Back in August, when we lost Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Peter Cullen in the space of three days, I wrote that 2026 is shaping up to be another annus horribilis like 2016, when we lost a lot of beloved celebrities, culminating in George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds dying in the space of four days over Christmas.
But I guess it’s official now that 2026 is rivalling, if not surpassing 2016 in sheer awfulness, because we just lost three more beloved famous people – Eric Bauza, Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart – in the space of a few days. The week before we also lost Tom Skerritt. Maybe it really is the rapture, though Lutherans, at least the sort found in Germany where Martin Luther actually lived and preached and nailed theses to church doors, don’t believe in that sort of thing.
And then there was the whole File 770 mess, too, which hurt a whole lot of people including me and which I may or may not publicly comment upon eventually.
The week started off with the news that Eric Bauza had died October 25, aged only 46. You may or may not be familiar with Eric Bauza’s name, but I guarantee that you have heard his voice, because Eric Bauza was an incredibly prolific voice actor. In particular, he was the modern voice of the Looney Tunes characters and very much the heir to the legendary Mel Blanc, so the Looney Tunes just lost their voice all over again.
But in addition to all the Looney Tunes characters – at least those that speak – Eric Bauza also lent his voice to so many other characters over the years. He was also the modern voice of Woody Woodpecker, Fozzie in Muppet Babies, Luke Skywalker in a bunch of LEGO Star Wars cartoons, Leonardo, Donatello and Splinter in various post-2000 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, Aquaman and Commissioner Gordon in Teen Titants, Go!, Stimpy in Ren and Stimpy, Amadeus Cho, Thunderbolt Ross and Ezekiel Stane in various post-2000 Marvel superhero cartoons, the Sentinels in X-Men ’97, the former Decepticon turned Autobot samurai Drift in the 2015 Transformers: Robots in Disguise cartoon (not to be confused with the 2001 Transformers: Robots in Disguise cartoon or the IDW comic book Transformers: Robots in Disguise) and so many others.
I can’t where I first heard Eric Bauza’s voice, since the bulk of his career falls into the time when I did not actively seek out cartoons to watch. And while I have watched some version of most of the cartoons he worked on, it usually was an earlier version. I probably first heard him as Stimpy, since I remember deliberately checking out Ren and Stimpy, when it was a big deal, only to find that it wasn’t for me. I also very likely heard his voice in some of the Marvel cartoons, since I would watch those, when I came across them on TV. Not Teen Titans, Go!, though, since it never did anything for me and very much confirmed to me that whoever those shows were made for, it clearly wasn’t me. Which is okay. Twenty-first century cartoons shouldn’t cater to me and my tastes, though I’m still glad when they do.
I also didn’t hear Eric Bauza’s voice in the 2015 Transformers: Robots in Disguise, if only because I didn’t even know the show existed until a few weeks ago, let alone that Drift was in it. Though I like Drift and think he is one of the most interesting Transformers characters created in the twenty-first century and I’m glad he got a better screen representation (Drift was originally a comic character) than the terribly cliched haiku spouting Autobot samurai from the live action movies who turns into a Mercedes for some unfathomable reason. As a (now former) Mercedes driver – since my Mercedes GLK was foully murdered – I’m always thrilled to see Mercedes Benz vehicles and other German cars turn into Transformers, but if one Autobot should be a Japanese car, it’s Drift.
However, I definitely heard Eric Bauza as the modern voice of the Looney Tunes characters, because I always liked the Looney Tunes and would watch, when I came across them on TV somewhere. And just recently, I heard him in Coyote vs. Acme as the various Looney Tunes characters, though not Wile E. Coyote, because he never speaks. However, Eric Bauza voiced his nemesis Road Runner and provided his distinctive meep-meeps, just as Mel Blanc before him (apparently, they initially used some kind of instrument to provide the Road Runner’s meep-meep, but it was lost after only a few episodes, so Mel Blanc just did it himself and so did Eric Bauza).
