The Alan Thicke Voiceover Invasion

Have you noticed that Alan Thicke's voice is all over the TV? He's voicing Comedy Central, he's voicing a bunch of other stations and commercials too.

Has this been going on for a long time and I didn't notice? Perhaps it's the law of attraction (*cough BULLSHIT!!*), and I'm just noticing Alan Thicke's voice as my Tivo has started recording Growing Pains every day. I watch it when I'm barely awake, and marvel at the acting prowess of religious sociopatch Kirk Cameron, and feel sorry for the kid who played Ben. He started out as a moderately cute little kid, and then had to go through a very awkward puberty on television, with writers who were clearly (and I'm borrowing from "A Christmas Story" here) under the delusion that he was a darling little rascal up to the hijinks of a sweet little 8 year-old. When he was approaching 18.

I'm not even going to talk about poor Tracy Gold, who was never even SLIGHTLY overweight, but those writers wrote fat jokes about her as SHE went through puberty on television, driving her to a life-threatening eating disorder.

If Alan Thicke's career has a comeback, it seems, however illogically, that he's dancing on the corpses of the show's former children's innocences. That sounds harsh, and Alan Thicke didn't write the show or direct it or anything. I still blame the adults on that show for not speaking up and telling the writers and producers to 86 the fat jokes on the sensitive teenage girl who is being judged by an entire country of stupid people, and who had to think about every last white-trash child-molester's opinion of her. Because frankly, those are the types of people who tend to be the squeaky wheels. Those are the types of people who make comments listened to by impressionable girls with bad self-images. Today, I saw Tracey Gold make a "pig" joke about herself on that show. They made her make pig jokes. About herself. And she was skinny.

Way to kill off entire cross-sections of America's youth, my beloved 80s sitcoms! I sat back and watched it all happen, and now, I can't figure out why. That's why my tivo records all the sitcoms I watched and loved and learned from (hell, i had an absent father, a hardworking mother, and an executive for a stepfather. I was home ALL the time, alone). I'd go so far as to say the influx of sitcoms were more parental to me, teaching me the difference between right and wrong, not to read other people's diaries, etc. They were my parents, and it hurts me to deconstruct them.

I suppose I'll stop this ramble and just end by saying, I wish those actors well, and that their sacrificed childhoods ARE still appreciated, and I'd love to take you guys out for a brewsky and not talk about what it was like to grow up making money by having strangers make you do stuff that made you feel bad.

You pooor. poorrr bastards


Look me up and I'll buy. As long as you're in Seattle.