What’s your favorite TV character from a TV show who was frequently refered to but never actually portrayed on screen? Here’s a sampling of ones that come to mind:
Cousin Jeffrey (Uncle Leo’s son from Seinfeld)
Bob Sackamano (Kramer’s friend from Seinfeld)
Fat Naked Guy (creepy neighbor from Friends)
Vera (Norm’s wife on Cheers)
Maris (Nile’s wife/ex-wife on Frasier)
Charlie (Charles Townsend from Charlie’s Angels)
I’m sure there’s dozens of others I can’t think of so if you have any more toss them in. I do want to avoid computer voices and whatnot that were never intended to have human forms like Kitt and Ziggy, I’m looking for characters who as a plot device never got past being an offscreen voice or third person reference.
My personal fave was Vera from Cheers. She was like the Sword of Damocles for Norm every night at his stool at the end of the bar.
You’re forgetting the Father of the Unseen, Carlton the Doorman from Rhoda.
I liked Stan on Will & Grace. I don’t watch the show religiously so they may have shown him, but on the episodes I’ve seen he’s shown in shadow or maybe an arm or whatever, though always referred to as grossly obese.
And speaking of grossly obese, there’s Peg’s mom on Married With Children. In one episode she’s sitting unseen on the end of a sofa while her husband (Tim Conway) is on the other end which is elevated from her weight.
I believe Fat Naked Guy was shown, if only from behind. Does that count?
My favorite is still Maris from Frasier, especially in combination with the jokes on her body type. Like how she’s so thin that she doesn’t even activate a whoopie cushion.
Maris. Each season they’d add more running jokes about yet another bizarre character trait of hers, till by the end of the series your picture of her was of some inhuman twisted abomination.
Supposedly she was never ment to be an “unseen” character (the creators wanted to avoid copying Vera from Cheers) but they reached a point where they couldn’t possibly get a human who could match the image they’d created of her in the audiences mind.
Actually, in the episode where the crew rode out a storm in the warp nacelles, we saw a hand and arm serving up food, tho it was never verified that it was Chef. It could’ve been anyone’s arm. And hand.
Not really a series, but a recurring set of specials, Peanuts, we never see any of the g’rumps we hear saying “mwap mwap mwah… mwap mwah…”
We see Stan’s hand grabbing Megan’s breasts in the W&G where Will and the happy couple are in the Carribean.
This goes far enough back (unless you’ve seen reruns – which I doubt) that only the geezers will remember. The old series Richard Diamond, Private Eye (and that may not be the accurate title, but it starred David Janssen, had a character whose legs were seen and whose voice was heard but that was the extent of her visibility. I’ll have to look in IMDB to remember the character’s name (something like Selma or Velma – although Velma was Mike Hammer’s gal) but a young Mary Tyler Moore was her voice.
Any geezers remember more than this without looking it/her up online?
1- Niles’s comment that Maris’s dream as a child was to be a ballerina but “she could never gain enough weight for it”
2- Roz (who had never seen Maris) hiding in a bathroom in Maris’s suite (I forget why) and looking out to see if the coast was clear, then reporting “It’s weird, there’s nobody there but she moved a coat rack into the middle of the room”. Frasier/Martin: Is the coat rack breathing. Roz: “OH MY GOD!”
3- Niles’s projection when he bought the world’s most high maintenance unaffectionate skinniest dog while separated from Maris but refuses to see what he’s doing until Frasier took a small rice bowl and said “Do you remember the time Maris wore that Jackie Kennedy outfit with the pillbox hat?”, put the bowl on the dog’s head and Niles almost fainted.
Also, Wilson the Neighbor from Home Improvement. All of his face was probably seen at some point or another but never all at once.
And Charlie from Charlie’s Angels. When I was a kid I had no idea who John Forsythe was so it really kept the mystery going.
Another vote for Maris. My favorite joke was Niles telling a story about how he and Maris had a fight at a ski lodge (or some such) and she stormed out. Niles went out to follow her footprints in the snow “but, alas, she left none.”
Here’s two: Tino, from My So-Called Life and The Gooch from Diff’rent Strokes.
Tino was the man. There’s a party at Tino’s. Tino will get you a fake ID. Let’s catch a ride from Tino! C’mon, we’re gonna watch Tino’s band practice! But Tino was never seen…and from the same show, the Chase family cat. They were always buying cat food and kitty litter and mentioning it off-handedly, but you never actually saw a cat.
Remember The Gooch, the bully who terrorized Arnold at school? The Gooch got to be kinda like Maris, I think: with the descriptions of arms so long his knuckles dragged the ground and such, I think they reached the point where no living person could really play what the description required.
We saw ***Ugly * ** Naked Guy in a hammock, and also from the back, when he opened the door when Ross was angling for the sublet - but he never spoke
We saw all of Wilson EXCEPT the lower half of his face. This was done on purpose. Infact, when the actor would come out for the studio audience at the beginning of the show, he carried a little picket fence to keep his nose and mouth hidden.
But I have to jump on the **Maris ** bandwagon, with **Stan ** as my second fave.
Nitpick by an ALW fanatic: When Wilson was dressed as the Phantom for Halloween, he was wearing a mask that covered the top half of his face, with the lower half showing.
