Move the World!

The other night, I noticed that we had access to old TV shows on our OnDemand feature on our cable. One of the shows is Diff'rent Strokes. Tonight we watched the first and second episodes. I have not watched Diff'rent Strokes for a very long time and I thought it would be fun to watch and make fun of. I was quite surprised to actually find it funny. In large part, this was due to Gary Coleman who was a really good child actor. What happened after that, I don't know, but at least he was good at that age.

An interesting thing we learned from watching Diff'rent Strokes is that John Travolta has a sister. It's not really surprising that he has a sister, but she is a seemingly well accomplished actress - appearing not only on Diff'rent Strokes, but also on many other shows throughout the 70's, 80's and 90's such as Happy Days, Charles in Charge and The Single Guy. I don't know if this is common knowledge, but we did not know that. Her name is Ellen Travolta and she played a social worker named Ms. Aimsly in the second episode of Diff'rent Strokes.

In that episode, Arnold overhears part of a conversation Mr. Drummond was having with Mrs. Garrett. Arnold overhears Mr. Drummond say that 'Black children should live with black families'. Arnold then tells Willis about this and they call the social worker to arrange to be moved to black parents. Don't worry though, the show goes on because in the last few minutes they all realize that Arnold only overheard part of the conversation. Mr. Drummond was actually telling Mrs. Garrett what the social worker had said and it was totally not what he thought. And they all lived happily ever after...till the next episode.

One other quick interesting sibling fact is that Conrad Bain who played Mr. Drummond has an identical twin brother named Bonar. Kind of an odd name if you ask me.