"Once Upon a Time" Season 6 Beefcake

In the 6th and sort of final season of Once Upon a Time, about storybook characters having soap opera battles, the writers rev things up by throwing in characters from every storybook they can think of.

Episode 1:  Deniz Akdeniz (left) as Aladdin, a former savior who has failed to save Agrabah, plus Oded Fehr as Jafar and Giles Matthey as Morpheus, the God of Sleep, who turns out to be Gideon, the unborn son of Rumplestiltskin and Belle (from Beauty and the Beast)

Episode 2: Craig Horner (left) as Edmund Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, who the Evil Queen hires to kill Snow White.

Episode 3: Cinderella, who does the glass-slipper bit Prince Thomas (Tim Phillipps), while her sister falls in love with his footman, Jacob (Max Lloyd-Jones, left),  Snow White is there for some reason, plus Gus (Jared Joseph), the rat turned into a hunk, is Cinderella's escort to the ball.

Episode 4: Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Hank Harris, Sam Witwer, left), who are actually ongoing characters this season, tell their back story, which involves competing for the love of the same woman.  Tom Sawyer (Reily Campbell) makes a cameo as a student in Snow White's class (her lectures all appear to be about birds).

Episode 5: Goldilocks makes an appearance in Agrabah.

Episode 6: Captain Nemo  (Faran Tahir) hangs out with Hook, along with Nick Eversman (far left) as Hook's long-lost half-brother, Liam (not to be confused with his full brother, also named Liam).

Episode 7: In a flashback about Snow White fleeing from the Evil Queen, the Woodcutter (Paul Johansson) makes an appearance.

Episode 8: "Henry anxiously prepares to take Violet to the school dance."  Way to throw in a mundane plotline.

Episode 9: Rumplestiltskin steals the newborn child of hill-climbers Jack (Nick Hunnings) and Jill.

Episode 11: Pinocchio usually bounces back between age 10 and age 30, with nothing in between, but here we see a teenage version (Rustin Gresluk, right).

Episode 12: Prince Charming's back story comes with Matt Ellis as Francisco.

Episode 13: Beowulf (Torstein Bjorklund), from the Old English epic, shows up in the Ogre Wars, making a deal with Rumplestiltskin.  Plus Brandon Spink as yet another incarnation of Rumple's son Baelfire.

















Episode 15: Vikings, cowboys, Prince Eric (Gil McKinney, left), who married Ariel the Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Captain Nemo, and of course Aesop (Thomas Cadrot), the ancient Greek storyteller, who was probably a real person.

Episode 16: Gideon, the son of Rumple and Belle (Gilles Mathey, left, as an adult, Anton Starkman as a kid), is captured by the Black Fairy, who happens to be his grandmother.  He bonds with fellow captive Roderick, and they escape together.  Gay subtext, finally!  Roderick is played by Grayson Gabriel (adult) and Mason Mackenzie (kid).

Episode 17: Back to Oz, with Alec Desert as the Tin Man.

After that, the cast is sort of full, so no new characters appear (except Tiger Lily  from Peter Pan.).  But it was a wild ride, with beefcake, bonding, and three lesbian characters.

Season 7 is a complete reboot, with an adult Henry Mills and a new cast facing a new Storybrooke.  I don't know why.

Love Beat: Tony DeFranco

Listen to my heart beat -- it's a love beat
And when we meet, it's a good vibration

Whatever that means, it brings back a rush of memories of the fall of 1973: pep rallies at Washington Junior High; accidentally touching my friend Dan's hand in science class; reading Greek mythology and Tintin comics; watching Chuck Acri's Creature Feature with my brother in our attic bedroom

The DeFranco Family never hit the heights of the Osmonds or the Jackson Five, but during the 1973-74 school year, they were everywhere, guest stars on every variety show, fave raves in every issue of Tiger Beat, competing with Tony Orlando and Cher to top the pop charts.  (Here Tony DeFranco competes with Tony Orlando to see who wears the tightest pants).

They consisted of five siblings: Nino (age 18), Marisa 19), Benny (20), Tony (14), and  Merlina (16).

