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R.I.P. Darren McGavin

darren mcgavin kolchak obitAs if Don Knotts wasn’t enough, we lost another longtime character actor this weekend when Darren McGavin died yesterday at the age of 83.

Everyone knows McGavin as the cranky dad from A CHRISTMAS STORY, but in my heart, he’ll always be Carl Kolchak, the hat-wearing, monster-hunting investigative reporter from the ’70s cult series KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER. Interestingly, the Associated Press obit completely fails to even mention this credit. He’s one of those guys who I liked in everything I saw him in, from the Disney movie NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN of my youth (co-starring, interestingly, Knotts) to being BILLY MADISON’s dad. Hell, even his role as the general in the ill-fated, straight-to-video CAPTAIN AMERICA. He will be missed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 1:20 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “R.I.P. Darren McGavin”

  1. » Hitch Magazine » R.I.P. old white guys Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    [...] TV producer Dan Curtis died yesterday of a brain tumor at the age of 78. He’s probably best known for the DARK SHADOWS TV series, as well as the pair of NIGHT STALKER made-for-TV movies that introduced audiences to Darren McGavin’s newspaper reporter/monster hunter Kolchak character. If there was a cool TV movie in the 1970s, Curtis likely was responsible for it: THE NORLISS TAPES, TRILOGY OF TERROR, CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW. [...]

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