For those who don’t know, after Warner Bros merged with Discovery, Coyote vs. Acme was sentenced to death and slated for deletion for tax purposes along with Batgirl and a Scooby Doo movie. However, Coyote vs. Acme was saved, when Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights and released it to become a resounding success and the highest grossing movie of the year for both Ketchup and Warner Bros. Eric Bauza was one of those who fought for Coyote vs. Acme to be released and I’m so glad that he got to not only see the movies released, but also become a success. That said, watching Coyote vs. Acme left me rather emotional, because Wile E. Coyote was my Dad’s favourite cartoon character – to the point that he was late for work one day, because he wouldn’t leave the house until Coyote and Road Runner had aired on the morning cartoon block. I would have loved to watch Coyote vs. Acme with my Dad, because I know he would have loved the film.
Then, only a day later, the news hit that Walter Koenig had died, aged 90. Unlike with Eric Bauza, I can absolutely where I first saw Walter Koenig. As for so many others, it was as Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek.
I never saw the first (and incomplete) German run of the original Star Trek, because it aired before I was even born. However, the original Star Trek was rerun on German TV sometime in the late 1970s/early 1980s and that’s when I first saw it. At the time, Star Trek aired on Sunday afternoons along with Time Tunnel.
In the 1970s and into the early 1980s, my parents spent almost every weekend at an old farmhouse in Teufelsmoor (Devil’s Moor), a boggy region north Bremen. My parents had restored the farmhouse together with another couple and used it as a weekend getwaway. For more about Teufelsmoor and some photos, see this old post.
Now I did not like Teufelsmoor and definitely did not want to be there. That said, I don’t have a problem with Teufelsmoor in itself, but I didn’t get along with my parents’ friends. My Dad and Uncle Horst met while they were sailing and became lifelong friends, even though they were very different. Eventually, they sold their sailboats and started restoring the historic timbered farmhouse in Teufelsmoor. Particularly Uncle Horst loved Teufelsmoor and eventually moved full-time to the historic farmhouse. And when he became too old and ill to maintain it any longer and was pushed into moving back to Bremen by Aunt Irmgard, he literally gave up and died.
As an adult, I hold no ill will towards Uncle Horst and Aunt Irmgard and got along perfectly fine with them. In fact, I need to call up Aunt Irmgard. But as a kid, I didn’t like them and always felt that they didn’t like me either. I was quiet, geeky, neurodivergent, didn’t eat meat or potatoes and though I was nominally German, I didn’t feel or act like it. Uncle Horst and Aunt Irmgard, meanwhile, were super neurotypical, very German, meat and potatoes people. They were loud and Uncle Horst always told rude jokes and made rude remarks, which made me uncomfortable, and sometimes he said racist things, which made me pipe up with “We don’t say that anymore”. Their two daughters were a few years older than me and only interested in horses and boys, neither of which I even remotely cared about. It was just not a good fit – they didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them and I definitely didn’t want to spend time with them every weekend.
As a result, I escaped whenever and however I could. I roamed the moors or sat on the floor reading or playing with my toys (which they considered yet more evidence I was weird) or I hid in the bathroom or the kitchen, until Aunt Irmgard caught me and was angry that I used the gas stove lighter as a laser gun in a furious space fight. Well, don’t get a gas stove lighter which looks like a laser gun then.
And then there was a TV. Uncle Horst and Aunt Irmgard has a colour TV at the bloody Teufelsmoor farmhouse well before we had one at home and it was always running as background noise, though weren’t watching. I, however, was watching and so I saw the whole weekend afternoon programming with no one stopping me or wondering whether that was appropriate or changing the channel to watch the news, because Uncle Horst and Aunt Irmgard did not watch the news, at least not as religiously as my parents did.
In the three channel world of the 1970s and 1980s, the TV program was usually bad. However, weekend afternoon TV was full of sword and sandal movies and pirate movies and old westerns (including Gunsmoke) and monster movies and lots of Johnny Weismüller Tarzan movies and movies about heroic dogs. I first encountered Godzilla and Mothra in Teufelsmoor and King Kong (though I eventually found out it was Mighty Joe Young) and Tarzan, Jane and Boy and Zorro and Marshell Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke and I learned about the existence of electric chairs from some live action Disney heroic dog movie.
On that colour TV which was always running in the background, I also discovered Time Tunnel, which was my introduction to the concept of time travel, and the original Star Trek. Now the original Star Trek was not aired in full in Germany until the 1980s and episodes were aired out of order and badly edited and many were missing altogether. However, I can clearly remember three original Star Trek I saw on that colour TV at Teufelsmoor, namely “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, which was the first Star Trek episode I ever saw, “Return to Tomorrow”, which deeply upset me, because I feared they killed Spock and he was one of my favourites (and of course, being upset at something that happened on TV was yet more evidence that I was weird, never mind that Uncle Horst and Aunt Irmgard’s horse-loving daughter Monika broke in tears whenever a horse was hurt on TV and I had to comfort her), and “Spectre of the Gun”, which upset me even more, because they killed Chekov and he was my favourite and one of my first celebrity crushes.
