Should have played the role as James Brown Shavar Ross turned 42 years old on Monday. He also holds the distinction of being one of the few surviving cast members from “Diff’rent Strokes”. The rags-to-riches 80s sitcom, produced by TV legend Norman Lear, is hardly the actor’s only significant contribution to popular culture; the birthday boy has a YouTube channel and IMDb page to prove it. But playing Weasel in “Family Matters” and one of Tina Turner’s kids in “What’s Love Got to do with It?”, among other roles in television and film, doesn’t hold a flame to a famously controversial episode that Ross starred in 30 years ago. Fans of “Diff’rent Strokes” know where I’m going with this. Lear’s show, for the most part, was happy-go-lucky during its seven seasons on NBC about a rich white guy (Conrad Bain, RIP) who made room for his deceased housekeeper’s sons, Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Todd Bridges), in his Park Avenue high rise. It was a pretty sweet Reagan Era fantasy that let two inner-city kids pull off hair-brained schemes in 22-minute intervals (well, mostly Arnold, like the time he wanted a bar mitzvah) but, like most of Lear’s series (“Mary Hartman Mary Hartman”, “All in the Family”, et al.), would occasionally air something controversial — not for the sake of shock but social awareness. Ross, who played Arnold’s friend Dudley in 43 episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes”, was the centerpiece to one of these “very special episodes,” a moniker NBC gave to the sitcom’s two-parter “The Bicycle Man” as a sort of network disclaimer. The February 1983 special focused on a pedophile (Gordon Jump) who lured Dudley and Arnold into the back of his bike shop. And, yes, if you haven’t seen it, bad things happen. It’s a pretty stirring episode, arguably one of television’s most important moments, that’s required viewing. And one that will make you appreciate the risk Ross took as a child actor in such a straight-laced and safe time for television. It seemed to pay off. Two years after the controversial episode, Ross had a supporting role in “Friday the 13th: A New Beginning”. The controversial episode gave “me some crossover appeal,” Ross noted in an interview. “I remember being at the [Friday the 13th] premiere in Westwood with Corey Feldman in the balcony and hearing white people stand up and shout ‘Run Dudley!’”
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 12:08:43 +0000
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