For better and for worse, Robert Carradine gave screen nerds their most recognizable icon in the 1980s, and while Revenge of the Nerds (1984) handed the geeks a win, it also cemented every visual stereotype in the book, complete with taped-up glasses and a nasally snort-laugh that took another twenty years to fully shake off.
The nerd was lovable but laughable, aspirational but always, always the punchline. And yet, Carradine played Lewis with enough warmth and vulnerability that you rooted for him anyway, and that performance embedded itself in the culture so deeply that Disney cast him in their Totally Minnie TV special in 1988. And it was glorious.
Totally Minnie first aired in the spring of 1988 on NBC as a way of repositioning Minnie Mouse as her own ultra-awesome entity, and the makeover was as aggressively ’80s as anything you’d find on MTV. It was also the first production to ever feature Minnie in a lead role.
And right in the middle of the action, Robert Carradine played Maxwell Dweeb, a friendless loner who checks himself into the Minnie Mouse Center for the Totally Un-Hip in hopes that someone, anyone, can teach him how to be cool. The character’s name was literally ‘Dweeb’, and I could relate.
I was 14 when this aired, and I’d actually seen Revenge of the Nerds a couple of years earlier, yeah I was way too young for it but that’s how things worked when the video store clerk didn’t care. So when Carradine appeared on NBC getting fashion advice from Minnie, I recognized him immediately, and more importantly, I recognized myself. I was deep in the awkward middle of my teens, still half-expecting some external deus ex machismo to fix me – to hand me a new wardrobe, a saxophone, a pair of aviator sunglasses and a working knowledge of how to talk to girls. Or anyone, really.
The premise of the special was basically my fantasy: walk in as a dweeb, walk out as someone worth sitting next to in the cafeteria. If Robert Carradine could be made cool by a cartoon mouse, surely there was hope for the rest of us.
My real transformation came a couple of years later, around seventeen, and it had nothing to do with a sudden Minnie makeover. I grew into my looks somewhat, but mostly I just started building myself out of stuff that I actually liked. I was into Public Enemy, The Ramones and Depeche Mode instead of whatever was on the radio. I rocked circular John Lennon glasses, artfully ripped jeans, white Converse covered in drawings, idiosyncratic vintage tees under a hand-me-down denim jacket. I curated myself out of contradictions that shouldn’t have worked together, and eventually this artsy fartsy hipster started getting invited to parties. It took a while, but like Dweeb, I got the hang of it.
But Carradine was there at the start of that road, before I knew how to rock it, and beyond the nerd persona, the man had a filmography that the typecasting consumed.
He was in Mean Streets for Scorsese at eighteen. He played a character based on Samuel Fuller himself in The Big Red One alongside Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill. He appeared in Coming Home with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight. He and his brothers Keith and David played the Younger gang in The Long Riders alongside the Quaids, the Keaches, and the Guests, one of the most extraordinary ensemble castings in film history.
There was a serious actor underneath the pocket protector, but the nerd image proved so useful to everyone else that it became his whole deal. That kind of typecasting is a compliment that works like a trap: you become so good at one thing that nobody lets you be anything else, unless you’re of the generation that grew up with him as the warm sitcom dad on Lizzie McGuire.
For the rest of us though, for the ones who were a little too young and a little too uncool and looking for evidence that it might get better, Totally Minnie was a way in. The weird little Disney branding exercise where we first adopted him, before we were old enough to admit we’d seen the movie that made him famous.
Goodbye Bobby, good journey. -Pop