I hate to admit it but as much as I used to love this show, it's been completely ruined for me. The rational part of me wants to say "Jake Cutter is not Stephen Collins" but the emotional part of me can't get past the actions of the actor.
The jovial charm is gone. It makes me angry because this show was SUCH a happy part of my youth but it's as if that joy has been retroactively removed. I can't see him as a hero anymore.
I know what you mean. Well said!
shareI am sorry that you both have been disappointed by the actor. In this case, what he said he did removes the need to prove anything, since it is not an accusation by another person, or persons. That provides a measure of certainty at least.
Such a thing is tough to deal with, and you may not be able to get past it. If you do, you may be able to eventually enjoy the show again, so isn't it worth the effort to try?
If it isn't, it really is only a TV show. But, it was a part of what has made up your life experience, and even part of your personality...
In the "big picture", losing a favorite TV show may well only be a bump-in-the-road of your life, and it will be a very fortunate life if this is the worst thing you face.
How does that old saying go? What doesn't kill me makes me stronger...
by sean_ohlson-1 ยป Wed Oct 22 2014 13:51:06
IMDb member since October 2003
I hate to admit it but as much as I used to love this show, it's been completely ruined for me. The rational part of me wants to say "Jake Cutter is not Stephen Collins" but the emotional part of me can't get past the actions of the actor.
The jovial charm is gone. It makes me angry because this show was SUCH a happy part of my youth but it's as if that joy has been retroactively removed. I can't see him as a hero anymore.
Very sad to hear about this, I had no idea until I read this. I loved watching Tales of the Gold Monkey as a kid, and this is gutting, but it wouldn't stop me from still being able to enjoy the series itself.
A lot of British celebrities have been exposed as paedophiles in recent years, most long after their deaths. To me, none came as a surprise. Jimmy Saville was a complete weirdo and I remember as a child the parent of a friend of mine, who worked at the BBC, saying that it was common knowledge amongst people in the industry that he was to be kept well clear of. In much the same way that we as children knew to stay well away from our headmaster at school, who seemed to want to insist on drying boys off after swimming lessons. But, back then, if you told anyone about this behaviour they thought you were just making it up and at most you were just told to avoid them... it took another 20 years before he was finally prosecuted and given an 8 year prison sentence.
Gary Glitter? Complete weirdo. No surprise there at all, and if his entire catalogue of dreadful music is scrubbed from history then all the better.
The only one that came as a shocking disappointment to me was Rolf Harris, whom I adored when I was a child, eagerly watching him on television, drawing cartoon characters. He didn't strike me as weird, like the rest of the ones who were eventually exposed. I still remember being completely in awe, when my parents took me to a panto as a small child, and we bumped into him in the foyer of the theatre, where he warmly said hello to me and shook my hand. He just seemed like such a nice man. That was the one that I found the hardest to stomach.
However, as you said, Jake Cutter is not Stephen Collins. And a lot of other great people and actors also worked on the series, their work shouldn't be sullied and consigned to the dustbin because of the actions of one person.
People still watch the films of Roman Polanski, who drugged and had sex with a 13 year old girl. They still watch The Blues Brothers and a host of other films Paul Reues starred in, convicted of possessing child pornography.
David Bowie, who died just last week and made some superb music had sex with Lori Maddox when she was 14, possibly even younger.
Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis (married his 3rd wife when she was 13... and also his 1st cousin, while he was still married to his second wife, adding bigamy to the list) all did it too.
The scandals and suspicions that surrounded Michael Jackson don't stop his music from still being played on the radio all the time.
Though not prosecuted for them, the list of accusations against Woody Allen is pretty long, some of them made by his own children or adopted children.
Ronald Regan slept with Elizabeth Taylor when she was 15.
Rob Lowe is once again making television shows all the time these days, in spite of two videos coming out in the 1980s of him having sex with underaged girls.
Then there are the authors... Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland and AA Milne who wrote Winnie the Pooh. Paedophiles.
And deep suspicions surrounded Arthur C. Clarke, not to mention JM Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, the royalties from which go to the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, in perpetuity.
Going back further in time, Plato and Socrates are still revered two and a half thousand years later, in spite of championing pederasty... but our society skims over those odious aspects of these individuals personalities and picks and chooses the good bits.
Unfortunately, the heroes of stage and screen that we once idolised were not the same people in real life that they were in the roles they played.
I was a huge fan of Sean Connery when I was growing up, particularly when playing Indiana Jones' father in The Last Crusade... and I was appalled when I saw the interview of him, widely available on the internet, where he spoke about how domestic violence against women is perfectly acceptable 'when the situation merits it', because, as he said, the problem with women is that they always have to have the last word, and you give them the last word and they're still not happy, so then 'it's absolutely right' to give them a slap. Idiot, and by all accounts a very unpleasant person all around in real life. But, people will always keep watching and enjoying all the James Bond movies he made.
I was a big fan of this show when I was 9 and 10 years old. I was thinking about watching some episodes simply for the sake of nostalgia. When I look up the show, I realized it was the same guy fired from 7th Heaven. What is troubling is that the abuse was going on while this show was being made, and at least one of his victims, who was about my age at the time, said that he lured her by promising to show props from the show. So that does pretty much ruin the show for me.