Cyndi Lauper, Girls Wanna Have Fun, so I’ve done a lot of stuff right along and it just fit right in. SLUG: Show business has a tendency to kind of chew you up and spit you out, how do you manage throughout that, how do you stay on top?ĬLA: Well I’ve stayed wrestling for 50 years, 53 years, and in the mean time I did my Super Mario, uh, who wants to be what do you call them… millionaires. SLUG: Alright….did working in wrestling provide good opportunities to break into other areas of the entertainment industry?ĬLA: Yes it did, 50 years in wrestling, I mean it gave a lot of, a lot of chances. SLUG: What did you enjoy more, wrestling or being behind the scenes, managing?ĬLA: Well I enjoyed like, Wiseguys, the movie Wiseguys with Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo. SLUG: You’ve had a long career in show business, starting most notably in professional wrestling, I caught up with him one Friday morning while he was trying to catch a plane. Super Show, which comes out on a four disc DVD set this March. But if you are a child of the 80s, you probably remember him best as the bumbling Italian-American plumber, Mario, in the 1989 TV series The Super Mario Bros. He had a notable role in Brian DePalma’s Wiseguys, a small appearance in an episode of Miami Vice and can even be seen in Cyndi Lauper’s music video for Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. So what is the story of the Captain? Is it a fairy tale? A whodunnit? A modernist work with themes of alienation? It’s certainly not a knock-knock joke, but what else could it be? For over 50 years, the Captain has entertained us, starting in the world of professional wrestling as both athlete and manager (he was recently inducted into the WWE hall of fame) and eventually beginning an eclectic yet prolific acting career. Since I don’t have the slightest clue as to what a shaggy dog story is, I’ll have to come up with something else. There is a scenario that video games and home consoles ended up as just a fad in the US, like the hula hoop or doo wop.If I knew what a shaggy dog story was, I would say that the life and career of Captain Lou Albano is one such story. Due to overstocks, every single retailer refused to carry video games (they had bad memories of clearances where they sold $50 Atari games for $4). Remember: the NES, despite how amazing and arcade-accurate it was, was nowhere near a surefire bet. Imagine that the entire history and future of video games came down to one game of wei chi. It’s got a positive message about learning and adapting to another culture, tons of eighties nostalgia, an underdog battle, would introduce people to a great new board game, and actually happened. One story about video game history that actually would make an incredibly good movie: video games were saved in the United States from total oblivion because the Japanese president of Nintendo was a fanatical wei chi player (圍棋, aka Chinese chess, called Go in Japan) and the Yankee head of Nintendo of America learned the game in order to beat his boss. Once he did that and got his respect, he asked the president of Nintendo to release the NES in America.įun fact: because the president of Nintendo was such a nut for Go, one of the earliest games for the NES, tragically, not released in the US, was computerized Go:Ī story like that would have everything.
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