Much later, I also learned that Chekov was a childhood crush for many young girls, since his character was specifically created to appeal to the same girls in their early teens who swooned over the Beatles and the Monkees. Of course, by that time, the Beatles had broken up and my main association with them was when “Under the Sea” or “Yellow Submarine” were played on Sesame Street. I had no idea who the Monkees even were and would not encounter them until I saw the Monkees TV show on the original Sky Channel many years later.
Of course – spoiler alert – Chekov wasn’t really dead. That said, “Spectre of the Gun” also taught me something else that’s important, namely that good and evil is sometimes just a matter of perspective. Because by that time, I had somehow picked up through cultural osmosis, quite possibly from the old westerns that were also airing in those weekend afternoon slots, that Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday were the good guys and the Clantons were the bad guys. However, here was an episode where the Enterprise crew ended up as the Clanton gang, even though the Enterprise were clearly the good guys and my heroes. And yet Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday were shooting at them and the bastards just killed Chekov, so how on Earth could they be the good guys?
I encountered the idea that good and evil can be just a matter of perspective in other contexts. One that stands out is a YA historical I read at the age of approx. nine or ten, which recounts the adventures of two young men who sail with the Spanish Armada. Now I had already encountered the Spanish Armada is the bad guys in countless historical films at the time, yet here were was novel whose protagonists were sailors in exactly that Spanish Armada and the English, normally the heroes, were the villains.
Together with “Spectre of the Gun”, the realization that good and evil can be a matter of perspective rather than absolutes generated a flurry of stories written in my teens, where the good guys were secretly evil and the bad guys were really the heroes, even if no one believed them. These stories are long lost to time and are probably also as bad as you can imagine something written by a teenager would be. Though they still live somewhere inside me and may eventually re-emerge, since the basic ideas are still good, even if the execution wasn’t. Or would you not want to hear about the glorious hero, brilliant engineer and philanthropist, widower and loving single father who’s also secret serial killer, while his sister and his ex-girlfriend, the one victim who survived and then faked her death, team up to take him down?
Or how about the two noble knights who gain immortality for five hundred years from a young witch who is kind of in love with both of them, only for the two idiots fall for the same princess, who is terrible bitch and cheats on both of them. One guy kills her in a rage, the other vows eternal revenge and they start waging a centuries long war – remember, they’re immortal of sorts – and making their problem everybody else’s. Then, after two hundred years or so, they get bored, decide that the bitchy princess wasn’t worth it and reconcile. However, in order to keep face, they have to keep their centuries long war going, so they just pretend to hate each other and still make their problem everybody else’s. Eventually, the five year immortality spell runs out and they grow old and need to refresh the spell. However, they are taken down by the latest descendant of the bitchy princess – who finds out that the whole five hundred year war is a scam – and the star pupil of the witch who granted those two jerks immortality in the first place and never got what she wanted from either of them.
Back to Walter Koenig and Pavel Chekov, another thing that was remarkable about Chekov was that here was a likeable and heroic Russian character at the height of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Star Trek‘s West German counterpart Space Patrol Orion, which debuted only ten days later, also featured a heroic Russian character in the amazing Lieutenant Tamara Jagellowsk. As a kid watching those shows some fifteen years or so after they debuted, I’m not sure if I was aware how remarkable it was that they featured heroic Russian characters. However, I never fell for the whole “Soviet Union – Empire of Evil” rhetoric in the 1980s and I also haven’t fallen for the whole “Russian Federation – Empire of Evil” rhetoric that’s sadly en vogue again right now, because shitty governments and shitty leaders don’t mean that the people themselves are evil.
Coincidentally, I also never grasped that the whole space race was really just an attempt by the US and the Soviet Union to one up each other and that progress in space travel and space exploration mostly fizzled out after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because I firmly believed that the reason the US and the Soviet Union poured so much money into space exploration was because space was cool and the future. And besides, I’d seen Pavel Chekov on the bridge of the Enterprise and Tamara Jagellowsk on the bridge of the Orion and knew that the whole US versus Russia rivalry would eventually end. Yeah, I’m still waiting for that.
