some girlfriends of both Spencer and Coop

6. Some teammates (Spence Moore II, Mitchell Edwards, left)

7. Some  gang members (Jay Reeves, Demetrius Shipp Jr., Kareem J. Grimes).  Coop is interested in keeping out of the gang or something.

In Beverly Hills, Spencer gets:

1. His coach, Billy (Taye Diggs), who he moves in with.  All is not what it seems: Coach Billy graduated from Crenshaw South High School, where he dated Spencer's Mom.

2. Coach Billy's son Jordan (Michael Evans  Behling), who is conflicted because his mother is white, so he doesn't feel that he fits into black culture.  He hates Spencer, both because of the football competition and because his girlfriend Layla is into the dangerous bad boy from the Hood.

3. Coach Billy's daughter Olivia (Samantha Logan), who is dating football player Asher (Cody Christian, left), but dumps him because she's into Spencer, too.

Is this guy, like made of pheremones, or something?

4. Billy's father (Brent Jennings), a former football coach, the only person in the family who is not trying to get into Spencer's pants. 

5. 1980s hunk Casper Van Dien as Asher's father (Asher is the ex-boyfriend of Coach Billy's daughter Olivia, remember).  Like all parents on this show, Casper is a former football player and coach.

6. Some other teammates, such as party boy JJ (Hunter Clowdus).

7. Some miscellaneous girls who fawn over Spencer.  Apparently the show bible states that "all the girls are interested in Spencer," and the writers took it literally.  Come on, he's not even hot.

All this teen dating intrigue and father-son baggage was too complicated for me, so I just fast-forwarded through a few episodes, looking for the homoromantic scene, or any buddy-bonding of any sort.

Gay Subtexts:  I couldn't find any.  Most male characters seem to be disagreeable jerks.

Sports:  There's at least one football game in every episode.

Beefcake:  There's a beach scene, hot tub scene, or strip poker scene in every episode, dozens of mega-hunks wandering around looking at girls.  You want to yell "Open your eyes! There's a hot guy standing right next to you!"

Heterosexism:  Yep.  In spite of the lesbian bff back home.

"The Society":Two Gay Guys, No Beefcake, Not Enough "Lost"

In the elite, entitled small town of West Ham, Connecticut, 200 high school kids ignore the ominous portents around them (a mysterious smell, the phrase "mene mene tekel upharsin" scrawled on a wall, a production of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead), and head out for a school-sponsored camping trip.  They don't get far.

"Change of plans," the bus driver announces."Rock slide, road closed, you're back home."

They get out. The buses drive off. There is no one to pick them up, so they walk home. But home is deserted. The whole town is deserted.  Cell phones won't call out; there's no tv or internet;  no way to communicate with the outside world. Eventually they discover  that there is no outside world, just a wilderness (no predators though, just wild turkeys).  They are alone.

Once they realize that they will not be rescued soon, the castaways rename their town New Ham and set up The Society.

Most episodes are about the growing pains of the colony, with checks and balances, crime and punishment, and various power struggles, along with standard survival problems and a lot of high school "who's hooking up with who?."  More Lord of the Flies meets The O.C., not so much Lost.  

Sidebar: How much survival do they need in a fully-equipped town? Surely there's enough frozen and canned food to last for years.

And why do they wait six months to explore beyond the town limits, to see if there are animals to hunt, streams to fish in, fruit trees, amber waves of grain?

I would definitely prefer more Lost.  Ordinary survival problems are not particularly interesting without zombies to fight. And the cast is very large, with nothing particularly distinctive (they're all Golden Boys and It-Girls), so it's often hard to determine who is allied with, romantically interested in, or feuding with whom.  I needed several articles to pull them together.

1. The Student Council. Cassandra (Rachel Keller), former student body president, becomes the first leader of the colony.  She is eventually murdered.

Casandra's sister Allie (Kathryn Pressman) becomes the primaryleader,  but not without opposition. Her main allies are Cassandra and Will (Jacques Colimon, left), a poor foster-care kid, who dates her except for a brief fling.

2. The Science Club.   Gordie (Jose Julian, left), who uses his Gilligan's Island Professor-type trivia knowledge to assist the castaways in the absence of the internet, has a crush on Cassandra.

His brainy sister Bean (Salena Quershi) wears a hijab, suggesting that they are both Muslim.

3. The Van Snobs.  Rich bitch Harry (Alex Fitzalan) becomes one of Allie's main opponents in the various power struggles. Maybe he's mad because Allie's boyfriend Will had an affair with his girlfriend. 

His allies include fellow rich bitch Lexi (Grace Victoria Cox);  and Campbell (Toby Wallace, left), a gun-wielding psycho who is abusive toward his girlfriend Elle (Olivia de Jong). So she tries to poison him, and ends up poisoning half the town.

