Loading ...Would You Rather Be A Has Been Or A Never Been?
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Has beens don’t have it so bad unless they get obsessive about what they used to have
In the wake of the brand new remake of The Karate Kid, twenty-six years after I first saw the original on movie screens, I rewatched it with my girlfriend and her son. Though I’m sure this was not the intent of the filmmakers at the time, the film captures the very different feeling and atmosphere of the mid 1980’s. It also captures something else: a teen-aged-looking Ralph Macchio, aged 22 at the time, at the peak of his acting career. Macchio went on to star in a few Karate Kid sequels and a few other pics in the mid 1980′s. His last big screen part was in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny in a supporting role. By most conventional assessments, Macchio, now pushing 50, is considered washed up.
We can cite countless other examples. Think of Gary Coleman, mega-star of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in Diff’rent Strokes, whose career languished in the toilet thereafter. Danny Bonaduce’s most popular acting gig was playing Danny Partridge in The Partridge Family between 1970 and 1974. Nancy Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board’s daughter, had a singing and acting career in the 1960’s. That career was over by the mid 1970’s. In 1995, she posed nude in Playboy as one means to get attention to promote her ‘comeback’ album.
In some way, I think we, the average Joes of society, get some perverted pleasure seeing people once on the top of the world now running up to us like lapdogs trying to get back into our good graces. It makes us feel justified with the average heights our own lives have probably risen to. How else can you explain the success of a show like The Surreal Life, which brings together celebrities past their prime living together in a Los Angeles mansion?
It’s interesting that we don’t usually apply the term “washed up” or “has been” to those in other fields whose greatest achievements are behind them. In business: Sabeer Bahtia co-founded Hotmail and sold it to Microsoft for $400m at the end of 1997. Jared Polis made over $100m when his Blue Mountain Arts was sold to Excite@home in 1999. Although Bhatia has gone onto other business projects and Polis has become the first openly gay man elected to the House of Representatives as a freshman, neither has since scored as lucrative a financial payout as their successes more than a decade ago. Yet neither would ever be described as a has been.
[Click the picture to read the rest of this brilliant article]
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