In the tradition of Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson, Tony
was the standout star, the source of many semi-nude pinups and many misty-eyed dreams for the heterosexual girls and gay boys at Washington Junior High.

For all the media attention, they recorded only seven songs, and only three charted -- "Heartbeat" (1973), "Abra-Cadabra" (1973), and "Save the Last Dance for Me" (1974).  They're all heterosexist, heavy-laden with "girls" and "babes."  But sometimes tight pants and a killer smile is enough.

A series of disastrous business decisions -- and the rise of disco  -- and maybe Tony's refusal to embark on a solo career -- led to the DeFranco crash.  By 1975, they were working Vegas, and in 1978 they disbanded, taking jobs behind the scenes in the music industry.

Today Tony works as a real estate agent in Westlake Village, a ritzy suburb of L.A.  He still performs occasionally, for fans who have fond memories of being in junior high in 1973.

Superstore: Just Leave It on and Watch

Superstore (2015-) is a workplace sitcom set in the vast Wal-Mart like Cloud 9, where responsible, by-the-books Amy (America Ferrara, best known from Ugly Betty) butts heads with the free-spirit Jonah (Ben Feldman, who bears an eerie resemblance to Charles in Charge-era Scott Baio).

We've seen this free-spirit/by the books pairing a thousand times.  Sam and Diane.  Sam and Rebecca.  Scully and Mulder.  But the twist here is: Amy is married.

Her husband Adam (Ryan Gaul) hosts a barbecuing podcast, watches football, fools around with tools, and basically acts like the uber-sterotypic Macho Man, in stark contrast to the sensitive, feminine-coded Jonah.

So this is the real-life aftermath of a teen nerd movie from the 1980s.  Instead of the teen nerd using his sexual prowess to steal The Girl away from her loud-mouth jerk boyfriend, she marries him. 

Of course, Jonah and Amy will hook up eventually anyway, but adding a husband delays the inevitable enough for the first two seasons to be palatable.

The other characters are the eclectic bunch familiar from other workplace comedies:

1. Lauren Ash as Dinah, the gun-toting, karate-chopping assistant manager/security specialist, who skins wildebeests before breakfast and dropped out of the marines because everyone was too wimpy.  She has a crush on Jonah.

2. Colton Dunn (left) as Garrett, the sarcastic, street-smart black guy who knows how to work the system to his advantage.  He's also in a wheelchair.

3. Nicole Bloom as Cheyenne, an airheaded 17-year old high schooler who got pregnant by her boyfriend (Johnny Pemberton), an aspiring rapper with extremely progressive, pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-racist lyrics: "God is a black woman, yo!"  They get married, and name their daughter Harmonica. 


4. Josh Lawson as Tate, a sadistic pharmacist who makes Jonah his personal slave.

5. Jon Barinholtz as Marcus, a doofus who gets everything wrong and often is injured ("My spleen!").

I was concerned about two characters.

6. Nico Santos as Mateo, who starts out as a priggish tattletale and brown-nosing sycophant, self-righteous, condescending, scheming, manipulative, a gay villan in training.  Over the first season, he softens and becomes more likeable, and in the second season he begins dating.  I still don't like him, but at least his character is not entirely homophobic, a source of laughter rather than disdain.

7. Mark McKinney as store manager Glenn.  McKinney was an original member of the Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall in the 1980s.  He plays Glenn with a squeaky cartoon-character voice, and as so completely clueless that he comes across as mentally challenged.  And he's a born-again Christian who reads the Bible aloud  and asks for Jesus' blessings during staff meetings.

Born-again Christian usually means homophobic, so I was cringing when a gay couple came into the store to plan their wedding.  He asks "Which is the lucky groom?", and upon hearing "Both of us," assumes that it's a double male-female wedding.  Upon being apprised that it's a gay couple, he is surprised but not angry, and overdoes the enthusiasm: "Oh, you're gay?  That's terrific!  I'm totally supportive! I think gay people are great!"  Finding out that Mateo is gay provokes the same reaction.

