The Scariest Film Of All Time Is The Old PBS Logo

Patrick Stewart's passing is one of those celebrity deaths in which it's difficult to imagine life without him, because he's just always been around being wonderful. (And he's still going to be very much still in our lives with the upcoming release of Avengers: Doomsday.) I think deaths like Stewart's hurt more because he was still very active.

Decades ago, leading actors would just kind of disappear. Jimmy Stewart died in 1997, but his last (non voice) work was in 1980 when he was in his early 70s. Now, actors very much work well into their 80s. When Jimmy Stewart died, he wasn't really around anymore. The culture knew what life was like without him. Patrick Stewart was still very much the culture, which makes moments like this more painful.

I started thinking about the first celebrity death that affected me. I remember my mom being upset about John Lennon's death, when I was too young to know who he was or how he was killed. I specifically remember her showing me a Beatles album cover, pointing at John and saying, "He's no longer here," and not knowing quite what that meant. I think at the time I assumed he had died a long time before. Not like, that day. It took me many more years to line up that memory with Lennon's actual death.

I remember Ted Knight's death affecting me, which probably sounds a little unusual. At the time, he had just starred in a sitcom called Too Close for Comfort, which had just been reconfigured into The Ted Knight Show. I remember my mom telling me this in passing, so I never saw a news report about it. And I did not know how shooting schedules for television shows worked, so I was confused when Knight kept showing up every week on The Ted Knight Show looking very much alive. This would have been a moment when the internet would have been useful to explain "how filming television shows" works.

But the first death that I remember having an affect on me was Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street – a now very famous episode in which the death of a character is explained to the Sesame Street characters after the death of actor Will Lee at the age of 74. (Will Lee and Jimmy Stewart were born two and a half months apart.)

It was this memory that caused my mind to drift to something much more sinister. And since it's Halloween weekend, it's maybe as good of a time as any to discuss the scariest horror film of all time: The old PBS logo. I still hate that thing so much. It is evil.

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