By the late 1980s, the private channel Sat 1 was finally airing all but one of the original Star Trek episodes, though they still aired them out of order. There also were Star Trek movies, the latter few of which I watched in the theater and the earlier ones eventually on TV. There was also a new Star Trek show on TV – more about that later – which led to a flurry of science fiction and science fiction adjacent shows coming out in the 1990s.
One of those shows was Babylon 5, which started out as yet another Star Trek wannabe, but quickly drew me in and eventually blew my mind. A couple of Star Trek regulars also appeared in Babylon 5 such as Majel Barrett as the Centauri empress and of course Walter Koenig as Psi-Corps officer Alfred Bester. Bester was about as far from Pavel Chekov as you could get, a menacing presence who shook up the status quo or what passed for it on Babylon 5 whenever he appeared.
Most actor only get to play one iconic character. Walter Koenig got two. He lived a good long life, though it also means that there are now only two members of the original Enterprise crew left, George Takei and William Shatner. Star Trek‘s German counterpart Space Patrol Orion has none of the original cast left BTW. The last survivor was F.G. Beckhaus who died this February aged 98. As for Babylon 5, that show appears to be cursed and lost much of its cast at much too early ages.
Then today, the news hit that we lost Sir Patrick Stewart as well, aged 86. Of course, given his age, it was pretty clear that he wouldn’t be around forever, but he seemed fairly healthy and was still working until very recently. Only this year, he leant his voice to the ram Sir Richfield in Sheep Detectives and he will be in Avengers: Doomsday, because everybody is in Avengers: Doomsday. Plus, Sir Patrick Stewart seemed ageless, as if he was perpetually in his fifties.
I very clearly know where I first saw Sir Patrick Stewart – and no, it’s not Star Trek. Instead, I first saw him in the 1980 adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, which is a holiday classic here in Germany, airing every year around Christmas. Patrick Stewart plays the groom and riding teacher Wilkins. Though I had no idea who he was, until Star Trek: The Next Generation started airing in Germany in 1990 and when we watched Little Lord Fauntleroy that Christmas, my Mom and I looked at each other and said, “Hey, it’s Captain Picard.” Come to think of it, I probably also saw Patrick Stewart as Gurney Hallett in the 1984 David Lynch adaptation of Dune before I saw him in Star Trek, though I didn’t see Dune at the theater, but on TV sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
However, like so many others, I first took note of Patrick Stewart when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out in 1987, though we didn’t get the show in Germany until 1990. Of course, the idea of a brand-new Star Trek show was very exciting. The execution less so, because the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is notoriously rough. Not to mention that when Next Generation started airing on ZDF – the same channel which had aired the original series in the early 1970s – the original Star Trek was being re-run – and for the forty episodes not shown during the original run, shown for the first time – over on Sat1, so I and everybody else got the direct comparison between the two shows. And early on, I much preferred the original series, though I watched The Next Generation as well, because I watched every science fiction show on TV. The Next Generation eventually switched from ZDF to Sat1, which aired the show every weekday afternoon, following Baywatch. I always watched, sometimes live, but usually I taped Star Trek and watched it with my Mom in the evening or sometimes I watched the late night repeat. I also saw an inordinate amount of Baywatch, because it aired directly before Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I often caught the end of it.
Coincidentally, we watched a recording of a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III by William Shakespeare at school in 1991, when we also read the play. And this production starred none other than Patrick Stewart as Richard III. Of course, all the students recognised him immediately and exclaimed, “Wow, that’s Captain Picard”, while our otherwise cool English teacher had clearly never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and was rather confused.
Initially, I also vastly preferred James T. Kirk to Jean-Luc Picard in the direct comparison between captains, especially in the rough first season. And yes, Picard also really pissed me off on occasion such as in “Up the Long Ladder” and “Homeward”, where he is far from the moral paragon everybody remembers. But while Star Trek: The Next Generation has some really shitty episodes, it also has a lot of good ones and the good episodes far outweigh the bad.