Ok, not homophobic.  Scarily out of touch, but not homophobic.

Superstore is not the most innovative of shows; it's mostly what we've seen before.  But it's pleasant enough.  It reminds me of the old days of network tv, where they put a C+ show in between two A+ shows, so you could either turn off the tv for a half hour or just leave it on and watch.

I'll just leave it on and watch.

Savage Sam: Disney Adventure Kid

The Disney Adventure Boy was usually a teenager (Tommy Kirk, left, James MacArthur, Roger Mobley, Kurt Russell,Jeff East)    who demonstrated his all-American masculinity by taking off his shirt (as Jimmy Lydon also did inTom Brown's School Days)  and by falling in love with a girl.  By the end of the 1950s, heterosexual desire as as emblematic of "young manhood" as a hard chest and bulging biceps. 

Only a few of the Adventure Boys were preteens, or cast as preteens (Bryan Russell, Kevin Corcoran Ike Eisenmann).  Then the requirements changed: they weren't expected to like girls at all -- the mythic "discovery" was still in the future.  But they still had to take their shirts off, displaying their physiques as blatantly as the teenage musclemen.  And the conflation of semi-nudity and lack of heterosexual interest allowed a space for the recognition of same-sex desire among the preteens in the audience.

Kevin Corcoran was born in 1949 into a family of actors (with six siblings in the business).  By the age of 7, he was starring on The Mickey Mouse Club as one of the singing, dancing, ear-wearing Mouseketeers

In The New Adventures of Spin and Marty (1957), Kevin played Moochie, the tagalong annoyance to the gay-coded couple (Tim Considine, David Stollery).  The name (and the personality) stuck, and soon he was playing tagalong annoyances named Moochie in several Disney productions, often as the little brother of Tommy Kirk, James MacArthur, or both.

But not merely annoyances. The boy exceeds the teenager in masculine bravado, his masculinity becoming even more enhanced by the absence of heterosexual desire. His semi-nudity itself becomes queer, signifying maleness without a feminine gaze. 

In the boy-and-dog Western, Savage Sam (1963), for instance, 14-year old Kevin plays Arliss Coates, his Old Yeller character, now living alone with his big brother Travis (Tommy Kirk). 

Mom and Dad are breezily dismissed, but adult guardian Uncle Beck (Brian Keith, who always wears pink) looks in on the boys from time to time, occasionally bringing along his gay-coded life partner, Lester White (Dewey Martin, who always wears lavender) and daring us to draw conclusions.

Travis does the wimmen’s work, cookin’ and cleanin’ and bein’ purty (the adult men constantly comment on how handsome he is), while Arliss, a scrappin’, ornery cuss, does the man’s chores.

Girl next door Lisbeth (Marta Kristen), responsible for demonstrating that Travis is heterosexual, overdoes it, eyeing him hungrily and bandying about barely-cloaked sexual innuendos. When they ride together, she places her hands not around his stomach, like most back-seat equestrians, but around his belt, a posture that might allow her intimate access to his privates. We can find few more risqué gestures in the Disney opus.
A band of Apaches, unregenerate savages of the old school, abduct Travis, Arliss, and Lisbeth, rip off the boys’ shirts to give the audience what they bought their tickets for, and force them on a cross-country journey back to their village. Butch Arliss squawks and fights, but shy, feminine Travis suggests that they bide their time until they can escape.

As a consequence, the Apaches pretty much leave Lisbeth and Travis alone, but they decide to make a brave out of Arliss. They grab and grope him exhaustively, including hands placed directly in his most intimate areas, suggesting a link between homoerotic desire and savagery, as juxtaposed with the “civilized” heterosexual romance of Travis and Lisbeth

Tommy Kirk was outed a few years later, and fired from Disney.  

Kevin played "the man of the house," his masculinity undiluted by a feminine desire for the feminine, in The Shaggy Dog (1959), Toby Tyler (1960), Swiss Family Robinson (1961), and The Mooncussers (1962).  In adolescence he retired from acting, but continues to work behind the camera, directing episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Quantum Leap, Baywatch, and Murder She Wrote.