R.I.P. Bill Dana

[Big Magilla]

He was a comedy writer in the 1950s. He didn't become a comedian/actor until 1960 when I was in high school and working as an usher/candy attendant with limited time to watch TV, so I had only a passing knowledge of him. Most of his "acting" from 1960 through the early 1970s was as "José Jimenez". I suspect that more people today know him from his six appearances as Angelo on the constantly re-running The Golden Girls than from The Right Stuff.

[Mister Tee]

I guess if anyone under 50 knows who Bill Dana is, it's from his very brief file-footage appearance in The Right Stuff. But he was hugely famous for a time in the late 50s/early 60s, for an act that plainly reads as racist today but was looked at benignly in that more naive time. "My name Jose Jimenez" was as widely known a phrase as "Show me the money", and Dana was especially popular with the Mercury astronauts (hence The Right Stuff appearance) for playing Jose as a would-be part of the space program.

He also created/starred in a series, The Bill Dana Show, where he played Jose as a bellhop, with Don Adams by his side as house detective in a role that was essentially the rough draft of Maxwell Smart. (That character I believe is still known today, yes?)

As I say, indefensible by today's standards -- as is Hogan's Heroes, and dozens of other things we watched back then -- but something I admit made me laugh when I was much younger.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/arts ... .html?_r=0