Back when Star Trek Picard debuted in 2020, I wrote:
I find it fascinating that Jean-Luc Picard is viewed as this huge moral paragon nowadays, because he was anything but in several Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. On the other hand, most of us have probably banished stinkers like The Next Generation episode “Up the Long Ladder” (where Picard thinks it’s totally okay to treat women like breeding slaves, forced to have sex with lots of different men, as long as they are cliched space Irish, whereas reproduction by cloning is somehow terribly immoral – and yes, this really happened) from our collective memories, while remembering the good Next Generation episodes like “Measure of a Man”, where Picard really was the moral paragon we remember him as. It’s that version of Picard who stars in the show named after him and most welcome he is, too. And of course, Sir Patrick Stewart – by far the best actor to ever appear in Star Trek – plays him as well as he ever did. I’ve sometimes said that the German SF show Raumpatrouille Orion, which premiered within two weeks of the original Star Trek, had on average much better actors than Star Trek. On the other hand, Star Trek has Patrick Stewart.
Six years later, this still holds true. Patrick Stewart still is the best actor Star Trek ever had. And while Star Trek: Picard also had an uneven run and the three seasons are so different from each other that they might as well be completely different shows, I’m still glad that Patrick Stewart got to reprise the character who made him famous and that Jean-Luc Picard got a good send-off and even a secret baby with Beverly Crusher.
However, like fellow Star Trek alum Walter Koenig, Patrick Stewart got to play not one but two iconic SFF characters, since he also played Professor Charles Xavier in the first three Fox X-Men movies as well as in Logan, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and later this year in Avengers: Doomsday.
Now the Fox X-Men movies aren’t perfect. The first two were good for the time in which they were made, when superhero movies were far and between and superhero team movies were nigh impossible to get made, because idiotic Hollywood executives believed that audiences would get confused when there was more than one superhero in a superhero movie. Even though Marvel’s X-Men were the most popular superhero comic of the 1980s and 1990s, the X-Men movie was in development hell for years and it was a miracle that it got made at all and that it was pretty good. And yes, most of the characters didn’t wear their iconic costumes on screen, but at the time it was pretty clear that this was as good and accurate adaptation as comic fans were ever going to get. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was still years in the future at this time.
But while the Fox X-Men movies weren’t perfect, there was one thing they got absolutely right and that was casting Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Indeed, casting two real life best friends as fictional former best friends who have a falling out over ideology and methods and become sworn enemies is such a pitch-perfect moment of cosmic serendipity that it’s amazing that it happened at all. And while James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender who played the younger Charles Xavier and Magneto from X-Men: First Class onwards are both very good actors, they just didn’t have the chemistry that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen had. Coincidentally, I also find myself quite uncharacterisically uninterested in what Marvel will do now they have the X-Men movie rights back. For starters, I’m pretty much over the X-Men, which shocks me, because I used to love them so much. And while I’m pretty sure that Marvel will do their best, there simply won’t ever be as perfect a Professor X and Magneto again as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.
Indeed, of the many much beloved famous people who died in 2026, the ones that hit me hardest were Patrick Stewart and Peter Cullen, even though they both reached a reasonably good age. I guess it’s because they both played parent figures and role models for an entire generation. Optimus Prime and Jean-Luc Picard and Charles Xavier showed us how to be better people and also good leaders. And that’s why losing the men who brought them to life hurts so much.
Coincidentally, we also got the same magic dynamic of real life friends playing fictional former best friends turned bitter enemies after a falling out over ideology and methods as we got from Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Professor X and Magneto in Peter Cullen and Frank Welker’s portrayal of Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively. And honestly, it’s amazing that we got this dynamic once, let alone twice.
2026 also still has a little over two months to go and clearly isn’t done with us yet. Just last week, we also lost Tom Skerritt at age 93, whom I will forever associate with Captain Dallas of the Nostromo in Alien, which I loved and my Mom hated, and Sheriff Jim Brock in Picket Fences, which my Mom loved and I came to dislike.
Finally, today we also got word that Elke Sommer, best known for her roles in such 1960s and 1970s romps as A Shot in the Dark, The Wrecking Crew, The Prize and Lisa and the Devil, died aged 85. As one of comparatively few German actors to find Hollywood stardom, she frequently showed up in variety and chat shows on German TV as well as in the pages of gossip magazines, when I was a kid, while her movies – both German and American – were also frequently shown. She even appeared in The Muppets Show.
So please, 2026, just stop killing all the good people.
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