4. The Gay Kids.  Campbell's younger brother Sam is deaf and gay, played by a deaf, non-gay actor (Sean Berdy, left).  His main ally is Becca (Gideon Adlon); she becomes pregnant (not from him), and he vows to help her raise the first baby in the brave new world.

Later in the season he starts a romance with outdoorsman Grizz (Jack Mulhern).

5. The Jocks.  Luke (Alex MacNeill), Jason (Emilio Garcia-Sanchez), and Clark (Spencer House) continue to wear their lettermen's jackets and sign on as the colony's police force.  They have some gay subtexts, although .Luke is also dating the super-religious Helena (Natashia Liu Bordizzo), who won't have sex with him.

Got all that? It's really not worth the trouble.  Especially when the gay guys get only two kissing scenes, and the beefcake is minimal. We're a long way from Riverdale.

And when the mystery is eked out in a few throwaway scenes, as if the writers forgot about it until the last minute and said "We should throw in a clue or something."

Hint #1: The stars are a little off, like they would be in the distant past.
Hint #2:  A mysterious Pfeiffer demanded $1,000,000 to remove the smell, and later was the bus driver who took the children (the Pied Piper?)
Hint #3: About that rockslide....

"Karate Kid," 34 Years Later

June 22, 1984:  Karate Kid premieres.  Diminuitive, baby-faced good guy Danny Russo, wearing pure white and mellowed by Taoist wisdom, clobbers the snarling, black-clad, bullying, hulking Johnny Lawrence.  Purity defeats corruption, light defeats darkness, good scores a definitive win over evil.  The audience cheers.

Thirty years pass.  We are older but not wiser.  The world has grown cold and dark, evil that we thought long-banished alive and vigorous.   Every day we think "It can't happen here -- can it?" Then we realize that it already has.  We need a new hero, a new baby-faced warrior in a white robe who can definitively defeat the Darkness.

May 2, 2018: The youtube series Cobra Kai reunites Danny and Johnny.

Except Danny is no longer a bastian of purity, and Johnny is no longer pure evil. Both do despicable things while the younger generation tries to find its way.

1. 34 years after being trounced in the big karate tournament,  Johnny (William Zabka, old photo) is middle-aged, unattractive, and poor, working at odd jobs, dreaming of his glory days.

2. One day Johnny saves a neighborhood boy, Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), from some bullies, and is inspired to re-open Cobra Kai, the karate dojo full of black-robed miscreants that bedeveled Danny Russo a generation ago.  Oddly enough,his teaching method involves bullying.

Johnny also starts dating Miguel's mom until she starts dating someone else, and they fight.

3. Miguel enlists some of his bullied friends to join Cobra Kai: the chubby Anthony (Griffin Santopietro), the nerd Demitri (Gianni Decenzo), and the disabled Hawk (Jacob Bertrand, left).  Hawk soon goes over to the Dark Side of the Force.

4. Meanwhile Danny (Ralph Macchio), who beat Johnny all those years ago,  has had nothing but good luck.  Karma, I guess.   He's still teen-idol hot, he owns a chain of car dealerships, and he has a loving family, including daughter, Samantha.

When he discovers that Cobra Kai is opening again, Danny is livid with rage, and tries all sorts of dirty tricks to shut it down or otherwise bedevil his old nemesis.

5. For example, he talks his cousin Vinny...um, I mean Louie (Brett Ernst) into destroying Johnny's car.

6. And he gives Robby (Tanner Buchanan), Johnny's estranged juvenile delinquent son, a job at his car dealership, just to get Johnny's goat.

Eventually he starts giving Robby karate lessons, and is inspired to open his own Miyagi-Do, based on the principles of his deceased sensei, Mr. Miyagi.

7. Danny's daughter Samantha happens to be dating Kyler (Joe Seo) one of Miguel's bullies.  But not to worry, the romance doesn't last long.  Samantha is rather a player, moving on to Miguel, and then to Robby, and then back and forth.

It's the eternal triangle: respectable but boring, or wild and dangerous.

8. Johnny is just starting to reform when his old sensei from the 1980s, Kreese (Martin Kove, old photo), returns and pushes him toward the Dark Side again.  But then he bonds with Danny, and the two work together to send Kreese back to Mordor.

Well, actually, alliances change so fast, among the adults and teens alike, that you can't really tell who's good and who's evil without a score card.  Maybe that's the point.

There are no gay characters.  Early fan buzz suggested that Robbie would be gay, but he turns out to be more obsessed with girls than with karate.

And, surprisingly, beefcake is limited.  No one works out shirtless, like in the original, and besides, most of the kids at the dojo are actual kids, not 20-something hunkoids pretending to be high school students.

I only watched the free episode.  A convoluted plot with no gay characters, limited beefcake, and a cast of scoundrels?  I have the original Karate Kid on DVD.

See also:The Karate Kid