Thing one – Creed Bratton, the weird creepy old guy on The Office – his real name is Creed Bratton. Well, sorta. First – he was William Charles Schneider. His mother remarried and he changed his name to Chuck Ertmoed. That’s pretty awful – even if you pronounced the last name like you were French having “Chuck” in front of it would make you sound a doofus. So understandably, that didn’t last too long. Then he changed his name to Creed Bratton – decades before he got the role in The Office. I wonder if anyone one else was up for the role of “Creed Bratton”?
Anyway – that’s not the part that pisses me off. He used to play guitar for “The Grass Roots”… “Let’s Live For Today!” “Midnight Confession!” Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me about this before now! The show’s been on for six seasons! I enjoy knowing shit like this! For example – Professional wrestling manager Jimmy Hart used to be in the Gentrys – he sang lead on “Keep on Dancin’.
But I was totally out of the loop on the Creed Bratton trivia. I’m not sure who is responsible for keeping me updated on stuff like this, but they really dropped the ball this time.
Thing two – On the Dukes of Hazzard there was a character named “Cooter”. Really.
How the hell did they allow that on network TV in the 80’s !?! Do people from the north not know what a “Cooter” is? Try looking it up in a slang dictionary. If you’re too lazy to do that, I’ll use it in a sentence: “Zeke always thought that as long as the girl has hair on her cooter she’s fair game”. And on a very popular TV show they had a character whose name was actually “Cooter”.
And Cooter was a man. Usually, if you’re in the deep south and you meet a man that everyone calls ‘Cooter” that means that the other hillbillies use him AS cooter when there are no actual women around.
If that was the case on the TV show they downplayed that part of the character. The character on the show was mostly just a dumb guy who was friends with the Dukes but too lowbrow to actually be accepted as one of the family. Think about that sentence for a minute. He was considered too low brow for a family who every week used their female cousin as a “distraction whore” so the rest of them could escape from the cops.
Ben Jones, the actor who played Cooter actually quit the show because he wanted the character to have a beard, but the network insisted that it’s better for Cooter to be clean shaven. I’m not making that up – he quit because they wouldn’t let Cooter be hairy. Really.
Since then he’s opened a restaurant call “Cooter’s” for tourists with a taste for cooter. It also holds the “Cooter Museum”. And if you think your parties might be a lot more fun if there was some cooter there you can contact him on face book – he makes public appearances. You’ll probably have to wade through a lot of other web pages offering cooter for sale, but his site is there somewhere.
